Trade Networks
This overland network specialized in high-value luxury goods like silk, porcelain, and spices connecting China to the Mediterranean.
What are the Silk Road?
These inns spaced exactly 100 miles apart — the biological limit of a camel's water retention — transformed desert trade routes into safe highways.
What are caravanserais?
This period of relative peace enforced by the Mongol Empire from roughly 1250 to 1350 revitalized Silk Road trade under a single legal authority.
What is the Pax Monglica?
This explorer traveled for 30 years and his accounts are historically significant for providing unparalleled documentation of the connected Islamic world (Dar al-Islam)?
Who is Ibn Battuta?
This drought-resistant, quick-ripening rice strain from Vietnam allowed China to have two full harvests per year, causing a massive population explosion.
What is Champa rice?
This network was the world's largest sea-based trade system, moving bulk goods like gold, ivory, pepper, and textiles across the ocean.
What is the Indian Ocean Trade Network?
This triangular sail pioneered by Arab sailors could catch wind from any direction, making Indian Ocean voyages far more reliabl
What is the Lateen Sail?
In 1258 the Mongols sacked this city, killing 200,000 residents and destroying the Abbasid Caliphate.
What is the city of Baghdad?
This language developed along the East African coast when Arab and Persian merchants permanently settled and intermarried with local Bantu-speaking populations.
What is Swahili?
The Black Death was responsible for killing 1/3 of this continent's population?.
What is Champa rice?
This network connected West Africa to the Mediterranean, with gold going north and salt, textiles, and horses going south.
What is the Trans-Saharan trade network?
This massive Chinese vessel up to 400 feet long featured a compartmentalized hull to prevent sinking and multiple sails for carrying heavy bulk cargo.
What is the Chinese Junk?
Despite being the most powerful empire of the era, the Mongols produced none of these — making trade taxation their primary source of wealth.
What are luxury goods?
This syncretic form of Buddhism emerged when Silk Road monks fused Indian Buddhist ideas with Chinese Daoist principles.
What is Chan (Zen) Buddhism?
The Black Death spread so rapidly across Eurasia in the 14th century largely because of this network, which connected China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe through trade
What is the Silk Road?
This city at the western edge of China served as a major hub of Islamic scholarship and a bustling market where Silk Road routes crossed.
What is Kashgar?
This navigation instrument allowed sailors to determine their latitude by measuring their distance from the equator using star charts.
What is the astrolabe?
The Mongols' policy of allowing Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and others to trade and worship freely — was key to making the Pax Mongolica work.
What is religious tolerance?
Chinese Admiral Zheng He led seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 primarily for this purpose rather than commercial trade.
What is diplomacy or to add states to the tributary system?
These locations, built to house animals and humans in close quarters along trade routes, became super-spreader nodes for the Black Death.
What are caravanserais?
This Southeast Asian city funded its entire navy through trade fees collected on this strategically located strait rather than through agriculture.
What is Malacca (on the Strait of Malacca)?
China's "flying cash" system solved the problem of long-distance trade by allowing merchants to deposit money in one location and withdraw it elsewhere using this document.
What is a bill of exchange?
The Mongols adopted this alphabet from a conquered people to create a single administrative script for their empire.
What is the Uyghur script/alphabet?
These communities were created by merchants waiting for monsoons who wanted permanent settlements in port cities.
What are diasporic communities?
The Black Death killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia. This was its most significant long-term social consequence in Europe.
What is the collapse of feudalism (surviving workers demanded higher wages)?