A certain Historical Inaccuracy

[Moorish guy]

Ive noticed that a large amount of European accounts of other counties,land,kingdoms etc during ancient and medieval times almost always included something about how rich and magnificent they were. I realize that a lot of them were but can anyone tell me why this is so?

[Jagdpanzer]

Could you be a bit less vague perhaps? Are you talking about accounts of European travellers who travelled to countries outside Europe?

Could you give us an example?

[Augustus Lucifer]

It's hard to analyze any particular account without knowing what that account is. In general though we can assume a few things about pre-modern ventures to truly foreign lands.

We understand the structure of our culture through the prism of our limited perspective. A bigger house means higher status, more ornate furnishings mean higher status, so on and so forth. This is true across most materially concerned cultures. More importantly perhaps, we consider the concept of rarity in respect to occurrences within our own culture. Rarity more often than not equates to extravagance, since if something is hard to obtain it will likely be snatched up by the wealthy. Gold is a show of wealth in many cultures, especially European ones.

When we go to other lands though, the commodities are different. The Aztecs doubtless understood some of the value of gold, but certainly not in respect to a European economy. When Conquistadors first laid eyes on Tenochtitlan then, it's no wonder they would report a glorious civilization due to the prevalence of gold. The same may be true for a civilization such as China, where things like porcelain and silk were in more abundant supply than in Europe; literacy could be an equally astounding phenomenon to some Western travelers, or the protocols of the courts.

Perhaps as important is where a traveler traveled to. If all you saw of China was the Imperial Capital and surrounding areas, chances are you'd have a skewed perception of that culture. Most cultures were top-heavy, with the standard of living dropping exponentially from the educated elite or royalty to the peasantry. If that traveler sauntered around through the rice fields he might not have as glowing a review, though he'd likely still praise the different approaches to agriculture. It probably doesn't help that most cultures want to project superiority, so it's unlikely that court officials would seek to break any disillusionment a traveler might have of their grandeur.

Not all travelers can be considered so aloof perhaps, but we also have to consider the transmission of these accounts. People don't want to read a book about an average civilization thousands of miles away, with uninteresting people, cruddy standards of living, and nothing out of the ordinary. The same is true of oral accounts. This is counterbalanced by the desire to proclaim the homeland culture is a rung above, which may bring about the depreciation of certain aspects in an account. As humans we want to find the interesting and the different, we're unconcerned with the familiar, so it's not surprising that subjective accounts speak highly of the lands they discuss.