Why “Idrisi”?
Idrisi is named after Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), an Arab geographer and cartographer at the court of King Roger II of Sicily.
Al-Idrisi spent roughly fifteen years compiling what became the Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq — “The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands” — accompanying an engraved silver planisphere and a set of seventy regional maps known collectively as the Tabula Rogeriana. The result was one of the most accurate world maps produced in the medieval era, synthesizing Greek geographic texts, Islamic scholarship, and firsthand accounts collected from travelers who passed through the Sicilian court.
The Tabula is, in a sense, exactly what a modern trip-planning tool is: a visual reference built by gathering accounts from people who’ve been somewhere, cross-referencing them, and producing something a traveler can actually use to plan their journey. The methodology is nearly a millennium old, and the name is a nod to a cartographer whose work was the travel-planning infrastructure of its time.