18 ms·
Medieval trade networks
- ucaetano 8y agoOne correction: missing the massive London -> Calais wool trade that drove most of the English economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Staple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Staple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_the_Staple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_the_Staple Calais isn't even featured in the map.
- acjohnson55 8y agoFrom your links, it seems like the London <-> Calais connection was much later than the 11-12th century timeframe of the map.
- pjc50 8y agoThe link is there, but labelled as Dover-"Saint-Omer". Which is a little odd as that's inland behind Calais and Dunkirk. You can still find "wool churches" from this period, although assigning a single date to a church that was assembled over centuries is a futile exercise.
- MartinMansson 8y agoSaint-Omer was heavily active in the wool and clothing trade at the end of the 12th century, it also was situated closer to the coast at this time. Sometimes, sadly, i have had to omit some locations in order to not clutt the map too much. Maybe i should look over the Calais region again. The port from France to England was probably in the Wissant region, as the Via Francigena went through here. I did not have a source of what city/port existed here at the time, some sources cites Sombre as an existing port. Calais existed during this time frame, but the extent to which it was used have been hard for me to establish. Saint-Omer was the only trading settlement i really had any good claims putting on the map.
- ucaetano 8y agoCalais was a massive trading center during the English occupation, 1350 onward. It wasn't necessarily the port itself, but where most of the trade took place. But if you're looking at before that, then Calais was less relevant.
- aaron-lebo 8y agoNot sure whether it originated there, but this kind of stuff is pretty common on the mapporn subreddit. The author posted and commented on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8kf22u/new_version_medieval_trade_networks_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8kf22u/new_version... It's probably one of the few places on the net that exists almost purely for curiosity and isn't full of inane arguments. Well worth checking out. You can spend hours on it. Hopefully exposure to stuff like this helps people realize how interconnected we all are and have been.
- ItsMe000001 8y agoI once read a memorable analogy for European explorers "discovering" Africa: It's like (today or 18th century, does not matter) some African dude showing up in the middle of a busy European city center yelling "I discovered Europe!" I fear I've mangled the analogy, in the original it also was pretty clear what was meant, of course the explorer discovered it from a European perspective. The original storyline included the self-important and presumptuous attitude of the Europeans that made it seem like there was nothing there of any consequence or sophistication. Another story was about the African drums [0], ow they actually work, that saying "drums talking" was not a figure of speech, but that that actually was exactly what they were doing! The drumming follows some aspects of how you would actually speak the words (the languages are tonal), "The pitch of the drum is varied to mimic the tone patterns of speech". Since lots of information is lost most words are ambiguous, they compensate by embedding every word in a context, saying (drumming) longer phrases instead of one word for disambiguation. And they could just talk over long distances relaying information faster than anything the Europeans had at the time (like semaphores). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum
- xamuel 8y ago>It's like (today or 18th century, does not matter) some African dude showing up in the middle of a busy European city center yelling "I discovered Europe!" Imagine you self-fund your own voyage to Mars. You descend into a cave and find a city full of humanoid Martians. Do you think it would be inappropriate for you to exclaim, "I discovered Submartia!"? Go medieval enough, and South Africa is about as remote as Mars.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIt's fairly amazing that goods managed to get from China to Europe, and vice versa, without any Chinese people visiting Europe for hundreds or years, or any Europeans visiting China. This was not just in the middle ages, but reaching as far back as the Roman Empire.
- benbreen 8y agoI agree, I love thinking about the journeys that these objects made, like the Roman coins that ended up in a 12th century Japanese castle. [1] There were a handful of individuals who made similar trips though - aside from the famous ones like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, there's also a few envoys sent on behalf of the Franco-Mongol alliance.[2] Or the Spaniards who went to the court of Timur: “Timour Beg turned to the knights who had seated around him… and said, ‘Behold! here are the ambassadors sent by my son the king of Spain, who is the greatest king of the Franks, and lives at the end of the world.’” [3] [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495821834/coins-from-the-roman-empire-are-found-in-ruins-of-japanese-castle https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495821834... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Mongol_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Mongol_alliance [3] https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samarkand-1404.html https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-spaniard-in-samark...
- twic 8y agoOne of my favourite historical surprises: > Clavijo recorded his entrance to the capital in great detail, noting the stores of “silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb” carried from China Today, to me, rhubarb seems so mundane, and so British. And yet just a few hundred years ago, it was an exotic wonder from the east. Rather than from Yorkshire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle
- perl4ever 8y agoI wasn't aware of it being British either. It was just something that grew in the backyard of the house I grew up in, in upstate New York.
- stephengillie 8y agoAdded to my Maps of the World image folder. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eftu4fak6efngfr/AAAWuj-oJ5AmOn_O7M7971Oda?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eftu4fak6efngfr/AAAWuj-oJ5AmOn_O7...
- speps 8y agoWould be awesome if it wasn't littered with memes.
- jrbancel 8y agoIt is Toulouse[0], not Tolouse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse
- _0nac 8y agoMany of the spellings seem to be historical and/or purposely antiquated.
- Rexxar 8y agoThe occitan/latin name is Tolosa. I never saw other intermediate form.
- MartinMansson 8y agoThis is not on purpose. This is a misspelling on my part. fast fingers.
- kingofhdds 8y agoI question the knowledge behind this map. The text states it depicts the state of affairs before "the rise of Mongols", but one can find on it Sarai city which was established by Mongols, and, for example, Arkhangelsk which didn't exist at those times either. Also some names are misspelled. Significant trade routes are omitted. No sources cited. Look too amateurish to me to take it seriously. Update: there is a list if sources on the picture itself, I tried to look for it in the text at first. However, it doesn't save the work from being evidently incorrect.
- wereHamster 8y ago> No sources cited. Sources are cited. Maybe we all should question your ability to read ;)
- 394852034 8y agoWhere are you reading about sources. I can't seem to find any at all.
- varjag 8y agoArkhangelsk is in quotes, suggesting it's some settlement at the same place without a known name.
- kingofhdds 8y ago"Some settlement" had it's proper name - Kholmogory, but it was anyway founded after Mongol invasion.
- varjag 8y agoOK, I looked it up and it was Ivany-Pogost. A Novgorod settlement/trade outpost established in early 12th century. So the map is correct there.
- kingofhdds 8y ago
- montrose 8y agoThis is an interesting map, but it seems implausible that there is no route between Cirencester and Gloucester.
- HugoDaniel 8y agoI wonder why there are not any trade routes in Portugal which was also under the peninsula caliphate during those dates. Perhaps was it what pushed them into their huge head start into the age of sail ?
- Quarrelsome 8y agoit is suggested that the Ottoman capture of Constantinople was instrumental in Christian countries seeking new routes as it made the capital and the Black Sea more of a tricky proposition. So if this is 1100-1200 we're still a couple of hundreds years off that event.
- beat 8y agoIt's a question of product, too. Countries only got seriously into the trading game when they had something valuable to offer in return. Portugal's early contribution to the trade was slaves, captured from the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa. They were the first Europeans to really explore south of the Sahara. Pushing ever-farther south for new targets led to rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and opening a new route to India - bypassing the tariffs of the Constantinople and Alexandria routes.
- MartinMansson 8y agoI've had trouble finding sources this early when it comes to Portugal concerning trade. Portugal seem to have been more involved starting from when the strait of Gibraltar opened up to christians and ships from the Mediterranean sea could sail up to the north sea. An opportunity in itself that seem to have had a negative impact of the trade fairs of inland france and germany. Although, i'm unsure to what extent this damage had.
- toyg 8y agoThe lack of records for the Southern areas of Africa shows how unbalanced our historiographical studies have been for so long, and how much documentation we must have lost in our colonization efforts. I refuse to believe a huge continent with relatively large populations might have had no significant trade whatsoever over half its territory, less than a thousand years ago. And of course, the same is true for South America - which was obviously disconnected from other continents, but still hardly a desert.
- dreen 8y agoVery few cultures were lucky enough to produce records on a medium which would outlast them. To be fair, it's not something our modern civilization gives much thought either
- kridsdale1 8y agoI sometimes imagine a thousand years from now where people are trying to figure out how to use USB-A flash drives and fry their contents since the voltage is wrong, after trying 5 times to get the correct orientation in the port.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoDo we have good records for trade across North America? Australia? There are "lost" tribes that still don't trade much; it doesn't seem impossible, especially if in times of famine/drought there were violent clashes over basic resources.
- beat 8y agoIt's not that there was no trade, but rather there is no documentation. The civilizations of the Orient were built largely on trade, and thus had sophisticated accounting systems and wrote everything down. So we have a lot of surviving accounting. And lots of kingdoms were all minting their own coins, so we can find surviving coins in all sorts of archaeological sites that show the travel of money. And the value of trade matters, too. It's not just sub-Saharan Africa that seemed like a backwater. Most of Europe was a backwater, too, outside of Italy and Constantinople (which is only half-European, really). Trade routes were weak there because they just didn't have much to offer in exchange for the valuable silks, porcelain, spices, and other luxury goods of the East. The Vikings were the only big traders of Europe, and their primary product was slaves, captured from impoverished backwaters like Great Britain and Germany.
- cafard 8y agoIf you are ever in Lubeck, there is a most interesting museum dedicated to the Hanseatic League.
- fiatjaf 8y agoSee this in IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTf4EBfik9iH7w2DeW3pZyiqMfnxqtZ3jL5S4tMXRxzaN/medieval-trade-networks.jpg https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTf4EBfik9iH7w2DeW3pZyiqMfnxqtZ3jL5S4t...