"Hello?
Your
Majesty?"
Communication in history and
fantasy
by Craig Barrett
-C
If you want to talk to the President of
the United States, all you have to do is
pick
up the telephone and dial the White
House. Well,
maybe it's not quite that
simple, but at least you have a fair chance
of getting the White House switchboard.
Now imagine Vespasian, Nero's general in
Judea in A.D. 67, picking up the phone
and
saying: "Give me Rome. I want to talk to
the Emperor."
Boggles the mind, doesn't it? We all
know that communicating across long
distances was just a tad more difficult
in
the ancient world than it is today. But
what that means in terms of specific details
comes as a considerable surprise. It's
not easy for us to lift our minds out of
our
own environment and cross the gap that
separates us from the minds and methods
of the people who inhabited the premodern
world.
That phrase itself, "premodern world,"
goes against the grain. Living in an age
of
constant progress -- if you bought a home
computer last year, there's a fair chance
that it's obsolescent already and obsolete
by next year -- we expect the world to
have always been like it is now. Allowing
for anomalies like the Dark Ages, a chart
of man's experience ought to show a general
upward curve of constant improvement.
But, in the communications field,
that isn't the case. From Egypt of the
Pharaohs
to Napoleonic Europe, the physical
limitations of man and animal imposed
unvarying dimensions of travel time on
all
human history. The "distance" from southern
Britain to Rome was 29 days in the
time of Julius Caesar, 29-30 days in the
12th century, and 30 days in 1834. Once
ingenuity had improved the available
methods of communications to a certain
level, a peak too fleeting in most cases
to
be termed a "plateau," there they remained.
The gap that separates that world
from ours was bridged by the advent of
the steam engine and the telegraph in the
19th century. In discussing communications
before that time, it's not necessary to
specify "Ancient," "Medieval," or "Renaissance,
-- but simply "premodern."
It requires another stretch of the mind
to understand the unpredictability and
delay that were both integral parts of
premodern
communications. Today, bad
weather is little more than an inconvenience.
When it's bad enough to upset our
timetables by as much as two or three
days, it becomes newsworthy. In the premodern
world, such delays wouldn't even
have merited a comment. Delays of three
or four days were accepted without question,
and delay of three or four weeks
were commonplace. The sudden closing of
a border or an unexpected flood could
force the re-routing of a letter through
country where no regular postal system
existed. If a route crossed any considerable
body of water, such as the Adriatic Sea
or the English Channel, delays of 30-60
days were possible. Oddly, the time between
Sicily and Spain could be shorter by
land than by sea. A state of alert, a warning
of bandits,
heavy rains, or a snowfall
might discourage couriers or even send
them scrambling in other directions. In
Outré Mer ("Beyond the Sea" -- the
Crusader
dominions in the Near East), renegades
and Bedouin tribesmen posed a
constant threat, despite efforts on both
sides of the Frankish-Moslem frontier to
patrol the highways. In Europe, the situation
was even worse
As Fernand Braudel writes in his two-volume
work, The Mediterranean (page
357), "Distances were not invariable, fixed
once and for all. There might be ten or
a
hundred different distances, and one
could never be sure in advance, before
setting out or making decisions, what
timetable fate would impose." A letter
from Spain to Italy might go by way of
Bordeaux and Lyons, or by Montpellier
and Nice. In April 1601, an ambassador's
letter from Venice to the king of France
reached Fontainbleau by way of Brussels.
The Portuguese ambassador to Rome in
the 1550s habitually sent his letters to
Portugal by way of Brussels in order to
avoid uncertainties. Philip II of Spain
wrote (Braudel, page 3571: "It is more
important that the letters should travel
by
a safe route than that four or five days
be
gained, except on occasions when speed
is
essential."
Despite these difficulties and dangers,
premodern societies did manage to keep
in
touch with each other. Four primary tools
were employed to this end (the horse post,
the foot post, the pigeon post, and the
sea)
with a number of lesser tools. What
should come as no surprise to the modern
mind is the fact that, in every case, these
tools were brought to their peak of performance
by sheer organization. In fact,
one of the earliest systems of which we
have any extensive knowledge sets the
pace and pattern for all that followed.
The horse
post
The horse-post
system of the ancient
Persians was created by Darius Hystaspis
(521-486 B.C.) to connect all the major
centers of the Persian Empire and to provide
the Great King with the most effective
means of communication that the world
had yet seen. Along already existing caravan
routes, post houses were established
at regular intervals, the intervals being
the
distance a horse could be expected to
gallop at top speed once a day (14-18
miles). Several couriers and relays of
horses were stationed at each post, and
the roads between were enhanced with
bridges, ferries, and guardhouses for
protection against bandits. While the
system itself was reserved for official
use
only (a theme repeated constantly
throughout history), the roads were open
to ordinary travelers; high-quality inns
or
caravanserais, presumably private commercial
ventures, were available at most
post stations. Letters dispatched through
the post traveled both day and night, with
a fresh rider on a fresh horse taking over
at each station to ensure maximum effort
at every stage of the journey. Such a system
could forward the official mail at a
minimum rate of 50 miles per day, allowing
for weather, and perhaps 75-100 miles
per day (where the going was good) when
top riders and horses were employed.
Five hundred years later, Caesar Augustus
(31 B.C.- A.D. 14) openly used the Persian
system as the model for the Roman public
horse and carriage post. As an added
advantage, he had the famous Roman
roads at his disposal. In time, all the
Mediterranean
world was united by these
roads: 51,000 miles of paved highways,
linked by myriad secondary roads, graced
by magnificent bridges, and crossing even
the most formidable mountain barriers.
Every Roman mile along the consular
roads, a milestone gave the distance to
the
next town; every ten miles a statio, complete
with a garrison of soldiers, offered
fresh horses; and, every thirty miles,
a
mansio combined the services of inn,
store, saloon, and brothel. Civilian travelers
could purchase "itineraries," showing
the routes and stopping places.
The post operated at all hours along
these roads, with the public stagecoaches
averaging 60 miles per day, while the
horse post (like the Persian, reserved
for
official use) averaged 100 miles per day.
Commercial mail services may also have
been available for private use, as a supplement
to hired messengers. Employing this
network of roads and stations, some remarkable
feats were possible. Julius Caesar
once covered 800 miles in eight days
by carriage. Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), riding
day and night to reach his dying brother,
made 600 miles in three days. The news
of
the death of Nero (A.D. 68-69) reached
Galba, 332 miles away in Spain, in 36
hours by messenger. After the decline of
Rome, it would be a long, long time before
Europe again experienced this level of
ease
and efficiency in communications.
For a time, the system of post roads was
maintained by the Byzantines in their
portion of the empire. The Imperial mail
system, the verdus, later became the berid
postal network of the Moslem kingdoms,
losing something in efficiency due to the
fragmentation of authority, but gaining
the
improved horsemanship of the steppe
peoples who were filtering down into the
Near East. The first great Mamluk sultan,
Baibars the Panther (1260-12771, himself
nomad-bred, reorganized the berid after
the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, and
thenceforth its center was Cairo. Under
his direction, the berid reached its zenith,
with reports coming into Cairo twice a
week from throughout the Mamluk domain,
messages traveling at a rate of 120
miles per day.
It was in the Far East, however, united
by the conquests of Genghis Khan (1206-
1227), that the horse post achieved its
best
development in the form of the Mongul
yam. Originally a military instrument by
which the Khan kept in touch with his farflung
armies, the yam linked together
centuries-old caravan routes through
postcamps of strings of relay horses and
a
few guards, set at 50- to 100-mile intervals.
By the time of Marco Polo's visit to the
court of Genghis' grandson, Kublai Khan
(1260-1295), the interval between post
stations had closed to 25 to 30 miles,
and
the daily rate of the Khan?s couriers had
increased from 100-150 miles per day to
200-250 miles per day, with a fresh rider
and mount taking over at each station in
true relay fashion. At three-mile intervals
between horse stations, smaller villages
served the foot post and also provided
torch bearers to escort mounted couriers
so that the Khan's post could operate day
and night.
All this was under the authority of the
district daroga (road governor),
who had
absolute power to requisition whatever
was needed for the yam. Couriers also had
the power to commandeer horses at need.
Each courier carried a "gerfalcon tablet"
as his authorization -- as Baibars' riders
carried silver plaques about their necks
and yellow scarves to distinguish themselves
? and wore a wide bell-mounted
belt to alert the riders at the next station
of their approach. Unlike the situation
in
the West, Mongol carriers had no fear of
interference from brigands or renegades;
the Mongols were absolute masters of the
roads, and legend has it that the "Pax
Mongolica" was so thorough that a blonde
virgin riding a white horse and carrying
a
sack of gold could ride from one end of
the Mongol domain to the other unmolested.
As proof of the efficiency of the
post, Marco Polo relates that fruit picked
one morning in Kambalu could be served
on the evening of the following day to
the
Grand Khan at Chandu, normally a ten-day
journey away.
Without intensive organization such as
these empires used, the scope of the
mounted couriers was considerably
smaller. On the average, a single rider
cannot expect to do more than 50 to 60
miles in a day, unless he's prepared to
kill
his horse in the process. These figures
are
cited for the ancient Persians and Greeks,
the Franks of Outré Mer, and even
for the
nomads of High Asia prior to and after
the
Mongol dominion. Adverse road and
weather conditions can reduce speeds
even further. In A Wargamer's Guide
to
the Crusades, Ian Heath writes
that winter
rains could turn the roads of Outré
Mer
into quagmires of clinging mud, bringing
travel of any sort to a seven- or eight-mileper-
day crawl. Even normal winter conditions
allowed only a 30-mile day for
dispatch riders, and the fierce heat of
the
Syrian sun, permitting only eight hours
of
riding time, made 60 miles per day an
accomplishment in summer -- and this
assumes that couriers obtained fresh
horses at whatever cities and castles happened
to be located along their route.
In the West, not even token repairs had
been made on Roman highways ravaged
by war and weather. Although a regular
post reappeared in 12th-century Italy,
it
wasn't until the 13th century that Western
rulers began taking steps to turn highways
from troughs of dust and mud into usable
roads. While both religious and secular
magnates kept private couriers in personal
attendance ? the King of England had a
dozen, the King of France 100 -- it was
from the dominant commercial centers
such as Bruges and Venice that the resurgence
of good communications came.
These states were capable of sending a
letter or small package 700 miles in seven
days. By the 15th century, Venice's administration
and postal service (open to private
as well as public correspondence and
parcels, for once) was the finest in Europe.
In the 16th century, a regular postal service
was developed by Gabriel de Tassis for
the Italy-Brussels route, using the Tyrol
pass and a carefully planned itinerary.
Tassis couriers covered 475 miles in five
and a half days -- only 86 miles per day,
but a regularly achievable speed that was
considered the best in Europe at the time.
This is not to say that the mails always,
or even frequently, operated at these
peaks. When the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
(1152-1190) died in Cilicia (the
coast country of south-central Turkey)
during the Third Crusade, it was four
months before his German Reich learned
of the fact. While the word of the birth
of
the grandson of Francois I (1515-1547)
traveled 130 miles per day to reach Fountainbleau
in two days, the equally vital
news of the St. Bartholomew Massacre in
Paris (Aug. 24, 1572) traveled only 62
miles
per day to reach Madrid on September 7.
It costs money as well as interest to
make the news travel fast. For rich merchants
and governments, the news was
less a matter of luxury than of vital necessity,
and they paid the prices. Between the
neighboring cities of Venice and Ferrara,
couriers demanded a ducat per letter. One
courier sent from Chartres to Toledo and
back in July of 1560 covered 179 stages
(of
6-7½ miles each) at 54 miles per
day, and
was paid two ducats per stage ? 358
ducats. (By way of comparison, in 1538
the
hull of a war galley cost 1,000 ducats,
and
a galley cost 2,253 ducats.) Braudel tells
us
(page 365) that between Venice and Nuremberg,
the cost depended on the speed:
?4 days, 58 florins; 4 days and 6 hours,
50
florins; 5 days, 24 florins; 6 days, 25.?
(According to Will Durant, The Reformation,
page x, the florin had the same approximate
value as the ducat; in 1460, a
rich man's maid in Florence was paid eight
florins a year.)
The horse post was the most common of
the premodern communications methods,
and in some ways the surest and most
convenient. But where sheer speed was
concerned, there were better tools, and
man himself was one of them.
The foot post
Victor von Hagen writes (Realm of
the
Incas, page 177): "Man can
outlast any
animal, including the horse."
The history
of the foot post as a tool of communications
proves his point.
Ancient Greece was a land unsuitable
for horse traffic. Roads were little more
than dirt tracks; the Sacred Way from
Athens to Eleusis, the finest road available,
was only packed dirt, and narrow besides.
Streams were unbridged except by
earthen dikes that a spring flood could
easily wash away. Since no postal system
existed -- even for governments -- communication
by king and private citizen
alike was by hired runner. But these runners
could make the 160 miles from Athens
to Argos and back in a respectable two
days, and the 85 miles from Plataea (30
miles northwest of Athens) to Delphi (in
central Greece) and back was only a oneday
run.
The impact of horse, pigeon, and distance
largely eclipsed the foot post in later
European history. The runners of the
Middle Ages averaged only 20-25 miles per
day on roads that were certainly no worse
than those of the Greeks. In the Far East,
however, the Mongols established a foot
post in conjunction with their horse-post
system. The Khan's runners were stationed
in villages every three miles along
the major roads. Like the riders, the runners
wore bells attached to their belts to
warn of their approach. The system was
organized as a relay so that each runner
covered only three miles before passing
his burden on to the next man in line.
There were no horses at all in Incan
Peru when the Spanish Conquistadors
arrived (1531) to discover a mail system
that equaled or surpassed anything else
in
the premodern world. Like the Roman
system, the Incan depended on the use of
excellent roads, and the Incan roads rank
with the Roman in terms of engineering
accomplishment. At 3,250 miles, the Andean
?royal road? was the longest in the
world. Along the entire length of the desert
coast, a second arterial road stretched
2,520 miles. Lateral roads branching off
the two main arteries completed a total
of
more than 10,000 miles of major allweather
highways. Through terracing,
sophisticated drainage techniques, causeways,
step roads, bridges specifically designed
to meet specific needs, and
side-wall borders to mark the way and to
cut down on snow and wind drifts, the
Incas overcame all obstacles and virtually
eliminated all but the worst weatherinduced
delays. Incan road markers
(topos), similar to the Roman, were
set up
every four and a half miles to give distances.
Post houses (tampus) of varying
size were spaced every 18 miles in level
country, every 12 miles if the road went
up or down the side of a mountain, and
as
water allowed in desert areas. The upkeep
of this, and of the postal system itself,
was
the responsibility of the local communities.
The local communities thus provided the
trained runners who served in pairs for
15-day shifts in the chasquis (pronounced
CHAS-ki) huts (o'kla) that were
set every
one and a half miles along the roads. The
runners were badged and sworn to such
absolute secrecy concerning the mail they
handled that not even torture at the hands
of expert Spanish inquisitors could make
them betray their trust. When a message
was dispatched, each runner would carry
it only the distance to the next station
and
there pass it on -- a verbal key as well
as
the knot-string recordkeeper that served
the Incas in lieu of writing -- to the
next
runner, who would continue the relay.
These runners are chronicled as accomplishing
the incredible feat of relaying
messages from Quito to Cuzco, 1,250 miles
at altitudes ranging from 6,000 to 17,000
feet, in just five days -- a rate of 250
miles
per day! Fresh fish was sent daily 130
miles from the sea to the Lord-Inca in
Cuzco.
It's well to remember, in the face of this
achievement, that on October 27, 1985,
the New York marathon was won by one
person, not a relay, with a time of 131.5
+
minutes, approximately five minutes to
the
mile. Every Incan runner was a skilled
athlete who served in his home area so
that he could be indifferent to the altitude
and totally familiar with the three-mile
section in which he served, even to the
point of running it at full speed at night,
and all this was done on the splendid
Incan roads. Running 250 miles per day
was probably a maximum achievement,
but the average would not have been too
far below it. Contemporary Europe had
nothing to match this postal system. The
Spanish colonial government continued to
employ it until the 19th century.
The pigeon
post
Another premodern postal system, the
pigeon post, continued in use well into
the
20th century. The discovery of carrier
pigeons aboard captured German trawlers
as early in World War I as August 5, 1914,
implying the trawlers were informants for
submarines, added significantly to the
worries of British Admiral Jellico. In
December of 1944, the ace paratroop
commander Colonel Friedrich von der
Heydte asked to take carrier pigeons along
when he landed behind American lines
during the early stages of the Ardennes
offensive. Permission was refused, and
events turned out as the colonel had
feared: the paratroopers' radios were
damaged in landing, and without pigeons,
Von der Heydte was unable to relay to his
superiors vital information concerning
American troop movements.
The use of carrier pigeons, dating back
as far as the ancient Greeks, shows up
best in the hands of the Arab and Mamluk
rulers of the pre-Crusade and the Crusading
eras. During the Abbasid (750-c. 1100)
and Fatmid (968-1171) Caliphates, the
pigeon post spanned the Arab dominions,
and top homing pigeons could sell for 700
to 1,000 dinars on the open market; the
egg of a pedigreed pigeon was worth 20
dinars (approximately 2.7 ounces of gold).
The Damascus-to-Cairo post of Nur ed-Din,
atabeg of Damascus and Aleppo (1146-
1174), used a system of "cot" stations
where letters were relayed from pigeon
to
fresh pigeon at every stage in the journey.
But the peak of this post comes, as with
the berid, under Baibars the Panther. Cot
(or loft) relay stations were established
along all the major routes of the Mamluk
domain, and the Sultan kept other pigeons
with him wherever he went, ready to
carry his orders to any part of the empire
at a moment's notice. Each pigeon flew
only the distance between the station
where he was normally kept and his home
cot, where the message was transferred
to
a new carrier. After sufficient pigeons
accumulated, the pigeons were returned
to their "ready" stations by mule transport.
The average station might house
several hundred pigeons, but the Citadel
of Cairo, the empire's communications
hub, kept as many as nineteen hundred
pigeons ready for service in its lofts.
Presumably,
some of these had their home
cots at the next relay stage along the
roads
out of Cairo, while others had their home
cots in distant cities and could be used
when considerations of speed or security
required direct contact with the Sultan?s
generals and governors. Security also
affected messages coming in to the Cairo
citadel, for some were marked for the
Sultan's eyes only, and Baibars gave instructions
that these should not be removed
by any hand other than his own.
Whether eating, sleeping, at conference,
or playing polo, the Sultan was to be notified
immediately of the arrival of these
pigeons, for every moment was critical.
The speed of pigeons varies with conditions
and from bird to bird, maximums
being approximately 60 MPH in windless
conditions and 110 MPH with a powerful
following wind; less, of course, bucking
a
strong head-wind. Letters were tied under
the wing rather than on the leg, for protection
against the weather, and pigeons
were never released at night, when hungry,
or during inclement weather, as a
precaution against their landing or wandering
between stations. Range was about
500 miles per day for ease, but relay stations
were placed closer together than
that when possible. Only male pigeons
were used as letter carriers by the Moslems.
State-owned pigeons were branded
on foot or beak, and registers were kept
showing their home cot, pedigree, value,
and history ? a formidable task, considering
the volume of pigeons in use. The
Fatmid Caliph Azeez one day decided that
he wanted to feast on the fresh cherries
of
Baalbek in Lebanon, so an order was sent
out by pigeon. Three days later, the Caliph
and his entourage feasted on 1,200 fresh
Lebanese cherries, brought to him tied
one cherry each fin a silk bag) to the
legs
of 600 pigeons.
The pigeon post has its disadvantages,
though. As Ian Heath points out, modern
magicians show how easy it is for a spy
to
secret a pigeon or two about his person,
but since pigeons fly only to their home
cots, that does no good if he has the
wrong pigeons. However vast the number
of carriers employed, you can't send a
letter if you don't have an available pigeon
tagged for the appropriate destination,
and the farther away the home cot the
longer you have to wait for the pigeon
to
be returned to you for future use. In a
fantasy world, this problem could be
overcome by a magical spell that can direct
a pigeon to the destination of the
sender's choice, or (combined with a
direction-finding or object-locating spell)
can even cause a pigeon to hunt out a
specific individual. Such spells, vastly
increasing a ruler's range of communications,
might easily be the most valuable
service a court magician could perform
for his master!
Pigeons are also limited in the weight
they can carry. Letters must be short,
expressing only main ideas or possibly
using a code where each word carries a
wider meaning for the recipient. In 1281,
when the governor of Hama sent to Sultan
Qalaoon a warning of the already-expected
approach of the Mongol army of Mangu
Timur, he said only: '?The enemy numbers
eighty thousand. Tell the sultan to
strengthen the left wing of the Mamluk
army." (Sir John Glubb, Soldiers
of
Fortune, page 112) In order
to allow for
longer messages, the Mamluks experimented
with special thin paper. Magic
could expand on this by devising psychic
messages so that merely holding the paper
could express entire paragraphs directly
to the mind of the receiver -- perhaps
even limiting the message to a specific
receiver, with no one else who handles
the
paper able to receive any message at all.
Finally, as with other posts, pigeon messengers
can be lost or intercepted. The
Guinness Rook of World Records
reports
of one pigeon released in Europe that
arrived in Australia, and another that
took
seven years to go 370 miles -- rare occurrences,
but possible. Less rare are the
chances of weather or predators bringing
down a bird -- or an enemy archer or
falconer in the right place at the right
time. The sky is a big place, and these
chances are seldom recorded as having
happened, but the danger is sufficient
that, in some cases, pigeons were released
in pairs to guard against the miscarriage
of important messages. Once more, magic
can help here, producing spells to make
carriers less detectable or to protect
them
against arrows and falcons. But then, the
magic itself may be detectable, or the
enemy may have magically controlled
falcons for "anti-pigeon" patrols. Most
important of all would be some means of
identification from the ground so
that
hunters would not accidentally bring
down their own master?s messenger
pigeons. The Sultan would not be very
happy about that!
The sea
As a highway for commerce, the sea was
and is unsurpassed. In the premodern age,
land communications, while slower and
more expensive, were usually favored
above sea communications. The latter
were simply too unpredictable. Fernand
Braudel writes (The Mediterranean, page
357): "The struggle against distance might
remain a matter of constant vigilance,
but
it was also one of chance and luck. At
sea,
favorable wind and a spell of fine weather
might make the difference between taking
six months for a voyage or completing it
in
a week or two. Pierre Belon sailed from
the Sea of Marmara to Venice in thirteen
days, a journey which frequently took half
a year.
Vessels might be forced to stop indefinitely
in safe havens when the weather
was prohibitive. In 50 B.C., Cicero waited
three weeks to cross the Adriatic from
Patras to Brindisi, and St. Paul was forced
to spend an entire winter at Malta during
one voyage. In the Middle Ages, the English
Channel crossing was known to be
particularly hazardous and timeconsuming,
varying from three days in
moderate weather to a month in bad; one
knight was kept at sea 15 days in a storm,
and landed much the worse for wear. In
January 1610, a Venetian ambassador to
England was two full weeks at Calais waiting
for the weather to abate, and, in June
1609, a Venetian ship headed for Constantinople
spent 18 days sheltering from a
storm at Chios.
Against this background, it's possible to
calculate the potential speed of voyages,
remembering that communications is a
matter for single ships rather than fleets
(which move at the speed of their slowest
members), and that record voyages are
exceptions from the norm.
"In the 4th century B.C., a favorable wind
might allow a high speed of six to seven
knots. Record voyages include 170 nautical
miles (Cotyora to Sinope, along the eastern
end of the Black Sea coast of modern
Turkey) in a day and a night; 190 miles
(Sinope to Heracleia, on the western part
of Turkey's Black Sea coast) in 2 days;
125
miles (Heracleia to Byzantion, modern
Istanbul) in 16 to 18 hours. Average speed
for a long journey with a light wind and
no halts was four to five knots (290 miles
from Lampsacos, a city on the Dardanelles,
to the Laconian Coast, the southeastern
coast of the Peloponnesos district
of modern Greece, in three days and three
nights), but usually there was no rowing
at
night and 65 to 80 nautical miles in a
16-
hour day was common in the good season.
-- Will Durant reports that some fast
Roman cruisers made 230 nautical miles
in
24 hours, but, in the 16th century, the
fastest speeds at sea were barely over
108
nautical miles in a day, under the most
favorable conditions and with elite ships.
On May 23, 1509, Cardinal Cisneros
crossed from Oran to Cartagena, 108
nautical miles, in one day, and it was
considered
a "miraculous" feat, as if he had
commanded the wind itself. Obviously, not
all things improve with age.
Well-designed ships and well-cared-for
crews (remembering that classical oarsmen
were not slaves but free) are important
factors in record voyages. Lionel
Casson writes that in the 1st century B.C.,
an ordinary vessel could make 70 nautical
miles in one day at three knots, while
a
well-made ship could make 90 nautical
miles in one day at four knots. Based on
this, he gives average speeds for ancient
vessels over open water of four to six
knots, with speed reduced during the
time-consuming tasks of working through
islands or of coasting. With a favorable
wind, a solitary trireme could average
four and a half knots (325 nautical miles
in
three days). Against the wind, the average
would be reduced to two or two and a half
knots. The Greeks also recognized that
a
trireme just out of dry-dock was faster
and more maneuverable than a ship which
had been at sea for some time and whose
timbers had become waterlogged and
heavy -- just as long-service ships in
sailing
times would be burdened with barnacles
and slower than ships which had been
freshly scraped. This problem, at least,
might be relieved in a fantasy world
where alchemists can provide a ruler's
navy with effective, water-resistant varnishes.
The formulas for the varnishes
would be state secrets, as carefully protected
as the secret of Greek Fire was by
the Byzantines, and as much sought-after
by foreign spies. Other aids from magic
could be potions to keep up the strength
of oarsmen, even at some cost to vital
life
forces, or spells to control the weather
(at
least in limited areas) so that a voyager
can
duplicate the feat of Cardinal Cisneros
and
"hold the wind in his hands." All of these
would be valuable both for dispatch boats
and fleet actions.
Exotica
In addition to the major communications
systems, some minor ones were of particular
value. Beacons -- sun telegraph, fire
telegraph, smoke signals -- can be solitary
or part of a network, and their use dates
from the first time a hostile fleet appeared
on an unguarded coast. The Romans used
torches and a simple semaphore code,
while the Byzantines had a sophisticated
heliograph system to transmit news of
invasions or disasters across the empire.
The beacon tower of Constantinople was
within sight of the emperor's residence.
A
chain of beacon towers along the coast
of
Syria in the 10th century could flash news
from Antioch to Cairo in an hour's time,
and was used later by the Mamluks to give
warning of the Mongol invasions. The
Franks heavily favored the use of beacons.
While the sites of their castles were chosen
for a variety of reasons, many were in
line of sight of each other so that messages
could be exchanged. When Saladin besieged
the Crusader castle of Kerak in
Moab (southeast of Jerusalem across the
Dead Sea) in 1183, a signal beacon summoned
relief from Jerusalem, 50 miles
away. In the maps of A Wargamer's
Guide
to the Crusades, Ian Heath
notes many
instances of this line-of-sight placement.
The use of heliographs endured so long
that Alexandre Dumas used the device in
The Count of Monte Cristo
as a means for
his title character to destroy an enemy
-- a
clear warning that telegraph operators
are
not above being bribed or otherwise interfered
with. Lacking telescopes for precision
sighting, however, probably nothing
as detailed and accurate as the modern
semaphore or the sophisticated flag codes
of the British navy was possible through
most of the premodern era.
More esoteric is a story told by Farley
Mowat in Never Cry Wolf.
Working with
an eskimo hunter named Ootek, Mowat
was startled one day when Ootek pointed
to a range of hills five miles north and
said, "Listen, wolves are talking." Mowat
heard nothing, though he noticed a nearby
wolf, asleep until then, was also watching
the hills. After listening for a couple
of
minutes, the nearby wolf raised a quavering
howl that ended on high notes above
normal human hearing. "Caribou are
coming," Ootek reported. "The wolf says
so!" And he explained that the wolf in
the
next territory north had been passing the
word -- passed to him by another wolf
even further north -- that the long
awaited caribou migration had started,
and had even specified their present location.
The nearby wolf had then acknowledged
the news and passed it further
along. Mowat was skeptical, and remained
so even when another friend named Mike
promptly went hunting, and returned
three days later with venison to spare.
The
caribou, Mike said, had been 40 miles
northeast on the shores of Lake Koiak,
exactly where the wolves said they would
be. He added that wolves could "talk"
almost as well as people and easily communicate
at great distances, and that some
Eskimos could literally converse with
them.
Coincidence? Yet an interesting story
comes from the Spanish-speaking Canary
Island of La Gomera. While the outdoor
range of a male human voice in still air
is
only 200 yards, the islanders speaking
the
whistled silbo language can, under
ideal
conditions, communicate across valleys
at
a distance of five miles (Guinness
Book of
World Records, 1975, page
46). The
Basque sheepherders and the Swiss moun-
taineers possess similar abilities. While
the
range of whistlers or yodelers depends
on
weather, altitude, and the capacity of
the
surrounding terrain to reflect or absorb
sound, the principle remains useful. This
is particularly so when a fantasy world
can combine it with animal communication,
and enhance it with low-level magic
native to given rural districts. Establishing
relay stations isn't necessary when a succession
of mountain farmers and herders
who are used to "talking" to each other
are able and willing to pass the news along
in this way! Allowing for the general conservative
attitude of scientists and researchers,
we can even consider the
five-mile range to be normal rather than
exceptional, with wolves able to "talk"
even farther.
Another method of rural communication
is the somewhat more specious notion of
Robin Hood's famous "whistling arrows,"
used to speed messages across Sherwood
Forest. The premodern record for long
shooting belonged to Sultan Selim III (953
or 972 yards in 1798), while the 1975
records are held by Harry Drake of Lakeside,
California: 856 yards 20 inches with
the handbow, 1,359 yards 29 inches with
the crossbow, and 1 mile 101 yards 21
inches with the footbow (Guinness,
page
494). If we accept that Robin Hood's men
could fire an arrow 880 yards through the
forest sky, that requires two men per mile
who must be in a specified locale at a
specified time to speed the message on
its
way. Such a method is a little wasteful
of
manpower, but could be valuable to get
important information across dangerous
terrain, and to do it secretly. The trick
would be arranging for enough top-grade
archers to be where the arrows are landing
just when they're needed. In heavy
forest country, where isolated farms are
virtually immune to interference and
where the necessarily fixed nature of road
travel guarantees that your lines of communication
will remain static, the procedure
almost makes sense.
In realms of pure fantasy, an enormous
number of devices, perhaps not originally
intended for the purpose, can serve as
tools of communication. The fabled "Seven
League Boots" that enable the wearer to
cover 21 miles at a single stride would
be
invaluable for special couriers. The "talaria"
or winged sandals of Hermes would
also be of use. The wings of Daedalus,
manufactured to allow him and his son
Icarus to flee Crete, and fatal to Icarus
when he flew too close to the sun and the
melting wax of the wings plunged him into
the sea, could be employed. The trouble
with devices like these is that they?re
usually one-of-a-kind items. They may
serve for a single individual, the prime
courier of a god or a king, but they hardly
allow for a communications network.
The same holds true for flying creatures,
such as a roc or a pegasus tamed to
the use of man. Unless you have an entire
herd of them, you can't expect to set up
a
postal relay, and if you do have an entire
herd, as Lew Pulsipher makes clear in his
article, "The
Fights of Fantasy" (DRAGON®
issue #79), you have better uses for them
than making mail runs. In addition, creatures
large enough to carry a man through
the sky have other liabilities. They're
a lot
more visible than pigeons, haven't any
chance of blending "anonymously" into
their surroundings, and make inviting
targets for any mage with the power to
strike at them.
Other courier techniques might include
teleportation, dimension doors, some sort
of potion to increase the speed with which
a man or a horse can run (at some cost
to
life energy), or even supernatural messengers
or astral travel. At sea, dolphins can
make 40 to 60 knots and are six to ten
times faster than the fastest dispatch
boats, if you can control them. All have
advantages and disadvantages (overkill
being one of the latter). For emergency
use, when you take chances and pay
prices you wouldn't normally consider,
all
may be viable.
Crystal balls armed with clairaudience
and ESP offer more promise. Just half a
dozen can link major cities and fortresses
together. For independent mages, the
difficulty in using them would be arranging
to have both sending and receiving
parties on-line simultaneously, in an age
when "synchronize your watches" has no
significance. But, in the case of societies
analogous to the Templars, Hospitalers,
or
Assassins of the Crusading era, it's entirely
conceivable that trained adepts would be
standing by, day or night, to receive messages.
Dedicated monks would have no
problem with this, and conditions of perpetual
warfare such as existed in Outré
Mer during the Crusades would provide
incentive for the duty.
Last, but very far from least, there?s that
most excellent message system popularized
by the TV series "M*A*S*H" -- the
"latrino-gram." Rumor and scuttlebutt can
be remarkably accurate, and can travel
faster even than the speeding news release.
Given the security skills of the premodern
world -- or even of the modern
world, some would say -- it's not impossible
that at the moment a special courier
is whispering a top-secret message into
the
king's ear up in the palace, the bosun
of
the ship that brought the courier is regaling
his companions in the local tavern
with precisely the same tidbit of juicy
gossip. In ancient Greece, commercial
information services developed in the
larger ports, fed by hard news and soft
rumor gleaned from incoming ships and
caravans. Gustave Glotz writes (Ancient
Greece at Work, page 293):
"Those firms
which had correspondents at a certain
number of centers could form a private
information agency." The same would hold
true for all ages and all societies, and
for
trade centers located inland as well as
on
the coasts. The medieval Jews had an
international information network second
to none. Kings could hardly match rich
merchants in this potential and were
prepared to buy and sell news through
these unofficial organizations. Never underestimate
the power of unauthorized
intelligence dissemination!
Be it by courier or ship, crystal ball or
gossip, the news has a way of getting
around. This has been a mere sampling of
the more prominent methods our premodern
ancestors used to help it on its way. In
the following article are some tips on
how
those methods can be translated into
fantasy role-playing terms. But don?t be
afraid to experiment on your own. You
just might come up with something
nobody?s ever thought of before.
Bibliography
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York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
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