Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and south to Tanzania. The narrative of these travels has been known to specialists in Islamic and medieval history for years. Ross E. Dunn's 1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam.

Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta被称为前现代最伟大的旅行家，他于1304年出生于摩洛哥，接受过伊斯兰法律教育。21岁时，他离家前往麦加进行神圣的朝圣之旅。这只是他一系列非凡旅行的第一步，这些旅行跨越了近三十年，不仅向东到了印度和中国，还向北到了伏尔加河流域，向南到了坦桑尼亚。这些旅行的叙述多年来一直为伊斯兰和中世纪历史专家所了解。然而，罗斯-邓恩（Ross E. Dunn）在1986年对这些故事进行了重述，这是第一部让普通读者了解这位传奇旅行者故事的学术著作。现在，通过修订、新的序言和更新的书目，邓恩的经典之作解释了伊本-白图泰的冒险经历，并将其置于丰富的、跨半球的中世纪伊斯兰文化背景中。