Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

The name 'Silk Road' suggests a single highway along which caravans carried Chinese silk to Rome. The reality was quite different. The term itself was invented only in the nineteenth century, by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, to describe a network of overland and sea routes that, at various times over many centuries, linked China with Central Asia, India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Few merchants ever travelled the full distance. Most goods moved in stages, passing through the hands of many traders, each of whom carried them a few hundred kilometres before selling them on. Silk was certainly important, but so were horses, spices, glass, metals and paper, and much of the trade was regional rather than between the two ends of the network. Historians increasingly argue that the most lasting cargo was not goods at all but ideas. Buddhism spread from India into Central Asia and China along these routes, and the technique of making paper, first developed in China, gradually travelled westward to the Islamic world and later to Europe. Musical instruments, foods and artistic styles moved in both directions. Not everything that travelled was welcome. Diseases could move with traders and armies, and many historians believe that the plague which devastated Europe in the fourteenth century reached the Black Sea along routes connected to this network.