Tyler Rico 5/9/17
Section 2 DBQ Essay
During the times leading up the 1500s Christianity and Islam both had different views on merchants and their craft with people from both faiths having varying degrees of opinions on it. Trade increased dramatically after the Mongols came into power and secured the Silk Roads making trade a lot more profitable and a lot less dangerous. This made the issue of trading come to light even more as it became more prevalent in people's everyday life.After the fall of the Mongols western nations raced to find new ways around the Silk Road as they did not want to trade through Muslim controlled land. The following documents dealing with
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St Godric was a merchant for many years until he eventually thought about spending his wealth on charity in honor of God and lived a humble life for the rest of his life. This document encouraged trading for Catholic as they saw a Saint who traded all his life and still was able to honor God by giving his wealth to charity. The monk probably had at least a decent understanding of St Godric life as he was one of his colleagues and probably had at least some contact with the man himself. Being a catholic monk, he also knew the Bible, but supported Godric’s trade anyway even though the Bible is indirectly against it in some passages. Document 4 is written by Thomas Aquinas who basically stated how he thought the art of trading was flawed due to in his opinion man should only sell what the item is worth which could drastically cut profits and was probably not feasible for most merchants because for them to travel long distances was expensive and selling items for barely any profit could cause the merchants to operate at a loss of money which isn’t feasible. Aquinas was most likely influenced by the Bible which states things like rich men can’t get into heaven meaning his views are heavily religious since he was a theologian. Document 5 was written by Ibn Khaldun a Muslim scholar who supported trade and commerce. His documents talks about how trading works and since Ibn Khaldun traveled across a large part of the known world he most likely has seen trading in action in a lot of places and the benefits it brings to those places. Finally document 6 is letters taken that were written to and from Italian merchants. These letters show the importance that trading had in Italy by seeing the complex transactions that went on between the merchants and their clients. Trade was important in Italy because it was in an ideal spot for trade being in the center of the Mediterranean Sea