Ibrahim al-Khiyari, a scholar from Medina, set out for Istanbul in 1669 following the Sultan’s Road, as the pilgrimage route from Üsküdar to Mecca was called. He left for posterity a journal of his year-long adventure that led him to Bulgaria and an audience with Sultan Mehmed IV (1648–87) and then back again to Arabia by way of Cairo. Although his account lacks the wealth of local color found in the more widely known travelogue of his contemporary Evliya Çelebi, he meticulously recorded those who hosted them along the way. They included Ottoman officials who had served in the Hejaz and religious scholars whom the author had met in his native city. Choosing not to travel, Muhammad ibn Kannan began a chronicle in Damascus at the end of the seventeenth century in which he noted, among other things, the Muslim scholars who stopped in his city while on the hajj. The correspondence of ibn Kannan’s contemporary, cAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (d. 1731), with scholars in Cairo, Medina, Van, Istanbul, Edirne, Tekirdağ in Thrace, and Sombor in Serbia points to a network of correspondence across the empire. Such informal and often personal contacts created a network for the exchange of ideas on a variety of topics. As most of the scholarship produced by the empire’s ulama was in Arabic, regardless of the language they spoke at home, Arabic-speaking scholars, most of whom knew no Turkish, were active participants in an ongoing dialogue across the empire.