Extensive as were Marco Polo’s travels, they were yet exceeded in extent, though not in variety, by those of the greatest of Arabian travellers, Mohammed Ibn Batuta, a native of Tangier, who began his travels in 1334, as part of the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan to visit the holy city of Mecca.  While at Alexandria he met a learned sage named Borhan Eddin, to whom he expressed his desire to travel.  Borhan said to him, “You must then visit my brother Farid Iddin and my brother Rokn Eddin in Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in China.  When you see them, present my compliments to them.”  Owing mainly to the fact that the Tatar princes had adopted Islamism instead of Christianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was ultimately enabled to greet all three brothers of Borhan Eddin.  Indeed, he performed a more extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to convey the greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, whom he met in China, to a relative of his residing in the Soudan.  During the thirty years of his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia, the Crimea, Constantinople (which he visited in company with a Greek princess, who married one of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and Delhi.  Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak, who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an embassy to China, at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route, he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China.  Civil war having broken out, he returned by the same route to Calicut, but dared not face the emperor, and went on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned to Tangier in 1349.  But even then his taste for travel had not been exhausted.  He soon set out for Spain, and worked his way through Morocco, across the Sahara, to the Soudan.  He travelled along the Niger (which he took for the Nile), and visited Timbuctoo.  He ultimately returned to Fez in 1353, twenty-eight years after he had set out on his travels.  Their chief interest is in showing the wide extent of Islam in his day, and the facilities which a common creed gave for extensive travel.  But the account of his journeys was written in Arabic, and had no influence on European knowledge, which, indeed, had little to learn from him after Marco Polo, except with regard to the Soudan.  With him the history of mediaeval geography may be fairly said to end, for within eighty years of his death began the activity of Prince Henry the Navigator, with whom the modern epoch begins.

Meanwhile India had become somewhat better known, chiefly by the travels of wandering friars, who visited it mainly for the sake of the shrine of St. Thomas, who was supposed to have been martyred in India.  Mention should also be made of the early spread of the Nestorian Church throughout Central Asia.  As early as the seventh century the Syrian Christians who followed the views of Nestorius began spreading