Luxury goods traveled very far, even crossing the frontiers of mutually-hostile civilizations, but most commerce was local. As for people, merchants could reall

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.)