Scholarship on the global Middle Ages has flourished in recent years, examining the role that a
global community played in the medieval period. Such work demonstrates the remarkable links
between various civilizations in the medieval period and the extent to which the Middle Ages truly
were a hotbed of trade. Recent scholarship has considered the cultural interactions of trade, literary
transmission, pilgrimage, religious conversion, explorers, colonization, and military expeditions. For
instance, literary scholars have shown that the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, traveled from
India through texts in Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Russian, and other versions,