7 ms·

When I was growing up and devouring things on the Romans and Middle Ages I was led to believe that these were isolated societies, with no knowledge of the outsi

When I was growing up and devouring things on the Romans and Middle Ages I was led to believe that these were isolated societies, with no knowledge of the outside world. People lived in their village, never left it, and believed there were monsters beyond the horizon. Many years and many words later I wonder if our understanding of the world has changed or if mine was just unsophisticated. Do kids still learn what I learned? The ancient world was incredibly mobile, considering the limitations. Not just traders moving overland between east and west, but within societies and craftsmen and scholars moving for work and opportunities. I find that quite comforting, in some ways.

pixl97 10y ago
>I wonder if our understanding of the world has changed I think that a lot of the worldview of past history was jaded by historians and their governments to show that they live in the best of times and that those that came before them, or were from other places, were savages. It may be easier to tell history more accurately if you're not trying to prove you're better than everyone else. Of course, my thoughts on what occurred in the past of telling history may be wrong.
- wutangson1 10y ago
  I think you're on to something. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984.
empath75 10y ago
Some of that is a symptom of people teaching lousy history to kids. But afaik, it's been well known among historians that the romans traded with India and had silk from china. It's not exactly a secret that Alexander invaded India.
13of40 10y ago
In the past century, at least in the Western world, we've developed a completely new concept of mobility. We live in a world where pretty much anyone with a passport and $2000 can spend a week on the other side of the earth, but the caveat to that is you're depending on being able to travel quickly (who can take the time off work?) being able to depend on the physical security of the society you're traveling in, at least to some extent, and having a global financial and communication network to take care of you while you're abroad. Go back a hundred years ago and most of that's out the door. Go back 1000 years, and all of Europe was still living in walled cities. I think people traveled back then, but it was far fewer individuals doing it. (And probably a lot more walked out into the hills than ever came back...)
- Fricken 10y ago
  I was travelling in Lombok a couple years ago, it's an island 70 km across, next to Bali in Indonesia, and stayed with a family. The woman of the house had never been off the island, and had only travelled to the capital city of Mataram (about a 45 minute drive from her village) on a handful of occasions. It's not uncommon for people in poorer parts of the world, even today.
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    I grew up in New York City. When my Dad retired we moved to a fairly rural area in Pennsylvania, about 90 miles west of NYC. Our next door neighbor there, age mid 30's, had never once been to NYC, and he never saw any reason to go. This was a cultural shock for me, because who didn't want to at least visit NYC??? Some people are just less adventurous than others.
  - paganel 10y ago
    My grand-mother lives in a mountainous valley in the Carpathians Mountains, she's now in her mid-80s. She has only ventured 50+ miles outside of her village I think only 2 or 3 times in her life. On the other hand, she used to have two brothers-in-law (who had grew in the same village as her) one of whom had studied at the Leningrad Polytechnic (I think that's ~2,500 km away) and the other one who had lived and worked as a secret agent in East Berlin in the mid-'50s. The world is a complicated place, always has been.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  Of course it was nothing like today, but it was a far cry from the isolated, dark world I was taught about where people didn't leave their villages and nobles were in their castles fighting off barbarians who shuttled between Norway and Britain for some occasional pillaging. Skilled craftsman who worked on large projects moved between them. Arab scholars and traders brought ancient texts into Europe. Traders brought spices from the east. Viking traders who weren't pillaging Britain traveled through Russia as far south as modern day Turkey. It was a far more interconnected world than I thought when I was 12.
- 10y ago
benbreen 10y ago
I do think it reflects some new archeological findings, and possibly also a new interest in globalization among historians due to the events of the last couple decades, which then causes them to revisit old evidence. I teach my students a combination of the two models that you mention. In other words, the premodern world was indeed a place where most people didn't venture beyond their own village. However, among elites (diplomats, ambassadors, religious or political leaders, military officers) there was a remarkable amount of mobility and cosmopolitanism. I find that comforting too - I like knowing that people hundreds or thousands of years ago grappled with the same issues arising from cross-cultural contacts that people do today. One example: my wife was born and raised in Iran, and I was having a lot of fun yesterday reading a 17th century Englishman complaining about Persian food ("their Cheese and Butter will make your mouths water at it; I ironize: in good earnest the cheese is the worst any ever tasted... its dry, blue, and hard, ill to the eye, bad to the taste, naught for digestion... their liquor may perhaps better delight you."). [1] Incidentally, if anyone is interested in global travel in a slightly later period (late Middle Ages) I wrote a blog post about a Spaniard visiting Samarkand a few years ago. I'm really interested by people who aren't Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta but who made similarly epic journeys. [2] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=mlJBAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA240#v=onepage&q=cheese&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=mlJBAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA240#v=on... [2] http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samarkand-1404.html http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samarka...
- HarryHirsch 10y ago
  In other words, the premodern world was indeed a place where most people didn't venture beyond their own village. Not so sure about that. Consider the Didache, a church constitution and katechesis manual dated to the late 1st century AD. Chapters 12 and 13 are devoted to brothers in faith from other towns and itinerant prophets. Christianity at that time was not a religion of the wealthy. If this very practical work spends so much time on the subject then travel must also have been possible for the smallfolk.
  - benbreen 10y ago
    It depends on where/when, of course - I wouldn't claim that the inhabitants of premodern urban areas never left. But keep in mind that in a world (like the 1st century Mediterranean) where the majority of people were illiterate and didn't live in cities or towns, then written sources will tend to be biased toward urban, literate people and their habits. Perhaps it's a stretch to say that "most people didn't venture beyond their village" in the premodern world, but I'd bet money that a statement along the lines of "most people didn't venture beyond a 50 to 100 mile radius around their place of birth" would hold true in most times and places prior to around 1700.
flukus 10y ago
> People lived in their village, never left it, and believed there were monsters beyond the horizon. I think that's true of most people in most of human history and would describe a lot of people even today. Even traders would typically only operate in a small section of a trade network, they weren't travelling the globe like Marco Polo. Some would move from small towns to cities, but cities were a population sink until pretty recently. The most well traveled people were probably mostly soldiers.
clock_tower 10y ago
Luxury goods traveled very far, even crossing the frontiers of mutually-hostile civilizations, but most commerce was local. As for people, merchants could really travel, mercenaries sometimes did the same, and elites and soldiers would sometimes go abroad and come back, but most people stayed put. Knowledge was also very expensive to come by, and the difference between what the best-educated and worst-educated knew was much larger than it is today. You might find Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life interesting; likewise A History of Private Life, especially the first two volumes (the classical world and the Middle Ages), as well as Simplicius Simplicissimus, a novel about the Thirty Years War which was written in the 1670s but is still eminently readable today. (Of course, my main area of interest is the early modern period, when Islam was a wall that bisected the world: Muslim merchants could and did travel freely through most of the Old World, but no one else could expect to get through Islam. The pre-Islamic world was more mobile, especially for merchants and mercenaries; likewise the early age of the Mongols, before the Golden Horde and the Il-Khanate converted.)

pixl97 10y ago

>I wonder if our understanding of the world has changed I think that a lot of the worldview of past history was jaded by historians and their governments to show that they live in the best of times and that those that came before them, or were from other places, were savages. It may be easier to tell history more accurately if you're not trying to prove you're better than everyone else. Of course, my thoughts on what occurred in the past of telling history may be wrong.

wutangson1 10y ago
I think you're on to something. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984.

empath75 10y ago

Some of that is a symptom of people teaching lousy history to kids. But afaik, it's been well known among historians that the romans traded with India and had silk from china. It's not exactly a secret that Alexander invaded India.

13of40 10y ago

In the past century, at least in the Western world, we've developed a completely new concept of mobility. We live in a world where pretty much anyone with a passport and $2000 can spend a week on the other side of the earth, but the caveat to that is you're depending on being able to travel quickly (who can take the time off work?) being able to depend on the physical security of the society you're traveling in, at least to some extent, and having a global financial and communication network to take care of you while you're abroad. Go back a hundred years ago and most of that's out the door. Go back 1000 years, and all of Europe was still living in walled cities. I think people traveled back then, but it was far fewer individuals doing it. (And probably a lot more walked out into the hills than ever came back...)

Fricken 10y ago
I was travelling in Lombok a couple years ago, it's an island 70 km across, next to Bali in Indonesia, and stayed with a family. The woman of the house had never been off the island, and had only travelled to the capital city of Mataram (about a 45 minute drive from her village) on a handful of occasions. It's not uncommon for people in poorer parts of the world, even today.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  I grew up in New York City. When my Dad retired we moved to a fairly rural area in Pennsylvania, about 90 miles west of NYC. Our next door neighbor there, age mid 30's, had never once been to NYC, and he never saw any reason to go. This was a cultural shock for me, because who didn't want to at least visit NYC??? Some people are just less adventurous than others.
- paganel 10y ago
  My grand-mother lives in a mountainous valley in the Carpathians Mountains, she's now in her mid-80s. She has only ventured 50+ miles outside of her village I think only 2 or 3 times in her life. On the other hand, she used to have two brothers-in-law (who had grew in the same village as her) one of whom had studied at the Leningrad Polytechnic (I think that's ~2,500 km away) and the other one who had lived and worked as a secret agent in East Berlin in the mid-'50s. The world is a complicated place, always has been.
stinkytaco 10y ago
Of course it was nothing like today, but it was a far cry from the isolated, dark world I was taught about where people didn't leave their villages and nobles were in their castles fighting off barbarians who shuttled between Norway and Britain for some occasional pillaging. Skilled craftsman who worked on large projects moved between them. Arab scholars and traders brought ancient texts into Europe. Traders brought spices from the east. Viking traders who weren't pillaging Britain traveled through Russia as far south as modern day Turkey. It was a far more interconnected world than I thought when I was 12.
10y ago

benbreen 10y ago

I do think it reflects some new archeological findings, and possibly also a new interest in globalization among historians due to the events of the last couple decades, which then causes them to revisit old evidence. I teach my students a combination of the two models that you mention. In other words, the premodern world was indeed a place where most people didn't venture beyond their own village. However, among elites (diplomats, ambassadors, religious or political leaders, military officers) there was a remarkable amount of mobility and cosmopolitanism. I find that comforting too - I like knowing that people hundreds or thousands of years ago grappled with the same issues arising from cross-cultural contacts that people do today. One example: my wife was born and raised in Iran, and I was having a lot of fun yesterday reading a 17th century Englishman complaining about Persian food ("their Cheese and Butter will make your mouths water at it; I ironize: in good earnest the cheese is the worst any ever tasted... its dry, blue, and hard, ill to the eye, bad to the taste, naught for digestion... their liquor may perhaps better delight you."). [1] Incidentally, if anyone is interested in global travel in a slightly later period (late Middle Ages) I wrote a blog post about a Spaniard visiting Samarkand a few years ago. I'm really interested by people who aren't Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta but who made similarly epic journeys. [2] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=mlJBAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA240#v=onepage&q=cheese&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=mlJBAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA240#v=on... [2] http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samarkand-1404.html http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samarka...

HarryHirsch 10y ago
In other words, the premodern world was indeed a place where most people didn't venture beyond their own village. Not so sure about that. Consider the Didache, a church constitution and katechesis manual dated to the late 1st century AD. Chapters 12 and 13 are devoted to brothers in faith from other towns and itinerant prophets. Christianity at that time was not a religion of the wealthy. If this very practical work spends so much time on the subject then travel must also have been possible for the smallfolk.
- benbreen 10y ago
  It depends on where/when, of course - I wouldn't claim that the inhabitants of premodern urban areas never left. But keep in mind that in a world (like the 1st century Mediterranean) where the majority of people were illiterate and didn't live in cities or towns, then written sources will tend to be biased toward urban, literate people and their habits. Perhaps it's a stretch to say that "most people didn't venture beyond their village" in the premodern world, but I'd bet money that a statement along the lines of "most people didn't venture beyond a 50 to 100 mile radius around their place of birth" would hold true in most times and places prior to around 1700.

flukus 10y ago

> People lived in their village, never left it, and believed there were monsters beyond the horizon. I think that's true of most people in most of human history and would describe a lot of people even today. Even traders would typically only operate in a small section of a trade network, they weren't travelling the globe like Marco Polo. Some would move from small towns to cities, but cities were a population sink until pretty recently. The most well traveled people were probably mostly soldiers.

clock_tower 10y ago

Luxury goods traveled very far, even crossing the frontiers of mutually-hostile civilizations, but most commerce was local. As for people, merchants could really travel, mercenaries sometimes did the same, and elites and soldiers would sometimes go abroad and come back, but most people stayed put. Knowledge was also very expensive to come by, and the difference between what the best-educated and worst-educated knew was much larger than it is today. You might find Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life interesting; likewise A History of Private Life, especially the first two volumes (the classical world and the Middle Ages), as well as Simplicius Simplicissimus, a novel about the Thirty Years War which was written in the 1670s but is still eminently readable today. (Of course, my main area of interest is the early modern period, when Islam was a wall that bisected the world: Muslim merchants could and did travel freely through most of the Old World, but no one else could expect to get through Islam. The pre-Islamic world was more mobile, especially for merchants and mercenaries; likewise the early age of the Mongols, before the Golden Horde and the Il-Khanate converted.)