oh man the ancient world had SO MUCH more long-distance trade than the West is prepared to to think about we forget that the Dark Ages were exactly that. Europe's end of the global trade networks shut down, & to this day we still think of that shut-down state as "normal."https://twitter.com/IOnceAteALeaf/status/1031209548147843072 …
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> Moreover, the evidence for Central Asian trade links to northern and eastern Europe really can't be ignored: one estimate is that perhaps as many as 100 million or more silver dirhams were imported into these regions in return for slaves, furs etc, which is astonishing >pic.twitter.com/PLL0Rymo63
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Some back of an envelope calculations in https://www.academia.edu/1764468/Dirhams_for_slaves._Investigating_the_Slavic_slave_trade_in_the_tenth_century … for the scale of 10thC slave trade to, primarily, Samanid Empire in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan etc; if even remotely right then they imply trade from N/E Europe involving potentially hundreds of thousands of slaves...pic.twitter.com/ghXr1fdi0y
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> And if we look to later medieval period, with its better surviving documentation, then we find plenty of evidence for significant scales of cross-continent/Indo-Pacific trade e.g. 15thC wedding feast of Hedwig Jagiellon to son of the Duke of Bavaria involved over 1,000 lbs >
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> of spices, incl 40kg of nutmeg and nearly 50kg of cloves... So, in sum, I would absolutely maintain my position that we just need to be careful about assuming complete collapses in cross-continental trade and links after the 5thC :)
End of conversation
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