We often hear about the "Silk Road" on TV news, but many people don't know exactly what the "Silk Road" refers to?
I recently read a book called The Silk Road, written by two famous British historians, Peter Francophan and Neil Parker, which tells the ins and outs of the Silk Road for two thousand years, and is an illustrated version for teenagers, which contains a large number of exquisite illustrations and is easy to read.
According to the author, in fact, the Silk Road did not have a strict sense of the beginning and end, because it is not a literal road traffic, but a network that allows goods, people, ideas, and even disease, violence and so on to circulate freely.
It stretches from the Pacific coasts of China and Russia in the east to the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa in the west; from Scandinavia in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south.
Emperors, armies, merchants, scholars, monks, and slaves of different races, faiths, and cultures came and went on this path, creating and transmitting wealth, wisdom, religion, art, war, disease, and disaster.
Trade on the Silk Roads took place mostly between towns and villages. Only expensive, lucrative rare or exotic goods, such as jewelry and pearls, spices and food (cucumbers, pistachios and peaches, the like), make difficult long-haul journeys.
Among them, silk is one of the most important commodities, this exquisite but difficult-to-mass-produce textile, made from the cocoons of silkworms that eat mulberry leaves. Silk not only shows the wealth and status of the wearer, but can sometimes replace currency.
As intercontinental trade grew larger, goods were exchanged not only silk, gold, frankincense, and lapis lazuli, a gemstone from the veins of Central Asia.
Of course, the Silk Road was not as uneventful as everyone might see, and there were occasional disputes between or within the countries along its route, but Asia, Europe and North Africa were increasingly closely linked. Coins and goods circulated from Rome to the Far East, while goods from Asia also circulated to the Mediterranean.
The three most typical roads on the Silk Road:
In addition to silk and various commodities circulating relatively quickly on the Silk Roads, there was also a particularly large demand for trade and a particularly high profit: the trade of men, women and children, that is, slaves, thus producing the slave road.
The number of European slaves sold to the East was so great that the Pope tried to forbid them, but no one wanted to deal with him, because the financial temptation of the slave trade was too difficult to resist.
So cities such as Berlin, Utrecht, and Venice developed into centers of the slave trade. But most of the traders were vikings, who arrived on British shores on longboats and began looting.
Silver coins unearthed in recent decades along navia and along the Silk Roads show that the slave trade in the Islamic world in which the Vikings were involved was enormous. If converted to the present, it is an industry with a multi-billion dollar output value.
The great event in European history was the conquest of Jerusalem, when kings and religious leaders were considering how to keep their possessions in the Middle East. One of the most critical issues is how to supply supplies to the garrison.
The local merchants thought that if they transported scarce supplies to the holy land and sold them to the occupying forces, they could make high profits. After the opening of the shipping route from European cities, European Christians were not only able to sell their own things, but also to buy some goods locally and ship them back to the country for sale.
A clever investor introduced and resold Indian and Chinese goods, and after making a fortune, he gave some of his money to support the renovation of the holy land of Mecca, thus obtaining the rare privilege of being buried in Mecca after his death.
One of the most famous figures in history, Genghis Khan was the leader of the Mongols, and after becoming king of the steppes in 1206, he and his people turned their attention to the south. Together, they captured the capital of the Jin Dynasty, followed by the rapid fall of Central Asia, and then Russia.
In 1241, the Mongol army attacked Europe and soon won a great victory, and within a few decades, the Mongols established the largest inland empire in history. The Mongol expeditions accelerated further communication around the world, such as what to buy, where to buy it, and at what price.
Intercontinental trade also began to flourish, but by the 1640s something was spreading rapidly along the Silk Roads, this time not war or violence, but plague. At that time, tens of millions of people were killed in the steppes of Central Asia, to Europe, Iran and the Middle East, to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula.
In the book "Silk Road", in addition to writing about the slave road, the hell road and the heavenly road, the author also writes the road of wisdom, the road of Western Europe, the road of conflict, and the road of war. The Road of Disaster and the New Silk Road and much more. After reading this book, you will find that in fact, the history of the Silk Road is a condensed history of the world.
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