Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Slavery was a grim but omnipresent reality across the Silk Road during the Middle Ages.

Speaking to Emily Griffiffitt, Claire Taylor

unpacks the complex networks of enslavement that span from Ireland to China, revealing how and why

human lives were traded alongside silks and spices. Could you just explain what we mean when we're talking about the Silk Road at

this time? Yeah, if we're thinking about the Silk Roads and what they are. In ancient times,

we think about the Silk Roads as the routes kind of through Central Asia, through to China.

By the time we get to the Middle Ages, we're aware of many more connections. So historians these days think in terms of world structures, world history, and actually

we can find connections running from the Atlantic Ocean right through to the Pacific, so

from Ireland right through to Korea and Japan.

We tend to think about silk roads over land routes, but particularly when we're thinking about the movement of goods and people, we're also thinking about sea routes as well.

And we also think about interconnectedness, so north-south routes as well as east-west routes that connected with the Silk Road in the Middle Ages.

Can you give us a glimpse of what life might

have been like along the medieval Silk Road? Who might we have met? And what would we have seen,

heard, as smelled? Right. Well, you might have come across lots of merchants, that's the obvious

one, bringing things like spices and silks and obviously slaves, which we're

going to talk about. And so depending on who you were meeting, it might be very different.

I think the travel itself was very difficult. The overland route was very difficult.

Yeah, you'd have smelt lots of spices, possibly. The towns that people would have met in the caravan-serai,

where people would have parked up and rested their animals and so on,

would have been quite smelly, camels and so on.

You might also be unlucky and meet an army as well

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