Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta is celebrated as the greatest traveler of premodern times. The narrative of his extraordinary journeys stands, along with Marco Polo's, as the most ambitious and informative work of travel literature of the Middle Ages. Ross Dunn here recounts the great traveler's remarkable career, interpreting it within the cultural and social context of Islamic society and giving the reader both a biography of an extraordinary personality and a study of the hemispheric dimensions of human interchange in medieval times.