Eurasia: the world's largest land mass.
Some 10,000 kilometers from the Pacific
to the Atlantic ocean.
A formidable distance,
even in today's world.
And yet over that vast distance,
human beings have pursued
one of history's greatest enterprises:
The Silk Road.
A tremendously profitable trade route
and so much more.
For thousands of years,
exotic goods,
new technologies,
conquering armies,
and brilliant ideas
traveled along the Silk Road.
Silk Road trade helped to build empires
and to break them.
It fanned the fires of revolution.
Drove great explorations,
and forged powerful bonds
between far away peoples.
The Silk Road made human beings realize
that there are other people out there,
and it opened the eyes
of the east and the west.
This is the story of how Silk Road trade
made so much more than money.
It's the epic tale of how the Silk Road
helped create a world;
a world that created us.
2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire
seemed unstoppable.
Rome had conquered much of Europe
and was sending its legions beyond
the eastern Mediterranean
to the Middle East
-- gateway to the riches of Asia.
But a journey to the east
could become a road of blood.
In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian
town of Carrhae,
the Parthians — an empire blending
Persian and Greek cultures —
confronted a Roman army.
The outcome of the battle
seemed beyond doubt.
Some 40,000 Romans
faced only 10,000 Parthians.
And Rome's legions
were Europe's finest foot soldiers.
There was just one problem.
The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.
The Parthians, they were cavalry.
They were horse archers.
Versatile. Rode like the wind.
What the Romans did
was what the Romans always did.
They took a fixed position.
They were ordered into a hollow square
defending all sides.
But that was nothing
to the Parthian horse archers
because they could just ride
around them, and they did.
They galloped around and around
and around and around,
shooting as they went.
Thousands and thousands of arrows
loosed into those Romans.
What the Romans eventually did
was they were ordered to go into testudo.
That's that Roman formation
where they lock their shields together
and put the next layer
of shields to make a roof.
Testudo is Latin for tortoise.
But the Parthians
had the answer to this tortoise.
They had a hammer
to break open its shell.
The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,
a Greek word meaning
"clothed in full armor".
Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.
The cataphract was the ancient world
equivalent of a battle tank.
At Carrhae, charging cataphracts
broke open the testudo.
Exposing the Romans inside
to more arrow attacks.
Some 30,000 Romans
were killed or captured.
Parthian losses were minor.
It was one of Rome's
worst military defeats.
But it may have been
something else as well.
A Roman historian wrote
that the Parthians dazzled the Romans
with banners made of a beautiful fabric:
silk.
That may only be a legend.
But around the time of Carrhae,
Romans began coveting Chinese silk,
and China began selling silk to Rome
in exchange for fine
Roman glassware and gold.
Inspiring the name
we give Eurasian trade today:
the Silk Road.
But long before Romans and Parthians
fought at Carrhae,
trade between the peoples of Eurasia
were shaping lives,
making new things possible,
and changing the world.
At Carrhae, the Parthians
won with a style of warfare
that had evolved centuries earlier
and thousands of kilometers away.
On the steppes of Central Asia,
an ocean of land,
where victory in battle, and life itself,
depended on moving
very far, very fast.
Thousands of years
before the battle of Carrhae,
a transportation revolution
took place on these vast plains.
There's good evidence for the existence
of domesticated horses
in what is today Kazakhstan
and southern Russia by 3500 BC.
And we actually think that probably
horses were domesticated
and began to be ridden
500 or maybe 1,000 years before that,
maybe as early as 4500 BC.
The domestication of the horse
was the first step
towards cavalry warfare.
But the second step
would be a long time coming.
The first use of horses in warfare
was with chariot warfare,
and we have that well established
Tutankhamun's chariot,
which many people have seen
in museum exhibits.
And we know that people
were using chariots in warfare
starting in the Near East
in about 1600, 1700 BC..
Horses were not used as organized cavalry
until after about 900 BC,
almost 1,000 years
after chariot warfare began.
And it's always seemed odd to me
that cavalry began after chariotry.
Chariotry is very difficult to manage.
You have to train horses to work together.
They have to pull this clumsy vehicle
that has two people in it:
a driver and a warrior.
Training the units to work together,
very difficult thing to do,
whereas jumping on the back of a horse
is an easy thing.
So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?
I think the real reason
that cavalry waited
is that you needed to have
really three innovations.
The earliest evidence for the recurved bow
is in Shang Dynasty, China,
probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.
Shang emperors communicated
with their ancestors
by heating animal bones or turtle shells
until they cracked
and then interpreting
the patterns made by the cracks.
One of these so-called oracle bones
is carved with the Chinese
character for bow
— the earliest known image
of a recurved bow.
And in the tomb of Lady Fuhao
— an imperial consort
and renowned military commander —
archaeologists found more evidence.
It's a thumb cover
for drawing bow string
and there's another piece that went
in the middle of a recurved bow,
a hand grip.
The bows themselves are not preserved,
so, it's a difficult thing to identify
the origins of the recurved bow.
The different components of it
probably came from different places
geographically.
Just how far the recurved bow
traveled across Eurasia
was revealed in 2005 at Yanghai,
in China's Xinjiang region.
Wooden bows rarely survive
burial in the ground,
but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate
preserved one
in a 3,000-year-old tomb.
Other grave goods
and the human remains
found in the Yanghai tombs
confirmed that the bow was made
by the Scythians,
a highly sophisticated culture
that originated in southern Russia
and migrated on horseback
across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
The true birthplace
of the recurved composite bow
remains an archaeological mystery.
But there is no doubt
that 3,000 years ago
anyone who fought on horseback
would have found it revolutionary.
A bow is as strong as it is long.
It derives its strength from its length.
And the recurved bow
packs the same length
into this very short bow
that can be swung over the horse's rear
and over the horse's neck.
And it was much, much easier
to use on horseback.
And the recurved bows are
technologically quite difficult to make.
It took a long time to develop
the craft of bow making to that point.
The recurve all these sinewy bends
— reflex and deflex —
that gives it in-built spring.
But that can only be created
with composite materials.
What we mean by that is
it's made of a number of materials.
The heart of it is wood, usually beech.
And then you have horn,
horn from a water buffalo,
and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.
That, when you bash it,
you can tease apart
and get these very fine fibers,
fibers with tremendous tensile strength.
That has elasticity and spring,
and it stops the bow bursting apart.
These are all materials that enhance
the power, the spring of the bow.
But only if bow makers
could solve a very big problem.
How to keep such a powerful bow
made from so many different materials
from breaking up when its own power
was pulling it apart?
Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,
some unknown genius discovered the answer.
This is the swim bladder of a sturgeon
— a fish from the Black Sea.
And if you start to break these up
then put it in hot water,
and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.
This simple idea of making a glue
out of a swim bladder of a fish
was a technological breakthrough
of immense consequences.
It is what enabled
the composite bow to exist.
And in turn the composite bow
was a military revolution
of far-reaching consequences.
The composite recurved bow
gave birth to a new kind of warrior
the horse archer.
The horse archer was able
to shoot from the saddle
in part because of the new technology
of the composite bow.
They were short, compact bows,
and that meant that you
can shoot them from horseback.
You see I can cross
to the other side of the horse,
I can turn and shoot behind.
It's much more suitable
for shooting on horseback.
Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,
whether as enemy or friend,
wanted a recurved composite bow.
By the early first millennium BC,
it was in use from east Asia
to eastern Europe.
A recurved bow gave a horse archer
unprecedented killing power.
But it didn't make him a cavalryman.
Before horse archers could fight
as an effective military force,
they needed a large supply
of identical arrows.
And that didn't exist.
Arrowheads were a variety
of different sizes and weights.
Some were made of bone.
Some were made out of flint.
Some were made out of bronze.
All of them would be individually made
and you had to adjust your shot
for the weight of different arrows.
Also a unit of soldiers
who were firing at the same time
would be firing arrows
of slightly different weights
and they might go different distances.
One of the features of a stone arrowhead
is its flattened rear
But how did it connect
with the arrowshaft?
It can only be tied to the shaft
by rope or ox tendons.
But what about the disadvantages?
First, the released arrows
tend to change direction easily.
Second, they are likely to fall off,
One of the technological innovations
was the invention
of the socketed arrowhead.
They were made of bronze, usually,
and they were made in a mould
and cast in a mould,
so that an infinite number
of socketed arrowheads of the same weight
could be made from the same mould.
Making socketed projectile points
was actually a big deal.
You have to have a mould with a core
where the socket is going to be
that you can pour molten metal around
so that it's the same thickness
all the way around.
Making arrowheads
of the same size and weight
was another Central Asian
technological revolution.
For the first time, mounted warriors
could unleash
coordinated arrow attacks
on their enemies.
With arrowheads of the same weight,
every time you drew the bow to shoot
you knew that you were firing an arrow
that was exactly the same weight
as the last arrow that you fired,
so you could determine
the range and the distance well.
And also all of the archers
that were firing
were firing arrowheads
at the same weight at the same time.
So the distance for all of them
would be the same.
With a socketed arrowhead
you can directly insert
the head into the shaft.
It look like this.
So what are the advantages
of this type of arrowhead?
Its improvements greatly enhanced
the lethality and efficiency
of ancient arrows.
Even in the chaos of war, the shooter
could aim t the target easily.
He wouldn't loose the direction
by aiming t the target quickly.
This ivention is a giant leap
in the development of human history.
Archaeologists believe that sometime
in the second millennium BC,
socketed bronze arrowheads
began spreading east
while the composite
recurved bow spread west.
Sometime around 900 BC,
socketed arrowheads and recurved bows
met in the Tarim Basin area
of Central Asia,
brought together by traders,
warriors, and migrating nomads.
After about 700 BC, you begin to see
thousands and thousands of arrowheads
and dozens of arrowheads
in a single quiver in a grave.
It's like they're being mass produced.
Bronze socketed arrowheads
turned central Asia into an arsenal,
but cavalries still couldn't exist
until warriors could become soldiers.
It was really the age of heroic warfare
— individuals going out
and doing great deeds by themselves
and attracting glory for their own name.
And this is the kind of warfare
that's described
in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey,"
or in the "Rigveda,"
a religious text that's at the deep roots
of modern Hinduism.
What had to change
was a psychological change
in the nature of the warrior.
You had to change
from individuals to units
working under the command
of a commanding general,
who would attack and retreat
upon command.
The psychological change
from the heroic warrior to the soldier,
probably is a feature of urban warfare.
The armies that were associated
with the great cities
of Mesopotamia and Iran.
That psychology had to spread
northward up into the steppes
and be accepted by warriors
in the steppes,
in the same area
where the recurved bows
and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.
While recurved bows were spreading west
and socketed arrowheads
were spreading east,
the concept of military discipline
was spreading north.
Sometime around 900 BC,
all three combined
in the heart of central Asia.
When those three things came together,
cavalry became a really deadly form
of military force.
A force that would severely test
the ancient world's most powerful armies.
2,000 years ago,
as the Romans pushed east
to expand their empire,
China was pushing west.
And like the Romans,
the Chinese encountered
a formidable enemy on horseback.
The Xiongnu were nomads
from the Central Asian steppes.
Armed with recurved bows
and socketed arrows,
they fought under commanders
as a disciplined military force.
They raided Chinese villages
and plundered the growing trade
between East and West,
and no one could stop them.
The Xiongnu was the migraine
of the ancient world for the Chinese.
They simply just kept coming
and they would not stop.
The Xiongnu wanted the finest
material goods produced by the Chinese.
That is why they raided.
Imagine you're a villager in China
and these men come from nowhere.
They come from over the hill
without warning,
tearing into your village.
They shoot the headman,
they shoot your husband.
They chase the women out.
There is no hiding place
and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.
They're in and they're out
and they take the stuff and they go.
China sent its military might
against the Xiongnu.
The famed Terracotta Warriors
reveal the size and power
of Chinese armies.
But the Chinese fought on foot
and from chariots.
Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.
A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu
moved like a flock of birds over the land,
impossible to control.
Once mounted warfare really
became deadly and effective,
it became a real problem.
If you're a farmer, the nomads know
where you're going to be all the time.
Your house is in the same place
12 months of the year,
and when your crops become ripe,
you have to harvest,
and the nomads know when that season is.
Whereas when you're trying
to strike them back,
it's impossible to know
where they're going to be
or when they're going to be there.
You have to search to find them.
To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese
needed soldiers who could fight like them.
They needed cavalry.
There are manuals of warfare
that were written
to instruct Chinese warriors
on how to counter the tactics
and the methods of the Xiongnu.
Those manuals introduced
the idea of cavalry
to the Chinese military.
The Chinese military
had not really used cavalry
before about probably 350 BC.
Chinese military, at first
with some resistance
from the old aristocratic families, said:
"Well, my father fought on a chariot,
"and his father fought on a chariot,
"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot
in my long robes like my ancestors."
But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors
traded their traditional
long, flowing robes
for shorter tunics that didn't get
in the way of fighting on horseback.
Eventually, the practicalities
forced them to get rid of their robes,
to put on riding trousers,
to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,
and they, too, became
a mighty horse archer force.
Chinese cavalry became experts
at shooting the recurved composite bow,
and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.
While its cavalry trained,
China agreed to Xiongnu demands
for payments of money and silk
until the year 133 BC,
when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay.
And sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.
Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.
And China seized
new territories in the steppes,
pacifying trade routes
and opening new horizons.
On one hand,
we have this perpetual conflict
— in Chinese culture would be
the Xiongn and the Han Chinese
that created incessant warfare.
On the other hand, it is this conflict
that demolished physical boundaries.
Even territory boundaries
were constantly being pushed farther,
pushed back between the two forces.
This was a stimulus for exchanges,
for political changes,
for new ideas, for artistic traditions.
It was also a new era for the Silk Road.
A fortune in Roman gold
traveled east
in exchange for Chinese silks.
And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan
made its own fortune
selling another luxury to China:
jade.
Silk Road caravans passed
through this border station
on China's western frontier.
So many of them carried Kushan jade
that this station became known
as the Jade Gate.
Chinese aristocrats
coveted jade for its beauty
and something more.
They believed that jade
would keep them alive forever.
The ruling elite commissioned
jade burial suits
to preserve their bodies in the grave.
They believed that, upon death,
all the orifices should be plugged in
to preserve the spirit inside the person.
And this notion of jade
as a material with protective power
in the afterlife,
is further enhanced by the fact
that they built an armor
made of thousands
of pieces of jade.
And of course, if you're the emperor,
your jade armor would be made
from the finest jade
from the western regions.
During the Roman empire,
Silk Road trade flourished
as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies
kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.
China had leveled the battlefield
with nomad raiders from the steppes.
But Central Asian horse archers
were about to carve
their names on History.
In the 4th century CE., Europe was invaded
by a Central Asian people
whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.
The Huns, who fought their way West,
all the way to Rome.
European peoples
like the Goths and Visigoths
— the so-called barbarians —
fled before their onslaught,
and sought refuge in Roman territory.
When the Huns withdrew
from the Roman world,
those barbarian refugees stayed.
And the rest is History.
The western Roman empire
was plunged into chaos
as barbarian tribes,
dissatisfied with their lot,
rebelled against Roman authority,
and weak Roman emperors
failed to crush them.
As Rome declined, migrating
horse archers, called the Avars,
carved their own country
out of eastern Europe,
bringing with them
another Asian military innovation:
the stirrup.
This Chinese statue
from the fourth century CE,
is the earliest known
depiction of stirrups.
Some 300 years later,
an Avar horseman
was riding with these stirrups
across Hungary.
By the eighth century CE,
the stirrup had spread
from one end of Eurasia to the other
and mounted warfare
was entering a new era.
The importance of the stirrup
relates to what kinds of weapons
can you use from horseback,
and it made it possible to use
certain kinds of weapons from horseback
that you couldn't use without stirrups.
Those weapons are the long sabre.
You have to lean over and absorb shock,
if you're going to use
a long sabre in battle.
And the stirrups allow the rider
to absorb the shock of contact
with a stationary target.
The other big weapon
that was possible with stirrups
was a seated lance held under the arm.
You could stab somebody with the lance
and then remove it,
riding past them without stirrups.
But if you seated it under your arm
and used the lance as a shock weapon,
it would knock you
off the back of the horse
if you didn't have stirrups.
So stirrups made it possible to use
long swords and lances
as shock weapons
against stationary targets
and keep your seat.
And of course that made it possible
to have really heavy mounted warriors.
Now, the rider becomes
a unit with the horse.
He's so anchored with his stirrups,
anchored with this,
and then with his long lance
he becomes a single projectile unit.
Man, horse, saddle, lance,
all locked together for the impact charge.
This was the age of the medieval knight.
A medieval knight's power
came from combining the Asian stirrup
and the ancient shock tactics
of the Persian cataphract
with a European invention:
articulated plate armor.
Strong enough to protect the wearer
from sword and lance thrusts
while light enough to allow him
to move freely on horseback
and on foot.
Heavy cavalry had never been
a more potent weapon of war.
Medieval mounted warfare
could be warfare
that generated
a lot of force on the rider,
a high impact warfare.
In that case, the mounted warrior
is being used
really as a shock weapon
to strike the enemy.
But even Europe's
formidable mounted knights
would be outfought
by Central Asian cavalry
that burst out of the steppes
and changed the world.
The largest conquest empire
that the Earth has ever seen
was created by pastoral nomads
from Central Asia.
In the 13th century,
the Mongols conquered
as far West as Poland
and as far East as the Sea of Japan.
Mongol armies combined the devastating
shock tactics of horse archers
with a highly sophisticated
military organization.
They could gather quickly
and march to distant battlefields.
Then the cavalry could reach
the enemy's battlefield
before they set up defenses
which could deter their enemy
psychologically and strategically.
It is said that the cavalry came suddenly
like something falling fro the sky.
and disappeared quickly
leaving no trace at all.
Western, especially European historians,
wrote that the Mongols appeared
far away like several spots
but would suddenly gather
before you, like dark clouds.
Unexpected attack was the core
The Mongols have gone down
in History as bloodthirsty killers,
but they were also sophisticated,
open-minded,
often generous conquerors.
They pacified the Silk Road.
Trade between West and East
flourished under
this Mongol-enforced peace,
the Pax Mongolica.
Before the age of Pax Mongolica,
banditry was a very serious
problem for traders,
for caravans, along the Silk Road.
The reputation of Genghis Khan
and his descendants
created peace and safe passage
along the Silk Road
because bandits were so afraid
of the Mongol soldiers.
The Pax Mongolica,
the control of trade and exchange
that was made possible under the Mongols
connected China with Europe
and with the Near East
in a really close way
for the first time in world History
And that had a profound effect
on the development
of European civilization.
Protected by the Pax Mongolica,
and anxious for good relations
with the Mongol empire,
Europeans began traveling East
as never before.
Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats
flowed East along the trade routes,
bringing back popular Asian goods
like cloth and spices
and tales of the wealth
and wonders of the East,
some true, some fabulous,
but all fascinating.
From Europe to China,
Silk Road trade spread
new knowledge of far-away lands.
The Silk Road made human beings realize
that there are other people out there,
and it opened the eyes
of the East and the West.
The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa
reaped huge rewards.
Their merchants traveled safely
throughout Eurasia
and founded trading posts on the Black Sea
to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.
Their Silk Road profits funded
magnificent art and architecture.
But their competition frequently
plunged them into war with one another.
In one of these wars, Genoa captured
a prosperous Venetian merchant
named Marco Polo.
Imprisoned by the Genoese,
Polo dictated the story
of his Silk Road journey to China
to a fellow prisoner.
Today, experts debate whether
Marco Polo really visited China
or was simply retelling stories
he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.
But there's no debate
that "The Travels of Marco Polo"
was one of the most influential books
in all of human History.
It tantalized Europe with tales
of China's immense wealth
and advanced civilization.
And years before Marco Polo was telling
those tales in a Genoese prison,
a Chinese invention was making
its way across Eurasia to the West.
Something created centuries earlier
when an experiment ended very badly.
Ancient Chinese alchemists
prepared potions of lead or mercury
for their aristocratic patrons
who believed that drinking these metals
would help them live forever.
Instead, those concoctions killed them
or made them insane.
Another deadly combination was sulfur
heated with an organic nitrate
found in soil throughout China,
known today as saltpeter.
When alchemists experimented
with this formula,
it burst into flame,
injuring the alchemists,
(Explosion)
and burning down their laboratory.
From that disaster was born
a chemical mixture like none other.
It may have failed
as an elixir of immortality,
but it would prove to be
a potent agent of death.
This Chinese Buddhist scroll
dating from around 950 CE,
depicts demons surrounding
a seated Buddha.
One demon holds what the Chinese called
a "huo quiang", or fire lance.
It's the earliest known image of a weapon
powered by that deadly mixture
of saltpeter and sulfur.
Known to history as gunpowder.
In the early 13th century,
the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.
The Jin Dynasty's army fought back
with exploding gunpowder bombs.
But as the Mongols conquered
more and more of China,
Han Chinese artillerymen
joined their armies
and marched West, bringing
their gunpowder weapons with them.
The Mongols attacked
Russian and Polish cities
with exploding fire bombs.
And Europeans found out the hard way
what gunpowder could do.
By the end of the 13th century,
the formula for gunpowder
was known as far West as England,
and Europeans were inventing
their own versions of the new weapons.
It wasn't long before this Chinese
invention changed European history.
On 26th August, 1346,
near the village of Crecy
in northern France,
the armies of France and England
prepared to fight.
Mounted on their war steeds,
encased in their armor,
the flower of French nobility
formed their battle line,
while the English deployed
a very different force.
Thousands of expert archers.
The French sent their higher Genoese
crossbowmen to attack the English
before French knights annihilated them.
But the English king, Edward III,
had spent years training his longbow men.
And all that training
was about to pay off.
Nothing like this had been seen
on a western battlefield up to this time.
The first time that a volley of arrows
was unleashed by the archers at Crecy
would have represented
something completely new
to many of those
in the French army watching it.
A cloud of arrows descending towards them.
It would have been frightening,
and of course the effect
was almost immediate.
Showered by English arrows,
the Genoese turned and ran,
and according to medieval
accounts of the battle,
they were also panicked
by another English weapon.
Giovanni Villani, writing
very soon after the battle,
says in his chronicle that
so loud and intimidating
was the noise created by the guns
that they thought God was thundering.
"The English guns cast
iron balls by means of fire.
"They made a noise like thunder
"and caused much loss
in men and horses."
Noise like that would have been
unprecedented
to the soldiers on the battlefield.
Nothing in their lives
could have prepared them
for a a bang of that size
and accompanied by smoke
and acrid sulfur smell,
which would hang in the air.
The impact of which, of course,
they couldn't see
until men around them dropped.
Not even professional soldiers
like the Genoese
would have experienced anything
like this before in their lives.
That would have been terrifying,
and it's no wonder
that they scattered and ran.
They turned and fled into the face
of the oncoming French cavalry charge.
The French cavalry were now
coming onto the battlefield
and they were appalled
at these people they'd hired
running away.
And they cursed them
and they rode into them,
and as many Genoese fell to French hooves
as they did to English
arrows and gunshots.
And the French knights,
all 12,000 of them,
double the size of the English army,
they came charging down onto the English.
And they, too, fell to the English arrows
and the English gunshot,
and they came again and again and again.
15, 16 times, they came.
And their horses were ripped to shreds
and the men were thrown from their horses.
And those that weren't thrown,
they had the opportunity
that the dagger men rushed in
and they brought these knights down.
This was a moment in History
where the world changed.
It spelled the beginning of the end
for the medieval knight.
The Battle of Crecy
has gone down in history
as one of the earliest uses
of gunpowder weapons
on a European battlefield.
Some 500 years after,
it burned down
a Chinese alchemist's workshop,
gunpowder had become
destiny's weapon of choice.
After Crecy, it was only a matter of time
until the fates of peoples and nations
were decided by the gun.
Within two centuries,
Europeans would use their powerful
gunpowder weapons
to dominate the world,
creating empires that would evolve
into today's global trading culture,
which binds people together
by commerce instead of the gun.