ABSTRACT
Not surprisingly, Muslim travelers were obvious beneficiaries of the great changes in the framework for contacts in the later centuries of the postclassical period. We will see that the greatest traveler of all, Ibn Battuta, benefited directly from the network of roads and inns through the Middle East and Central Asia; from the stability provided by Mongol rule; and from the prosperity of trading centers scattered from the Mediterranean to Africa to Asia. But Muslim travel patterns had been launched earlier in the post-classical period, for several purposes. The more ambitious routes extended overland, into Central Asia, but also through various parts of the Indian Ocean. This chapter explores these precedents and then their culmination in the great Muslim journeys of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
