The Mongols and the Silk Roads1

Janet L. Abu-Lughod

Some economic units in the thirteenth century owed their importance to their entrepôt
functions–to their competitive edge as neutral ground at a crossroads. These were places at
which traders from distant places could meet to transact business, their persons secure in
passage and their goods protected from confiscation or default. The towns of the French
Champagne fairs, and the towns along the Strait of Malacca offered such a haven.
Other units, such as Bruges and Ghent, enjoyed a comparative advantage in the
production of unique goods in high demand. It was their industrial output that drew them into
the world market. And although from time to time they supplemented this role by shipping and
finance, even when others preempted those activities their economic viability was sustained by
production.
Commerce, finance, and transport constituted the economic underpinnings of the
mariner city states of Italy and the strength of Genoa and Venice. These functions would have
been of little value, however, had they not also had sufficient naval military prowess to protect
their own passage. Whereas feudal lords and bourgeois governing classes, respectively, offered
these guarantees in Champagne and Flanders, the Italian fighting sailors, supported by a
mercantilist state, were responsible for the defense of their ships and of the goods they carried.
Without this trade would have been impossible.
The thirteenth-century Mongols offered neither strategic crossroads location, unique
industrial productive capacity, nor transport functions to the world economy. Rather, their
contribution was to create an environment that facilitated land transit with less risk and lower
protective rent. By reducing these costs they opened a route for trade over their territories that,
at least for a brief time, broke the monopoly of the more southerly routes. Although their social
and political organization could not transform the inhospitable physical terrain of Central Asia
into an open and pleasing pathway, it did transform its social climate.

The Physical and Social Environment of the Central Asian Steppes

Barren, empty, sparsely populated by scattered tribes of nomadic herders, weeks of travel with
no local resources to draw on, vast desert expanses. Balducci Pegolotti, in his manual for
merchants, is explicit in describing the hardships of the journey that, by the time of his writing

1
Abridged and adapted from Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D.
1250-1350, (New York, Oxford University Press), 1989.
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(ca. 1340), had been considerably ameliorated as a result of safe transit and comfortable stations
established along the way. According to his itinerary, it will take 25 days by ox-wagon to go
from Tana to Astrakan, another 20 days by camel-wagon to reach Organci, another 35–40 days
by camel to reach Otrar, 45 days by pack-ass to Armalec, another 70 days with asses to reach
Camexu on the Chinese frontier, 45 more days to the river that leads to Hangzhou, and then
finally 30 days overland to the Mongol capital Khanbalik (modern Beijing). Since by the time
he wrote, the route had reached its point of greatest ease and safety, imagine what it must have
been like before such “ease” and “security” had been established!
The inhospitable terrain was the place of origin for a long succession of groups that left
it to plunder richer lands. From earliest times, nomadic groups poured out of this marginally
productive zone, seeking better grazing land, more space, or a chance to appropriate the surplus
generated in the more fertile oases and trading towns.
The Mongols, in the beginning, differed little from their predecessors. As is usual in the
case of nomads who prey on settled agriculturalists, their economy developed less out of
nomadic pastoralism than out of extraction from a new type of herd–human. The sedentary
populations conquered by the nomads were forced to use their own productive surplus to pay
the “tribute” that supported their new masters. Once conquest was achieved the court was
empowered to distribute the revenue collected by Mongol governors from the subject
populations amongst the imperial relatives and the Mongol nobility. Thus Genghis Khan’s
conquests had the effect of transforming a nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal society into a kind
of feudal society in which the military leaders enjoyed the fruits of their conquests without
having to relinquish their traditional mode of life. This was not an economic system designed to
create a surplus, nor could it be perpetuated indefinitely. The continuous military campaigns
took the common tribesman away from his cattle and horse breeding and led, furthermore, to
high death rates which decimated Mongol ranks. Thus, their leaders were forced to rely
increasingly on slave labor at home and on foreign troops in their campaigns abroad.
Massive deportations of civilians, especially craftsmen, were carried out in Genghis’
time. These unfortunate people, forcibly removed from their towns and villages in Persia and
north China, were resettled in Siberia and Mongolia where they had to weave, mine and make
tools and weapons for their oppressive masters. Gradually the Mongols changed their policy,
concentrating more on the exploitation of the settled population of the conquered territories.
When Ogodei was elected in 1229, one of his first tasks was to work out a more efficient system
of levying taxes and corvée from his subjects. At Karakorum were Chinese serving as scribes
and astronomers, Central Asian advisers versed in the relevant languages and cultures, as well
as a large group of Muslims engaged in trade operations for the Mongols. With the help of these
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people, Ogodei set up in 1231 a State Secretariat to deal with the administration of his vast
empire. A more regular system of taxation was introduced, and a more complex network of
post-relay stations (jam) was established.
One of the difficulties of using tribute to support the state, however, is that revenues can
be increased only by raising taxes on existing subjects or by expanding the domains from which
surplus can be extracted. A second limitation of tribute is that exploitation, if too rapid and
ruthless, can actually “kill the cow” itself. But the Mongols were not dependent solely upon
foreign conquests. They also derived profits from trade across their domains. Even before the
unification of the Central Asian trade route under the Mongols, that forbidding region had been
regularly traversed by Muslim and Jewish merchant caravans.
Through Islamic conquests in Central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries, the region
became more hospitable to merchants from various parts of the Muslim world. When there was
peace a vigorous and profitable transit trade plied the overland caravan route, Samarkand was,
of course, the great meeting place for the land routes–those coming north from India, eastward
from the Black Sea through the Caucasus, and westward from China.
And yet, prior to the greater Mongol empire, passage could be interrupted for many
reasons. With control of the region fragmented among dozens or sometimes hundreds of rival
tribal groups, each competing to wrest lucrative surplus from the limited number of prosperous
oases, eruptions of warfare over territory were inevitable and frequent. Each time, the safe
transit on which the caravan trade depended was threatened and often lost. Furthermore, with so
many groups guarding limited stretches along the way, demands for protection money at times
reached prohibitive levels. In spite of these perils and costs, however, Muslim merchants moved
precious cargo from west to east and back.
The unification of the vast region under Mongol control reduced the number of
competing tribute gatherers along the way and assured greater safety in travel, not only for the
usual caravans of Jewish and Muslim merchants, but for the intrepid Italian merchants who now
joined them, vying to share in the profits to be gained from the generous and acquisitive
Mongol rulers.
It must be remembered, however, that when they first traversed the great Central Asian
route to China during the last third of the thirteenth century, bringing back wondrous tales of
rich lands and prosperous trade, Europeans were describing a preexistent system of international
exchange from which Latin merchants had previously been excluded except in their entrepôts
on the Black Sea.

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Reducing Europe’s Ignorance of the Mongols
Although Ogodei’s death in 1241 spared western Europe forever from the threat of a direct
Mongol invasion, this miraculous salvation did little to enlarge Europe’s knowledge of either
the “new barbarians” or the land from which they came. European ignorance of the east was
vast, a simple indicator of how isolated she still was from the system she sought to join.
Certainly, now that reports about approaching Mongols were reaching Europe, more exact
information was needed and for very practical purposes. Europeans assessed whether Asian
Mongols could be enlisted in the war against Saladin and the Muslim Ayyubids.

Papal Envoys
In 1245 Pope Innocent IVth sent the first serious emissaries to the Mongols: a Dominican friar,
Simon of Saint Quentin, and a Franciscan, John of Pian di Carpine. Their reports constitute the
first European accounts of travel to Central Asia. John of Pian di Carpine, who had instructions
to proceed all the way to the Mongol court to deliver the Pope’s letters, left from Lyon on
Easter Sunday 1245 returning from Mongolia two and a half years later. His detailed report to
the Pope is known by its later title, History of the Mongols, and Simon of Saint Quentin
authored an account when he returned in 1248. Although these reports were filled with both
inaccuracies and prejudices (little wonder, since in the Mongol camp the envoys had been
treated more as prisoners than as emissaries), they constituted the data on which Europeans
made their first judgments of the Mongols–enemies or allies, they knew not which.
Somewhat more accurate, yet still hardly “true,” was the account rendered by William
of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar who went to Mongolia in 1253–1255. Born in French Flanders
sometime between 1215 and 1220, Friar William accompanied St. Louis in 1248 on his Crusade
to Egypt and stayed with him in Palestine until 1252. From there, apparently on his own
initiative, he journeyed to China, taking copious notes on the “manners and customs of the
natives,” particularly their religious practices. After returning from Mongolia, he went to Paris
in where he met Roger Bacon who was intensely interested in his experiences. Bacon refers to
him at length in his Opus Majus, which indeed is the only contemporary record of him that we
possess.
We know that Friar William set out overland from the Black Sea in the spring of 1253
and soon encountered his first Mongol camp. In spite of maltreatment he persisted eastward. He
reports the very first European impression of the people of the east:
They [The Mongols] are little men and dark like Spaniards; they wear
tunics like a deacon’s with sleeves a little narrower, and on their heads they
have mitres like bishops. . . . Next is China. From them come the best
silken materials. . . . The inhabitants of China are little men, and when they
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 speak they breath heavily through their noses . . . they have a small opening
for the eyes. They are very fine craftsmen in every art, and their physicians
know a great deal about the power of herbs and diagnose very cleverly
from the pulse. . . . There were many of them in Karakorum. . . . There are
Christians and Muslims living among them like foreigners.

Within the next few decades, this ignorance would begin to dissipate as a result of
Venetian traders who followed in the footsteps of the Papal missionaries and Genoese traders.

The Polo Adventure

Certainly, the first European merchant adventurers of whom we have record who traversed
Mongol territory, taking the overland route to China, were the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo
Polo. They left Constantinople in 1260 and did not return to Venice until 1269. Being astute
businessmen, they did not freely share their discovery of the great new possibilities for trade.
They set out on a second, longer journey in 1271, this time taking Niccolo’s young son Marco
with them, not returning to Venice until 1295.
Much of what is known, not only of their travels but of the world of the Mongols, is
learned from the memoirs set down a few years later by a fellow cellmate in a Genoese prison,
after Marco’s capture in one of the recurrent sea battles between Genoa and Venice. The book
begins as the elder Polo brothers sail eastward on the Black Sea to the Venetian colony at
Suduk, from which they depart by land, coming at last to the court of the Khan of the Golden
Horde. Berke, the third khan, received them with honor and accepted the jewels the brothers
offered him, giving in return “goods Of fully twice the value [which] . . . he allowed them to
sell . . . very profitably.” Their stay in Berke’s domain was rudely interrupted after a year by a
war between Berke and Hulegu, in which the latter’s forces were victorious. Since their route
back to Constantinople was blocked by strife, they set out eastward and, after traversing a desert
for seventeen days, came to Bukhara, Three years later an envoy from Hulegu, stopping at
Bukhara on his way to Kubilai Khan, was surprised to find the two brothers there “because no
Latin had ever been seen in that country.” On learning that they were merchants, he invited
them to accompany him to meet the Khan. Protected by his safe conduct, the Polo brothers
arrived at the court of Kubilai Khan who evinced great interest in learning more about the West
and Christianity. He proposed to send them as his emissaries to the Pope, with a request that the
latter send him 100 priests and some oil from the lamp in the sepulcre of Jerusalem.
Equipped with a gold tablet bearing the Khan’s seal, which ensured their safe conduct
throughout the Mongol empire, they set out again overland, taking three years to reach Acre.
Since the Pope had died and a successor had not yet been elected, they returned to Venice to
visit their families. By this time Niccolo’s wife was dead, leaving a son of fifteen, Marco, who
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would accompany the brothers when they returned to Acre several years later. After the new
Pope had been selected, the Polos began their return journey to the Khan’s capital, entrusted
with messages and gifts but only two priests, far short of the 100 requested. Although the two
fearful priests soon eluded them, the Polos did manage to complete their trip in some three
years, being welcomed back with great enthusiasm. They remained for the next seventeen years,
during which Marco served the Khan and traveled widely on his behalf.
Marco Polo observed what people made, what they traded, and what had commercial
value. His account presents an image of the Mongol domains as containing prosperous
agriculturalists, skilled industrial producers, and many foreign traders–mostly Muslims. His
account follows the route from west to east. In Turkey he exclaimed over the “choicest and
most beautiful carpets in the world;” beyond was the land of the Georgians, in which “silk is
produced . . . in abundance, and the . . . cloth of gold woven here . . . [is] the finest ever
seen. . . . There are ample supplies of everything, and commerce and industry flourish.”
Polo described Mosul and Baghdad in Iraq as flourishing cities, even after the Mongol
devastations, which he recounts from hearsay. But it is Tabriz that captures his full admiration.
Not only are silk and cloth of gold produced in great quantity by its artisans, but it is a great city
for trade. “The city is so favorably situated that it is a market for merchandise from India and
Baghdad, from Mosul and Hormuz and many Latin merchants come here to buy the
merchandise imported from foreign lands. It is also a market for precious stones [and] a city
where good profits are made by travelling merchants.”
Polo describes Persia as a prosperous land in which trade and industry abound, “They
make cloth of gold and silk of every sort. Cotton grows there in abundance. They have no lack
of wheat, barley, millet, panic-grass, and every type of corn, besides wine and all kinds of
fruit. . . . Turquoise is mined, along with ‘steel’ [sic]. . . . The inhabitants . . . manufacture . . .
all the equipment of a mounted warrior–bridles, saddles, spurs, swords, bows, quivers, and
every sort of armaments” and the women embroider silk with “beasts and birds and many other
figures.” Crossing a great plain one then reaches the Persian Gulf at an excellent harbor called
Hormuz where Polo noted, “Merchants come here by ship from India, bringing all sorts of
spices and precious stones and pearls and cloths of silk and of gold and elephants’ tusks and
many other wares. It is a great center of commerce.” Polo eventually reached Ganzhou, and then
China.
The most interesting part of his account is the description of China itself, including a
sycophantic description of his patron, Kubilai Khan, “the wisest man and the ablest in all
respects, the best ruler of subjects and of empire and the man of the highest character of all that
have ever been in the whole history of the Mongols.” On the site of the old city of Khanbalik,
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Kubilai had built a new city as his capital, which he called Taidu. Since this is contemporary
Beijing, we quote at length from his description because there are remarkable parallels to the
city and Great Palace of today.
Taidu is built in the form of a square with all its sides of equal length and a
total circumference of twenty-four miles. It is enclosed by earthern
ramparts . . . all battlemented and white-washed. They have twelve gates,
each surmounted by a fine, large palace. . . . [T]he streets are so broad and
straight that from the top above one gate you can see along the whole
length of the road to the gate opposite. All the way down the sides of every
main street there are booths and shops of every sort . . . the whole interior
of the city [being] laid out in squares like a checker-board. . . .

The most significant statement contained in Marco Polo’s description of Beijing,

however, is one whose implications elude him. He notes that the suburbs contain as many
inhabitants as the walled city itself and that in each suburban quarter there are “many fine
hostels which provide lodging for merchants coming from different parts; a particular hostel is
assigned to every nation. . . . [for] merchants and others come here on business in great
numbers, both because it is the Khan’s residence and because it affords a profitable market.”
These foreign merchants were Muslims from all parts of the heartland of the thirteenth-
century world system. For them the Khan’s domains are no new discovery; they are a natural
and integral part of their world. And indeed, Polo goes on to tell a story of Ahmed, a Muslim
governor in the city to whom the emperor gave power for some 22 years!
These extracts are sufficient to illustrate an important point. European merchants first
traversed the great Central Asian route to China during the last third of the thirteenth century,
bringing back wondrous tales of rich lands, of prosperous trade, and of an ongoing system of
international exchange from which Latin merchants were still essentially excluded. In the
decades that followed, many traveled in the footsteps of the Polos. Italian merchants once traded
extensively over this northern route.

Italian Merchants in the Mongol Empire

The Pax Mongolica and safe travel accounted only partially for the flourishing of
Mediterranean-Mongol trade. The intensification of trade was also the result of the commercial
revolution that sent Italian traders on wide missions, including those to the Mongol empire. The
primary item in that trade was the silk of China that, as early as 1257, was being sold by
Genoese merchants at the fairs of Champagne, France. Commercial, religious, and “political”
missions were frequently intermixed. The last date for which there is any evidence of Genoese
merchants using the land route to China is in 1344, when a court case was recorded involving

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the inheritance of a merchant who died along the way. Diplomatic missions also were coming to
a close.
In 1339 the Pope sent his last emissary via Central Asia to China for some time. Why?
The land route across Central Asia been closed, and Europe suffered in the chaos of the Black
Death. The vast regions unified under Genghis Khan and his successors were wracked by
internal dissension and depopulated by the plague, for whose spread they were largely
responsible.

The Unintended Consequences of Mongol Success

The unification under the Mongols of much of the central Eurasian land mass put the termini of
Europe and China in direct contact with one another for the first time in a thousand years.
Although this facilitated the expansion of trade by opening up the northern route between China
and the Black Sea outlet to the Mediterranean, its very success led ironically to its eventual
demise. The unintended consequence of unification was the eruption of the Black Death
pandemic that set back the development of a world system for some 150 years.

Samarkand and Other Caravan Centers

Overland trade is a complex matter. Prerequisites for overland trade can be classified as
physical, political, and institutional. Routes must be passable and means for transport must
exist. In the northern overland route that stretched some 5000 miles from end to end, however,
neither could be taken for granted. The quality of the roads that threaded the inhospitable
terrain, the existence of stopping places at regular points in the sparsely inhabited regions, the
ability to obtain water and provisions for a journey that at best took months were all physical
variables that were sensitive to other events.
The great trans-Asian routes were, however, particularly sensitive to political factors as
well. The unification of Central Asia under the Mongols was certainly significant for both the
physical and social channeling of trade. Although they could scarcely be called highways, the
major lateral routes underwent substantial improvement as a result of the steady horse
movements of the Mongols–both troops and post communications. By the end, there was a real
road network, provided with way stations and points around which caravanserais flourished.
Even more important was the safety of travel that a unified and regularized administration
eventually produced.
It is difficult for us today to appreciate the extent to which trade depended on risk
reduction, or the proportion of all costs that might have to be allocated to transit duties, tribute,
or simple extortion. Protection costs (including duties) far exceeded transport expenses
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themselves, which, according to his calculations, were a great bargain. The spread between
purchase/transport costs and gross sale prices might be considered enormous–until one
calculates not only what was added in transit dues but the risks involved in shipments that were
confiscated or lost, as well as in buying goods whose eventual market price could not really be
estimated.
The relative order introduced by the Mongols must have reduced many of these costs,
while their generosity and receptivity to merchants encouraged additional trade through their
territories. The third variable has to do with institutional arrangements for business. It is
important to note here that the operations of the myriad small traders along the caravan routes
would not have been possible, or at least not as efficient, if means for getting credit, transferring
debts, and exchanging funds between one trader and another and between one trading point and
the next had not existed. The check (or rather a demand note to be paid at a distant point and in
a different currency at a pre-established exchange rate) was first institutionalized in Persia and
seems to have been linked to the caravan trade.
Although most points along the caravan route were modest burgs–oases or agricultural
settlements for which the periodic arrival of a string of camels was an exciting festival but not
their staff of life–a few of the cities located at the crossroads of heavily traveled routes grew to
large size, particularly if they occupied fertile sites and also served political or religious
functions. Then, permanent trade and industry were likely to appear, stimulated by local
demand and supplemented heavily by long-distance trade.
Samarkand was perhaps the quintessential caravan city and a political capital. Set near
the point at which the east–west lateral route intersected the north–south “highway” between
India and Russia, embedded in a fertile garden fed by an elaborate irrigation system from a river
that flowed into it. Samarkand was one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. Its persistent
commercial importance derived from its location at the juncture of trade routes, which made it
an attractive prize. It was ruled successively by Turks, Arabs, Persians, and then the Mongols
after 1220 CE. Given its strategic location, it was no accident that fortifications defined
Samarkand. Ibn al-Faqih gives us the earliest description of Muslim Samarkand. He tells us
that, like Balkh and Buhkara, Samarkand and its suburbs were “encircled by a wall with twelve
wooden gates; this enclosed a second wall around the city itself, which in turn contained an
inner third walled area.” The physical expanse of the city was tremendous. According to a
contemporary geographer, “A considerable part of the area was occupied by gardens, almost
each house possessing one; in viewing the town from the summit of the citadel no buildings
were to be seen because of the trees in the gardens.”

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 In spite of the horrendous tales of Genghis Khan’s conquest of the city in 1220 CE–
accounts of mass murders and massive deportations of artisans–it managed to survive. An
eyewitness description of Samarkand in 1221 belies the scorched-earth image, suggesting
instead that life continued, albeit on a much more modest scale.
When trade declined Samarkand survived by other means. Indeed, for a brief time it
attained even greater importance. During the middle third of the fourteenth century the Mongol
forces were in growing disarray, not only from internal dissension but from a thinning of their
ranks from disease. Throughout the various parts of the empire, the ruled revolted. In China the
rebellion resulted in the overthrow of the Yuan dynasty and its replacement in 1368 by the
Ming. In Samarkand, the outcome was different. The beneficiary of the unrest was a Mongol,
Timur (Tamerlane), born near Samarkand and a putative, albeit distant, descendent of Genghis
Khan. He rose to prominence first in the 1357 uprisings. In 1370, Timur proclaimed himself the
new sovereign (and would-be restorer) of the Mongol empire; he did this in Samarkand, which
became his privileged capital.
Thus, during that period of sharpest retrenchment in Central Asia, the late fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries, the condition of Samarkand improved relative to her rivals. During
Timur’s rule Samarkand became the most important economic and cultural center of Central
Asia. From a wide region Timur assembled artisans and craftsmen who not only produced
goods for a luxurious court life but embellished some of the still-standing architectural
masterpieces. From Samarkand Timur’s troops set out in all directions to regather the
fragmented pieces of the empire over which the former Pax Mongolica had been established.
However, whereas the unity achieved under Genghis Khan and his immediate successors
brought relative peace to his realms and encouraged travel and trade, the unity so brutally
wrested by Timur had the opposite effect. It severed the trans-Asian land routes.

Lessons from the Mongol Case

The most striking lesson is that the economic role of facilitator, depending as it does on an
ability to enforce its control over a wide zone, is basically an unstable one, subject to chance
political and demographic fluctuations. In itself, unification does not necessarily reduce the
overall costs of transit, but it has the potential to do so, depending upon policy choices. The
chief contribution made by the Mongols was a reduction in unpredictable protection rent. By
eliminating competing tribute gatherers and by regularizing tolls, unification makes transport
costs calculable. Furthermore, although it can scarcely eliminate natural disasters, such as
droughts that dry up watering holes, it can reduce overall risk by virtually eliminating human

10
predators. As long as these advantages can be assured, trade will flourish, but when roads
become insecure, merchants seek other routes.
A second instability arises from the parasitic nature of tribute as a basis for the state.
Since the Mongols neither traded nor produced, they were inordinately dependent upon the
skills and the labor power of the peoples they conquered to ensure their livelihoods; their
subjects therefore provided the means used to perpetuate their own continued oppression. An
economy so ordered could not be generative. Enlightened self-interest might dictate the
encouragement of commerce and industry and a certain restraint in appropriating surplus, but
the demands of maintaining military supremacy had their own imperative. If they went up, new
sources of surplus had to be found.
Thus, the third instability comes from the need for continual geographic expansion. The
Mongols could not stand still. Expansion of surplus required the conquest of more and more
productive units. And when new peoples could no longer be conquered, the system did not
stabilize, it contracted. This contraction initiated an exponential cycle of decline. If expenses for
control were cut back, restive captives might rebel; if oppressive measures were escalated,
production might suffer, for surplus extraction was already at its maximum. Given this inherent
instability, any new shock might topple the precarious system.
The shock appeared in the second third of the fourteenth century with the outbreak of
the Black Death, which apparently spread fastest among the most mobile elements of the
society, the army. Demographically weakened, the Mongols were less able to exert their control
over their domains, which, one by one, began to revolt. Such revolts disturbed the smooth
processes of production and appropriation on which the rulers depended, which in turn led to a
reduced capacity to suppress the revolts. Once the process began, there was little to prevent its
further devolution.
As the plague spread to the rest of the world system, impulse to conduct long-distance
trade was similarly inhibited, although it did not entirely disappear. But when trade revived, the
myriad number of small traders sought more secure paths. These were, however, no longer in
the forbidding wastes of Central Asia. The lower risks, and therefore lower protective rents
along that route, were forever gone.

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