sandr020

The Silk Road was a trade route for precious silk, but not only silk. It became an East-West network of inter-­con­necting routes linking Central Asian Kingdoms (eg Bukhara, Samarkand, Bishkek and Islamabad) in the west with major China cit­ies; especially the Han and Tang dynasty capital, Changan (modern day Xian) in the east. It was rare for individual traders to cover the whole length of the Silk Road. When each trader arrived at his region’s limit, he sold the goods ac­ross his border. Thus as the goods moved westwards from China, Chinese traders would sell to Central Asians, then to Pers­ians, to Syrians, to the Greeks and Jews, and finally to the Italians. Marco Polo mosaic, by Francesco de' Rossi Ducal Palace,   Genoa The volume of goods traded along the Silk Road increased during the Tang dynasty (618-907), in both directions. The Chin­ese imported gold, gems, per­­fumes, dyes, textiles, ivory and glass, and exported furs, ceram­ics, spices, jade, silk, bronze a...

Bruges (pop 120,000) was founded in the north of Belgium in the C9th by Vikings who settled locally. A town developed around the fort­ress that the Counts of Flanders built in the area and the young settle­ment worked hard to acquire city rights. In fact a very prot­ective city wall was built around Bruges, with solid gates. The settle­ment very quickly became an imp­or­tant har­bour close to the North Sea. Inside the city, the river and canals became the vital communic­ation links. By the C14th Bruges was the starting point of a commercial transport road to the Rhineland; traders from all over came to sell their pro­ducts and to buy Flemish cloth. Markt Place, outdoor coffee shops and sculpture (top) The Beguinage  (second ph oto) Growing from a few North German towns in the late 1100s, the Ger­man Hans­eatic League dominated Baltic maritime trade for three cent­ur­ies along the Northern European coast. Bruges bec­ame a port of even greater importance when it joined the Hanseatic...

Lasting only from May-Sept 1212 , the Children’s Crusade was a popular religious movement in which thousands of young people took crusading vows and set out to rec­over Jerusalem from the Muslims. This was probably not as surprising an event back then, as it sounds to our ears. Popular movements of religious fervour appeared whenever off­icial crusades were preach­ed. Preach­ing aroused mass enthusiasm, mostly in areas with a long tradition of crusad­ing, as in and around the French town of Char­tres . From the time of the First Crusade in the late C11th and cont­in­uing into the C13th, successive waves of crusading fervour swept over this region. This was already a turbulent era. The Albig­en­sian Crusade (1209–29) was being preach­ed against the heretic­al southern Cath­ars, result­ing in strong military recruit­ment from Chart­r­es. Spain was the scene of another Crus­ad­ing crisis. A Muslim invasion from North Africa in 1210 led to the fall of Salvatierra Castle in Spain in 1211...

A settlement called Portus Cale was founded on the north bank of the Duoro River in the C4th BC. But nothing much was known before Porto was recovered in 868 AD from the Moorish empire. Sao Bento Railway Station 1900-1916 Prince Henry the Navigator  (1394–1460) was born to English Queen Philippa and Portuguese King John I who had earlier married in Porto, creating a political alliance between Portugal and England. It was Prince Henry who, in the new Portuguese Empire, initiated the Age of Discoveries. Henry supervised the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the exploration of Western Africa, Atlantic Ocean islands and the search for new routes. Only thus did Portugal become a sea-trade force, so it is appropriate that a statue in a park honours Prince Henry still today. Prince Henry, the Navigator pointing to a far-off place across the Atlantic Once Portugal became an economic power in the age of the great geo­graph­ical disc...

Some history Acre/Akko was conquered by Pharaoh Ramses II (1279-1213 BC), then by the Greeks, the Persians and the Syrian Sel­eucids. Herod the Great and Roman Emperor Vespasian (69-79 AD) used Akko and Caesarea for their campaign. The town pros­pered in Byzantine times and Om­mayad times, when it was the port for their capital in Damascus. The Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099 and Akko in 1104. They renamed it St Jean d'Acre and made it the head quarters of the Knights of St John. The Italian port cities est­ablished trading posts in Acre, and made it a flourishing port. After Jerusalem fell in 1187, Acre became the large capital of the Crusader kingdom. In 1219 St Fran­cis of Assisi visited the town and estab­lish­ed a nun­nery. In 1228 Emperor Freder­ick II landed here during his Crus­ade, as did Louis IX of France in 1250. Soon afterwards there was a bitter civ­il war, between the two Christian orders, The Knights Hospital­l­ers of St John and The Templars. In 1290, the Cr...