Welcome to Litsy!

Tim Mackintosh-Smith traces some of the travels of Ibn Battuta, an avid traveler of North Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. The writing is dense (he loves a good turn of phrase) but I enjoyed reading it, visiting the late 1990s version of some of these places, with the underlying current of the 14th century - Tangiers, Alexandria, Aleppo, Sur, etc. ⤵️

Few stork-revering peoples have gone quite as far as the Maghribis: according to Ali Bey, the endowments of the Fez lunatic asylum were regularly diverted to pay for the nursing of sick storks, which were believed to be temporarily transmogrified humans.

Because we can‘t go anywhere at the moment.

Hoping it‘s as good as William Dalrymple‘s early travel stuff.

🤔 Didn‘t know there was this Kindle edition. Very handy since I want to revisit some of this book and don‘t have a paper copy. I remember loving it when I first read it.