/u/Aclockworkwalrus and /u/Micp were both curious about whether/how infrastructure improvements in the late Middle Ages contributed to increased mobility and travel. After all: a horse is still a horse, a camel is still a camel, most people still walk, and the Mediterranean is still trying to kill you.

It turns out that the most important improvements involve the human infrastructure of travel. This sounds recursive and obvious when taken broadly--more people traveled because traveling was easier because more people traveled. So let's talk some specifics.

Medieval people traveled, but they typically did so with a purpose: a destination in mind. But as Ruth Evans notes, one of the biggest puzzles of late medieval travel narratives is how completely unconcerned people seem to be with figuring out directions. There absolutely are "guidebooks" of sorts from the later period, especially with the popularization of cheaper paper over vellum. Many of these seem to have been of minimal practical use, since a lot of the places noted are more symbolic than practical; plus there are the problems of literacy (really the big one here) and hauling along an expensive codex with all your other baggage. Then there are the problems of medieval street addresses. Streets and city quarters might be designated by a name or description, but you weren't handed a neat little map upon paying an entry toll. And houses/buildings weren't designated by numbers to be counted, but rather given names according to little signs/statues on the exterior--the House of the Three Kings, the House of the Weeping Virgin Mary, and so forth.

The most obvious answer is also the one hinted at in textual sources: human guides! This could mean an actual guide for the journey, or simply talking to local people asking where to go next. And this is where "more people traveling" came in handy. Villagers who have been traveling to multiple market towns thanks to increasing specialization will know the immediate countryside better than those who made a monthly journey to one. A monastery liaison who finds himself pointing hosting more and more travelers is going to become familiar with where they're going to and coming from. A set route traversed by more and more people might even acquire known guides who accompany travelers for a fee. This might be particularly helpful for travelers who wanted to minimize the number of people they interacted with along the way (that is, who might recognize them, or recount the meeting to someone else who asked).

This proto-"travel industry" was particularly useful and structured for some of the longest and most famous trips of the Middle Ages: long-distance pilgrimage, especially to Jerusalem. Nicole Chareyron has done really fascinating work reconstructing the travel infrastructure for organized pilgrimages to Jerusalem (like the one famously undertaken by 15C English holy woman and author Margery Kempe), down to notes about how the bribe system between Christian ship captains, Italian-Arabic translators, and Muslim "customs agents" worked.

In addition to "travel professionals" who got paid to help other people travel, many of whom would nevertheless have been themselves stationary, improvements in medieval travel also benefited from the increase in professional travelers, that is, messengers and diplomats. Experience over the same route is an obvious factor, especially for royal-papal couriers. The later Middle Ages saw a reduction in peripatetic (moving) courts, meaning it was much more possible to travel the same route over and over and over for years. Even in the less centralized Holy Roman Empire, the numbers of cities that hosted the Reichstag (parliament) gradually decreased over the 15th-16th centuries until it was, for all practical purposes, a Regensburg institution. The first post-Roman organized postal service in the west comes out of the HRE around 1500, reflecting the normalization of standard routes and the professionalization of a messenger corps.

The increase in salaried cursores and nuncii also contributed to better travel in a less obvious way. Traditionally, international and papal diplomats were drawn from the higher nobility (it was an honor to convey the king's message!). And, well, nobles had certain demands of comfort for their travels. Plöger and Boyer both highlight how slow a giant diplomatic familia had to move thanks to all the Stuff noble diplomats required. A single messenger could make 4-7 times as much progress in a day.

The rise in professionalized diplomatic corps relates to the growing power of more centralized government (though we are still deep down into the age of the power of regional princes,n.b.), which aided travel in a very important way: laws protecting travelers and, to some extent, the ability to enforce them. Some of the earliest privileges had to be extended to traveling scholars, who in the 12th century were getting kidnapped and held for ransom at an apparently alarming rate. (One of the "privileges" associated with a university degree even today goes back to those travel protections). Late medieval diplomats had a sort of agreed-upon diplomatic immunity, but could even secure extra protections from the territories they had to traverse. It seems likely that there were also special markers for pilgrims that would hopefully have afforded them some protection, at least from marauding lords if not necessarily bandits.

By way of physical infrastructure, there are a couple of definite developments, although their overall importance in making travel easier is surprisingly questionable. First, the age of more travelers was also the age that nobles and royals paid more attention to profit maximization of their lands (coinciding, of course, with the rise in paid/professional soldiers and importance of conspicuous consumption as a show of power). This meant more toll stations to extract more money from more travelers. Boyer discusses how, in France at least, the rise in tolls and toll-castles shifted preferred travel routes over the centuries, as people sought to pay the least they could. On the other hand, extra money paid in tolls also helped fund physical infrastructure, especially the upkeep of bridges. (Can't build a stone castle on a creaky wood bridge; can't have the stone bridge collapsing if it's going to destroy the toll castle as well!)

Second, there were some significant improvements in shipbuilding geared towards the problems of boating the Mediterranean specifically. According to Pryor, around the mid-14th century earlier efforts at combining ship improvements from both Latin and Islamic worlds resulted in enough advantage to result in their widespread (trans-religionist) adoption. Hull shape and the use of multiple sails were a couple of big ones. These allowed sailors, in theory, to better fight the winds on the east-to-west journey that had previously been all but impossible in the winter. The use of sail-ships over rowed galleys, too, allowed for more use of open sea rather than always hugging the coastline. This was especially valuable for the southern route, considered much more treacherous travel than the north.

But Pryor continues on that these developments, while obviously profitable enough to result in their popularization, had less of an effect that we might expect. Sailors still largely preferred the northern route, and on merchant-based runs, stuck to the coastline for more access to trade opportunities. The biggest displayed improvement would probably be the easier winter travel.

So overall, improvements in human infrastructure were critical in better, faster travel experiences in the late Middle Ages. However, changes to the physical infrastructure--often spurred by the increase in travel in the first place--played a significant role in shaping what travel might look like.

Hello! Recently I picked up (and subsequently lost, but that's another story) a copy of Miles 'Carthage Must be Destroyed', and what caught my interest was less Carthage itself than what it rose out of.
So! Could someone recommend a book focused on the Near and Middle East before the expansion of the Persian Empire?

Last week, I asked for a Thurgood Marshall biography recommendation and got an upvote but no reply. /u/Thurgood_Marshall in /r/law delivered. I haven't gotten to their fourteen recommendations in the 24 hours since but I thought the list was worth sharing.

Hi does anyone know of any good books on the history of mining/extracting industies in Britain or Europe. Even the history of gemstones and how they were extracted would be great. A book with an archaeological focus would be even better!

Just finished A Political Theory of Territory by Margaret Moore, although not strictly history, it lays out the groundwork for a theory surrounding territorial rights and uses a lot of historical examples as case studies of different issues surrounding it. One of the main examples she drew from was the settlement of Bermuda by the British, lead by Sir George Somers. Due to the fact that the area was previously uninhabited, that they established a colony that had a continuing relationship with the land, and formed a political project to express their collective self-determination, they qualified as having territorial rights to the island. But what if a Spanish ship landed on the other side of the island and decided to settle? At what level do we determine territorial rights between groups who claim the same land? Sometimes multiple parties have legitimate claims, whether based in history or a present relationship with said land. It is an extremely thorny issue throughout history and in current global politics. The book also drew on various examples such as Hitler Germany's military reoccupation of the Rhineland, Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the West Bank, territorial issues of Indigenous groups within states, and modern day conflicts such as Kurdistan and Russian-annexed Crimea. I would definitely give it a read if you're into political theory and geopolitics, although I wouldn't personally agree with all of the positions she took throughout the piece.

Just picked up Europe Transformed 1878-1919 by Norman Stone. It dives into the dramatic changes happening in the domestic and international political landscape of various European nations at the time. I'm really excited to dive into it.

This week, it’s Anglo-Saxon women. Specifically, I’m stepping out of my usual to look at genu-ine nobility, Queen Ælfgifu of Northumbria (1006 – 1036?), mostly to get an idea of how Anglo-Saxon women of the nobility exercised power. Like most Anglo-Saxon women, Ælfgifu had a rough start. Her family was a powerful and Mercian, but they fell out of favor around the time she was born. Still a baby, her dad was killed and her brothers blinded, probably on King Æthelred’s orders. Now, they called Æthelred “the ill-advised,” which probably had something to do with him murdering a bunch of Danes in the north and provoking King Swein Forkbeard’s invasion. The family was suspected of treachery during the invasion, so 7-year-old Ælfgifu saw more family members get axed. That’s probably why her family was eager to switch sides and marry her off to Swein’s son Cnut when she was no older than 10.

As it happened, Swein got a foothold in northern England, and Ælfgifu bore two sons by Cnut: Swein and Harold Harefoot. But despite having two sons under her belt, after the war’s end and Æthelred’s untimely death, Cnut still decided to marry the newly-widowed Emma (also sometimes called Ælfgifu; it was very confusing times). Polygamy wasn’t too unusual for Danish kings at the time, but what was unusual was how Ælfgifu handled the situation—despite now being the “old wife” and sharing a house with the widow of the man who killed or maimed much of her family, Ælfgifu stayed prominent. Still in her 20s, Ælfgifu was sent by her husband to Norway to rule as regent, along with her son Swein. I’m still brushing up on why, exactly, but she left a strong impression on the Norwegians as being a harsh ruler. She kept her reputation despite the efforts of Emma back in England, who commissioned an entire codex (the Ecomium Emmae Reginae) about her husband’s reign in which she conspicuously relegates Ælfgifu to the status of an unnamed concubine. NB: Emma only commissioned the codex, so it’s entirely possible the author/scribe just thought it best to leave Ælfgifu out, but he would have thought so for a reason. In any case, after four years in Norway, Ælfgifu and little Swein got ran out to Denmark, where Swein died. Two years later, Cnut followed, and Ælfgifu rushed back to England to press her son Harold’s claim to the throne.

And she had good reason to rush. Emma had sons of her own by Cnut, and rumors were already going around that Ælfgifu was just a concubine and that Swein and Harold were illegitimate. This practice was fairly common in Anglo-Saxon politics during contended successions, but Ælfgifu remarkably pushed through it all and put her son Harold on the throne—again, I’m not entirely sure on the details of how, but if anyone knows, I’d love you forever. We don’t know exactly when she died, but her name fades after she puts Harold Harefoot on the throne, and there are no further challenges to his right to rule during his short reign; Emma’s son Harthacnut inherits the throne peacefully. Emma gets a lot more attention from history and modern scholars, partly because history loves the Normans, and partly because Emma was the one commissioning more history at the time. What I’m interested in now is how Ælfgifu muscled through it all—was it her force of personality? Two sons? Were her Mercian connections more important than Emma’s Norman ones? Ælfgifu herself shows up with Cnut in the Stowe MS 944, f. 6r., which is conveniently digitized by the British Library and free for anyone to see. I was going to give a description here because it’s got a few interesting things going on, but I’ve already gone on too long.

I'm starting a project that analyzes newspaper advertisements for nostrum cures that ran at the height of Nashville's bout with the Spanish flu. A bit of cursory research showed that at least 7 companies ran regular advertisements for their bullshit, which ranged from Vick's VapoRub to snake oil.

I'm hoping to analyze their claims using a contextual approach that weighs their society's understanding of the disease -- does anyone know any texts to point me towards?

Apart from Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, what other books do you recommend about The Terror and the Committee of Public Safety?