Spices – pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cardamom, cinnamon, and ginger – served not only as flavoring for food, but also as ingredients in perfumes, love potions, pain killers, and funeral balms. Ships carried all types of merchandise, but spices from the “Spice Islands” (now the Moluccas, part of Indonesia) and other parts of South and Southeast Asia were the most important luxury product. Persian and Arab merchants sailed down the East African Swahili coast, establishing fortified, independent, merchant-controlled trading towns as far south as Sofala in Zimbabwe, and linking these with those across the Indian Ocean.Ĭoastal Indian cities, including Muslim ones in the north and Hindu ones in the south, made a profit from trade going in any direction. In the eleventh century trade on the Red Sea became increasingly important, and Cairo soon surpassed Baghdad as the hub of world commerce. Islam provided a body of commercial law, a common commercial language in Arabic, and an international currency, the Muslim dinar. Commerce was judged to be an honorable profession in Islam, as the Prophet Muhammad himself had once been a merchant. The middle of this trading zone was the Muslim world, where the spread of Islam enhanced a wide network of trade contacts and productive handicraft industries already in place. The largest trading network in the period from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries was that across Eurasia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |