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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans knew little about Arabia. That Middle Eastern peninsula’s extremely harsh climate and desert terrain, coupled with the hostility of its inhabitants toward Christian interlopers, had discouraged contact through more than a millennium. During the eighteenth century, however, the pattern had begun to change, and during the nineteenth century European explorers, acting from a variety of motives, traveled into and sometimes across Arabia. Several Europeans even disguised themselves in order to visit the holy city of Mecca, a pilgrimage to which was required of every able-bodied Muslim man.