Rivers and Ports
The salt highways of Europe were the navigable rivers, where by medieval times shipments of salt coming upstream passed rafts and log-trains of timber, which could only be shipped downstream. And even along Europe's coasts, once long-distance trade was revived in the 11th century, the hot and sunny south naturally outproduced the wet north. By the Late Middle Ages the expanding fishing fleets of the Low Countries required more salt than could be produced locally; the balance was made up with salt from the Iberian Peninsula: "The United Provinces could have been brought to their knees if their supplies of salt had been blocked at the end of the sixteenth century. Spain did no more than dream of this," Fernand Braudel has written. In Ming China, salt as well as rice was shipped from south to north, along the Imperial Canal as far as Beijing.
Read more about this topic: Salt Road
Famous quotes containing the words rivers and, rivers and/or ports:
“It is easier to move rivers and mountains than to change a person’s basic nature.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Thank God we’re living in a country where the sky’s the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television.”
—Joan Rivers (b. 1935)
“When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)