How Did The Silk Road Change

The Silk Road was a trading route, beginning in China and created during the Han Dynasty, which acted as the main course of trade throughout Eurasia. Running through its routes were not only european luxuries, but ideas, religions, and even disease! From 200 BC to 1450 AD, the Silk Road’s patterns of interactions changed with the Black Plague and the spread of Islam and Buddhism, but the Silk Road maintained continuity with the goods that passed along its routes and its main purpose.

Disease, religion, and ideas. These things that made their way along the Silk Road, spread into the various countries of Eurasia, between 200 BC and 1450 AD, changing patterns of interactions. During the Middle Ages, a band of disease controlled rats on a single boat sparked an epidemic that would kill millions and change the world forever, the Black Plague. Because the Silk Road consisted of both overland and maritime routes, it was a prime source through which the Black Plague could be spread. Ships carrying the disease would dock at various ports along the Silk Road, and from there the disease could be dispersed person to person on land. The Silk Road connected Asia with Western Europe; every major city in between was affected by the Black Plague, which its travelers carried.

Ideas were an asset between 200 BC and 1450 AD, and the Silk Road acted as a core for the circulation of ideas, which stretched cross almost the entire known world. Two ideas in particular were religious in nature, Buddhism and Islam. Buddhism began in China and made its way through the Middle East and into Europe with the help of the Silk Road. Today, statues of Buddhist icons can be seen where the Silk Road once was. Islam was spread much in the same way, through Silk Road merchants. Eventually, these two religions became the most widely accepted belief systems in the