How did iron/roman/medieval/renaissance regulate travel?

[OgreBattle]

So today we have stuff like ID's and passports, but what was it like to travel through different territories in past eras?

It's a detail I've never seen described in a fantasy game other than "Here be undeadlands, stuff kills you there", "The dorfs won't open the door" and the classic "elves will break your bones for every twig you step on tresspassing"

[angelfromanotherpin]

In general, sea travel was not particularly regulated, but inland travel more or less was. They used proto-passports of some variety, usually a simple letter from local authorities, and including a description of the places they were allowed to visit, whether a specific list or a broader description (like 'all settlements on the Dneiper river'). Some included a description of the person it was intended for, others simply referred to 'the bearer' and were essentially a tradeable commodity. Most had expiration dates, and some sort of attempt at forgery prevention, like a seal.

How effective such a letter of transit was would come down to how stable the area was and how respected the issuing authority was. In some places it would be very powerful, in other places all it would get you is a discount on your bribe, and if it declared you a 'friend of the crown' or something and you ran into a band of rebels, it might be a liability.

[Longes]

Here's a letter with which Peter the Great traveled as a member of the embassy to Europe. It states the travel purpose, lists the leaders of the group, and commands people to aid the group in whatever they need.

[fectin]

Wealth of Nations (yes, that wealth of nations) spends a while talking about it. If you only want the takeaways, PJ O'Rourke has an excellent summary of it.

[Ancient History]

It depends on the culture and the period, but from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages at least population mobility was highly discouraged; lots of people were locked into agricultural or trade jobs specific to a given piece of land or town and couldn't officially leave without permission (or, in some cases, encouragement). Which didn't mean it didn't happen, because there are records of migration and problems with itinerants and suchlike, and in the late Middle Ages especially you get pilgrim routes and whatnot that open up, but for a long period movement along certain roads or waterways was controlled, mainly at stopping places and checkpoints where tolls and tariffs were assessed.

Asian countries with more regimented bureaucracies in the pre-modern period (China, Japan, Korea) were, from the accounts I've read, even more stringent in controlling traffic, mainly by requiring travelers to have specific papers and regular check points and searches (and, in post-European contact Japan, sometimes tests for secret Christians). Of course, if you didn't travel by roads and cut through fields and wilderness you could bypass the checkpoints, but if anybody saw you then you'd probably be reported.

None of which stopped human migration, and as noted trying to control sea traffic was a dicey proposition (even into the Age of Sail), but some rulers did try to enforce laws to control travel, often for a desire to maximize taxes and tariffs as much as anything, and a major sign of economic development in Europe was often the relaxing of laws restricting travel, permitting Jews or foreign merchants to enter and stay in part of a city, or exempting them from certain fees.

[shadzar]

Letters of Marque, said who you are, where you came from, who sent you. Otherwise you could become slave in another kingdom if it allowed that.

inside one kingdom of course you had toll roads, they were pretty much paying a tithe when you entered a new city or area, as many times as gaurds charged you if you are a newcomer.

Most people didn't travel because they were too busy. the ones that did were either merchants or laborours that were escorted/taken by gaurds to do tasks.

[tussock]

Medieval Europe.

So, there's roads. Sort of. They're impassable when it rains, and it rains all the time. People would winter over in places, find a way to earn a crust (literally). Armies and Kings would get caught with early snow and have to winter over somewhere. A handful of things the Romans built sort of half work, but most don't even go anywhere any more because Rome was a thousand years ago.

Not to mention the outlaws. There was a thing where certain people got put on a list where they were officially un-people and you could freely kill them and take their stuff. It's cool for adventure, but those people are angry, desperate, and they like watching roads. Various Barons also play that game, robber Barons were a literal thing in parts of Europe. Some Barons were outlaws, or excommunicated, which meant the other Barons could kill them and take their stuff, in theory if not in practice.

The few good roads are taxed at every little bridge and town and crossroads and pass and ford and where you go tight around marshes or woods or ... yeah, even a day's travel gets impossibly expensive, and there's plenty of bodies in the marsh even without scaleykind.

A letter of marque was a thing where someone non-local who was exempt from those tolls (generally by right of arms) stamped their extension of that right to you. Guys like the Inquisition had letters from the Pope, which said they could freely kidnap and torture people: so it's not just for travel, it's any exemption from any law. Piracy, whatever.

Locals were mostly immune on certain days because they couldn't pay anyway. Nearby farmers could bring their stuff to market with much smaller tolls than you'd pay for walking the same road some other day.

The land off the roads is even worse. Huge forests, swamps, and people that are just dangerously hostile.

Then there's rivers. That's how you travel. At least in countries without widespread canal networks. That's where every non-farmer lives and trades and shits and drinks. The medieval version of Cholera was common and also relatively tame. The problem with rivers is they decide which direction you go and how far and fast, and crossing between them is more of the thing with roads.

Anyway, the bit where a good road joins a piece of river has a city. Same where rivers meet each other, or meet the sea (if the entry is navigable at least, which many aren't). Cities have walls and you pay to get past them, if they let you in at all (because your kind isn't welcome here). London's huge because the Thames is a big river that you can navigate from Oxbridge all the way to France, and London's where you have to catch the tides.

And everyone's basically a slave, give or take. Serfdom is a thing like you have a day job and the pay is you get to try to grow food for your family on public land with your own gear, and build your own tiny house when you find the time. Freemen paid rent for that right instead, but they still couldn't just leave, because the rent was for life (or at least a year and a day after you stopped using the land, which is the same thing).




But that's a ridiculous pain in the ass for PCs. So, meh. Just in general, people are not free, the enumerated rights from the French Revolution / US Independence times do not yet exist. So freedom of movement isn't a thing at all, and there's no system of complaining about that which doesn't end in tortured confessions and horrific methods of execution for anyone stirring up trouble.

[Laertes]

Serfdom sucks. Like, more suckage than is possible to comprehend. For example, in late medieval Poland every male peasant owed his feudal lord eight days' work every week. As a result, if you didn't have a family to grow food for you and do that extra day on your behalf, you are totally boned. You'll either starve to death or you'll be beaten to death for refusing your feudal dues.

Surviving medieval records are full of little laws that stand out due to their horrendous unfairness. For example, in England every peasant was expected to supply their own plow for planting season. If they were too poor to afford one, they would have to rent the lord's one. Which would cost more than having your own one would, because screw you. There were also laws against collecting firewood, against fishing in communal rivers, and against collecting up animal poop to put on your fields. Even basic things like brewing beer or (especially) owning flat stones to grind grain into flour were very illegal; you were expected to pay the lord for the right to use his millstones and buy his beer. When the man of the family dies, the widow and children were expected to pay an extra tax and hand over their tools to the lord and the church, so as to prevent the widow from feeding her kids.

If it sounds like this was all the attempt to keep people from rising above the starvation economy, well, that's because that's exactly what it was. Surviving texts on land management all stress that the most dangerous thing possible was to allow the peasants to have any disposable income or any free time whatsoever, because they would tend to use it to organise against the lord, mount legal challenges to the lord's practises, and find ways to circumvent the lord's exploitation. There was serious paranoia among the aristocrats and churchmen about the possibility that, if you stopped raping your peasants brains out, you might end up completely dispossessed. *

There is a case in Burgundy where rabbits overran the village's fields to the point where the lord was urged to give the peasants the right to kill them; instead, he refused and they ended up having to abandon the fields. The other option - giving the peasants the right to kill rabbits, and thus the ability to supplement their diet to above a starvation level - was too frightening to contemplate.

One of the biggest dues was cartage. Being allowed to take your wares to market was something that was very strictly controlled. It seems odd that a peasant with a cart full of turnips could be seen as a subversive social force, but that's the medieval era for you.

Naturally, attempting to flee one's lord's lands is completely illegal and in some parts of Europe was punishable by death. Serfs were part of the land, not people in their own right. Which means that travellers would be stopped repeatedly and forced to show that they had the right to be here and weren't runaway serfs.

---

* This isn't as bizarre a concept as it appears to us today. Most lords were demanding far more from the peasantry than they were legally allowed to, because being an aristocrat was ruinously expensive, particularly in the High Middle Ages when armour and horse breeding got to be serious things. As a result, the prospect of the peasants hiring a lawyer and forcing the lord to dial back his demands to legal levels was something that was taken very seriously indeed.

[Laertes]

Oh yeah, and adventurers. Actual adventurers were a thing. Just not a good thing.

Knights were increasingly, as the medieval era went on, an anachronism seen by everyone as such. They ended up being somewhat like today's super-rich: a dead weight on society who were obsessed with using whatever legal and political mechanisms they could to deadlock the system and ensure that people didn't pass reforms to get rid of them. Some medieval dynasties like the Capets and Angevins worked hard to bring the knights under the royal bootheel; in other areas like Germany the knights ended up deposing lords and kings who tried that against them. What made the knights especially dangerous wasn't just that they had political protection: what made them dangerous was that they were the top predator, militarily speaking. Men of the knightly caste were trained from a young age, and while not all of them had the best armour and horses, nobody else really had better outside of extremely wealthy merchant cities. Furthermore, they were educated to be willing to use violence to solve their problems, and to see the peasantry as literally nothing more than a machine to produce the goods they wanted and the money to buy said goods. As such, their behaviour frequently seems almost puzzlingly psychopathic to our modern sensibilities.

It was traditional amongst the knightly caste to send their young men travelling for a few years to fight, rape, loot and other such things, and generally get it out of their system. However, as the years went by and the Crusades burned down, it became less and less practical to do so. Thus, groups of knights simply started travelling their own countries, looking for alcohol and violence. Sadly, the knights were also the caste who fed the monasteries and therefore the caste which controlled literacy, and so we remember them as the charmingly quaint concept of "knights errant", riding around to slay dragons and rescue fair maidens. The reality was a little less Walter Scott and a little more George R R Martin.

You need to remember that during the medieval era, there was basically no law enforcement beyond the local lords' private armies, and thus a group of knights who were militarily more powerful than the local lord could basically not be prevented from looting, raping and stealing at will. Some local lords had more powerful feudal overlords they could call on for help, but even this became a delicate matter. In some areas (like Germany) this call for help could be interpreted as you stating that you needed their protection and thus invalidating any claim you may have had to holding your land in your own right, driving you into vassaldom. In other areas (like Spain and Poland) it could end up with you being dispossessed of your land entirely, on the "if you can't defend it it isn't really yours" basis. Finally, driving off a force of knights would require a larger group of knights, which would be expensive; if the cost to the lord of doing so is greater than the harm to his purse of having his peasants looted, then you can guess which way he'd decide.

As a result, when travelling you would have a not insignificant change of running into one of the following:

a) A group of drunk young noblemen, armed and equipped with some of the best stuff available, who are entirely willing to rob you of all your possessions for the lulz, and possibly rape and/or kill you into the bargain.

b) Local groups of peasants who are prepared to quietly murder groups of (a) and may mistake you for them.

Seriously. This was a thing that happened. The medieval era was a horrible time to be alive.

[AndreiChekov]

Capernicus (the round earth guy) was in charge of a farming community when he was in his 30s. He kept very meticulous records, and there are times mentioned when serfs ran away, and he sent letters to other areas about getting them back, and also arranged hunting parties to retrieve them. This was in modern day Germany. It should also be noted, that the Lutheran areas, and the Catholic areas at the time were at war, but I don't know how that affected this.

[Ghremdal]

Laertes, could you link some books or webpages serfdom in medieval time? I am intrigued and would like to know more.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Capernicus (the round earth guy) was in charge of a farming community when he was in his 30s. He kept very meticulous records, and there are times mentioned when serfs ran away, and he sent letters to other areas about getting them back, and also arranged hunting parties to retrieve them. This was in modern day Germany. It should also be noted, that the Lutheran areas, and the Catholic areas at the time were at war, but I don't know how that affected this.

It had a huge effect on things. 1600-1650's Germany is about as close as you can come to hell on earth. Every princely state is choosing one religion or another to ally them selves to a separate power block (Austria vs Sweden and France). 30% of the population dies, either through starvation, random massacres, conscription, the works. Huge mercenary armies are rampaging through the territory looking for gold to replace the pay they usually don't receive, as well as new recruits. To give you some context, the Soviet union lost between 15-20% of its population in World War 2 and that was mostly concentrated in a couple of areas. Peasants fleeing was a matter of the region in which they lived in becoming unliveable, but their lords still needed their labor.

On a more generic note, remember that travel was inredibly limited in the Middle Ages, everyone knows everyone in town, so a new person, or heck, even a person just moving through, sticks out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, cities are much more open and usually independent of local lords, so you can disappear there.

[kzt]

The horrors of the 30 years war is where the revolutionary Westphalian concepts like sovereign states, an end of overlapping religious and political loyalties, and rules on war comes from. In our more enlightened present many have decided that those Westphalian ideas are old and outmoded, without understanding what that implies.

[OgreBattle]

Oh yeah, and adventurers. Actual adventurers were a thing. Just not a good thing.

Knights were increasingly, as the medieval era went on, an anachronism seen by everyone as such. They ended up being somewhat like today's super-rich: a dead weight on society who were obsessed with using whatever legal and political mechanisms they could to deadlock the system and ensure that people didn't pass reforms to get rid of them. Some medieval dynasties like the Capets and Angevins worked hard to bring the knights under the royal bootheel; in other areas like Germany the knights ended up deposing lords and kings who tried that against them. What made the knights especially dangerous wasn't just that they had political protection: what made them dangerous was that they were the top predator, militarily speaking. Men of the knightly caste were trained from a young age, and while not all of them had the best armour and horses, nobody else really had better outside of extremely wealthy merchant cities. Furthermore, they were educated to be willing to use violence to solve their problems, and to see the peasantry as literally nothing more than a machine to produce the goods they wanted and the money to buy said goods. As such, their behaviour frequently seems almost puzzlingly psychopathic to our modern sensibilities.

It was traditional amongst the knightly caste to send their young men travelling for a few years to fight, rape, loot and other such things, and generally get it out of their system. However, as the years went by and the Crusades burned down, it became less and less practical to do so. Thus, groups of knights simply started travelling their own countries, looking for alcohol and violence. Sadly, the knights were also the caste who fed the monasteries and therefore the caste which controlled literacy, and so we remember them as the charmingly quaint concept of "knights errant", riding around to slay dragons and rescue fair maidens. The reality was a little less Walter Scott and a little more George R R Martin.

You need to remember that during the medieval era, there was basically no law enforcement beyond the local lords' private armies, and thus a group of knights who were militarily more powerful than the local lord could basically not be prevented from looting, raping and stealing at will. Some local lords had more powerful feudal overlords they could call on for help, but even this became a delicate matter. In some areas (like Germany) this call for help could be interpreted as you stating that you needed their protection and thus invalidating any claim you may have had to holding your land in your own right, driving you into vassaldom. In other areas (like Spain and Poland) it could end up with you being dispossessed of your land entirely, on the "if you can't defend it it isn't really yours" basis. Finally, driving off a force of knights would require a larger group of knights, which would be expensive; if the cost to the lord of doing so is greater than the harm to his purse of having his peasants looted, then you can guess which way he'd decide.

As a result, when travelling you would have a not insignificant change of running into one of the following:

a) A group of drunk young noblemen, armed and equipped with some of the best stuff available, who are entirely willing to rob you of all your possessions for the lulz, and possibly rape and/or kill you into the bargain.

b) Local groups of peasants who are prepared to quietly murder groups of (a) and may mistake you for them.

Seriously. This was a thing that happened. The medieval era was a horrible time to be alive.

Where can I find references on that? Lots of Samurai dramas depict the shitty side of armed asshole nobility, but I don't see that as much with knights.

[Stahlseele]

that may be in large parts because the winner gets to write history as he likes it i guess?

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's worth noting that the reason being a noble was so expensive was because their lords made it that way. Because if the nobility had free time and money, they'd plot against their lord. It was basically like that all the way up the ladder.

[Wiseman]

This intrigues me. How would all this work in a world like D&D where the high ups have magic? I'm thinking of designing a setting around this.

[Ancient History]

And, not to belabor the point, but it was a complicated situation with lots of exceptions and weird little peculiarities after the fall of the Roman Empire. Roman farming technology and diet wasn't well-suited to a lot of northern climates, and there were restrictions on land clearance, the use of fertilizer, metal tools, and basic farming technology. That meant that for something like a thousand years subsistence farming yields were often pitiful, sometimes as bad as 1:1 (one grain harvested for each planted). Rents were typically fixed and in kind, because there was a shortage of coins and a lot of precious metals ended bound up in church relics and decorations.

[darkmaster]

It probably wouldn't work in D&D because the only way to prevent people from being able to usurp your rule is to keep them personally from being able to stab you in your face so you'd have prevent people from getting military training which is fine until you remember that you need an army because no matter how bad ass you personally are so you need an army, you could try to prevent soldiers from leveling up but good luck keeping people from deserting and possibly going on adventures to kill you once people figure out you send any unit you deem too seasoned into the meat grinder. And of course if any of your neighbors decide having more high level people is worth the risk then you're screwed because that neighbor becomes a meat grinder that can plow through your armies by opening a portal to an erupting volcano on the elemental plane of fire under your castle.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

that may be in large parts because the winner gets to write history as he likes it i guess?

Sort of. Japan had a lot more centralized control for longer than Europe so samurai were always more professional mercenaries than knights. Though you have some romanticism during the civil wars of the 1100's, during the real peak of the Samurai during the Sengoku era, the Samurai were quite content and honest with themselves. They were mercenary badasses who served the most powerful lords. They never really thought of themselves as honorable per se (loved guns, trickery, burning shit down, treachery, the works). Its only in the 1700's when the samurai become lazy people who aren't allowed to get any other jobs that you get all this noble bright katana bullshit.

Meanwhile, the knights also happened to form the ruling class (guys who giver orders, not just those with privileges), which they never really did under the Tokugawa's, so you then get that crap.

[Drolyt]

They never really thought of themselves as honorable per se (loved guns, trickery, burning shit down, treachery, the works). Its only in the 1700's when the samurai become lazy people who aren't allowed to get any other jobs that you get all this noble bright katana bullshit.

Your Japanese history is crap. Swords were praised as early as the Kojiki in 712 AD, and while the word bushido is a modern invention the term bushi is used in the Shoku Nihongi (797 AD) and there are all kinds of premodern sources on how a samurai should behave:

When one is serving officially or in the master's court, he should not think of a hundred or a thousand people, but should consider only the importance of the master. Nor should he draw the line at his own life or anything else he considers valuable. Even if the master is being phlegmatic and one goes unrecognized, he should know that he will surely have the divine protection of the gods and Buddhas ... One should rely on neither age nor youth. But he who reveres the master and protects the people may be called a sage.

If one treats men roughly in this existence, he will be roughly treated by them in the next, for karma is never-ending in all things. And if one would rid himself of bad karma in this round of existence, he should treat well those who are not so kind to him. For if one is dealt with kindly by people, he can rejoice in his previous existence; but if he is handled roughly in this world, his previous existence is a matter for regret.

First, a man whose profession is the use of arms should think and then act upon not only his own fame, but also that of his descendants. He should not scandalize his name forever by holding his one and only life too dear. On the other hand, in the light of this, to consider this life that is given to us only once as nothing more than dust and ashes, and lose it at a time when one should not, would be to gain a reputation that is not worth mentioning. One's main purpose in throwing away his life is to do so either for the sake of the Emperor or in some great undertaking of a military general.

Again, the August Personage said, "Literary men and warriors are they whom the nation values."

You cannot tell me that real samurai did not care about their honor, even if that honor was more rooted in Shinto and Buddhism than the modern concept of "bushido".

[Omegonthesane]

We can, however, tell you that Samurai were not so fond of their swords when they were actual warriors, because bows are a better weapon and emphasising your swordsmanship meant downplaying your bow skill.

[Drolyt]

We can, however, tell you that Samurai were not so fond of their swords when they were actual warriors, because bows are a better weapon and emphasising your swordsmanship meant downplaying your bow skill.

Source please. I am aware that Samurai were trained to use bows, particularly while riding a horse, but they also valued their swords. Of course swords were sidearms for the most part (though there was a type of sword samurai used from horseback similar to how sabres and scimitars were used) so they wouldn't be the first choice in most battles but as far as I can tell swords were still associated with samurai since well before modern times.

[Omegonthesane]

Original source (Cracked)

Citation from the above article, which emphasises how swords were a backup weapon and gives a story circa 1184 CE of a samurai running for it when he realises he has a sword against a rider.

Other citation from the above article, which admittedly (on that page anyway) just reiterates that the contemporary samurai code was the Way of the Bow and the Horse, no swords mentioned.

[Username17]

The word you're looking for is Kyūjutsu.

-Username17