The Silk Road-------------The riches of the East

The Silk Road
The riches of the East

The silk road is really a conglomeration of caravan routes. Its roots reach back through time, probably to as early as 1000 B.C. , and much earlier along portions of the route. It was a trade route that served several of the world’s greatest empires. Including the Persians and Alexander the Great, who may be credited for forging a more solid trade link between the East and the West through his military exploits, and inaugurating the first great golden age of the silk road. The Ptolemies then inherited this trading link, and a few centuries later the Silk Road was in its second and greatest golden age linking the far reaches of Northern China to the utmost reaches of the Roman Empire.

With the exchange of goods was coupled an exchange of ideas and cultural symbols. This exchange is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and links can be found between the Greeks and the Japanese, the Romans and the Chinese, and many more. India in this period was a sort of cultural melting pot that has earned the name Greco-Buddhist which is a fascinating case study of cultural exchange. Wealthy Romans took to wearing silk from China, and there was an outcry among more morally conservative Romans. They considered the clinging fabric to be virtually transparent, and claimed that women wearing silk in public might as well be walking around nude.

The fall of the Western Half of the Roman Empire ended this second heyday of the Silk Road, but the remainder was soon consolidated under one government, the Mongols, and some might consider this its third and final golden period. The silk road was truly the central feature of the largest contiguous land empire in history, and the Mongols thrived on the trade and prosperity it brought them, eventually becoming assimilated into Chinese culture.

By 700 A.D. Islam arose to dominate many of the former western Mongol lands, only to be conquered by/merged with a fierce wave of Turkoman horsemen who would chop up the former non Chinese part of the Mongol expanse among themselves. These same horsemen also conquered Byzantium, the last remnant of the former glory of Rome. Constantinople fell around 1400 A.D. The new political and military climate reduced the importance of the silk road, and made trade much more difficult. (I realize I just lumped 700 years of a complex story into a few sentences, but that’s a fairly accurate assessment for the purpose of this topic.) The trade continued, but continued to slow throughout this period.

When this land route was reduced to a trickle Europeans began to seek new ways to tap the riches of the East, and this led to the voyages of men like Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan (just to name two of the most famous). In short, the known riches of the East and the loss of political stability along the silk road were the spurs that drove the great European Age of Exploration.

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