Routes That Carried More Than Goods
1In the 1300s, three great networks of trade routes linked much of Africa, Asia and Europe. The Silk Road was not one road but many overland routes running from China across the deserts and mountains of Central Asia to Persia and the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean routes were sea lanes joining East Africa, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and China. Trans-Saharan routes crossed the great desert between North Africa and the kingdoms of West Africa. Few merchants traveled a whole route. Most goods passed from trader to trader and from city to city.
2Sailors on the Indian Ocean depended on the monsoon winds. In winter the winds blow mostly from the northeast, and in summer mostly from the southwest. Captains timed their voyages to the seasons and often waited months in a foreign port for the winds to turn. While they waited, merchants lived among local people, traded, married and built mosques and temples. Along the East African coast, trading towns such as Mogadishu and Kilwa developed Swahili culture, which blended African languages and customs with Arabic words and, for many people, Islam.
3The goods were valuable and often light enough to carry far: silk and porcelain from China, pepper and cotton cloth from India, gold and ivory from Africa, horses from Arabia and Persia. Ideas moved with them. Centuries earlier, Buddhism had reached China along Silk Road routes. By the 700s, the skill of making paper had spread west from China into the Muslim world. Islam spread to West Africa and Southeast Asia largely through merchants and teachers rather than armies.
4Disease moved too. In the 1340s the Black Death, a plague probably carried by fleas on rats and passed between people, seems to have traveled west from Central Asia along trade routes. Ships brought it to Mediterranean ports in 1347. It killed an estimated third to half of Europe's people and also struck Egypt, Syria and other lands of the Middle East.
5One traveler saw all three networks. Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304 and left home in 1325 to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. He kept traveling for almost thirty years, by camel caravan and by ship. Back in Morocco, around 1355, the sultan asked him to tell his story to a scholar named Ibn Juzayy, who wrote it down as a book called the Rihla, or "journey."