When the Mongols burst onto the scene in the thirteenth century, Chinese culture and Buddhism were providing a measure of integration among the peoples of East Asia, Christianity was doing the same for Europe, and the realm of Islam connected most of the lands in between. But it was the Mongol Empire, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that brought all of these regions into a single interacting network, enabling the circulation of goods, information, disease, and styles of warfare all across Eurasia and parts of Africa.
Toward a Eurasian Economy
The Mongols themselves did not produce much of value for distant markets, nor were they active traders. Nonetheless, they consistently promoted international commerce, largely so that they could tax it and thus extract wealth from more developed civilizations. The Great Khan Ogodei, for example, often paid well over the asking price to attract merchants to his capital of Karakorum. The Mongols also provided financial backing for caravans, introduced standardized weights and measures, and gave tax breaks to merchants.
In providing a relatively secure environment for merchants making the long and arduous journey across Central Asia between Europe and China, the Mongol Empire brought the two ends of the Eurasian world into closer contact than ever before and launched a new phase in the history of long-distance trade and travel. Many European merchants, mostly from Italian cities, traveled along the Silk Roads to China. Indeed, so many traders attempted the journey that guidebooks circulated with much useful advice about the trip. One of them, by an Italian banker from Florence named Frances Pegliotti, contained this advice:
In the first place you must let your beard grow and not shave. And … you should furnish yourself with a dragoman [a guide or interpreter]. And you must not try to save money by taking a bad one instead of a good one. For the additional wages of a good one will not cost you as much as you will save by having him.16
European merchants, including Marco Polo, returned with tales of rich lands and prosperous commercial opportunities, but what they described were long-established trading networks of which Europeans had been largely ignorant.
AP® EXAM TIP
You should know the economic and political effects of the Mongols as well as the cultural and technological transfers they initiated.
Similarly, traders and travelers from the Islamic world made journeys along both the Silk Roads of Mongol Central Asia and the Sea Roads of the Indian Ocean to Mongol China. Ibn Battuta, an Arab Muslim and intrepid traveler from Morocco in northwest Africa, made the journey by sea to China in 1345 following long-established routes of Arab merchants. He stayed only a year or so, and while he was impressed by many things, he was also culturally uncomfortable, living outside of the Islamic world. Nonetheless, he was not alone, for he noted: “In all Chinese provinces, there is a town for the Mohammedans [Muslims], and in this they reside. They also have cells, colleges and mosques, and are made much of by the Kings of China.”17
The Mongol trading circuit was a central element in an even larger commercial network that linked much of the Afro-Eurasian world in the thirteenth century (see Map 4.2). Mongol-ruled China was the fulcrum of this huge system, connecting the overland route through the Mongol Empire with the oceanic routes through the South China Sea and Indian Ocean (see Chapter 3).
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