Let's say that when you go to the bathroom in the next hour or so, when the door closes behind you, instead of sealing you in a room of peace and quiet, you get dropped into the middle of a field somewhere in Europe one thousand years ago. You only have on you what you are currently wearing and have on your person and in your pockets. We shall for the purpose of this exercise, pretend that women are not limited to the three options of Nunnery, peasant woman or 'working' woman and have equal opportunities, such as they are, as the men-folk have. Besides being 6 to 9" taller than everyone, relatively free of scar tissue, physical deformity and medieval grime, you are clothed in brightly colored and exotically made leathers and fabrics and contain a full set of dazzling white teeth inside your head. Latin is only the language of scholars and the highest levels of the church and modern European languages don't come into existence for another 400 years or so. I don't remember Tuscan or Frankish being exchanged out on the street, so we're all speaking a wildly foreign tounge and do not comprehend the local dialect. You are ill suited for the 14 hour days of backbreaking physical labor required to grow and raise your own food, although a few weeks of this work will toughen you and your soft hands a bit. You have no practical knowledge, i.e. how to thatch a roof, till soil or herd sheep. Do you wander around to find a Church and beg for mercy? Do you show your cell phone to the villagers in an attempt to awe them - that may get you killed or robbed if you are lucky. You may appear to be a lost noble and be held captive by the local lord for ransom. Upon close inspection, due to a 20th century medical practice common with newborn males, most American-born men would be unable to pass themselves of as Christians – a dangerous position to be in at this time. Some of us have gold rings or fillings that may be bartered or sold. A good watch might be useful to a navigator if you could explain how to calculate longitude with it (latitude has been known for a long time by now), but how many of us can explain longitude? I suggest you hold on to your shoes for as long as possible.
What do you know that would really be of use to you and those around you? Would you survive more than a few days? weeks? Our bloodlines have built up sufficient immunities to a lot of the scourges that wiped out pre-Columbian Americans, and we've been vaccinated for most of he rest. Most of us have an innate concept of hygiene that would get us a little farther than the commoners of the time. If you made a rudimentary soap, you could keep yourself healthy for a lot longer than your average person. Even the knowledge of keeping a wound clean or keeping cats as pets to kill flea-bearing rats would give you a huge advantage. We have a concept of basic math using Arabic numerals and the ability to write using a Roman alphabet. These would set us apart very quickly as highly educated, even if no one understood what we were showing. We understand decimal notation and have all balanced a checkbook before (somewhat). Banking or Moneylending is a possibility. Usury laws haven’t come into existence yet. Just being able to interact with our modern banks has given us an understanding of monetary concepts that won’t be invented for at least a couple of centuries. You could be useful to a merchant or noble in this regard. You know that boiling water is good, but how do you communicate the need for this to a peasant? There are “bad things” in the water? Prove it. You may get killed just for insinuating the idea. Can you justify burning that much wood to get clean water when they can drink some barley wine instead and keep their buzz going? Alcohol distilling wouldn’t require any tools or technology that didn’t exist at the time. You could become a rather wealthy brandy or vodka merchant.
You’d use your knowledge of warcraft and gunpowder to raise a techno-army and rule the land? Have you ever made gunpowder? Charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. Do you really know where to get this stuff? Do you think you could make it without blowing yourself up in the process? You could potentially advise a noble on modern military tactics or use your understanding of history to avoid certain political situations or plagues. If you’ve ever watched Discovery channel, you’re aware of a catapult and a trebuchet, but can you really explain how these work or display a working prototype to a local craftsman? Think of a pencil, that’s probably the result of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of man-hours of engineering and development. Think about locating, extracting and processing the graphite necessary. Think about harvesting, milling and gluing the wood and the rubber eraser. What about the mining, refining, stamping and adhering the metal for the eraser? The pencil is a relatively low-tech item in the 21st century, but it’s an astounding piece of engineering for an 11th European, far beyond even the most powerful and wealthy royal. The best the Roman Empire came up with was a stick and some wax. Most high school students are forced to learn what a feat the printing press was, but in this age of laser printers, how many of these high schoolers really conceptualizes this accurately?
The best place many modern people could hope to go would actually be the middle east. Cities like Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Istanbul/Constantinople were teeming with world travelers. You could even pass yourself off as a traveler from a ‘far off land’. Your knowledge of geography and the ability to draw a world map would make you an instant celebrity with the seafaring classes. When you draw a sailboat, what shape is the sail? Arabs invented the triangular sail hundreds of years before Europeans started using them. If you managed to get a catamaran built, you’d be able to out-run any navy on the planet. Unless you remember any of that calculus though, you’d be a middle of the road mathematician in Cairo.
I think some of the most effective things that you could do are some of the most basic items that we take for granted. In any location modern cooking would be a big hit, as would any songs or dances you have memorized. If you can play an instrument or juggle you’d be useful as a jester or courtly entertainer, just watch out for any utterances of ‘Magic’ or magic tricks, lest you be set ablaze as a heretic. Anyone’s knowledge of playing cards and card games would make them a fortune as a professional gambler or at least a valuable entertainer. As would being able to play chess, checkers or backgammon. Understanding how to build a windmill or a waterwheel would make you the best mechanical engineer in Europe, but average in China. If you made some rudimentary paper and folder up a paper airplane, the first time you threw it, people would faint. Boiling seawater to make salt would provide you with almost limitless income. That is until someone saw you doing it and stole your idea. Growing herbs and spices would be the equivalent of growing gold, as these were at least as valuable as the metal was at the time. You could invent scissors 400 years early. A hot air balloon could be achieved, but testing it would be tricky. A lightning rod might be useful, but explaining it would be difficult. If you could get it built, re-introducing rudimentary indoor plumbing and toilets to the royals would make you a home-renovator extraordinaire.
Re-writing history to cast yourself as the pre-renaissance renaissance man is unlikely. If you were a really smart person and started predicting comets and eclipses, the Catholic Church would find out about you very quickly and roast you like a marshmallow. If you happen to know the locations of any great coal, silver or gold mines, you could acquire these lands and exploit them to great benefit. Becoming a wealthy merchant using your knowledge of geography and basic accounting/banking would be doable. Telescopes, crossbows, stirrups and metal farming implements would be doable technology starting points that could improve the local lot in life. Based on these achievements, you could convince a Noble that infrastructure like maintained roads, irrigation and sewage and larger scale projects like suspension bridges would make their lands more productive and defensible and from there you could achieve lasting fame. World domination isn’t possible because you are not from a royal family and have no access to armies and land. You could kill the local noble and seize power or if you became wealthy enough, you could hire an army, but this is also not good long-term plan.
Try this exercise out for different time periods. Would you be better off in Roman times? Egyptian? Revolutionary War – America? Civil War-era America? 50 years ago?
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