As a number of scholars have noted in recent years, the significant growth of geographic mobility during the early modern period and the movement of greater number of peoples beyond the familiar and intimate boundaries of community life not only helped reshape a sense of collective and individual identity for many during the early modern period but also compelled state authorities as well as societies to create portable instruments of identification to reduce risks of imposters and trickster travelers. Passports and letters of recommendation were two such forms of “paperwork” that came to be used with increasing frequency by early modern boundary crossers whether these were travelers, merchants, pilgrims, or missionaries. This paper examines mobility and boundary crossing in an unpublished late eighteenth-century travelogue by Hovhannes Tovmachanian (1717-1806), an Armenian gem merchant from Istanbul. Written in 1790 in Venice, The History of Ter Hovannis Tovmachanian, Who for Thirty Years in his Life Traveled to Europe, Asia, in the Indies, and in Ethiopia in Africa, Written by Himself is a remarkable memoir of a peripatetic man of the world whose forty-year travels took him across “thirty sovereign kingdoms” and much of the global Armenian diaspora of the early modern age. The work still remains as an unpublished manuscript in the Library of the Mekhitarists in San Lazzarro in Venice where the author retired after becoming a monk late in his life. The paper probes Tovmachanian’s memoir and examines the author’s use of letters of recommendation to validate and establish his identity while traveling through and across the networks that constituted both the early modern Armenian diaspora as well as the world of trade beyond its frontiers and networks. It argues that letters of recommendation that have hardly attracted scholarly attention were ubiquitous and a necessary part of every traveler’s baggage. In an age defined largely by mobility, letters of recommendation were much like identity papers and surety documents; for global travelers like Tovmachanian, they provided access to networks of trust and community beyond the boundaries of face-to-face intimacy.