20 chapter one
1.1.3 The Silk Road as the Spine of Eurasian Commerce
the vast network of eurasian trade routes made up a system stretching
from the pacific to the atlantic and from the taiga to the Indian ocean.
certainly, not all routes were equally important within the network, nor
were the towns and regions that they connected. From this perspective,
the Silk road linking china to the eastern Mediterranean was far and
away the most important, forming the veritable backbone of eurasian
trade. a few preliminary observations are in order if we are to understand
its anatomy and physiology.
In premodern times, goods were transported either by water or over-
land. although there are no exact quantitative data to help us grasp
the comparative advantages or disadvantages of one or the other mode
of transport, it may be instructive to draw an analogy from precise fig-
ures available in our own day. thus for instance, where it costs €45.21 to
transport a ton of goods 1,000 kilometres by road freight and €48.42 by
rail freight (Deutsche Bahn), the same payload and distance costs only
€12.60 by river and canal.63 thus prices are at a ratio of 4:1 in favour of
water transport, and this disproportion can only have been greater in the
Middle ages when road transport relied on animal power, either yoked or
harnessed to carts, or loaded directly as pack animals; the inconvenience
of such freight compared to modern mechanised transport can easily be
imagined, especially given the deplorable state of the roads.64
Under such conditions, it is understandable that the sea or river routes
were always preferred wherever possible. Merchants in particular always
paid close attention to the costs of transport, since they were always seek-
ing to maximise profits and these costs contributed to the final price of
goods. however, during the chinggisid era, when most of asia and West-
ern europe enjoyed open borders thanks to the Pax Mongolica, a “single
global market” developed, from the latter thirteenth century onwards. a
Genoese merchant travelling on the Silk road, for example, needed to
know how much he could buy a bale of silk for in china, how much his
transport costs would be, the rate of the customs levy and so forth, if his
63 pLanco, Vergleich, p. 62.
64 Lamprecht, Wirtschaftsleben, II, p. 256: “Zudem ist es wahrscheinlich, dass der Was-
sertransport im Mittelalter noch viel billiger war, als heutzutage;” Bookmann, Stadt, p. 94:
“auch waren die Landwege im 15. Jahrhundert kaum weniger beschwerlich als im frühen
Mittelalter. Befestigte Straßen gab es auch jetzt nicht, und so waren die Wagen stets in der
Gefahr umzustürzen. Vielfach konnten die Waren über Land nicht auf Wagen, sondern
nur auf tragtieren transportiert werden. Der Wassertransport wurde deshalb dem Land-
transport immer noch vorgezogen—so mühsam er auch war.”