Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word passport originates from the Italian phrase passa porto meaning to pass the harbor and first appeared in medieval Italy to describe documents required for travelers to move through the physical gates of walled cities. These early papers were not issued by a central state authority but by local officials who needed to control the movement of people into and out of their jurisdictions.
King Henry V of England is credited with having invented what some consider the first British passport in the modern sense as a means of helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands. The earliest reference to these documents is found in a 1414 Act of Parliament and by 1540 granting travel documents in England became a role of the Privy Council of England.
The modern concept of the passport began to take shape in the 15th and 16th centuries when monarchs began to assert control over the movement of their subjects. The outbreak of World War I fundamentally changed the nature of international travel transforming the passport from a rare luxury into a mandatory security tool and introducing border passport requirements for security reasons.
Since 1998 many countries have transitioned to biometric passports which contain an embedded microchip to facilitate authentication and safeguard against counterfeiting. As of July 2024 over 150 jurisdictions issue such e-passports and previously issued non-biometric passports usually remain valid until expiration.
As of 2026 the strongest passport in the world is the Singaporean passport and its value is measured by the number of countries it allows its holder to enter without a visa. One method by which to rank the value of a passport is to calculate its mobility score which is the number of countries that allow the holder of that passport to enter for general tourism visa-free visa-on-arrival eTA or eVisa issued within 3 days.
Currently the ICAO recommends that passports be issued in English French and Spanish or in the national language of the issuing country and in either English French or Spanish. Many European countries use their national language along with English and French and some additional language combinations include Algerian Chadian Lebanese Mauritanian Moroccan and Tunisian passports which are in three languages Arabic English and French.