Life at the time of Ibn Batuta

Reading about the old man in this book by Ross Dunn, there’s a new theory which was mentioned, Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill developed this Ecumene model, the belt of agrarian land from the Med basin to China, where the major civilisations arose, most cities sprang up and most important cultural and technological innovations were made.

He would have travelled during the Abbasid Caliphate and here’s a map of the Caliphate when it was at the greatest around 850 AD

Before that was the Ummayad Caliphate and this is how it related to the rest of the world in 750AD

Fascinating the range of empires which was around when the Ummayad’s were pootling around..