The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.

This chapter surveys heterogenous lived experiences of disability throughout medieval Afro-Eurasian travel networks, examining examples from approximately the seventh through fifteenth centuries CE. It uses a broadly comparative approach to ‘religiomedical’ modes of understanding disability, illness, and other conditions, which situate the analysis of lived experience within local sociocultural understandings of the body (namely religious frameworks or historical forms of medical knowledge). Surveying disparate medieval first-person accounts of temporary or lifelong disability across Asia, Africa, and Europe, this chapter attends to disability as an adaptive practice and a venue for world transformation: an opening up of possibility, and an intellectual and artistic resource for people in motion.

This chapter considers the spread of ceramics produced in the Chinese empire to destinations within Eurasia, East and Southeast Asia, and throughout the Indian Ocean during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It charts the circulation of Raozhou ceramics as they were traded through the region and far beyond, beginning to show the intricate ways in which local knowledge about making and selling things feeds into and is fed by global patterns of consumption. Moreover, it shows how the look and feel of Raozhou’s porcelain, or the materiality of these goods, changed during this period. To understand these changes, this chapter suggests, one has to consider both local factors, such as the availability of raw materials in the immediate vicinity of the kilns, and global factors, such as the desire for large vessels amongst consumers of porcelain in nomadic communities and in the Islamic worlds of Central Asia. The combination of both local and global factors is key in understanding the changes that occurred during this period.

This chapter takes a foundational Muslim tradition known from early Arab sources and widespread in Muslim Southeast Asia, namely Adam’s banishment from paradise and his landing in Sarandib (the Arabic name for Sri Lanka), as a starting point to ask whether Adam’s fall to earth in this particular site mattered to, or shaped in some way, Malay perceptions of exile to colonial Ceylon, and if so, how? Based on references to Adam and his plight found in Malay sources from Sri Lanka, Arabic sources, among them Ibn Battuta’s Travels, and the Javanese Serat Menak Serandhil (a volume of Menak tales narrating the life of the Prophet’s uncle Menak Amir Hamza, which unfolds in Sarandib), the chapter argues that the ancient story of Adam’s banishment from paradise to earth, a paradigm for all future banishments, was deployed to frame and partially give meaning to exile to Ceylon. Recalling Adam’s fall shifted the temporal frame of political exile under colonial domination and located contemporary, worldly events within a divinely determined chronology.