NY Regents 9.4: Rise of Transregional Trade Networks

Around 100 CE the port of Barygaza (modern Bharuch in Gujarat, India) at the mouth of the Narmada River on the east coast of the Arabian Sea was one of the busiest entrepôts of Indian Ocean monsoon…

Around 700 CE the maritime empire of Srivijaya, based at Palembang on the Musi River delta in what is now South Sumatra Province, Indonesia, dominated the Strait of Malacca — the narrow sea passage…

Near the town of Taraz, on the Talas River in what is now southern Kazakhstan, the Battle of Talas was fought in 751 CE between the Abbasid Caliphate and Tang China for control of the western Silk…

Around 1000 CE the island port of Kilwa Kisiwani — off the southern coast of what is now Tanzania — began its rise as the dominant trading city of the Swahili coast, the string of Bantu-speaking…

In 1025 CE the Chola king Rajendra I launched a major naval expedition from the Coromandel Coast of South India (modern Tamil Nadu) across the Bay of Bengal, raiding and temporarily occupying over a…

The pin belongs at Kouroukan Fouga, in what is now southern Mali — right where the upper Niger River winds through the West African interior, deep in the Saharan borderlands that the clue called the…

Karakorum sits in the grassland steppe of central Mongolia, north of China and south of Siberia, in the empty middle of Asia where the Mongol Empire built its capital. By 1260 that empire, stitched…

Around 1300 CE Great Zimbabwe — a walled stone city on the granite plateau of what is now south-central Zimbabwe, near modern Masvingo — reached the height of its power as the political and…

In 1324 CE Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, departed from Niani — his capital on the upper Sankarani River (a Niger tributary) in what is now northeastern Guinea — on hajj to Mecca, crossing the…

This event took place at Caffa, modern Feodosia, on the Crimean Peninsula in present-day Ukraine — a port on the northern Black Sea coast, exactly where the Eurasian steppe grasslands reach the water…

This is Baghdad, the capital of modern Iraq, sitting in the flat alluvial plain where the Tigris River flows southward toward the Persian Gulf — exactly the river-valley heartland the title clue…

This achievement took place in Palma, on the island of Mallorca, Spain — sitting in the western Mediterranean, west of Italy and north of the African coast across a narrow sea. In 1375, Abraham…

This is Malacca, on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula in modern Malaysia — sitting precisely at the strait where the Indian Ocean's trade winds funnel ships into the South China Sea…

This is Constantinople, now called Istanbul, in modern Turkey — sitting precisely on the Bosphorus strait where Europe and Asia are separated by less than a kilometre of water, exactly the narrow…