In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so rich in gold that Cairo talked about it for years. Arab chroniclers wrote of thousands of servants carrying gold bars and camels loaded with gold dust; historians today treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than anyone could imagine", not as a count. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 still shows him enthroned in the Sahara, holding up a piece of gold.
The route keeps to the places the sources actually record: the royal city of Mali, the camp below the pyramids, Cairo, Mecca, and Gao and Timbuktu on the way home. The road across the desert is not documented, so it is not drawn. The route offers no travel advice for Mali.
In 1791 Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, a sugar and coffee economy worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans under brutal conditions. Thirteen years later it was Haiti, the first nation born from a successful slave revolt and the first independent Black-led state in the Americas. The cost was enormous: some 200,000 Black Haitians died, and tens of thousands of French and British soldiers, most of them from yellow fever.
The route follows the turning points, from the ceremony that tradition places at Bois Caïman to the declaration at Gonaïves, with a detour to the French mountain fortress where Toussaint Louverture died. Fighting was savage on all sides, and the texts say so plainly. The route offers no travel advice for Haiti.
Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love at secondary school in Lagos, in a Nigeria under military rule where everyone seems to be planning to leave. She gets a scholarship to Philadelphia; he, refused an American visa after 9/11, ends up working illegally in London. Over thirteen years in the United States Ifemelu discovers that she has become "black" — and writes a hit blog about it — before deciding to go home.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel moves between real cities on three continents, and the route follows it in story order rather than in the book's flashback structure. Homes, salons and the university in Philadelphia are not identified, so most pins mark the city or campus.
In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out from Spain to attack Rome by the one route the Romans never expected: overland, across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers, horses and 37 war elephants. Five months later he came down into the plain of the Po with a battered but unbeaten army, and within weeks had won his first two victories in Italy.
The route follows the march as told by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about seventy years later and walked the Alpine route himself. Nobody knows for certain where Hannibal crossed the Rhône or which pass he used, so several pins are marked speculative.
