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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Time to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why.

There were three major reasons why it faded.

The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder.

The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes to India, and then China, which bypassed the much more expensive land routes.

The third was the opening up of the Americas as potential sources of commodities.

The result was a long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East. The extent of which was not realized by the West until Napoleon conquered Egypt.

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> long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East

It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and so on, which made sense, with trade drying up. My wife comes from a town that really came into being in the 1600's, which, for Italy, is fairly late, all things considered. Prior to that the area was a malarial swamp that was not of much interest to people.

The decline of Venice has less to do with the decline of the Middle East and more to do with the rise of the Ottomans -- whose conquest of Constantinople shuttered a 2-century long dominion of the Bospherous (and the substantial trade thereof) by Venice. Additionally, Mongol incursions at the north end of the Black Sea made the increasingly-expensive trade with the Ottomans very expensive.

On top of all that, the agitation of the Christian West to the Islamic East put Venice in a very tough situation -- one that engendered hatred from both sides and filed down the richness of that international trade they had labored centuries to build.

I just finished reading City of Fortune (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400068207/ref=pe_180000_31...), and this is closer to the truth - the rise of the Ottomans, the fact that Christian Europe couldn't get its act together after the debacle that was the 4th Crusade, etc etc - at one point, Venice was almost single-handedly fighting the Ottomans.

My understanding of the decline of Venice is that a lot of it was driven by the fact that the commerce situation had changed drastically. Why were the Venetians fighting the Ottomans on their own? Because the Mediterranean had ceased to be as important as it had been historically - interest had shifted to the new world, and to sea routes to Asia, which bypassed many of the middlemen, each of whom marked up prices. For the Spanish, for instance, why get much involved when you could be pulling silver out of South America hand over fist and conquering vast chunks of land? Also, with trade shrinking, there were fewer incentives to find peaceful solutions that allowed commerce to continue.

So, yes, the proximate causes were the Ottomans and other problems, but a significant portion of the root cause can be attributed to 1) the discovery of the new world, and 2) new sea routes around Africa to the spice islands and Asia.

At least that's what I've gleaned from what I've read. Naturally, human affairs are often quite complex, and so there are a lot of different things that contribute.

Spain got in the fight at the vehement request of the Papacy -- and because Muslim corsairs were raiding their coastline with substantial vigor (including the Barbarossa twins). Genoa, too, was goaded in to fighting, but they were very reluctant to put their ships on the line as their ships tended to be individual/family owned and there was a built in disdain for the Venetians that cautioned them against committing resources to help.

There were a number of massive naval engagements, including the Battle of Lepanto(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto_(1571)) which was one of the single largest naval battles ever fought.

Much of the riches that Spain gleaned from the Americas was funneled in to building and maintaining a massive fleet to fight the Ottomans with.

If you enjoyed that I would also highly, highly recommend "Empires of the Sea", also by Crowley. http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Sea-Battle-Lepanto-Contest/dp/...

Thanks Defen - will check it out. I liked Crowley, with a few criticisms: - the back-and-forth, lack of a completely chronological narrative threw me a couple of times. - Also, because he was hyper focused on Venice, it was sometimes amazing what he left out (ie, much of what happened under the Latin Empire) - Lastly, I wish he had covered the final decline and death of the Venetian republic - he stopped for all practical purposes 200 years early.

That's a great book -- all of Crowley's books are wonderful reads.

Some of my grand-grand-...-parents moved from Venice to England around that time, together with many other families.

Awesome, how are you able to know that, is there any clear branch of your family that is traceable to that time or just by locating your last name´s origin?

Some related trivia: While it was called the Silk Road, silk was less of a major point of trade after the 6th century. Two Byzantine monks made the journey from Constantinople to China and back, purloining silk worms in the process. This led to a domination of the European Silk trade by Byzantium for the proceeding 8 centuries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into...

That is a nice triplet of reasons but all of them occur after the decline of the silk road in the mid-fourteenth century with the devastation of the black death that economically weakened Europe and directly contributed to the the fragmentation of the mongol empire.

This article makes a case that 3 products and one trace element are the major drivers of Eurasian history up until the modern era:

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2013/04/29/selenium-silk-spices-...

Don't forget the fall of the Mongol empire, and then of the successor states. It was only really during the Mongol age that the land-based high-volume trade could exist along the routes of the Silk Road.

Can you recommend some books on the topic?

John Green's Crash Course series of YouTube videos are somewhat related and entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

> The result was a long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East. The extent of which was not realized by the West until Napoleon conquered Egypt.

Can you expand on that (or recommend further reading/links/videos/books?). Especially the "the extend of which was not realized by the west"? Were people in western europe suprised when napolean conquered egypt?

The Americas started rising in the 1600s. That would preclude them as a factor in the Silk Road's decline.

If you believe this, then you were probably educated in the USA.

Columbus sailed in 1492. The development of the Spanish colonies proceeded fairly quickly. The first Spanish city in the New World was founded in 1500, the first on the mainland in 1510, and by the 1530s a respectable empire had been carved out and colonized. By mid-century the New World was mining more silver than the old world.

It is hard to overstate how late English colonization began. Perhaps one of the most striking examples which brings it home is that when the Pilgrims landed in 1620 they were able to communicate with the natives thanks to meeting a native, Squanto, who already knew English on account of having lived in England. The mythology that they found a virgin land, untouched by white men, couldn't be farther from the truth!

The Spanish treasure fleets which striped South & Central America of much of its gold first started sailing in the early 1500s. Even in the 1490's (soon after Columbus) Spain was getting significant amounts of Gold & Silver from America.

That influx of wealth totally changed the balance of power in Eurasia.

People these days don't realise how poor Europe was prior to the 1500s. For example, it's commonly thought that one of the main reasons the Mongols didn't push further into Europe was simply because there was nothing there that was worth raiding.

Even the "rich" cities in Europe (Venice, Vienna, Paris) compared very unfavourably to comparatively minor trading centers in central Asia. For example, Paris was probably the largest European city in 1250 (population probably < 200,000) and it was about quarter the size of Merv when the Mongols killed all its inhabitants in 1221[1].

A truly rich city like Baghdad (prior to the Mongol sack in 1258) was in an entirely different league.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv

But they were discovered in the late 1400s, resulting in a change of interest. Nations invested in New World colonies with similar goals as their trade with China. It would follow that trade with China decreased as resources were directed elsewhere.

Actually trade with China increased due to the ease of direct trade.

The real trade with china didn't begin until silver mining took off in the 1550s. Before that, spices and the trade with the 'indies'(India) were the primary trading interests. Most maps didn't even get the eastern half of the Indian ocean correct until the mid-1600s and from the east the pacific ocean was a mystery for longer.

Silver was the item that the chinese intensively desired for monetary reasons as multiple experiments with paper money failed due to runaway inflation and they lacked precious metals of their own. Almost 40% of the silver mined in the late 16th century ended up in china.

Are you sure the decline of the Middle East was a result of the Silk Road fading in importance? A better argument is that it was the other way around.

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