As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I am deep into the historical research weeds while building the world that will house my next set of characters. Certain points I have already decided: mid-sixteenth century, a good seven years after Song of the Storyteller and Song of the Steadfast; a new location on the shores of the Caspian Sea; a shift back to a social class other than the high nobility; and the inclusion of a few foreign merchants, with their specifically western view on life and a family background that can explain how they got to this distant region and why they stayed even when the political situation turned against them. But finding information on what life was actually like in this period in history—even in normal times, and historical fiction rarely takes place in “normal” times, since novels demand drama and action—is a challenge at best.
This is not my first dive into historical world building; five years ago I wrote a post on “Lost Worlds,” where I discussed how to convey information without dumping it by the barrel over a reader’s unsuspecting head. In 2022 I addressed a similar problem in “Down the Rabbit Hole.” (The similarity in title to the post from two weeks ago was unintended; after more than five hundred of these mini-essays, I sometimes think I’m inventing something new when I’m actually quoting myself.)
One great source of on-the-ground information comes from international diplomats and merchants—the “traveling salesmen” of history. There is a widespread myth that medieval and early modern people stayed close to home, but that has even less truth than the myth that all medieval women were obedient doormats—meaning that society encouraged such behavior in many instances, but the reality was as varied as any other human endeavor.
Sure, enserfed peasants seldom traveled farther than the nearest town, but European, Arab, and Indian merchants reached the Levant, Africa, the Black Sea, Poland, the Danube, Anatolia, Persia, and even China by the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth and sixteenth, they had spread out across Russia (and Russian merchants were visiting these lands, too). They would vanish for years while their families at home slowly surrendered the hope that those missing might ever return, then miraculously show up after almost a decade. Or not, since they faced many perils, including falling ill, being robbed of their goods, facing arrest and kidnapping, finding themselves stranded, running out of cash, and generally falling afoul of the wrong local leader.
And quite a few of these travelers, bless their hearts, left records of their journeys, which were then translated into what in some cases now reads as distinctly archaic English filled with mangled place and personal names yet rich in details unavailable elsewhere. Some are gossipy, others filled with complaints from men (until the nineteenth century, they were almost all men) impossible to please, but a few offer a real eye for detail mixed with gems of insight into foreign lands. The trick is finding them and figuring out how best to fold those details into a story.
I’ll close with a couple of examples, starting with one of the very best, the Travels of Ibn Battutah, who over the course of almost thirty years in the mid-fourteenth century covered the region from the Straits of Gibraltar to Beijing, with detours through much of northern Africa as well as the Eurasian steppe and down through India as far as Sri Lanka. Here he is in the northern Black Sea area where, a couple of centuries later, my new set of characters will live.
From al-Qiram [Staryi Krym, in Crimea] we travelled for twenty-one days to Azaq [modern-day Azov, Tana during the time of my story] then continued on our way to the city of al-Machar, a large town, one of the finest of the cities of the Turks, on a great river, and possessed of gardens and fruits in abundance.... I witnessed in this country a remarkable thing, namely the respect in which women are held by them, indeed they are higher in dignity than the men. As for the wives of the amirs, the first occasion on which I saw them was when, on my departure from al-Qiram, I saw the khatun, the wife of the Amir Saltiyah, in a waggon of hers. The entire waggon was covered with rich blue woolen cloth, the windows and doors of the tent were open, and there were in attendance on her four girls of excelling beauty and exquisitely dressed.… As for the wives of the traders and the commonalty, I have seen them, when one of them would be in a waggon, being drawn by horses, and in attendance on her three or four girls to carry her train, wearing on her head a bughtaq, which is a conical headdress decorated with precious stones and surmounted by peacock feathers. The windows of the tent would be open and her face would be visible, for the womenfolk of the Turks do not veil themselves.
Can’t you just see this scene in your head? Who would believe it took place seven hundred years ago? And then there is his surprise, which tells you that women were obviously treated differently in the place he came from.
Here is another excerpt, from an unnamed early sixteenth-century merchant who is neither as observant, as cosmopolitan, nor as skilled in description as Ibn Battuta but who nonetheless offers a window onto a world fated to vanish in a prolonged war between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid dynasty, an independent group of Turks who took control over what we now call Iran. He is describing the city of Bitlis, in southern Armenia, then a region much larger than the contemporary Republic of Armenia, in 1507 or thereabouts—a time much closer to the setting of my novel.
This city of Bitlis is neither very large nor walled round, but has a fine castle on a hill in its midst, which is large and well built, and according to their chronicles and traditions, was founded by Alexander the Great; it is surrounded by high walls, with many turrets and lofty towers. The city, together with the castle, is governed by a Curd [Kurd] named Sarasbec [Saras Bek?], half a rebel against Sultan Sciech Ismael [Sheikh Ismail, probably], and who is considered in Persia as the master of this fine fortress. All the Curds are truer Mahometans [Muslims] than the other inhabitants of Persia, since the Persians have embraced the Suffavean [Sufi, but he actually means Shi’ite] doctrine, while the Curds would not be converted to it…. This same city is situated among high mountains in a valley; so that it is, as it were, hidden, and one does not perceive it till one is close upon it. And all that region is a kind of receptacle or reservoir of snow, and so much falls that they are only three or four months of the year without it, and they cannot sow their corn before the 15th or 20th of April. Many merchants leave this city to trade in Aleppo, Tauris [Tabriz], and Bursa, as there is nothing to buy in it, nor any merchandise to be retailed.
He goes on in this vein for some time, but the truly telling detail from an author’s perspective is the footnote from the nineteenth-century translator: “Modern travellers give a very different account of this region.”
And that, in brief, is the beauty of these travelers’ tales. Even when they are wonky on names, obsessed with the amount of snow, and downright derogatory (as the second author often is) about the people they encounter, the traveling salesmen of the early modern era are like keepers of a time machine: they open a window onto a world that, in every sense of the phrase, no longer exists.
And since they were slogging their way from place to place, often without clear directions, finding out the dangers and discomforts they might face only at the point when it was too late to avoid them, they have left us many of the details that tend to vanish from loftier historical accounts: who ate what where, who wore certain types of clothes—or no clothes at all, how easy it was to secure horses and boats, how long it took to get from one place to another, and much, much more.
Sometimes, too, these intrepid travelers found themselves in serious trouble. That can be even more enlightening. I’ll get to that in a future post.
Images: Drawing by Léon Bennett of the 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta in Egypt, published in Jules Verne’s Découverte de la terre (1878); colorized photograph of Kazakh woman on horseback, wearing a saukele (headdress similar to the bughtag), taken by Sergei Ivanovich Borisov, 1911–1914; etching of Bitlis from Jacob Peeters, Description des principales villes, havres et isles du golfe de Venise du coté oriental: Comme aussi des villes et forteresses de la Morée, et quelques places de la Grèce (Antwerp, 1690)—all public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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