The Dangers of Travel—Banditry on the Roads: Comparison
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Since the dawn of time, one of the main barriers to travel has been the fear of leaving one’s place of residence and travelling into a foreign unknown and dangerous space. However, at the same time, firmly rooted in human nature is the desire to know and experience travel, this archetypal inner need is the motive for undertaking travel. In the past, in ancient times, it was difficult to travel safely, not always succeeding in avoiding dangerous areas and being among the friendly inhabitants of distant countries. In modern times, too, travel is dangerous and no traveler can have the comfort of carefree travel until the end.

  • dangers of travelling
  • highwaymen
  • cultural tourism

1. Introduction

Travel hazards in a retrospective context are a scarce topic of scientific research. Hence, there is a paucity of publications on the subject in the world literature.
Despite the dangers of travel for thousands of years, almost since the dawn of human civilization, some atavistic and archetypal force of new knowledge, beyond the conditions of being, has prompted people to change their place of residence, and to move, to wander around the world [1]. Travellers, who will later be called tourists, chose the safest possible roads, more willingly where there were hospitable, friendly parties and good people. Routes leading among dangerous and sinister areas were reluctantly chosen. Further, it seems that the danger of travel in the twenty-first and subsequent centuries will still accompany tourist travellers, because the world is shaken by various dramatic events that limit carefree travel. In addition, the specter of further pandemics can limit this movement to a minimum [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].
Travel safety is an important component of a traveler’s choice of route to a destination. The relevance of the issue of travel safety, including tourism safety, is evidenced by tens of thousands of specialized studies on all travel dangers. Researchers encounter the two concepts of “travel safety” and “travel danger”. Danger, on the one hand, is defined as a condition, situation, or position threatening something bad, endangering someone. Safety is one of the main human needs. This aspect is also found in the hierarchical ordering of travel needs made by H.R. Scherrieb. Danger can be treated as a predictor of fluctuations in the volume of tourist traffic in a given area. A high crime rate in some cities can be identified as a threat to travellers, including for tourism, and is a factor in reducing the number of visitors to the city or the entire area. Thus, danger can be treated as a destimulant of tourism. Travel dangers can be generated by social forces, including armed conflicts and warfare, religious unrest, political terrorism, nationality feuds, and natural forces or natural disasters: floods, earthquakes fires, hurricanes, etc. There are also threats of traffic disasters. However, most often, travellers are concerned about criminal crime including murder, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, rape robbery, or theft. The presented entry aims to show the records of retrieved publications from the scope of retrospective research on criminal dangers and threats during travel in ancient times.
The academic research today generates a huge number of publications in thousands of journals. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the academic research, as well as greatly dispersed knowledge, it is not possible to use an autopsy, which not so long ago had some pragmatics of an armchair examination. Today, an efficient research activity in any area, even in narrow research fields, is not possible for a clearly stated hypothesis without using modern methods of identification, evaluation and synthesis of all the sources concerning a given research problem. Only a professional systematic literature review can adequately describe the current state of knowledge.
In the academic activity of any discipline the basic duty lies in getting to know the topical academic achievements concerning the part of the world that is being examined. Therefore, a researcher at the beginning of their retrospective analytical process concerning travel safety should start their exploration from a bibliometry, a statistical set of methods and tools used for a quantitative analysis of academic writing, and then work it out in a qualitative way.
It is important to answer basic questions: who and where conducts research on a given topic? What research areas do researchers distinguish in each of the disciplines and who is responsible for that? Who, when, and where has published the research results for a given issue? Who was cited by them? How many publications are available in the area being examined? Answering those questions will lead to gathering knowledge of the existing research niche as well as journals that researchers can publish the results in. It is the bibliometry that shows the methods and tools that will make it possible to obtain basic knowledge during the stage of planning the research.

2. Dangers of Travel

For the phrases mentioned, the following results that are shown in Table 1 could be found.
Table 1. Results for queries presented by the EBSCO system.
No. Entry Items Found
 1  history of tourism 7460
92  2  history of tourism AND robbery
311
1
As the phrase “travel AND bandits” generated a number of results that would be useless for any research purposes, it was obvious that the criteria should be changed in order to achieve a better efficiency and complexity in turn. Therefore, this phrase was removed from further results. What is more, the rest of the phrases was grouped into two separate groups. From among the selected groups (highlighted in grey), the found positions were imported to the Zotero software (bibliographical data) (Table 2).
Table 2. Presentation of one of the stages of the work, consisting of selecting the results of individual queries and, at a later stage, introducing the selected items into the Zotero bibliographic system.
No. Entry Items Found
 1  history of tourism 7460
155
 2  history of tourism AND robbery 155  3  history of tourism AND dangers of travelling 3
 3  history of tourism AND danger of travelling 3  4  history of tourism AND travel dangers 7
 4
 2  history of tourism AND travel dangers 7  5  history of tourism AND bandits 21
 5  history of tourism AND bandits 21
Table 4. The effect of the work at the stage of database exploration after organizing the results, removing duplicates, and rejecting publications that are obviously inconsistent with the adopted subject.
The Results of the Work Performed Number of Items Found
the simple search 94
 6
 history of tourism AND highlander and robbers 1
 6  history of tourism AND highwaymen AND robbers 1  7  history of tourism AND cultural tourism 611
 8  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND dangers of travelling 1
 allintitle: bandits 2300
the advanced search 87  3  allintitle: cultural tourism 7  history of tourism AND cultural tourism 611
707  8  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND danger of travelling 1  9  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND travel dangers 2
 9  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND travel dangers 2  10  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND bandits 4
 10  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND bandits 4  11  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND highwaymen 3
 11  history of tourism AND cultural tourism AND highwaymen 3  12  dangers of travelling
 12  dangers of travelling 311  13  travel dangers 135
 13  travel dangers 135  14  bandits 131,000
 15
 14  bandits 131,000  travel AND bandits 36,200
 15  travel AND bandits 36,200  16  travel dangers AND bandits
 163
 travel dangers AND bandits 3  17  cultural tourism 45,000
 17  cultural tourism  18  cultural tourism AND robbery 331
45,000  19  cultural tourism AND dangers of travelling 1
 20  cultural tourism AND travel dangers 3
 21
 18  cultural tourism AND robbery 331  cultural tourism AND bandits
 19  cultural tourism AND dangers of travelling 61
1
 20  cultural tourism AND travel dangers 3
 21  cultural tourism AND bandits  22
61
 22  cultural tourism AND highwaymen AND robbers 1
Then, a list was prepared, from which repeated items were removed. For the advanced search, the following results were found (Table 3) (the allintitle operator means the search is performed only for a title of a publication):
Table 3. Presentation of the results of the work involving the use of previously presented capabilities of the EBSCO search system and narrowing the query to the title of the publication (advanced, in-depth queries).
No. Entry Items Found
 4
 allintitle: ROBBERY 849
For other keywords that are not mentioned in the table the system did not find any items. Only for search no. 1 was a list of items collected. Finally, the simple and advanced searches were superimposed on each other. The full bibliographical list, which consists of items that were found during the final stage of the search, can be found at the end of the article in the Reference section. The section consists of two parts (Table 4 and Table 5). The second part is the final choice of items.
total number of chosen publications after removing duplicates
168
Table 5. A summary of the work including exploring the databases, and a detailed analysis of the results, with items not present in stage 1 included as the results of stage 2.
The Result of the Work Number of Chosen Items
 1  allintitle: history of tourism
STAGE 1—Simple search 94
STAGE 2—Advanced search 87
STAGE 3—Total number of chosen publications after removing duplicates 168
STAGE 4—Published selected items after a substantive analysis of content 29
 cultural tourism AND highwaymen and robbers
After being superimposed, the final search results were chosen. Based on the results of Stages 1 and 2, a bibliographical list was prepared with duplicates removed; 168 items of literature were selected. After subjecting the obtained results to filtering, 11 items were selected for in-depth analysis from the total material obtained at stage 2. The items extracted in the appendix bibliography can be found at the end of the paper.

3. Banditry on the Roads

Despite the dangers of travel for thousands of years, almost since the dawn of human civilization, some atavistic and archetypal force of new knowledge, beyond the conditions of being, has prompted people to change their place of residence, and to move, to wander around the world [1]. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Europe formed a comprehensive territory, the borders of which did not constitute a barrier to the movement of travellers. The barrier was the hardships of travel and the risks lurking on the roads. It must be remembered, however, that people in ancient times were accustomed to uncertainty, because in turbulent times it was impossible to avoid dangers. Danger was, therefore, an inseparable companion of everyday life on the journey. Most often, they wandered on foot, though often also on horseback; to carry large luggage, pack animals were used. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the common use of the horse collar and horseshoe began, the carts already had four wheels, which allowed them to carry a greater weight. In the Middle Ages, millions of pilgrims, tourist travellers, merchants, soldiers, students, vagabonds, etc., travelled throughout Western Europe along a miserable and dangerous road network. They often suffered from the inconveniences of travel, hunger and thirst, endured cold and heat, the malice of carriers, the dishonesty of guides, and the deception of innkeepers. They were exposed to the dangers of travel, loss of life and limb. In the Middle Ages, it was mainly merchants and pilgrims that travelled. The purpose of the peregrinations were mostly places of religious worship, as well as famous colleges—universities of Italy, universities in Padua and Bologna. Travelling tourists visited Rome or Santiago de Compostela, Aachen, Canterbury or Einsiedeln. Many continued on their long journey to Jerusalem. Since the sixteenth century, a high dynamic of travel has been observed in Europe. The travel movement included the youth of France, Spain and Italy. For educational purposes, young German aristocrats were sent away; soon, they were joined by noble sons of the Danish and Swedish nobility [6][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Crime and the standard of socio-economic living have always had a feedback loop. Furthermore, the overall crime rate increased in the sixteenth century, and then decreased after the mid-sixteenth century. The reason may have been the harvest in the last decades of the sixteenth century, as well as slower population growth and greater availability of work. A sharp increase in robberies usually occurred after a poor harvest, or after the end of the war, when demobilized soldiers returned home, and the roads were full of armed men and organized bands of stragglers. Sometimes, it was during wars that a decline in crime was observed. Both in the Middle Ages and the following centuries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theft and violence were the main manifestations of crime. Travellers were usually robbed of small sums of money or goods such as food and property. Violent and life-threatening crimes against travellers were the minority of cases. When, as a result of the spread of literacy, the availability of printed information about crimes increased, and often exaggerated their number for populist sensationalism, the public became mistaken about the increase in crime. In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, crime declined, as it did after 1850 [4][6][8][9][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Travellers, who will later be called tourists, chose the safest possible roads, more willingly where there were hospitable, friendly parties and good people. Routes leading among dangerous and sinister areas were reluctantly chosen. In addition, it seems that the danger of travel in the twenty-first and subsequent centuries will still accompany tourist travellers, because the world is shaken by various dramatic events that limit carefree travel. Furthermore, the specter of further pandemics can limit this movement to a minimum [2][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].

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