You are head of the largest merchant trading house on the Silk Road. It is the year 1500, and the long prosperity of the Pax Romana has created strong demand in Italy for the luxury products you import from China and India. Chief among those products is silk. Everybody who is anybody wants their clothes made of silk. There is a great desire in the west to have the exotic goods of the east. And the most widely desired of those goods is that marvellous fabric called silk. It is beautiful to the eye, smooth to the touch, light in weight and very strong. How it is made is a mystery, only the Chinese know that, and they carefully guard the secrets of its manufacture. You also trade in other fine products to enhance the enjoyment of life. There are jewels to delight the eye, spices to tantalize the palette, medicines to heal the body and substances to soothe the mind. These are the products that are carried on the Silk Road. They are high in value, and smaller in size and weight than the common commodities of daily life such as grain, leather, iron, wood or woollen cloth. It is this combination of high value, small size and lightweight that makes it profitable to transport such products over long distances. These cities are also places where caravan leaders can sell their products to local merchants and return to their cities of origin. One way to manage the risks inherent in a long journey on the Silk Road is to specialize in just one or a few shorter routes between certain cities. The prices you can get for products increase the further you go from the origin points of those products, but costs and risks also increase the further you carry those products. So, you balance the risks against potential profits. In meetings with caravan leaders, and countless conversations with other merchants, travellers, priests, and soldiers, you are forever gathering information about conditions on the Road and prices and supply and demand for different products. You work at developing an i