51–60 of 104 posts
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Why would firewood be difficult to find? I could be wrong, but I don't think the European deforestation had set in yet, at that time. Is the wood in most European forests not of sufficient quality?
It belonged to the nobles.
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How can you make money with that? Purveyor of scented soaps? ;)
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.
"... 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…
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…
What one invention would you introduce ahead of its time?
The fireplace chimney as it wasn't introduced before the 13th century and fire smoke is a major cause of lung ailments.
What would you do to prepare if you knew the journey back in time would start in one hour?
This machine was not invented yet at the time, but could have been made by any decent medieval carpenter. I could probably do it with an axe and a saw. It would have been quite valuable at the time, and could make you rich if you played your cards right.
Of course, that doesn't help solve the problem of immediate survival in a world where you don't speak anybody's language...
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 w…
There's a comparison of El Cid in Old Spanish and modern Spanish at wikipedia (see link below), and they don't appear to be very different. Spain was not conquered by non-Spanish speaking foreigners between 1000 and now, so it's not surprising that the language has changed less than English.
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I think I'd grab a gun and some ammo and maybe get some jewelry and gold. And then I'd grab a history book.
I would add a good ski parka, extra boots, tooth brushes, and as much penicillin as I could scrounge up.
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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.
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.
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)
"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...
What would you do to prepare if you knew the journey back in time would start in one hour?
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.
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.