The Silk Road & Beyond

The fabled route to distant Serica, the land of silk, is beginning to coalesce again at the beginning of the 13th century, as the Mongol invasion paradoxically creates a degree of safety for traveling merchants and missionaries by controlling the almost incessant brigandage of the area. Later to become known as the Silk Road, the route has existed throughout antiquity in various states of accessibility. It consists of not one road but many — a network of caravan stages, marked by resting places known as caravanserais, that branches and reforms through the deserts, steppes and mountains as the caravans travel northeastward from Baghdad. Through Khurasan and into the Eastern Provinces of Transoxiana, Badakhshan, and Wakhan, the trade routes delve past the borders of Mythic Middle East and even into the supernatural Realms beyond.