Halfway down the Danube

Amman

I haven't described Amman yet, have I.

Sprawling, low-rise city. Very few large buildings, so the city just goes on and on.

The dominant color is white. Cream, with accents of bone and pale grey. Amman sits on a plateau of white limestone and that's what the city is built of. Sorry, Belgrade -- this is the whitest city I've ever seen.

It's hot and dusty. Later in the summer, I'm told, it gets hotter and dustier. (On the other hand, it has pleasantly cool winters -- snow is not unheard of.)

There's not a lot of architecture. Blocks and more blocks.

The road system is insane. There are no boulevards, no big plazas or squares. There are some large fast roads, but they sort of wind through the city randomly. There's no grid, no hint of order.

I have come to dislike top-down city plans. They're usually imposed by assholes, and the results -- especially in the 20th century -- were often horrendous. But here in Amman, I'm getting a look at what happens when there's no urban design or planning at all. That's not so great either.

Oh: no parks. I mean, like, none. It's the least green city I've ever seen.

In the first generation after independence -- the 1950s and '60s, when the city was maybe a quarter of its present size -- there was a fad for low-slung ranch-style vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright-ish houses. These seem to be where the wealthy Ammanites live today; they usually have high fences and gates.

Amman is growing at a furious clip, fueled by the steady flow of refugees from Iraq. An estimated 700,000 Iraqis have come to Jordan in the last four years. That group is heterogeneous, but includes a disproportionate number of upper- and middle-class Iraqis, members of the Sunni administrative and professional classes. These people have bid up the price of land and apartments and are contributing to a construction boom. Nobody knows the current population of Amman, but estimates run as high as 2 million. That seems high, but it's obviously growing very quickly. I can hear jackhammers right now from across the street.

Jordanians grumble about traffic. I don't see it, myself -- Yerevan is much worse. There are a fair number of cars with Iraqi license plates around.

About 90% of the women are wearing headscarves, but there's a significant minority who don't. Some of these may from Jordan's small Christian minority, but apparently most are just liberals. I'm told that there are parts of Jordan where this would be unacceptable, but in Amman it doesn't turn any heads.

There are two big Safeway supermarkets, a McDonalds, a Pizza Hut and a Starbucks. The local food is good enough that I really wonder why anyone goes there, but then there are Pizza Huts in Singapore and Paris and Rome, so go figure.

It's not a great city for walking. I did get a really good haircut, though -- the first one I've liked since leaving Romania. The barber had the oddest method of removing extra hair... worked, though.

Questions about Amman?

Minimum Capital Requirements

Noel Maurer wants to know why I'm here. And also why no pictures!

The second question first, because it's easy: I don't have a camera.

Why I'm here. I ask myself that every day... No, wait, why I'm in Jordan. Well, that gets a little technical. I don't often write about work here. But what the heck. Let's try an experiment. If y'all find it boring, just don't comment.

It's about Jordan's company law.

Let's say you want to start a new company in Jordan. Jordan has several corporate forms available -- simple partnerships, sole proprieterships, publicly traded companies -- but most likely you'll want to start a Limited Liability Company, or LLC. That gives you the protection and flexibility of the corporate form without the elaborate requirements of a publicly traded corporation.

Sounds good... but right away you're going to hit a speed bump: to start a new LLC in Jordan, you must invest a minimum of 30,000 Jordanian Dinars. That's about $40,000 US dollars. In a country where the per capita income is around $4,000 per year, that's a lot of money.

In technical terms, this is a "Minimum Capital Requirement", or MCR. MCRs are pretty common around the world. Almost every country has MCRs for some companies; for instance, there's often an MCR if you want to be traded on the local stock exchange, or if you want to start an insurance company or a bank.

Very broadly speaking, about a third of the countries in the world have only these MCRs, for certain specialized sorts of business. About another third have modest MCRs, US$1,000 or less. (Note that $1,000 is still a lot of money in some places.) And then about half have serious MCRs, enough to make it impossible for most people to start a company.

Why? Well, historically there were several justifications.

1) MCRs showed that the investors were serious. By restricting access to the corporate form, they encouraged all but the most skilled and dedicated from entering into business.

2) MCRs gave protection to creditors.

3) MCRs discouraged the formation of shell companies and certain sorts of fraud.

4) By limiting the number of companies, MCRs made them easier to monitor. It also made it easier for the government to intervene in a particular sector.

5) MCRs deterred the Wrong Sort of People from starting companies.

Now, if you look over this list, you can probably guess what sorts of countries went for MCRs in a big way. That's right -- former European colonies run by governments that were dirigiste, explicitly socialist, or both. Go back 30 or 40 years, and MCRs were conventional wisdom from Malaysia to Mali.

Another factor was that economics -- talking practical, developmental economics here -- went through a long period of being fascinated with large firms and neglecting small ones (except insofar as small firms could become large ones). This wasn't so much an argument for MCRs as an argument against them that nobody was paying attention to. So they discouraged the formation of small businesses; so what? It's big businesses that matter anyway.

But economic orthodoxy has shifted, and the tide has been running against MCRs for a while now. In the last 10 years countries all over the world have been cutting or eliminating them. And now -- maybe -- it's Jordan's turn.

In theory, Jordan could just cut their MCR with a simple change in the law. In practice, there are complications. For example, the fee schedule for new companies is based on the initial capital investment. Eliminate MCRs, and we'll eliminate several million dollars a year of government income. So, someone must develop a new fee schedule that's revenue neutral.

Another issue: there are a lot of Jordanians out there who'd like to start LLCs. How many? Well, we're not sure... but someone needs to find out. Because once the MCR is changed, there will probably be a surge of people wanting to start new companies. If the surge is too big, it will overwhelm the local company registration office.

Yet another: Jordan has a large population of guest workers, mostly from Egypt. (Since many Jordanians work in the Gulf States, this makes Jordan one of the few countries that is both a destination and a source for guest workers.) Remember reason #5, above? There's a concern that if the MCR is dropped too low, guest workers will start founding companies.

Now, this is unlikely to happen, for various reasons; and if it did happen, it probably would not be a big deal. But -- as in most countries with large guest worker populations -- there's a lurking fear that the guest workers will somehow bootsrap themselves into some status they're not entitled to. I don't speak a dozen words of Arabic, but I've already learned the word for "Egyptian" -- "al Masri". (Because I'll be sitting in a meeting, and suddenly the conversation will shift to Arabic and get very animated, and it'll be blah blah blah al-Masri blah.)

Even if the fear is irrational, it's still real, and has to be dealt with. The people who are worried about al-Masri either have to be talked around, or the new law has to contain some provisions that will make it impossible (or at least very hard) for the tricky al-Masri to start a company.

There's more, but that's probably as much as it's appropriate to discuss here.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing in Jordan: I'm working with the Jordanians to help them figure out (1) how low they should drop their MCR, and (2) how to do that.

So. Questions, thoughts?

King Abdullah

Jordan has a King, Abdullah II.

He's 45 years old. Been king since 1999, when his father died. His picture is everywhere -- not just government offices, but shops and private businesses.

The Jordanian monarchy is interesting in a couple of respects.

1) It's still there! Unlike the monarchies of, say, Egypt, or Syria, or Iraq. This is largely thanks to Abdullah's father King Hussein, one of the 20th century's great political survivors.

2) It's a real constitutional monarchy. That is, the monarch has significant power, but is not an autocrat and is not involved in the day to day running of the country.

3) It's popular. It's hard for me to judge this based on four days in the country, but people seem to think that the monarchy is the reason Jordan is a (relative) oasis of peace and stability in a very difficult neighborhood.

Note that "the monarchy is popular" is not exactly the same as "the monarch is popular". I can't speak to the latter point.

There's a large royal family -- Hussein had ten children over thirty years. The royals seem to be prominent, but it's nothing like the swarm of Princes in Saudi Arabia.

King Abdullah is the fourth Hashemite King of Jordan. The first was his great-grandfather, Abdullah I, who founded the kingdom in 1923 and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951. The second was Abdullah's son Talal, who reigned for only one year and then abdicated. The third was Talal's son, the redoubtable Hussein, who ruled from 1953 to his death in 1999.

It's been descent in the direct male line, though this is not inevitable; Hashemite tradition allows brothers to succeed as well as sons, and this is enshrined in the Jordanian Constitution. Indeed, for much of his reign King Hussein's heir was his brother, Prince Hassan. But a few weeks before his death, he abruptly changed from Hassan to Abdullah. The reasons for this remain obscure, but the best guess is that he simply wanted his son to succeed instead of his brother.

King Abdullah went to school in the US and Britain -- Deerfield Academy, Oxford, Sandhurst and Georgetown -- and speaks perfect mid-Atlantic English.

More importantly, he's a huge Star Trek fan; he appeared as an extra on an episode of Voyager in 1995.

Nothing

If you fly from Dubai to Amman, your route goes across northern Saudi, parallel to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders but maybe 100 km south.

And if you look out the window of your plane, you see... nothing.

Well, you see desert. But it's empty desert. There are no roads, there are no towns. There's no sign of humanity. There's no sign of life at all. Just this reddish-tan... surface.

The day was pretty clear. Some haze, but I could probably see eighty or a hundred miles. And the desert extended, empty, for as far as I could see.

And this went on for a couple of hours.

Nothingness is strangely hard to look at. The eye sort of claws at the desert and then falls back, baffled. Perhaps it's different on the ground but from cruising altitude it's almost painful after a while. If not for the signature blue of the atmosphere, we could have been in a probe flying low over one of the duller parts of Mars.

The desert gets livelier when you get close to Jordan: there are hills, and depressions, and lots of dry riverbeds. You can look at that with interest. But northeast Saudi is just flat and dead and empty, going on for hundreds of miles. There's just... nothing.

However: there's a part of Saudi Arabia called "The Empty Quarter". And the part we were flying over? Wasn't it.

It's a big world.

Memorial Day

Because I can't say it any better:

Copyright 2007 Trudeau

Dubai

Holy crap, Dubai.

I only spent a few hours in Dubai, but it made a hell of an impression. It's rich, it's modern, it's clean. Big new buildings. Huge wide roads. (Crazy drivers, but that bugs me a lot less than it used to.) No visa hassles -- you show your passport, you go in.

First impressions: hot and sticky. Apparently Dubai has three seasons: dry and warm, dry and hot, and hot and intolerably humid. We're just at the beginning of the humid season, so: dog breath. And it will get worse before it gets better.

It's flat as a pancake. The combination of flatness, heat, and humidity reminds me faintly of central Florida... Orlando on the Persian Gulf, I guess.

But it's the Middle East. I saw my first woman in a, what do you call it, burqa? The one with just an eyeslit. That's not the norm --most women were just wearing headscarves -- but wow.

The woman at the visa desk had henna patterns all over her hands and wrists. I think of henna as something bored teenage girls do, not something people take seriously. But someone had obviously spent hours on this.

The airport was full of South Asians with a sprinkling of Central Asians and Filipinos. Dubai is one of those places where the locals have desk jobs and guest workers do everything manual. How well this works I can't say based on a few hours, but they've certainly managed to build a lot.

The air conditioning in my hotel room was turned to deep freeze.

Hotel: modern business culture has a tremendous homeogenizing effect. The hotel had a British pub, an Italian restaurant, and a Mexican place. There was also a bar with a little dance floor and a band. Which was of course Filipino, and which of course played the most awful hits of the last 40 years. ("Loooovving you... is easy 'cause you're beautiful...")

I had to try the Mexican place. It was decent basic Mexican, maybe half a cut north of Denny's. It had one of those annoying TV screens that announces the specials. They all were about 50%-100% more expensive than in the US. "Barbecue ribs! (may contain pork)" said one screen. "Thursday is Karaoke night!" warned another. I ate nachos and read my book until they turned the lights down for dancing. They weren't great nachos but they weren't bad either, and you'd be surprised how good even mediocre Mexican tastes after six or eight months without.

Walked around for a few minutes after, but the hotel was not in a good neighborhood for walking -- by which I mean it seemed to sit at the intersection of two large highways, with no neighbors but other hotels -- and anyway I was tired. And my flight was at 7:00 so I had to be early to bed.

Internet was $30 for a card good for 10 hours, so none of that. Read a few pages, crashed, got five hours of sleep.

And that was Dubai.

Outward Bound

I'm going to Jordan for two weeks. I'm not sure how much time I'll have there, but I'll try to post at least occasionally.

Following up on a couple of earlier posts: elections here ended with -- I know you will be shocked to hear this -- victory for the ruling party. President Kocharian's Republic Party gained just over half the seats in Parliament, meaning that they can form any government they like. Four other parties split the rest of the seats. Two of those four are pro-government parties anyway, so the actual opposition has less than a quarter of the votes in Parliament, and no political power at all.

The international community's reaction was one of mild approval. OSCE, the State Department and the Europeans all agreed there were some irregularities, but they also agreed that this was the cleanest and fairest election in recent Armenian history. (N.B., this is not setting the bar very high.)

The conclusion of the Isfahan-Moscow story will have to wait until I get back.

Elections, travel, Jordan (I know very little about Jordan): consider this an open thread.

A Tale of Two Pacmen

Brett Favre relaxes in his hometown of Kiln, Mississippi.

The nightmare has come to pass: Brett Favre Demands Trade To 1996 Packers.

And Onion John cried, "Father, let this cup pass from me, for it is not even a good bad beer, like Schlitz, or even a Budweiser like that mad Welshman likes."

Even though Randy Moss is a wart on the keister of professional American football, it has to be said that Moss is a very talented wart. It also doesn't say much that the most smartly coached team in the NFL picked him up immediately, as if by giant electromagnet.

Carrie at Bad Mama knows I'm jonesing bad for football -- the shakes, the tremors, seeing John Madden flicker in and out of the corner of my eye -- and she sent me this beautiful link to the current Pacman Jones case (PDF). It's a comprehensive list of damn near everything NFL players have gotten in trouble with the law over the last few years. Learn why Najeh Davenport is called the Dumptruck!

I really should find a back-up sport for the interminable off-season. I picked up a Brooklyn Cyclones schedule, but it's not doing anything for me. Union Hall has two bocce courts and a bar, which sounds promising. Or I could read another book.

Update: Republican presidential candidate Brownback learns the third rail of Wisconsin politics. "That's really bad," he said. "That will go down in history. I apologize."

Mangling the names, we can forgive. No one was too upset with Kerry saying 'Lambert' instead of 'Lambeau'. You try saying 'Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila' after three Bloody Marys with extra horseradish. Even 'Bart Starr' becomes difficult.

Other things are unforgiveable.

Incidentally, Carrie informs me the answer to Brownback's question, "How many passes does he complete without a line?" is 56%.

Uninvited

Is that a real word? In any case, that is what happened to Paul Wolfowitz yesterday. The German Development Minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, advised Mr. Wolfowitz not to participate in a two-day World Bank forum on Africa that takes place in Berlin next week.

This is quite a dare - to tell the director of an organization not to come to a meeting by his own organization. Think this one through. It's almost, but not quite, as if Wolfowitz had been declared a persona non grata.

The Minister has called repeatedly for Mr. Wolfowitz' resignation and the Germans (and the EU) have grown ever more impatient with the apparent unwillingness of the US government to relieve Mr. Wolfowitz of his post. This latest step can be called an affront, it is definitely not a faux pas - not in the sense that Wieczorek-Zeul wasn't perfectly aware what a ruckus she would create.

It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- Wolfowitz, as a German newspaper put it, is already dead on the ground. Why kick him?

Well, I think it sheds light just how annoyed the Europeans are with the US government in this matter. Wieczorek-Zeul's statement is a clear signal to the US government to stop dithering and slithering and get rid of a man who has behaved improperly, and do it NOW. Of course, in the meantime, he started negotiating a deal over his resignation. I have to say, the man has nerve.

Me, I'm sitting back in my chair and watch the events unfold...

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Five

Continuing the story of the first great embassy from Persia to the West.

During the two months following we now travelled in our galleys up the Volga, but every ten days we disembarked and went ashore to some village, for all along the river bank there are small settlements with houses that are built of wood. At each stopping place we changed some of our rowers, taking on fresh men...

The hills which the Volga has on either side of its banks are very high, and are populated by settlements. We saw on these hills numerous bears, lions, and tigers, also martens of many species.

That sentence stopped me cold. Lions and tigers?

Tigers I can see. The Asian tiger is almost extinct, but it used to range all over Central Asia and Siberia. So it's not so surprising that there were tigers on the lower Volga.

But lions? I thought lions had been extinct in Europe since Roman times, and I never knew they had roamed that far north and east. I half wonder if the writer was confusing some other cat, a lynx or something. Would a 16th century Persian know from lions? I'm really not sure.

Every hundred leagues or so along the river there stand cities of the Duke of Muscovy, adn the first that we came to was called Cherny Yar, the next Tzaritzyn, the third Samara, and so on with the rest we do not name. When there was a contrary wind blowing down the river, the boatmen would land the horses, [and] these towed the galleys with great ropes. Every night we were wont to land to sleep comfortably ashore in the fields, and our escort of a hundred soldiers then kept watch and ward for us.

Watch and ward against what, I wonder. Tigers?

At the end of two months journeying by river we came to a very great city of the Duke of Muscovy called Kazan, and its population, numbering over 50,000 households, are all Christians. This town is extemely full of churches, each having many great bells, and on the vesper of feast days no one can sleep or indeed stay in the city for the noise. On the day when we arrived at this city so great a concourse came to meet us and wonder at the sight, that we scarcely could pass through the squares and streets.We stayed in Kazan eight days, and they provided us with such abundant supplies that the food we could not eat had to be thrown out the window and wasted.

Kazan is due east of Moscow, near the northern end of the Urals, and roughly a thousand miles or 1600 km upriver from Astrakhan. That works out to eight or nine miles a day. Even going upriver, that's not blinding speed.

In this country none are poor, for the victuals are so cheap, that any that are hungry go out to find it on the highways. What they lack is good wine, and they have only one kind of drink, which is made from wheat or barley, and this is so strong that those who drink it are often drunk. For this reason there is a law and ordnance that no officer may carry any kind of weapon, otherwise they would be killing each other every other moment.

"What they lack is good wine". Well, the Safavid Persians were noted for their appreciation of fine wines, Koranic injunctions notwithstanding.

One has the feeling the Persians think if the Russians just had good wine, the drunkenness and violence would go away.

The climate here is extremely cold; hence all go clothed in marten skins, which are to be found in abundance...

They have great use for staves, and in eah house is a dog, as big as a lion, for they fear robbery by night... In the daytime the dogs are chained up, but at the first hour of the evening the bells ring to warn people that the dogs are about to be let loose in the streets, and thus the passengers abroad must take care. For they now set their dogs free, and no one then dare go out of his house, lest he should be torn to pieces by them.

Charming.

I notice the local breed is "as big as a lion". Poetic exaggeration, or evidence that "lion" really meant "lynx" or some other feline? You make the call.

From Kazan we set forth in seven galleys with which the captain of the city supplied us, together with a guard of a hundred soldiers ordered to conduct us safely to the Court of the Duke of Muscovy. We continued to travel up the same stream, and advancing northward, began the more to feel the rigor of the climate of that region; and six days after leaving Kazan we came to a town on the same river bank, which is called Chekobsary. That same night the Volga, or Eder river, was frozen so thick... that perforce we had to change our way of travelling.

Next: Dashing through the snow!

Arkansas Wins Statovision!

Some people disdain the results of block voting. Still, you have to admit, that was some fine, fine banjo playing.

Alas, I doubt if we'll ever see Statovision produce a superstar like Israel Kamakawiwo'ole again.

Doug's Eurovision analysis is here.

Election Day

Today is Election Day here in Armenia.

I haven't blogged much about the elections... no, that's not true. I haven't blogged at all about the elections. That's because I find it a depressing topic.

There's not much doubt who will win, you see. The only questions are how and by how much. And also -- this is about to become of pressing interest -- how much post-election violence there will be when opposition supporters protest, and are suppressed. The last time around, the protests and suppression got pretty savage; there were casualties. This time, well, we'll know tomorrow.

And that's all I have to say about Armenia's elections right now.

Perhaps pounding my head against the wall will make the pain go away.

Some of you may know that Claudia, the missing third of Halfway Down the Danube, once met British humorist Terry Pratchett at one of these convention things. (Thanks to Carrie for the link.) I couldn't believe the article -- literally, I couldn't believe in its existence. Now con-going has made the New York Times Travel section? Because really, once you've seen all the covered bridges in New England, what's left. I look forward to science fiction fandom's infiltration into the Times's Vows section, The Ethicist, and especially Modern Love. "Hi, I'm a 56-year-old fan and numismatic expert who was recently ordained in the Chaldean Orthodox church. Lately I've been experiencing an irresistible compulsion to..."

But that's not the funny part. (Well, it is funny, in a Shakes the Clown sort of way.) This is the funny part:

But on Saturday afternoon, after lecturing on deep-space colonization, Les Johnson, the manager of NASA’s science programs and projects at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., lamented what he saw as a generational shift in fans’ interests. "I see a lot of young people here gaming, but I don’t see a lot of the younger folks here for the science fiction," said Mr. Johnson, who has been attending conventions since his own adolescence in the 1970s. "That bothers me, because the dreaming is what interested me in getting into physics. If they aren’t reading the stuff, where are our next-generation physicists and NASA engineers going to come from?"

You know, I have a sister with a degree in aerospace engineering. She designed space missions for her senior thesis. Do you know how much interest she has in science fiction? Take a guess. The answer is below the fold.

Update: two trolls in twelve hours over the weekend! now deleted. People are dumb.

From Isfahan to Moscow, part Four

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West.

The embassy has crossed the Caspian Sea and arrived at the mouths of the Volga. To the north lies the city of Astrakhan, once the capital of a Muslim Khanate, now a frontier city of the expanding power of Russia.

One of our Persians and an Englishman, with some of the sailors to row, now got into a small boat and went to wait on the captain-general of the town, which lay thirty leagues above where the ship had come to anchor, for the water above here is so shallow that she could not have passed the bar without running aground.

Hm, it sounds like the Volga delta was one vast shallow swamp. I wonder when the Russians got around to draining a channel?

Now as we lay here, by a change of wind our vessel was in great risks, for though of considerable size, when a squall fell on us, she was all but overset, and we already accounted ourselves as doomed men. Immediately we began to throw overboard first a thousand bushels of wheat and flour, next many provisions with which we had been supplied, many boxes of clothes, lastly some chests of valuable gifts, whereby finally, and by the loss thereof, the tempest came to be appeased, and the ship saved.

This danger being overpassed, those who had gone up to the city returned, and with them the captain-general had sent down to us many gentlemen, aboard four galleys, with provisions and refreshments. We now trans-shipped and were taken aboard their galleys, and our ship weighing anchor, sailed away, leaving us. On arriving at the city we disembarked from the galleys, when they gave us a very great and solemn reception, for there was a mighty assembly of folk present. Here we found another ambassador from the King of Persia, especially accredited to Muscovy, who was on his way thither, and in his suite 300 persons.

Remember, our boy's embassy is a general one to various kings of the West. They're just passing through Russia en route.

300 persons? Wow. Persian rulers did go in for conspicuous consumption but I wonder if there wasn't something more here. Perhaps Shah Abbas was hungry for an ally against the Turks. (He was just a couple of years away from launching a major war against them.) Or maybe he wanted to make sure the Russians wouldn't get ideas about expanding down either coast of the Caspian, in the direction of Persia. Which, of course, is exactly what they'd be doing in the following century. But in 1599 that was still a distant ambition, so probably it was more about the upcoming war with the Ottomans.

In Astrakhan we sojourned for sixteen days, for they gave us excellent entertainment, and it being the autumn season, there was in that country an abundance of melons and apples of very good quality. Also not only was the land pleasant, but the people likewise, for the captain-general, whom the Grand Duke of Muscovy had appointed here as governor, had caused it to be proclaimed that no one should presume to demand money for anything that we might need or desire, and this under pain of 200 lashes for disobedience...

Well, that gives us an idea of how things were done in Russia back in the day. It's also pretty suggestive of how important the Russians considered these embassies to be.

This must have been pretty sweet for the ambassadors! For the local merchants of Astrakhan, maybe less so.

Having sojourned sixteen days in Astrakhan, and the five galleys being now ready which had been prepared for our accommodation, and for that of the other Persian ambassador whom we had joined company with in Astrakhan, we all now came together and embarked -- namely, we Persians and the Englishmen and the Friars. Along with us were sent a hundred soldiers of the Duke of Muscovy, who were to serve us as guard and escort, by order of the captain-general at Astrakhan. The galleys were very well built, and each had a crew of a hundred rowers. We got on board down at the strand of that river [the Volga], the stream here having a width across of half a Spanish league.

Five hundred rowers plus a hundred soldiers. Astrakhan probably didn't have more than 20,000 inhabitants, so this was a pretty big commitment of manpower.

The land is well inhabited on either bank by the Tartar folk, who are divided up into hordes or tribes, and who for the most part live out in the countryside among their folcks, which supply them with their chief sustenance and livelihood... They live as do the nomad Moors of Morocco, changing their habitations with the four seasons, even as those men are wont to do. They go by the name of the Nogay...

The Nogai are still around, although there are a lot fewer of them now. They're a people of mixed Mongol and Turkish descent, speaking a language that's very close to Turkish.

In the mid-16th century, around the time the Russians captured Astrakhan, the Nogai split in two. The Great Horde stayed on the lower Volga and accepted Russian rule (which was pretty light at first). The Lesser Horde moved west to the lower Don and the lands north of the Sea of Azov. This region was under the control of the Crimean Tartars, who in turn were tributary allies of the Ottoman Empire; presumably the Lesser Horde preferred Istanbul's rule to Moscow's.

The Great Horde had about a century of relative peace. The embassy passed through right in the middle of this period. Then in the mid-1600s, more and more Russian colonists came floating down the Volga to settle the lower valley. The Great Horde was forced south and west into much less desirable territory in the north Caucasus. That's where they are today.

(Well, most of them. Some ended up in Turkey, some in Jordan. And one branch of the Lesser Horde ended up in the Dobrudja -- the lower Danube, in Romania. Several thousand Nogais live there yet. They even have their own representative in Romania's Parliament.)

We get one interesting glimpse of life with the Great Horde:

[S]ince there are no bridges... it is their custom to make the passage over the river breadth during the month of August, when the river is at its lowest. To accomplish this fording of the river, they have contrived a method as follows. The horses and camels are tied together by their tails one to the another, thirty by thirty, or fifty by fifty, and then being driven into the water their number enables them to struggle against the force of the current, and thus to get over... But as the distance across the stream is very great, it is not uncommon for half the flock to get drowned, for, indeed, in the narrowest places the river here is a league from bank to bank...

1599: Shakespeare was writing Richard III, Queen Elizabeth was an old lady in London, and the first English settlement of America was still a generation away. And from Romania to Central Asia, it was still a nomad world. The Russian state hadn't reached the Black Sea or the Caucasus, and had just gained a tentative foothold at the top of the Caspian. The Russian expansion, which would reduce the mighty Hordes to tiny enclaves in Siberia and the Caucasus, was just getting under way. The embassy travelled through a world of herds and horsemen, river and earth and sky. It's a world that's hard to imagine today, because it has absolutely disappeared.

Next: up and up and up the Volga. Lions and tigers, oh my.

I wonder if Heaven got an Accounts Receivable

Though his mind was not for rent, don't put him down as arrogant.