The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The medieval millennium is not normally considered a great age of travel.We look back at it across 500 or so years of European global expansion, a period characterized by systematically pursued exploration, trade, colonization, missionary activity, emigration and immigration, grand tours, and tourism, not to mention the mass displacements caused by war, famine, and ethnic cleansing.Yet, even leaving aside the large-scale medieval movements of peoples ('Germans', Vikings, Magyars), one can say that, despite genuine differences in scale and scope, people travelled a great deal in the medieval world and more than a few of them did so extensively, sometimes even in considerable numbers.Not just pilgrims, but also missionaries, scholars, and merchants made their way by land, river, and sea to destinations both far and near.Marco Polo is only the most famous medieval traveller nowadays, but there were others who made remarkable journeys of their own: Margery Kempe from England to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella, and Prussia in the early 15th century, for example; or Friar Odoric of Pordenone from Italy to Khanbaliq (Beijing) in the early 14th century; or Leifr Eiríksson from Norway to Vinland around the year 1000.Nor should one forget the great Muslim travelers like Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubayr, or the Jewish travelers like Abraham ben Jacob and Benjamin of Tudela.Many medieval practices, technological developments, and attitudes, moreover, persisted into the early modern period-for instance, travel to the Holy Land, the portolan chart and the magnetic compass, and various degrees of Christian hostility to non-Christians-and these helped shape those travels that
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".