It happened relatively often in the pre-modern world.
There was a pretender to the English throne, Perkin Warbeck, that got the support of the Yorkists near the end of the War of the Roses. He pretended to be one of “Princes in the Tower”. But he lost in battle and eventually lost support.
Something similar happened with Lambert Simnal a few years earlier. There have since been a long line of Yorkist pretenders.
The key here seems to be that your claim needs to be valuable in some way in the court you are hoping to infiltrate. The Burgundians and some Irish (and Scots) supported the Yorkist cause, so having a Yorkist pretender was a good thing. You could probably live at court for awhile with some bizarre claims and promises, but eventually you have to put up (money) or fight for your claim (risking death).
It also helps if there is a reason that the person you are claiming to be would be poor (like having been put in the Tower by Richard III). But then if you don’t have power/money yourself you better have a claim that is valuable to your patron(s).
A lot depends on who you are defrauding. Peasants and villagers? If they are dim and powerless enough you might be able to abscond with what little they might offer. A head of state or other noble? Once they find out, they will persue you to the ends of the Earth until they have your head on a pike. It’s like robbing from the Mafia; only the truly desperate conman would risk the wrath of those wealthy enough to be worth conning.
Not sure how ‘ancient’ we are talking about here, but Mesopotamia 3500BC till much later had an ingenious solution to fraud.
The Cylinder Seal. A small clay cylinder about the size of a thread spool. It has a hole in the middle for a string around your neck and the outside round bit had an emblem, figure or creatures. Rolling this cylinder on a wet piece of clay ‘signed’ it with an identifiable mark that was difficult to fake. The poor and rich alike carried these everywhere and they’ve been discovered all over.
That might work great in the country they were issued but I am pretty sure if I sailed with Columbus and landed in the new world and showed the locals my patent of nobility they’d not care about it at all.
I recall another time travel novel where the time traveller arrived in the 14th century and pretended to be an amnesiac, but had learned the language and social mores necessary to seem like she must be some sort of noble. It “worked” insofar as the local nobility took her into their home, but she wasn’t trying to get anything more than room and board out of them.
Similar devices are still in use in parts of Asia, especially those using a non-Latin script: Seals in the Sinosphere - Wikipedia. Commonly called a “chop” in English. The act of signing with a chop is termed “Putting your chop on [whatever]”.
Hardly ancient, but your question brought to mind the imposter “Princess Caraboo” who persuaded a quite a few Brits in the early 19th century that she was of exotic, royal origin, while IRL she was an impoverished cobbler’s daughter from Devon. You gotta credit her with a lot of chutzpah!
Thanks. Also note that at one point in his return voyage, Marco Polo travelled from China to India via ship. The Romans knew about China. From Roman to Rennaissance times, there were carvans regularly travelling the Silk Road. These were not isolated communities with no knowledge of each other.
There’s even a record of a group claiming to be “foreign ambassadors” (shades of this topic) who historians sometimes imagine were from Rome, showing up in China in 166AD. Some speculation suggests they may have been Roman merchants travelling onward from India.
A note on sea travel… I think it was Boorstein’s The Discoverers that mentions the Mongol Empire opened up travel across Asia (hence the Polo’s and their voyages) before the Empire fell apart and the local kingdoms restricted travel so as to claim their cut in the spice trade. This is what impelled Europe in the 1400’s to look for alternative sea routes to bypass the restrictions.
Also, regarding pretenders - the important point is that the king was the legitimate ruler (when convenient). A cause or rebellion would prefer to have a figurehead to point to as “see, we are fighting for the real king.” How many believed, and how many simply found the imposter convenient, is an interesting conjecture.
We had a black cat whom the other cats suddenly started hissing at, after years of peaceful cohabitation. Then I noticed his balls had grown back. He was an impostor! We named him Guerre, of course.
Sir Gregor MacGregor, a 19th-century Scottish con man who claimed to be the “Cazique” (prince) of Poyais, a fictional Central American nation. In the 1820s, he sold land plots in this non-existent country to British investors, leading to settlers being stranded in an untouched jungle, where over half died.
It also occurs to me that in the good olde dayes before colonization, if you showed up claiming to be from somewhere other than Europe, people would (should?) notice you look amazingly like a local instead of a member of an exotic foreign race. I would imagine at least some people from any national court would be aware of the fact that people from far away “didn’t look like us” in specific ways.
I suppose there was always the “lost Roman legions” and similar excuses, but they better be good.
There were three, possibly four, men who claimed to be Dmitry Ivanovich, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. They are known to history simply as “False Dmitry.”
The real Dmitry had died at the age of eight, under “mysterious circumstances,” as they say.
One of the imposters actually became Tsar for a year.
I enjoyed the film Princess Caraboo, which is based on a true story. An Englishwoman who’d led an adventurous life returned to Regency England and successfully passed herself off as a princess from the island of “Javasu” who’d been kidnapped by pirates and escaped.
Bit surprised it hasn’t come up yet, but the OP is basically a variation of the classic Spanish Prisoner con, which still works remarkably well to the present day.
I assume unless you looked the part or had proof of some kind (which was expensive back in the day), people would just believe you were a fraud or madman.
