Like, I don’t think passports exist, right? Could a person travel to another Empire/Kingdom?
Borders have existed as long as humans have claimed territory. Borders are only meaningful to the extent they are enforced, so border control has existed in some form or another for all that time.
Borders have been a bit fuzzy at many times and places. The farther one travels from a seat of power, the harder it is for that power to patrol and control the area. Thus we get borderlands, places at the fringes of a government’s authority.
In addition to borders, documents analogous to passports have existed for millennia. If you wanted to travel from your kingdom to another kingdom, your monarch might send you off with an official letter requesting your safe passage through whatever kingdoms you need to cross. Without papers you might be deemed a vagrant or worse, and wind up in a cell.
I imagine the issue wasn’t so much migrating itself, but the question of how do you feed yourself and your family in the new land?
500 years ago most people were farmers. So you had to possess some land to have food. So, where do you get that land from?
Also language. It’s not so easy to find a translator in the old world.
Border control was practically impossible until the very modern era (last 100 years or so). The infrastructure for controlling borders only became possible due to technology.
May I introduce to you the wall? There’s a whole wonder of the world that’s a wall: a Great one in China.
Also, there used to be people on those walls with pokey things that hurt. People outside the empire/nation/whatever they called it back then didn’t want to go near it when they weren’t supposed to, since they didn’t want to be poked by the pokey things.
With the invention of firearms, you can shoot a tiny pokey thing really fast! Pokey things have really advanced over the years, for the better or worse.
The Great Wall was not very effective. China has been successfully invaded many times, including (but not limited to) the Jurchen, Mongols, Manchus and many many others.
And the Great Wall is an exception. Most walls were around cities, not countries.
Passports for everyone are a relatively new invention, but passports as sign of being the emissary of somebody important are much older. Paiza is one such example in the Mongols empire. Wikipedia has examples reaching into antiquity.
500+ years ago there very much was border control, at least in certain parts of the world, because every regional lord wants to control what goes into his kingdom and what leaves. I can only speak for Europe, but probably every feudal lord over the world did the same. They levied taxes on merchants transporting goods through their kingdom. That happened on border checkpoints where the big merchant routes where passing through. This is how a lot of regions got rich: by being between a source and a big buyer region and taxing the shit out of merchants.
That’s why smuggling was so attractive. Go through the official road and pay 10% of your profits or pay this nice man with the donkey 5% and he leads you through the woods on a path the lord’s soldiers don’t patrol…
Secondly, in feudal Europe 500 years ago, peasants were still often the property of their lords, they weren’t allowed to leave the country. Another reason why border control existed. So no, most normal people could not just leave and travel to another kingdom.
They levied taxes on merchants transporting goods through their kingdom. That happened on border checkpoints where the big merchant routes where passing through. This is how a lot of regions got rich: by being between a source and a big buyer region and taxing the shit out of merchants.
There are places that are still named after having been such tax/tariff points. Or buildings, inns etc. And the New Testament of course.
