Silk Roads Dbq Essay

The Silk Road enabled East-West travel and trade, but its decline started in the late 15th century. It was 7000 miles long and helped travel goods, ideas, and cultures. The Silk Road helped with cultural diffusion and the spread of different religions and beliefs. There are many reasons for the fall of the Silk Road and the main ones are new threats, new technologies, and new political policies. Muslim attacks, crusades that took place by the Franks, and geography made new threats. Central Asian empires did not use new technology to help with their trading, it made trading between civilizations difficult, and it took a long time. Many empires in East Asia created new political policies which disturbed the trade with the West. Some empires let

For example, the Ottoman army conquered Constantinople, and the Franks did many crusades to conquer Jerusalem. But the most important was the deserts that were along the Silk Road made traveling hard for goods to come to China or to go from China. Ibn al-Athir talks about the invasion of the Tartars, which is a Mongol group, “For some years I continued averse from mentioning this event, deeming it so horrible that I shrank from recording it and even withdrawing one foot as I advanced the other,” (Document 3). This evidence shows that the Mongols used the Silk Road and other trade routes to invade empires. It may have been easy for armies to walk across it to invade. Many people were killed in the invasion and some were enslaved. A century later, the Black Death, brought by Mongol traders, killed ⅓ of Europeans. Soon the disease spread, affecting many people from different empires. Ray Gonzales, a writer at Humboldt State University, talks about the fall of the Silk Road, “Perhaps the greater factor contributing to the decline of trade along the Silk Road was geography. Maintaining existing settlements along the Taklamakan and the Gobi deserts became increasingly difficult during that era of political unease” (Document 8). This document shows that geography was a tremendous threat to the Silk Road because it was hard

The textbook “World History, Patterns of Interaction” talks about the Ming dynasty’s relations with foreign countries. “China’s official trade policies in the 1500s reflected its isolation. To keep the influence of outsiders to a minimum, only the government was to conduct foreign trade, and only through coastal ports” (Document 4). Trading between two empires or more was against China’s Confucian beliefs, which made China avoid trading with other empires. China did not want the influence of other empires to enter China, so they controlled trade with the West. This caused China to only let higher officials trade with the West and only specific products such as silk and porcelain were traded to the West. The Tokugawa government of Japan created a policy called the “Closed Country Edict”, “1. Japanese ships shall by no means be sent abroad. 2. No Japanese shall be sent abroad,” (Document 10). Japanese empires did not want to trade with other foreign empires and they did not even let their merchants travel to sell their goods. The Tokugawa government believed that Roman Catholic priests could colonize Japan by converting them into