Many of the core jurists of Fez under the Marinid Dynasty (1244-1465) never traveled to the Islamic East and never performed the hajj pilgrimage. In this age of the great Maghribi traveler Ibn Battuta (d. 1377), travel may have been difficult, but it was not impossible. Some Marinid scholars did make the pilgrimage, while other scholars from further east cycled through the Marinid court, the most notable of these being Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). This paper explores two sets of related questions: what were the reasons that so many Marinid jurists did not travel to the Islamic East, and how did this lack of travel shape the intellectual and jurisprudential environment of Marinid Fez? The paper considers how people, knowledge, and ideas circulated between the Islamic East and West, and why in only a few cases Marinid scholars were included in biographical dictionaries from the Islamic East. Using sources such as biographical dictionaries, city histories, political chronicles, and fatwas, it also traces intellectual and legal debates among North African scholars, and the engagement of these debates with scholarly trends of the Islamic East.