Originally posted by Owen
tpc, I was very preoccupied at the time in game, but I feel that province knowledge of the silk road is unreasonable at this time for any nation we had playing today.
well, that's fine, & since i was just subbing, i will not protest overly much, but here's a short excerpt from fernand braudel's
the mediterranean and the mediterranean world in the age of philip ii, vol 1, haper & rowe, new york, 1966, pp. 548-9 & then pp. 550-1:
"What is quite clear is that the Mediterranean had recaptured a large portion of the pepper trade, indeed the lion's share [in the second half of the 16th century.] Trade with the Levant was flourishing, supplied by numerous caravans, some from the Persian Gulf, others from the Red Sea. And at the end of these routes, looking on to the Mediterranean, two double cities owed their prosperity to this trade: to the north, Aleppo and the active quays of Tripoli, to the south, Cairo and its port Alexandria, the latter as if drained of its substance by the over-sized capital. In the west the revival of the spice trade brought most benefit to the Venetians, the grand masters of trade, alongside whom the merchants of Marseilles and Ragusa cut a very modest figure. Venetian merchants even, rather curiously, moved inland, from Alexandria to Cairo in 1552 and from Damascus (now in decline and where moreovere personal intrigue,
garbugli, had brough the affairs of the Venetian colony to a sorry state) to Aleppo, the terminus of the caravan routes from Babylonia. In Egypt the move was motivated by the desire to dispense with the intermediaries .... [T]he arrival of the Venetian merchants in Cairo and Aleppo signified the prosperity of these inland markets, of their capitalists, their caravan traffic and at the other end of the caravan routes, efficient buying by Arab merchants in India and the East Indies. The Mediterranean was recapturing the treasures of the Indian Ocean."
"So the difficult gateway to the Red Sea stood wide open, and a huge volume of trade flowed through. The presence of costly porcelain, surly from China, ... is proof enough of this, for fragile procelain would only be shipped along with a stream of other merchandise. As for spices, of which pepper was by far the most important, there was an annual flow of 20,000 to 40,000 light quintals between 1554 and 1564. In 1554, the Venetians alone took 600
colli of spices, about 6,000 quintals, from ALexandria. Now the Venetians controlled only a part, half at most, of the Alexandrian trade, and to western trade must be added consumption of spices in the East, which was always considerable. Between 1560 and 1564 a copy of consular documents from Cairo gives an annual figure of 12,000 quintals for Venetian purchases alone, a figure as whigh as in the old days before Vasco da Gama, and which tallies with the estimates of the Portuguess ambassador at Rome, who guessed that the total volume of the ALexandiran spice trade was 40,000 quintals. In October 1564, a spy in the pay of Portugal estimated this traggic at 30,000 quintals of which 25,000 (2,800,000 lb. Eng.) were pepper and the Venetian consul at Cairo, in May 1565 refers to 20,000 quintals of pepper unloaded at Jiddah; and this was before the convoys from Gujarat, Calicut, and elsewhere (which was usually docked in winter) had arrived. In the previous August twenty=three ships were unloading spices at Jiddah. So once again, we find a figure of approximately 30,000 to 40,000 quintals for the Egyptian trade alone, that is not counting what came through Syria."
i hope this is sufficient, there is tons of evidence about the venetian dominance of the levantine silk-road trade, which was definitely coming all the way from china, the east indies and india.
