SC - Columbus' chilies
Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net
Wed Jun 21 20:14:31 PDT 2000
Bear gave some wonderful information on some spices and then said:
> Do you have any dates on the trade? A lot of things came from the
> Trans-Sahara in Antiquity, when the Sahara was still a grassland and travel
> was relatively easy. After it turned to desert, the trade route between
> Mali and the Mediterranean became one of the deadliest in the world and it
> was essentially abandoned. IIRC, it became a major slave trading route only
> in the 17th and 18th Centuries as the supply of slaves from Europe was cut
> off.
What evidence do we have that the Sahara was still a grassland in Classical
times? Or by "Antiquity" do you mean further back than say 100 AD?
While humans appear to have denuded Easter Island and Iceland in only
a few hundred years, the Sahara is much larger and isn't as isolated. That
is a lot of climatic change within a short time period.
Was slavery still going on from within Europe as late as the 17th and
18th centuries? I thought that it had pretty much stopped even from
Eastern Europe well before then.
- --
Lord Stefan li Rous Barony of Bryn Gwlad Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris Austin, Texas stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at: http://www.florilegium.org ****
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