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Riding the New Silk Road

nytimes.com

61–70 of 161 posts

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#65
post #34

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…

Can you recommend some books on the topic?

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#66
post #49
post #34

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…

> 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…

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

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#68
post #30

It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6

I watched on a 5 year old Mac in Chrome. Looked great to me.

It worked well on my 5 year old netbook. FreeBSD. Xombrero.
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