
Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? - robg
http://www.kottke.org/08/06/survival-tips-for-the-middle-ages
======
pg
1000 plus or minus 200 years covers a huge range. 1000 was just about the
fulcrum of the medieval period: life in 800 would have been a complete
disaster, whereas life in 1200 was in some places a mini-Renaissance.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century>

If you really got dropped at a random place, it would probably be grazing land
or forest, especially in 800. You'd have to find the nearest tiny village and
convince them you weren't dangerous. The stuff you had on you would seem
miraculously fine, so could be valuable in trade if it wasn't stolen from you
first. But the best way to extract value from your stuff would be to give it
as a gift to some powerful protector; money wouldn't be any use unless you
could protect yourself against robbers. So it would be all about finding a
powerful protector.

In 800 you'd want to find the most enlightened bishop nearby, present yourself
as a traveller from some obscure pocket of Nestorian Christians in the far
east (drop hints about Prester John), and get work helping to administer his
estates. This wouldn't work everywhere, though: a lot of Europe was still
pagan in 800. If you landed in the north or the east, you'd have to try to
find some enlightened local warlord instead. Hard to say what use you could be
to him, though; probably your only hope would be that he'd keep you around as
an adornment to his court.

In 1200 you might still want to find a bishop, but if there was a town nearby
(especially a great one like Florence or Venice) you could also find work in a
bank or for one of the great wool merchants.

Generally: Be compulsively clean, and keep your opinions to yourself.

~~~
robg
What one invention would you introduce ahead of its time?

~~~
pg
Hygiene.

~~~
robg
How can you make money with that? Purveyor of scented soaps? ;)

~~~
pg
You could not die, which would be pretty valuable.

But come to think of it, you could also make tons of money. An ordinary
educated person today knows way more about medicine than medieval doctors did.
So your optimal career goal should probably be to become a court physician.
You could become as rich as minor nobility doing this, and (most importantly)
without having to take sides in power struggles.

~~~
robg
SaS = Soaps and Sterilization. Hmmm, interesting, but seems like you'd have to
violate your second rule ("no opinions"). Maybe if you could manage to out
live most other folks into your late thirties and forties (steering clear of
all sorts of bugs - water, food, and transmission-based) the marketing would
be your very aliveness. People would have to solicit your counsel rather than
you having to actively sell it.

------
davidw
"Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my
boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the
line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this
sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and
nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair
trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"

~~~
time_management
How much ammo would you carry?

It'd be nice to have enough to make an impression on anyone who threatened
you. Aside from that, you'd probably never have to use it.

~~~
davidw
It's just a quote from "Army of Darkness".

------
mechanical_fish
_Prediction is impossible, we all know that. What we don't know is that
retrodiction is also impossible. History is a form of science fiction. The
future is history that hasn't happened yet. History is the sensibility of one
time, assessing another time, that it cannot possibly know._

\-- Bruce Sterling,
<http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000001.txt>

~~~
icey
Superman can't really fly, but he's still fun to watch.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm sure Sterling, who has made his living writing SF, would never wish to
suggest otherwise.

------
daniel-cussen
How to make gunpowder, from Wikipedia. Warning, gross.

"Historically, nitre-beds were prepared by mixing manure with either mortar or
wood ashes, common earth and organic materials such as straw to give porosity
to a compost pile typically 1.5 meters high by 2 meters wide by 5 metres
long.[3] The heap was usually under a cover from the rain, kept moist with
urine, turned often to accelerate the decomposition and leached with water
after approximately one year. The liquid containing various nitrates was then
converted with wood ashes to potassium nitrates, crystallized and refined for
use in gunpowder.

Urine has also been used in the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder. In
this process, stale urine placed in a container of straw hay is allowed to
sour for many months, after which water is used to wash the resulting chemical
salts from the straw. The process is completed by filtering the liquid through
wood ashes and air-drying in the sun. Saltpeter crystals can then be collected
and added to brimstone and charcoal to create black powder.[4][5][6][7][8]"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate#History_of_pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate#History_of_production)

~~~
ksvs
"Government officials had the power to scrape up dried urine from beneath the
boarded floors of Stuart stables because it contained saltpetre, a vital
ingredient of gunpowder."

<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_/ai_n15630934>

------
DanielBMarkham
Hope for 1200. 800 wasn't that great.

Be humble, mute, and helpful. If you know latin, work on learning the current
dialect/script -- you'll have a shot at declaring yourself a "wise man from
the east" and go for the job of physician. I would be careful with the Prester
John references, your mileage may vary. As one commenter pointed out, you
should be able to make aspirin from willow bark and penicillin from mold.
These two alone, plus hygiene, should make you a miracle-worker. Be prepared
to saw a lot of limbs off. You could also be the first to use opiates in
medicine, which could alleviate a lot of suffering in that time.

After 1100 or so, the crusades are well under way. Most of the nobles will be
coming and going to the various crusades. They started in the Levant and ended
up being next door as crusades were eventually preached against heretics. As
physician, try to attach to the church -- they're on the ascent. Perhaps with
some luck you can get noticed by the pope and end up with a (relatively) cushy
job in Rome.

 _Don't_ do the man-at-arms thing. You'll suck at it. _Don't_ try for any kind
of social revolution -- people were pretty tolerant during that time, but by
1200 the church was getting very sensitive about outliers. You don't want to
show up on their radar. Stay away from southern France -- the Cathars were
nice folks but trouble is on the way for them.

If I had the choice of picking a city (besides the Rome-physician thing), I'd
go for Genova, Pisa, or Venice. Great cities with fast growth and more of an
open culture. They made out like bandits transporting nobles and supplies
during the crusades.

~~~
derefr
As to the "man-at-arms thing": if you could bring with you to the past a
suitcase or so of initial supplies, what would be the best investment in the
long term to become a unopposable warlord (or just an arms dealer with a
technological monopoly?) Just "a bunch of guns" wouldn't help once you had
given them away, and even specifications wouldn't help because no one could
engineer to the required tolerances at the time. I'd think the best investment
would be body armor, walkee-talkie radios, and surveillance equipment,
personally.

~~~
Darmani
The big question is how to stop worrying about the need to personally fetch
water and make clothes, and how to start worrying about implementing your
overall plans. That is, how to get enough production going where you wouldn't
be screwed when the solar cells powering your electronics (you didn't
seriously consider bringing batteries, did you?) wear out.

My basic plan would be: Convince a small village I'm God and chose them to
build my kingdom, improve their farming and sanitation enough to produce some
labor surpluses, and then work my way up the tech tree.

The basic sketch of that would involve fireworks, a single assault rifle, and
a low-power device storing lots of specifications.

------
vaksel
there are a few series that cover that area.(not exact mind you, but close
enough)

First you have the Assati Shards series(1632, 1633, 1634)...basically a town
in Virginia get transferred to Germany in 1632.

And then you have the Conrad the Engineer series, where you have a guy
transported to 13th century Poland, just before the Mongol invasion.

But chances are, no matter where you wind up...you'll be dead within a week.
Why? Simple...language barrier. You won't be able to understand a
thing....even if you wind up in the most civilized English speaking country.
So you'll probably wind up getting burned as a demon who is speaking in
tongues

For example...this is what Beowulf's first few lines look like in original
english.

    
    
      Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum,
      þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon,
      hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.
      Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,

~~~
lionheart
The language barrier is an interesting point.

I wonder if there are any places with languages that haven't changed that
much?

Do you think I might be able to get along in the Middle East in 1000 AD if I
knew modern Hebrew?

~~~
joeyo
I don't know about Hebrew but I bet Arabic would be the language to know in
1000 AD if you were in Spain or Persia or many points in between.

~~~
gaius
Arabic's a good bet because the Qu'ran is still written in the original
Mediaeval Arabic and people learn it in order to read it in its original form.
The accent might have changed over time but Arabic's going to be good for any
time in the last 1300 years.

~~~
showerst
Modern Standard Arabic (The generalized approximation of what college-educated
people speak nowadays) is fairly different from Koranic Arabic, but it'd still
probably be at least somewhat mutually intelligible, so you could pass as
being from some other part of the Arab world I suppose.

Spain would've probably been the best possible place to land during the
Ummayad/Abbasid Caliphates (before about 1085 or so), but it was a very rough
place afterward (the Almoravid/Almohad Caliphates were not known for
tolerance, and the reconquest was even worse)

------
ChaitanyaSai
Teeth. I would show off my teeth as a start to my entrepreneurial apothecary
business. Our average dental hygiene is way way better than what they had
then, and consequently our teeth look like divine pearls in comparison.
Hopefully, their amazement will allow a perceived transference of my expertise
to other medicinal areas.

Also, knowing more math might help me make coinage with some simple engraved
code that needs to be combined with the name of the bearer in order to be
verified (only feasible for inter-medieval banks). This would be impetus for
trade across greater distances.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
knowing some modern first aid would probably be your most valuable asset. you
might be able to position yourself as doctor to some powerful noble.

------
dhyasama
Funny, I've been daydreaming a lot recently about scenarios such as this. At
first I thought it might be a sign of mental illness, but everyone had so much
fun thinking up answers I'm pretty sure it's everyone else that is crazy :)

------
fauigerzigerk
What would you do to prepare if you knew the journey back in time would start
in one hour?

~~~
vaksel
Backpack full of seeds. Potatoes, corn, etc etc. The agriculture of that time
was pretty much non-existent. You'd get something like 20x the output from
your seeds.

~~~
nostrademons
Most modern crops have been bred or genetically engineered so that they
physically cannot survive on their own. They need petrochemical fertilizers to
grow, pesticides to fend off insects & fungi & disease, mechanized tilling to
penetrate the ground, and artificial supports so they can stand up and avoid
keeling over.

In my sustainable agriculture course, I read that modern grain varieties put
60% of their photosynthesized energy into growing the fruit (the edible
portion of the grain). Wild varieties put more like 3% into the fruit. There's
your 20x difference in yield. But it comes at the expense of every other
survival mechanism of the plant: modern grain varieties yield so much grain
because they don't have working systems for _anything_ , be it support, storm
resistance, disease resistance, or general hardiness. They give us food
because we supply them with a good amount of fossil-fuel derived work.

~~~
ntoshev
Thanks for the insight. It's interesting why the external work supplied to the
plants still costs less than growing plants that can do these things itself. I
suppose chemistry and mechanization in agriculture are just much more
efficient than their biological counterparts.

~~~
randallsquared
Almost certainly not more efficient, but growing plants can't use oil
directly, and since we can supply enormous amounts of external energy by the
standards of a crop plant, engineering them to be able to use it more
effectively is useful even if the plant itself is less efficient overall.

~~~
nostrademons
Almost any sort of mechanical or chemical process is more efficient than
plants. Photosynthesis is only 3% efficient; by the time the energy enters the
plant, you've lost 97% of it. Then you figure various biological pathways, and
you're down to maybe 1-2% efficiency for _the best_ plants.

This, among other reasons, is why grain ethanol was such a scam.

The worst mechanical processes, by contrast, usually get at least 10-15%
efficiency. That's what photovoltaics can do, for example. Gasoline engines
have a thermal efficiency of about 30%, diesel about 45%. Granted, you lose
energy in the extraction/refining/transportation steps, but it's still an
order of magnitude more efficient than photosynthesis.

~~~
randallsquared
I did not know that. Thanks.

------
kirubakaran
Have you read Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"?

<http://bulfinch.englishatheist.org/yank/86-h.htm>

Audio book: [http://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-
cou...](http://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court-by-
mark-twain/)

~~~
nazgulnarsil
read _Lest Darkness Fall_ for a MUCH more interesting account.

~~~
kirubakaran
Thanks.

------
edw519
I'd find a bookie and make a bet on the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans are my lock of the week.

------
rglovejoy
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall>

~~~
Caligula
I like(and hate) the author so I try to see if I can get a preview online
before I buy and sure enough [http://www.scribd.com/doc/8651639/LSprague-de-
Camp-Lest-Dark...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/8651639/LSprague-de-Camp-Lest-
Darkness-Fall)

------
lionhearted
Fascinating to think about. I did some fencing in college, and some archery
and horseback riding when I was younger. I think I'd try to survive and move
over land until I got to a coastal trading city, and then convince the nearest
Lord that I was shipwrecked from a distant, mystical land and try to enter
into military or guard service. Then catch up on the local language and
customs, do what I can to get land or a title, then try to figure out what
modern process improvements I could invent to build a lot of wealth. If I was
in a rigid caste system type place, I'd definitely recruit potential great men
from non-aristocratic classes and get them working for me. Depending on which
invention path I went down, take over in terms of commerce of have myself a
mini-revolution displacing the aristocracy and becoming ruler and protector of
the land. It probably wouldn't be a party, but it wouldn't be so bad either.

------
rgrieselhuber
If you're interested in this highly unlikely scenario, I highly recommend the
Dies the Fire books by S.M. Stirling. I actually got a good education in
feudal economics and have a much better appreciation for the concept of food
as wealth.

------
bootload
_"... how many people living in the US know how to make gunpowder from
scratch? Given enough time, I guess I could build a ... How would you survive
if suddenly transported back to 1000 AD? ..."_

Well I'd hope I'd be pushed forward a few hundred years into the late 12'th -
early 13th century and dropped into Western Europe. The UK or France.

Why late 12th/early 13th century France or UK?

Well for one thing the _"Hundred Years' War"_ is just starting and it probably
is the most turbulent time in UK/French history and with this comes warfare
and opportunity. It turns out this period of history is where the linage of
the French House of Capet was broken and King of England (John - Henry III)
had gone from owning more land than the King of France to loosing almost the
lot.

    
    
        The consequences of these new weapons meant 
        that the nobility was no longer the deciding 
        factor in battle; peasants armed with longbows 
        or firearms could gain access to the power, 
        rewards, and prestige once reserved only for 
        knights who bore arms.
    

But these were heady days for the English this is the time of the Longbow (
_and by the way the 2 fingered salute favoured by those of English descent and
a token to their weapons superiority_ ), the introduction of the cannon and
the end of the era of chivalry, the introduction of Modern army, the
introduction of the Magna Carta some 50-100 years prior, centralised
government that had the authority to raise taxes & armies. So in terms of
making your mark this was the era.

The first problem you'd have is language. I'd either have to bring a book
(latin) or wing it on my language skills but where to learn latin? Anything
but a classical education makes me stand out as an uneducated heathen. As for
a job if you are fit enough you could either join up as a foot soldier but a
more lucrative path might be to hack the warfare technology of the time and
work on improving them. One problem at the time was training enough archers to
use the longbow efficiently. It took a lot of training from an early age - all
English boys from the age of 12 years had to train to use the longbow & all
men from the ages of 15-60 carried such weapons.

I'd be looking out for Yeoman ~
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeoman#Middle_Ages>

~~~
bootload
The idea for this btw is not a new one. I remember this reading Micheal
Crichton book called Timeline ~ <http://www.crichton-official.com/books-
timeline.html> which in itself is based on an idea by Leo A. Frankowski who
wrote a book called Cross-Time Engineer ~ [http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-
Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...](http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-
Adventures-Conrad-Stargard/dp/0345914392)

------
makaimc
Let's flip this around a bit. Who would have a better chance of survival, one
of us transported back to the Middle Ages, or a person in the Middle Ages
transported to 2009?

I'd say we have a better shot at living a longer period of time (over a year)
since we could take basic precautions against disease and germs. The Middle
Ages guy/gal would probably die of our modern germs within a few days (similar
to the Indians when they met European explorers).

~~~
dag
As I recall, most of the Native deaths were from smallpox, measles, typhoid,
diphtheria, and the bubonic plague. Not exactly common diseases these days. I
don't think that the Middle Ages person would do too badly, though we would
definitely do better as we have MMR and other mandatory vaccinations.

------
mattmaroon
"I'm skeptical of this approach...how many people living in the US know how to
make gunpowder from scratch?"

What did this guy do for fun in high school? Saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur in a
75-15-10 ratio.

Saltpeter + sugar in a 6-4 mix and then caramelized is more fun though. It
would also aid your getaway when the angry knights came to hunt the heretic
who just invented gunpowder.

------
biohacker42
The most obvious and easy thing I can think of is Penicillin. If you can
somehow identify which moldy bread is it, that with the basic knowledge of
human health any modern person should have, will make a great healer.

This is a time when people were still sealing wounds with boiling oil.

So yes, even if you have no formal first aid training you can be a great
healer.

------
nazgulnarsil
you'll die of infectious disease. I'm almost 100% sure of this.

~~~
Tichy
Would it be much worse than traveling to a 3rd world country today, though?
Granted, typically travelers get some vaccination, but overall, not that many
(mostly Hepatitis?).

~~~
hapless
Yaws and Smallpox, just to name two, are practically extinct today. You will
have NO immunity.

Rubella, mumps, chicken pox, lockjaw etc were all common diseases then. Today,
we vaccinate against them, even in the third world. You, like all adults, have
probably relied on herd immunity to compensate for your fading resistance.

Intestinal disease was common in this era. It's very rare today. You would
suffer from it for the same reason that modern tourists suffer in the third
world. Tourists, soldiers, and aid workers grin and bear it in comfortable
quarters with plenty of clean water. You would be bearing it... elsewhere.

Disease might not take you out, but it would certainly be more of a problem
for you than for the natives.

------
gur
No need for the time travel. Try to survive nowadays within an isolated tribe
in the amazonian forest.

------
keefe
Sit still, breath and wait for the LSD to wear off (:

------
scott_s
Step back into the time machine and poke the _Back to the Future_ button until
your finger bleeds.

------
Tichy
Maybe one could start a lottery.

------
hs
i'll invent a search engine startup and conquer the wo ... wa ... wait a
minute

------
est
> Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?

It's simple. Go to China & learn KungFu!

------
time_management
Two chicks (Marle and Lucca) at the same time.

~~~
bd
Congratulations, you made a top Google search result for "Marle and Lucca":

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Marle+and+Lucca](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Marle+and+Lucca)

~~~
time_management
I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

