ABSTRACT
Even before the birth of Christendom, some of the peoples living in ‘Europe’ had been aware of their debts to ‘Asia’. The Greeks revered the wisdom of Egypt and Mesopotamia and, indeed, for a considerable part of their culture they were indebted to the civilizations of the Near East, of Persia and of India, although they might not always acknowledge this debt. From the age of Alexander the Great onwards, the links with central Asia, with China and the Indian subcontinent remained consistently strong, even though contacts were almost always indirect, by means of intermediaries, such as, for example, the merchants who travelled along the so-called ‘Silk Road’, the chain of trading routes connecting the Chinese and the Mediterranean economies through the plains and deserts of central Asia.1 Rome, too, continued to be aware of the powers and the products of the east if only because of its very extensive trade links which, according to some Romans, sapped the Roman treasury. Admittedly, in the centuries following the decline of the Roman Empire, the ties grew weaker, and Asia became more of a fantasy land, for the role of its silver in the resurgence of the European economy under the Carolingians was understood only dimly, if at all, by even the most knowledgeable of politicians and traders in the eighth and ninth centuries.
