Premodern Travel in World History

Stephen Gosch, Peter Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134583690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book features some of the greatest travellers in human history – people who undertook long journeys to places they knew little or nothing about. From Roman tourists, to the establishment of the Silk Road; an epic trek round China and India in the seventh century, to Marco Polo and through to the first speculations on space travel, Premodern Travel in World History provides an overview of long-distance travel in Afro-Eurasia from around 400BCE to 1500.

This survey uses succinct accounts of the most epic journeys in the premodern world as lenses through which to examine the development of early travel, trade and cultural interchange between China, central Asia, India and southeast Asia, while also discussing themes such as the growth of empires and the spread of world religions.

Complete with maps, this concise and interesting study analyzes how travel pushed and shaped the boundaries of political, geographical and cultural frontiers.

Chapter 1
Introduction

WHY TRAVEL?

World history teachers have come to love Ibn Battuta. This North African traveler journeyed over 75,000 miles in his life, on foot and by donkey and ship, visiting three continents and many islands and reporting on them with a combination of keen description and vigorous value judgments. He tells us much about societies of his time—the fourteenth century—and his travels more broadly suggest the larger context for interregional contacts, including available transportation. But there is more than reportage. His motivations—why would someone go so far, amid such demanding conditions?—invite speculation about what moved some extraordinary people to indulge such wide curiosity. The consequences of his travels count too: his trips, and others like them, helped motivate other kinds of connections, in a crucial period in which world history turns from largely a story about separate places to an analysis of mutual influences.

* * *

This book is about some of the greatest travelers in human history—people who journeyed often thousands of miles, into places they knew little or nothing about, before travel was made easier by mechanical transportation or hotel reservations. The book is also about unknown people, again before modern times, who also went great distances but did not leave a personal record. They, too, helped cause change through their voyages.

Travel, particularly across cultural or political frontiers, is always exciting. The stories of the great premodern travelers have their share of adventure. But there is more to travel than some stirring anecdotes. Travel also reveals much about the societies in which it occurs. It involves not only transportation systems, but also political organization and patterns of trade, even religious beliefs. The motives of the travelers themselves are a mirror of the times they lived in. More directly still, travelers’ accounts sometimes provide virtually the only information we have about certain societies in the past, for example in the vast nomadic reaches of Central Asia.

Travel also has results. Some of the great journeys of the past—through reports and simply through finding viable routes—affected political and diplomatic policies. Others helped blaze new trade connections, or the paths of religious missionaries. Travel is one of the forces that shaped world history, prompting new kinds of contacts among various peoples of the world.

It is impossible, of course, to cover all the long-distance travel that occurred from early times to 1500. Many travelers left no direct records, though sometimes we have other evidence that allows us some knowledge of venturesome merchants or missionaries even when we don’t know their names. In one case, as we will see in Chapter 8, we can’t even be sure that one of the most famous travelers even went where he said he did. But there are more records about travel than about many other human activities, especially in past centuries where it was fairly unusual. So we do have access to some incredible individual stories. We can see how travel sheds light on wider political and cultural issues in times past. And we can see what consequences some of the great travelers inspired.

We can also see how travel changed. New methods of transportation, more effective political systems, new kinds of religious motivations all affected travel. Travel itself also caused change, as information about one journey stimulated others to set out on their own adventures. Travel, and the knowledge travel brought, helps explain why, by 1400 or so, more people, from more societies, were setting out on ambitious journeys than ever before.

Travel has some distinctive human characteristics. Lots of animals travel long distances. Some are genetically programmed to migrate with the seasons or to return to their birthplaces to have their own progeny. Humans are not genetically guided to particular travel routes, they have to experiment more. But the species can adapt to a variety of environments, which is an important precondition for travel. It can easily be pushed to travel by economic necessity. And in some cases, it can be pushed by sheer curiosity as well.

The first kind of human economy, hunting and gathering, involved considerable travel, at least within a region, in search of game. Fairly small population increases, in an economy that required lots of space per person to generate adequate food, could force humans to migrate even longer distances. Thus homo sapiens sapiens, the most recent human species, to which we all belong, surged out of East Africa, where it originated, in migrations that took the species to almost all parts of the habitable world by 25,000 BCE. Migration patterns continued later on, bringing nomadic peoples from Central Asia into India, the Mediterranean and Europe, or spreading the Bantu peoples of west Central Africa both south and east.

While migration demonstrates that human beings are traveling animals, and while migrations are a vital force in their own right, this book is mostly about a different, more individual kind of travel—in which people leave a place, cover long distances, but intend to come back home (and usually manage to do so). This is the kind of travel that brings news of remote places that can stimulate the fancies of one’s own people. This is the kind of travel usually associated with trade.

Most of this kind of travel—going, but coming back—occurred, before very modern times, in agricultural societies, where most people did not in fact travel widely. In contrast to hunting and gathering, agriculture encouraged most people to settle in one spot, where farms could be developed, irrigation systems or other amenities built. Some hunting or short-distance trade might still be essential, but many peasants placed a great premium on geographic stability—in their own lives, and in fear of strangers. But even agricultural people realized that there were advantages to contacts with more distant places, if only for trade in exotic goods. And agricultural societies generated a few individuals who, for whatever personal reasons, could not accept local confines, and went out to see what they could find in exotic places. Many agricultural societies also interacted with nomads or other peoples who regularly moved about, and this could connect to individual travel patterns as well.

Most of the great travelers—at least the ones we know about—were men. Women obviously participated in migrations. But agricultural societies urged sharp differences between men and women, with women usually expected to stay in and around the home, or at most go to a local market. We will find some exceptions, particularly around religious pilgrimages; and of course this gender bias may also reflect slanted records. But there is no question that travel was not available to a number of key groups.

The few people—predominantly men—who traveled widely in societies where most people’s horizons were bounded by a handful of villages, could have an unusual impact in part because their activity was so unusual. They also require a special kind of explanation, of what pushed them to do what most of their fellows did not attempt. A book about travel before travel became somewhat routine captures these distinctive elements and consequences.

CAN TRAVELERS BE BELIEVED?

This book relies heavily upon writings by travelers who describe what they saw and heard while on the move and (sometimes) how they got from place to place. But can premodern travelers be believed? Are the narratives they produced credible sources of evidence for the modern scholar? Strabo, a Greek traveler in the first century CE, once wrote, ‘Everybody who tells the story of his own travels is a braggart.’ As we shall see in the course of this book, boasting about one’s adventures on the road or at sea was a continuing, but not universal, feature of premodern travel writing. However, an attitude of healthy skepticism on the part of modern readers, close attention to the varied and sometimes contradictory elements embedded in travel narratives, and the careful use of other sources of evidence can correct for traveler braggadocio, and enable researchers to distinguish, for the most part, between what is historically sound and what is not. This general approach is also useful in overcoming a second problem inherent in much premodern travel writing, namely the tendency of travelers to exoticize, and create fantasies about the lands and peoples they visited.

Premodern travelers not only frequently bragged about their experiences, they also depicted some of the peoples they encountered en route as strange and weird, as ‘others’ quite different from, and often inferior to, themselves. An aspect of much travel writing before 1500, to which all students must remain alert, is the contrast, often implied rather than explicit, between ‘we’ who are ‘normal’ and ‘they’ who are ‘bizarre’. Some of the travelers in this book went even further, spicing up their narratives with fantastic stories of monstrous beings, usually said to inhabit the outer edges of the earth, to which the travel writer had not ventured.

The bragging, the ‘othering,’ and the fantasies about strange creatures and monsters in premodern travel narratives, have led some researchers to reject much of this writing as of no real value to the historian. Some scholars, mostly in the field of literary studies, have argued that premodern travel writing is useful, but only for understanding the beliefs of the...

Table of contents

• Themes in World History
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Beginnings to 1000 BCE
• Part I The classical period
• Part II The post-classical period
• Index