The Caravanserai

1254–1324 · Venice

A Venetian merchant who left for Asia at seventeen with his father and uncle, spent some seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan, and returned to a Venice that barely recognised him. Captured in a war with Genoa, he shared a cell with the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa and dictated the account that became the Book of the Marvels of the World — which introduced paper money, coal, the imperial postal relay and the scale of Asian cities to a Europe that mostly refused to believe him. Scholars still argue about how much he witnessed: he never mentions the Great Wall, tea, or foot-binding, and Rustichello demonstrably embroidered. The deathbed line "I have not told half of what I saw" is almost certainly a later invention.

1304–1368 · Morocco

A young Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier at twenty-one to make the hajj and did not come home for twenty-four years, travelling perhaps 75,000 miles across North and West Africa, Arabia, East Africa, Persia, India, the Maldives, Central Asia and — by his account — China. He served as a judge in Delhi under the volatile Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq and in the Maldives, was shipwrecked, robbed and nearly executed, and dictated the whole account, the Rihla, to a court scribe on the orders of the Sultan of Morocco. Parts of it are demonstrably lifted from earlier writers and some episodes are doubted outright, which makes it both the richest single portrait of the fourteenth-century Muslim world and a document that has to be read with care.

1371–1433 · Ming China

Chinese mariner, diplomat, and admiral of the Ming dynasty who commanded seven epic treasure-fleet voyages across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa — decades before the European age of exploration — with hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of crew, projecting Chinese power through diplomacy and trade.

1332–1406 · Tunis, North Africa

North African historian and scholar whose Muqaddimah founded the fields of historiography, sociology, and the philosophy of history. He analyzed the rise and fall of dynasties through group solidarity, economics, and the life-cycles of civilizations — centuries ahead of his time.