Eli5 How did ancient and medieval borders work?
In: 7
ok, so the modern concept of a hard border you couldn’t cross basically didn’t exist back then. Borders were much more porous, with access control generally limited to the cites and towns. their wasn’t anythng generally stopping a frenchmen going into the Holy Roman Empire, beyond things like cash and security concerns
generally, the borders would tend to follow the line of control at end the end of the last round of fighting. towns and local lords owed allegiance to the current ruling king, and the villagers would pay taxes to whichever group of armed retainers turned up in the kings name to collect them. Often, some significant landmark would mark a border, like a major river, or the high point of a mountain range, etc.
The concept of sovereign states with clear borders where the reach of one ended and another began is actually quite modern.
The treaty of Westphalia is often seen as the origin of the modern system of sovereign states. It is from 1648.
For context, the city of New York was founded in New York was founded in 1624 and the last aurochs died in 1627, so it is up to you to judge how ‘ancient’ that is.
The important part is that from that point on borders worked more or less like they do today.
Before that you had borders too and a general understanding that some ruler far away made the rules in their far away place and that your own reach ended at some point, but generally it was not seen as it is today. It was more like you had places you hadn’t quite conquered yet and places on the edge of your country that had less independence than those close to the center of your power and various degrees of rulers having allegiance to you or someone else.
The idea that it might in some way be wrong to take over a plot of land next to the one you control was not really well developed.
In the medieval world you had lots of small fiefdoms where the local rulers had agreed among themselves where their lands ended and the next ones began, usually some place like a river where they had stopped fighting when the topic had come up the last time.
Borders were often less important than who controlled cities and towns and control over rivers and roads.
It depended on the authority, on the time period, and also which border. The Assyrian Empire didn’t enforce their borders 3500 years ago in order to make cross-border trade easier. The Roman Empire fiercely defended their northern borders and conveniently made them follow two of Europe’s greatest rivers, but they didn’t care where their jurisdiction ended in the south, because south of Roman Africa was the Sahara Desert.
You had clear borders at key points (river crossings, coasts and so on) and zones of influence and control. So ‘this town and its territory belong to the Kingdom of France” means French officials, or oaths in the king’s name and sermons calling for long life to the king, and maybe some checks at the town gate. Villages around follow suit, but exactly where the town’s territory ends is not clear – it fades into wood or marsh or mountain or just some patch too poor to bother with.
The maps showing Roman borders following the Rhine and Danube are misleading. Rome had outposts on the other side, regularly policed adjacent lands, took tribute and demanded safe passage for their merchants. Then, as power shifted, the ‘Roman’ side became less safe away from the major centres, and barbarians settled in. Again, a zone of control and then a zone of influence.
In modern times, up to 1946 the British Indian Raj ruled what is now Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The rules were: no raiding outside the Province; no fighting on the major roads or in the big towns; no molesting subjects of the Raj; hand over anyone wanted. Enforced by garrisons, patrols and visits by political agents (“Now, Mohamed, your nephew has been very naughty. He can hand himself in, or I can have the 5th Gurkha Rifles turn over the district. Which is it to be?”). So the ‘border’ was an overlying web of lines and dots reaching out from the core area.
As a followup to other’s great answers to this question, Robert Jordan illustrated this point pretty clearly in the Wheel of Time series, where residents of the region the main characters came from (Two Rivers) had mostly forgotten that they were even a part of Andor, even though on a map, the borders of the nation contained the Two Rivers, and no representative of the Queen had visited the area in generations. But when the characters met up with the Queen later on, she clearly considered them her subjects.
Moving armies around was really slow, so you only want to be fighting in one place at a time. So armies would stick to walking down the heavily traveled roads.
In the countryside, where there’s no good roads, there’s also no good farmland, so there’s not much of a reason to go there.
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