The question of whether the ‘Silk Road/s’ is a useful concept for historical analysis, or too vague or too all-encompassing to have interpretative value, is one that scholars have been debating ever since the term moved into the cultural and scholarly mainstream. Although the use of the term in marketing does not often impinge on its scholarly use, its appropriation in the cultural and politico-economic worlds has the potential to be more distorting. Here I offer a definition and discuss its appropriateness, look briefly at the history of the term, and then explore how it is appearing more frequently in historical scholarship of medieval Europe...