The Black Wolf, have a duel role as Crusaders for Christ and as Merchant Traders. As such, the trade routes and caravans are very much part of their lives when engaged in both trade and preying on Heathen Caravans. The “road” would not be called the Silk Road for another 600 years, but it was called the Salt, Tin or Tea road in our time.
National Geographic chart the travels of both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, and this clearly shows that the Middle East is at the centre of the known world trade. It must be understood that trade goods were not loaded onto camels and carried from China to Europe. Instead goods made their way westward in a piecemeal way, with a lot trading and loading and unloading at the caravan stops along the way. Different caravans carried goods during different sections, with traders coming from the west exchanging things like gold, wool, horses or jade for silk coming from the east. The caravans stopped at fortresses and oases along the way, passing their loads from trader to trader, with each transaction increasing the price as the traders took their cut.
Few people travelled the Silk Road from one end to the other as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta did. Many were simple traders who took goods from one town or oases to the next and then returned home, or they were horsemen who earned an income from trading and transporting goods between settled towns. Indeed, perishable food goods only had a certain life and this would dictate how far or fast these commodities needed to be transported. Non-perishable items were the trade good of choice, but anything that invited a profit was sought.
Valuable commodities carried west on the Silk Road included silk and porcelain from China; pepper, batik, spices, perfumes, glass beads, gems and muslin from India; incense, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg from the East Indies, diamonds from Colcond; nuts, sesame seeds, glass and carpets from Persia; and coral and ivory from Siam. Other goods that made their way west, some being furs, ceramics, medicinal rhubarb, peaches, pomegranates, and gunpowder. In cold areas, flint and steel were among the most sought after products.
The Chinese were not as interested in goods arriving from the West as Europe was in goods arriving from the East. Even so traders coming from the West brought fine tableware, wool, horses, jade, wine, cucumbers, and walnuts. Ivory, gold, tortoise shells, drugs and slaves and animals such as ostriches and giraffes came from Africa. Frankincense and myrrh were brought from Arabia. Mediterranean coloured glass was treasured almost as much in some parts of the East as silk was in the West.
Silk was prized as a trade item and was ideal for overland travel because it was easy to carry, took up little space, held up over time, weighed relatively little but was high in value. By weight silk was worth as much as gold and often used as a form of money and could be given as bribes and as tribute. The silk carried on the Silk Road came in the form of rolls of raw silk, dyed rolls, cloth, tapestries, embroideries, carpets and clothes. Most silk that left China was often in its raw form and it was turned into embroidered cloth and art work in cities such as Samarkand in Central Asia, Baghdad in the Middle East and Lhasa in Tibet.
Another highly prized trade item was iron billets. During the Iron Age there was an abrupt transition from a tribal and clan-based society to a sovereign state form of government where de jure and de facto rights of individuals were replaced by sovereignty to the state. Better availability of iron as a raw material allowed for new weapons development and large scale production. The Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is believed to have begun with the discovery of iron smelting and smithing techniques in Anatolia or the Caucasus and Balkans in the late 2nd millennium BC (circa 1300 BC). Meteoric iron, or iron-nickel alloy, was used by various ancient peoples thousands of years before the Iron Age. This iron, being in its native metallic state, required no smelting of ores.
The Iron Age began with the development of higher temperature smelting techniques. During the Iron Age, the best tools and weapons were made from steel, an alloy consisting of iron with a carbon content between 0.02% and 1.7% by weight. Steel weapons and tools were nearly the same weight as those of bronze, but stronger. However, steel was difficult to produce with the methods available. Therefore, many Iron Age tools were fashioned of wrought iron. Wrought iron is weaker than bronze, but because it was less expensive, people used it anyway. Iron is by itself an adequately strong metal without additional alloys (although it could be further strengthened by case-hardening or forge welding small amounts of steel to areas subject to wear such as edges).
In the thousand years that followed, allowed the production of “good” metal, and in times of war, iron ingots were a prized item for Black Wolf to both trade in and purloin from heathen caravans. This advanced the Christian war effort and lined their pockets at the same time.
