I'm doing research for a game that I'm planning to develop. It's a 2-D scroller where you manage your caravan as you try to get from Europe (Genoa or Venice?) to China (Xian or Beijing?). I'm trying to come up with a setting (time period and cities that you encounter) based on historical events.
What would be a good route to choose between the cities I mentioned? I specifically want to avoid water route eg (Alexandria to the Indian Ocean) as that would be a boring game.
For example, in 1453 you would see the siege of Constantinople (if we force the player to go through there. However, it suffers from accuracy because the trading party would want to avoid war if possible). Can a historian give me good setting to work with? I'm willing to do the research myself, I just need a general framework to begin researching the different cities, culture, garments, people, etc, that one would meet along the way.
Ideally, the historian takes into consideration of biomes that we would journey across. I intend on showing the desert, mountains, inland sea (Mediterranean) forests, etc.
My advice would be to pull the time-frame back 150 years and follow Marco Polo's route (I also think it would be more marketable; maybe the game could follow a competitor of his?).
In Marco Polo's time, expeditions to China weren't exactly common: there were thousands of Venetian merchants in Alexandria, Damascus and Constantinople, but probably only one or two at a given time in Beijing. Most far eastern goods were purchased from caravans arriving in the Middle East in the Levant. A particularly adventurous merchant adventurer could go once or twice in a lifetime (as brothers Nicolò and Maffeo Polo did. Nicolò's son Marco probably would have gone twice too, had he not been drafted into the navy on his return to Venice).
Marco's fame comes from the book he wrote while a Genoese prisoner of war, where he embellishes the stories of his travels travels to the point of outright making things up (the book was ghostwritten by his cellmate, Rustichello di Pisa, who was a professional story writer. The intent of the text was less than scholarly.). There are countless scholarly analyses trying to establish what is and isn't true in his narrative, however the consensus is that the travels are accurate, but his account of what he did isn't. The book is available in english under the title "The Travels of Marco Polo.".
After the 1450's, a series of wars in Italy slowed down trade activity. The nail in the coffin was the discovery of the new world, so adventurers (many of the early ones Italians!) showed more interest in North America rather than China. Plus, rapidly improving navigation techniques would make sea-routs infinitely preferable to overland routs. Niccolò de Conti (the lest famous Venetian merchant adventurer) would travel primarily by sea in his voyage to China in the early 1400's, while Megallen's circumnavigation of the globe would accelerate the disintegration of the Silk Road as early as the 16th century.
