From The Meadows of Gold

An eclectic collection of short chapters, covering a huge number of countries/locations and a vast array of things! Culture, people, animals, customs, stories, etc. Very like Herodotus or Marco Polo in their travel / cataloguing type books. Helpfully where places or people are named in Arabic, their modern equivalent (by which they are better known) is provided in brackets, which is a helpful thing!

Some example chapter titles: (there are 80 of them.
The lighthouse of Hercules
The Galicians
The Lombards
Viking raiders
The wine cups of Alexander
The sources of the Nile
Ivory
Pearl fishing in the Gulf
The Seventh Sea - The sea of China
Camphor
St Elmo's Fire
The skillfulness of the Chinese