Ibn Battuta left Tangier in 1325 as a young scholar bound for Mecca and did not stop for two decades, eventually covering some 75,000 miles across 44 countries, from West Africa to China. This three-part series follows writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith as he retraces that route, standing in the same ports, deserts, and cities Ibn Battuta described and checking his fourteenth-century account against what remains on the ground. Mackintosh-Smith, who has spent years studying and translating the original travelogue, treats it less as legend than as a working document, cross-referencing its claims about sultans, trade routes, and local customs with the archaeology and history still visible today. Along the way the series sketches the political map of the medieval Islamic world, from Mali's gold-rich courts to the Delhi sultanate, showing how one traveler's curiosity produced a document historians still mine for detail centuries later. The series stays close to Mackintosh-Smith's own path and reactions, so the modern journey and the medieval one run side by side throughout.