How did long distance overland travellers (e.g. Marco Polo) fund themselves over the months and years their journeys took?

The hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, offers a good look at the variety of funding methods for long-distance travelers in the medieval circum-Mediterranean world.

The first option was, of course, to just bring caravan-loads of gold (and sufficient troops and slaves to guard it). This was most famously practiced by Musa, the 13C mansa of Mali, whose lavish gift distribution as he passed across North Africa and through the Levant supposedly cratered the economy through inflation for years.

But very few people could afford this sort of expense at the outset, and even fewer were willing to risk it. Bandits were a real problem--both raiders in the (North African) desert or (European) forest, but also government officials. Ibn Battuta is barely out of Tangiers when the untimely death of one of the merchants in his caravan results in the governor's officials snatching up three thousand dinars that had been for the merchant and his travel companion.

So one option was to trade goods along the way. Ross Dunn mentions gemstones and leather goods as popular barter items along the hajj route, but I'm not sure what his primary source there is. The "trade along the way" method was definitely practiced by sea-based merchants, though, both along the Mediterranean coasts and eventually when Europeans started to prowl the western coast of Africa. Goods were swapped for goods, with the hope of making a slim profit margin each time.

Some people earned money along the way through hard labor when opportunities arose. Ibn Battuta's caravan across North Africa would stop in towns for substantial portions of time, for example (long enough for him to get married in one town, get in a bitter battle with his wife's family in the next and divorce her, and get married again in a third). Construction or other odd jobs might be a way for people to shore up a little money.

There were also, in lucky circumstances, institutional frameworks set up to aid travelers. Sticking with our hajj case study, the Mamluks organized charitable distributions for the massive caravans that would coagulate in Damascus for the last push to Mecca, and even set up hostels of sorts along the way for shelter. The sultan in Egypt, too, Ibn Battuta tells us, sought to supply camels loaded down with food and other supplies to pilgrims with little means remaining. (In Europe, monasteries might provide overnight housing, especially along pilgrimage routes, and Jewish merchants traveling around the Mediterranean often found welcome in various towns' Jewish communities.)

But Ibn Battuta? Ibn Battuta had the best funding method.

He just got people to give him money.

Stuck in Damascus and facing a long haul to Mecca? No matter. Ibn Battuta actually ran out of money altogether when he was in Damascus. Nur al-Din, the lawyer he'd been staying with, supplied him with money, food, and apparently multiple camels.

And our intrepid scholar-traveler got just as lucky on the other side. Determining to travel onward rather than return home across North Africa, he attached himself to the caravan going north, to Persia/the Ilkhanate. And the caravan leader himself paid out of pocket for fresh camels and other supplies for the scholar.

Ibn Battuta is an exception in so many ways--his education and elevated social status in the Islamic world as a scholar, of course, but also, if ever someone rolled a natural 18 charisma, it was him. But he was an exception whose writing, about his own travels and his observations of those around him, give great insight into long-distance travel in the medieval world.