I started watching Marco Polo on Netflix again and it just occurred to me that merchants went through some tough time traveling the Silk Road.
So it got me thinking, how hard was it to travel the Silk Road. I am guessing there were naturally bandit raids but generally speaking was it very common or there was some sort of unspoken law to protect the merchants across such wide distance between Empires? Do we have any accounts of how difficult the journeys generally were and all the dangers?
A lot of the times, merchants did not travel the Silk Road itself. Presuming the time period of the Yuan dynasty and the Mongol Empire, roads were much more secure. This is due to an actual entity being able to roam the road and rid/reduce of bandit presence. Merchants usually were on the fringe of their civilization's boundaries who then sold the goods to nomads, who knew the landscape much better. These nomads were the middlemen - they navigated the vast spaces before in turn handing it off to more nomads, until the goods finally reached their destination. You must remember that the Silk Roads would be in decline after the fall of Empires. For example, when the Western Roman Empire fell, there would be no significant reason for luxury goods to be transferred westwards.