Medieval

Lubeck led a loose confederation of eventually more than 200 towns, from Novgorod's German trading post to London's Steelyard, Bru...

The muda, annual escorted galley convoys, carried pepper, ginger and cinnamon from Alexandria and Beirut, often with pilgrim passe...

Shallow-draft longships that could row up rivers and be portaged between them let Norse traders build a western network of emporia...

Rus merchants ran convoys of furs, wax, honey and enslaved captives down the Volga to Bolghar, the market city of the Volga Bulgar...

From the Tang dynasty onward, compressed Pu'er and Ya'an tea traveled by mule caravan from Yunnan and Sichuan across the Hengduan ...

Held in rotation at Troyes, Provins, Lagny and Bar-sur-Aube, the fairs brought Flemish and northern cloth face to face with Italia...

The empire built relay stations every 30 to 40 kilometers where mounted couriers changed horses, carrying official messages at spe...

Air-dried cod, stockfish, kept for years and was exempt meat for the fasting days that structured the medieval Christian calendar....

Scandinavian traders and warriors known as Varangians or Rus sailed from the Baltic up the Volkhov to Novgorod, then dragged their...

The name refers to the roughly forty days the journey took through some of the driest desert on earth, from El Fasher in Darfur vi...

From around the 9th century, Swahili towns such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Sofala grew rich as middlemen between the Af...