Overview: Eurasian Travelers

In this project, we traced the itineraries of more than a dozen medieval Eurasian travelers whose routes corresponded, more or less, to the "Silk Roads". Below you will find an annotated list and an interactive map.

List of travelers

• Xuanzang, Buddhist monk and scholar. Traveled from China to India and back, 629-645 CE.
• Anonymous Chinese Monk, Travels of an Anonymous Chinese Monk from China to India in around 968.
• Benjamin of Tudela, Spanish-Jewish explorer. Traveled across the the Middle East to Western Asia, 1165-1173, and recorded the population of Jewish people and scholars.
• Mongol Postal Road, The routes of which the Mongol's postal system followed, that was first created by Genghis Khan around 1200.
• Qiu ChujiA Taoist Monk and Master. Founder of the Dragon Gate Sect of Taoism. Traveled from Beijing to Afghanistan and Back from 1220-1224, lived from 1148-1227 CE.
• John of Plano Carpini, Franciscan Friar who traveled to the Mongol capital of Karakorum from 1245-1247. Carried letter from Pope Innocent IV to the Mongol Leader.
• William of Rubruck, Flemish friar under order of King Louis IX. William traveled from Constantinople to Karakorum and back to convert the Great Khan Mongke to Catholic Christianity, 1253-1255.
• Rabban Bar Sawma, Chinese Christian monk. Traveled the silk road from China to Europe as a pilgrim and religious ambassador in the 1280s.
• Marco Polo, Venetian explorerer. Began his journey in 1271 and returned to Constantinople in 1295 after traveling along the Silk Road and recording his journey.
• John of Montecorvino, Franciscan friar who traveled to China in the thirteenth century and founded the first Catholic mission there. He departed Tabriz in 1291 and remained in China till his death in 1328.
• Friar Odoric of Perdenone, Franciscan friar and missionary, who traveled to India, Indonesia, and China, 1318-1330.
• Ibn Battuta, Muslim legal scholar and judge, traveled from Anatolia to India, Indonesia, and China and back, 1330-1348.
• Francisco Balducci Pegolotti, Flortentine Merchant. Compiled Silk Road routes from various merchants into a mercantile guidebook, 1335-1343.
• John de Marignolli, a Franciscan friar sent by the Pope to China in response to the arrival of Mongol emissaries in Europe in 1338; proceeded on a fantastical journey through south Asia before returning in 1353.

Interactive map

The following map contains many layers that can be turned on and off. Click the icon in the upper left of the map window to show the list of layers, and use the tick boxes to turn them on and off. The map can be panned and dragged around, and you can zoom in and out. You can also click the icon in the upper right corner to open it in its own tab.

The first layer (red and black) is the "Silk Roads" routes as proposed by von Richthofen in 1877. The remaining layers show the routes or itineraries of the travelers we have mapped for this project.

A note of caution: many of these routes are conjectural. In particular, if you see a long straight line or arc between two points, that indicates that the route between those points is unknown. It would therefore be a mistake to assume (for example) that the Anonymous Chinese Buddhist Monk (dark brown line) crossed the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas, which he almost certainly circumnavigated by traveling a thousand miles further to the west. In a similar vein, Rabban Sawma (Eastern Christian, orange line) crossed the Taklamakan Desert, but because his narrations of the route cannot be securely translated onto a map, we do not know for sure whether he took the more northerly or southerly route. The more jagged a route is on this map, in general, the more likely it is to represent a route that has been carefully described in the original source.