Next, Timur planned to invade Ming China. He pulled together an alliance of eastern Mongol tribes, but became ill along the way and died before he reached the Chinese border. The two heirs Timur had designated, his son and grandson, both died before him, so the throne went to a younger grandson, who called off the invasion.

Timur claimed to be both a Mongol in the tradition of the Great Khan, and also the "Sword of Islam". Temur means iron in the Chagatai language (like Genghis' name, Temujin). He was a brilliant strategist and tactician who was never defeated in battle and a great patron of scholars and poets; but is also remembered as one of the most brutal generals in history. When Timur crossed the Indus River with about 100,000 troops in 1398, he sacked the first city he reached, Tulamba, and massacred its inhabitants. As he advanced on Delhi, each of the cities he reached surrendered without a fight.

Europe adopted magnetic compasses for navigation in 1199, allowing more dependable travel by sea, especially out of sight of land.

However, the ease of travel had a disastrous unanticipated consequence when Yersina pestis, the bacterium that had caused the plague of Justinian and probably the Yamnaya-era depopulation, rose again to infect humans.

While China held the secret, silk was one of the most sought-after products of the ancient world; worth its weight in gold in imperial Rome. Silk production and trade was a key to China's wealth, cultural prestige, and diplomatic power, accounting for possibly a quarter of China's income at the peak of Silk Road exports.

The social importance of the connections these types of meetings may have fostered, could easily have been understood in spiritual terms and led to something like religious reverence for the locations of these events.