Daily Bookshot: History’s Greatest Travelogue?

History’s Greatest Travelogue?, originally uploaded by Robert Burdock.

Whenever somebody asks me to recommend a good travelogue, I invariably give the same answer every time – The Travels of Ibn Battutah (Picador).

OK so a reasonably obscure fourteenth-century Islamic travelogue probably isn’t the most obvious recommendation to make, nor does it probably sound all that exciting. But the fact is, the travelogue of Ibn Battutah is a truly remarkable work; a record of incredible richness, which charts one man’s thirty year journey around most of the known medieval Islamic world at the time, and then some.

Most people have heard of Marco Polo right? Well Ibn Battutah (1304-1369), who was a very close contemporary of Polo (1254 -1324), covered three times the distance of Polo during his journey; a journey which began in 1325 when he left his hometown of Tangier, Morocco for the Hajj in Mecca. Surely that fact alone marks this travelogue out to be something pretty special?

This Picador edition of Ibn Battutah’s travelogue is actually an abridged version of the original Arabic travelogue, but don’t let that put you off. It’s editor Tim Mackintosh-Smith is probably Ibn Battutah’s greatest modern-day advocate and he has been hugely sympathetic, both in his translations and in his selections for this work, and rather than detracting from it, Tim adds to the quality of Ibn Battutah’s account.

Pictured with The Travels of Ibn Battutah is what I believe to be its perfect companion – Travels with a Tangerine (Picador), written by the exact same editor of Battutah’s travelogue, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (HERE’S his personal website).

In this book Mackintosh-Smith creates his own travelogue, following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah during the first stage of his journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Almost equally as exquisite Mackintosh-Smith shows in Travels with a Tangerine not only how accomplished he himself is as a travel writing, but just how deep and profound his love for the fourteenth-century traveller is.

On a final note, there is also a three-part documentary series, also called Travels with a Tangerine, which follows Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s on his journey in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah. It’s good. But it’s not as good as the book (well I am going to say that aren’t I?