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There may have been a lot more cross-culture communication than you think. Examples include Venetian and Florentine trading posts in Beijing/Dadu and other cit
by zhdc1 8y ago
There may have been a lot more cross-culture communication than you think.
Examples include Venetian and Florentine trading posts in Beijing/Dadu and other cities in the Mongol Empire, Caucasians living in Xinjiang, and so on.
The issue has more to do with the lack of written records than anything else. Given how little we know about contemporary kingdoms and empires in other parts of the world, I wouldn't be surprised if there were significantly more Europeans in China and SE Asia, and at least a handful of East Asians in Europe and the Near East, during that time.
- toyg 8y ago> The issue has more to do with the lack of written records than anything else. Exactly. Until 300 years ago, unless you were a nobleman or a religious scholar, you likely didn't know how to write (bar a few numbers you might have required for trading activities). Long trips were tiring and extremely dangerous; travellers were, more often than not, hard men doing a hard job, mercenaries, fugitives, "rolling stones", and so on. These people didn't care for poetry, so to speak. Even Marco Polo didn't actually write anything -- he dictated to a fellow inmate who (somewhat miraculously) happened to be a professional writer, when they really had nothing else to do while imprisoned.