When passports/border checks became widespread?
score:10
According to The Guardian, "passports were not generally required for international travel until the first world war". Wikipedia concurs
This matches accounts I have read of people travelling from London to Moscow without travel documents. During the First World war, they became necessary, and they never stopped being needed.
Upvote:1
As for passports, AFAIK, they were introduced first in Russia by Michael I, according to ideas of an early socialist Charles Fourier.
Absolute majority (peasants) had no passport and could not travel out of the district. Many people had inner passports, that allowed to travel along the whole empire. And some people got passports that could have leave visa in it.
For example, the greatest Russian poet Pushkin never got such passport, and he had tried many times!
It was absolutely widespread. A person without passport and out of the district where he knew everybody and everybody knew him, had to be catched by police.
Upvote:7
Forever? Every civilization makes it a priority to know who is who and keep out the unwanted people. In the Book of Judges an incident is described from 3000 years ago whereby a shibboleth is used to identify aliens. According to the Wikipedia entry on identity documents, the passports of King Henry V (15th century) were the first such documents, but various personal documentation devices certainly date back to the Romans, if not earlier. Diplomats, of course, have always carried passports since ancient Egyptian times. The word "diplomat", by the way, comes from the Roman word diploma, which was a sort of a passport, or at least was used that way.
Note that there has already been a History channel post on Roman identity documents which may be relevant ("How did the Roman state verify citizenship?").
In terms of the first country to be "checking papers" on every Tom, Dick and Harry in the modern sense, I would probably give that honor to Frederick the Great. He was a real bureaucrat and was known for appointing "Passport Meisters" who required passports even of the most ordinary people to get across borders. He definitely bumped up the usage of passports on a massive scale and set the tone for the later Prussian obsession with elaborately documenting each and every individual.
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