Silk Road Trade

The Silk Road and Sea Trade: The Two Drivers to a Worldwide Expansion of Cross-Cultural Connections Before there were trains, planes, or automobiles, people had much more elementary ways of traveling long distances to interact with other cultures. There were no paved highways and signs showing where to turn to get to Mecca. Nope, the Mongols had to travel across the terrain that lay ahead of them, as difficult as it might have been, to conquer the Middle East. Also, they had the form of horses as their transportation, which wore out after a while. However, when certain things happened all at once, the way cultures interacted changed forever. When the Silk Road was created as a safe trade route, it allowed cultures all along its stretch
The first major unexpected problem that came up was the spread of disease. The bubonic plague was the deadliest of the diseases to travel along the path. The plague was so deadly that many civilizations nearly became extinct along the Silk Road. The bubonic plague was very deadly and had very severe symptoms. “Swollenness of lymph nodes of the neck, armpit, and groin” would be the main symptoms, and “60-70% of people who contracted the disease would die” (Bentley 351). The fact that the disease was that deadly was bad enough, but what made it worse was the fact that human contact was the way to spread it was the scary part. On the Silk Road, human contact was the whole point so it was unavoidable. All it took was one person who had the plague and travelled on the road and gave it to one other person. It would not take long for someone in each city along the way to catch the disease, as that is exactly what happened, and thus why so many people died from it. The main reason why the disease was not stopped before it took out a large portion of the world’s population was due to the lack of medical knowledge at the time. The plague was commonly thought as a message from god because the sins the Muslims did (Jean DeVenette, Ibn al-Wardi). Another unexpected thing that came from the Silk Road was the use of the route by armies. The route gave a very clearly cut path to the main cities from Europe to China, which armies such as the Mongols took advantage of. They would travel along the trading route invading and taking over each city on the way, all the way to the Chinese capital city. This easy access to highly valued strongholds for potential empires brought interest in the idea, and made it so easy to perform, that a “nomadic group of people were able to control the largest simultaneous empire the earth has ever seen” (Stratton, In Class