Trade Routes of Late Medieval Europe
The major trading routes of late-medieval Europe: the Hanseatic network of the north, the Venetian and Genoese sea lanes of the Mediterranean, and the overland roads that linked them.
By the fourteenth century Europe was laced together by overlapping commercial networks. Along the Baltic and North Sea the merchants of the Hanseatic League moved grain, timber, furs and salted fish between Bergen, Lübeck, Novgorod and London. In the south the rival fleets of Venice and Genoa carried spices, silk and alum from Constantinople, Caffa and Alexandria to Italian ports, from where goods passed onto the overland and river roads running north through Bruges, Cologne and the Alpine passes. Clearly keyed by carrier, the map shows how these arteries of exchange knit distant regions into a single, if fragile, economic world.
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