• I meant to post this earlier but forgot:

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/21/researchers-win-1m-grant-to-unlock-secrets-of-viking-era-treasure-trove

    Taken altogether, the hoard hints at hitherto unknown connections between people across Europe and beyond

    What I always find interesting is that there is often an underlying assumption we have about the past is that, just because people weren't hypermobile, they didn't travel. It's a bit like archaeologists in a hyper-hypermobile age, say, 1,000 years' from now, excavating a Polski Sklep in London and concluding that it hints at unknown links between the UK and Poland. The sensible assumption is that even when travel took longer and was quite perilous, it occurred all the time--fewer people travelled more slowly and more rarely, but there was still a lot of travelling, especially by merchants, but also pilgrimages, army expeditions, and the like, so the presence of traded luxuries shouldn't be surprising. It's pretty clear by now that most large cities were as inter'national' then as they are today, for instance.

    I do wonder what fruit this research grant will bear. It seems like a lot, but I don't know how expensive such research usually is.

  • There is contrasting evidence.
    One of the original causes of the Catholic crusades to reclaim the Holy Lands was to make it once again safe for pilgrims to venture to Jerusalem. I've no idea when such pilgrimage became popular, but clearly for anyone in Europe such a journey would have been at least a multi-month expedition, if travelling on foot. How anyone outside the wealthy aristocracy could have have funded such a trip is beyond my understanding, unless dependent upon picking up casual work on successive harvests.

    Reading about the array of kervansarays in southern Anatolia that comprised one of the Silk Routes during Ottoman times, Marco Polo's journey was notable for the fact that someone travelled the entire distance. Local traders tended to oscillate between their local kervansaray, spaced at around 15 miles, or the distance a caravan of pack animals could comfortably achieve in a day.

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