Abu Abdullah Ibn Battuta was a 14th-century Islamic scholar who spent 20 years travelling the full extent of the Islamic world, which stretched from West Africa to the Middle East to Southern Russia to Western China down to the island of Java. All of these newly-Islamicized lands needed legal experts, and Ibn Battuta’s skills were in as high demand as an IBM mainframe engineer in the 1960s or a Java developer today.

He made an entire life travelling on religious pilgrimages, going to wealthy courts, getting highly paid positions, finding new wives, fleeing when his life was in danger (including a memorable shipwreck off the coast of India), and repeating the process over and over again. In this way he went as far south as Tanzania, as far north as the Volga basin, as far west as China, as far southeast as Indonesia, and as far west as Mali. In all, he went three times further than Marco Polo.

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