Download PDF | The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450), By Virgil Ciocîltan (Author), Brill 2012.
340 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was originally a doctoral thesis, and I owe its composition, along with my whole training as a historian, to Professor Serban Papacostea, member of the Romanian Academy, who has supervised my work as a researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History in Bucharest since 1971.
Professor Gottfried Schramm, Professor Ulrich Haarmann, Professor Dieter Mertens and Doctor Ursula Ott of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg gave me unstinting support, in word and in deed, while I was gathering source material in German libraries with the help of a stipend from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My great good fortune in having such help and support became clear to me ten years later back home in Romania, when I set about updating the bibliography for the English edition of this work. Although much can be achieved with research on the internet and inter-library loans, I sorely felt my lack of access to libraries such as that of the Freiburg Orientalisches Seminar, which undoubtedly contain a wealth of recent literature on the topic which I could not, alas, include.
Samuel Willcocks and his wife, Dr Maria Pakucs, have ensured that the English translation follows my arguments and style in the Romanian version of the book as closely as possible, while Dr Juliana Barnea’s professional and painstaking work on the maps has illustrated the sweep and scope of these arguments.
To all these people, and to the institutions named, I owe my most heartfelt gratitude.
CHAPTER ONE
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
It is a well-established fact that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Black Sea benefited from an economic boom without parallel in the Middle Ages, since during this period more than any other this crossroads region fulfilled the function that Gheorghe Bratianu so aptly described as a “plaque tournante” (“turntable”) of the Eurasian trade.!
The Romanian historian made extensive studies of the commercial activity of Western seafarers in the Black Sea, and especially of the interests and actions of the Venetians and, predominantly, the Genoese.” He must also be credited with the insight that the famous Pax Mongolica was fundamental to the development of trade in the Black Sea as in all the other areas across which it extended. Nevertheless, along with all those who shared this historical view, he missed two factors: shifts within the great web of long-distance trade routes controlled by the Chinggisids, and the khans’ own concrete initiatives in the realm of Black Sea trade. Both were of supreme importance for the truly exceptional economic development of the Black Sea region.
It is impossible to correctly appreciate the importance of these factors, their profound implications and the specific forms which they took, without first clarifying the attitudes of the Mongol rulers to trade in general. The first step in such an assessment is to research the sources, and the historiographical concepts and approaches, touching on relations between the khans and the merchants.
11 The Mongols and Trade
There is no escaping the fact that the massacres and devastation which the Mongols left in their wake in the course of their conquests will forever—and rightly—cast a shadow over Chinggisid history.
Nevertheless, even from the very start there were discordant notes in this dismal image: even those who suffered from the Mongol scourge could not restrain themselves from admiring comment on the conquerors’ military prowess. Similarly, the sheer size of the empire, which in the midthirteenth century extended from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, was impressive.
Those who had direct experience of internal conditions in the state were among the most admiring voices. They did not hesitate to praise the law and order which the rulers could guarantee throughout the whole extent of the vast empire. Positive opinion only increased once foreign travellers, merchants or missionaries, came forward to say that not only did the ‘barbarians’ not forbid access to the territories that they ruled, but they even encouraged travellers to their enormous Eurasian domain. This welcoming attitude was all the more surprising since it so visibly went against the well-known practice in Islamic and Byzantine lands of completely forbidding foreigners to travel in the interior of the country.
Indeed, the most positive accomplishment in all of Chinggisid history is precisely the extraordinary ease of access and transit which they created in an enormous geographical space. People from the most diverse cultural regions, heretofore isolated from one another, came into contact for the first time, came to know one another, and exchanged material goods and religious or intellectual ideas.
Among the first to take advantage of the abolition of traditional barriers and the opening of new horizons were, of course, merchants. It is selfevident that in such unusual conditions, transcontinental trade developed at a dizzying rate, on a scale unprecedented in the Middle Ages.
Historians agree in emphasising that this measure was the Mongol khans’ decisive contribution to the development of the global economy. No significant voices deny the achievement, just as no arguments would be sufficient to refute this major fact in world history.
Sadly, the historical consensus is not demonstrably based on concrete proofs. It is here, precisely in the domain of academic rigour and demonstration, above and beyond any general impressions, that the difficulties begin. As might easily be supposed, the main fault underlying this state of affairs—as in so many other instances in medieval history—is the scarcity of source material.
11.1 Sources and Historiographical Concepts
One of those who deplored the paucity of information on trade during the time of Mongol rule was Bertold Spuler, unsurpassed as a scholar of Chinggisid history. His remark on the situation in the Tartar? state in Iran is indeed discouraging.®
Surviving written sources from the Ilkhanate’—where, as is well known, the long-established Persian bureaucracy continued to function with a high degree of efficiency under the Mongols—give some idea, however exiguous, of merchant activity and of the policies which this or that ruler may have adopted regarding the merchant class. It is no surprise then that a genuine steppe empire, as the Golden Horde was, left incomparably fewer documents as evidence. Indeed the output of documents issued by the khans of Desht-i Qipchaq’ seems, by all appearances, to have been already very modest, and the number that has survived the ravages of time is so low that they can be counted on one’s fingers.
Nor is there any hope of supplementing this scanty internal source with information from private documents, since these too are notably absent. Equally discouraging to researchers is the situation regarding narrative sources, since none of the rulers of the ulus of Jochi® in the Cuman steppe departed sufficiently far from nomad habits to feel any need to immortalise his deeds through the efforts of court chroniclers.
By contrast, in the neighbouring Ikhanate—as in China—the genius loci displaced at least a part of these established customs. In the fertile cultural soil of Persia, works of history and literature flourished under Mongol rule which were no lesser in quality than those composed in other epochs under the patronage of local rulers.? For instance, the works of the great Persian scholars ‘Ala al-Din ‘Ata Malik Juwayni and Fadl Allah Rashid al-Din are fundamental not just for understanding the history of the Ilkhanate, but also that of all other branches of the Chinggisid dynasty down to the beginning of the fifteenth century; these works recorded and duly celebrated the deeds of the rulers at some length, but do not mention merchants except briefly and in passing, since this socioprofessional class was valued no more highly in Muslim circles than it was in Christian settings.!°
Although there are more internal Ilkhanid sources on trade than these Persian chronicles alone, these cannot offer anywhere near as much information as external sources. These latter are more numerous and more comprehensive, offering the main body of evidence for the history of trade both during the time of the unitary empire and, after 1260, in the age of the Mongol successor states.!!
Of the multitude of documents, uncommonly heterogeneous both in genre and in place of origin, which happen to contain information about trade, it is worth paying closer attention to the ‘high-profile’ sources preserved in the archives of Genoa and Venice, the great maritime and commercial powers of the Middle Ages. Documents touching upon commercial activity by the subjects of these two republics in the lands governed by the Tartars are unevenly distributed, both chronologically and geographically, and by their very nature they give only a partial and partisan picture of the complex of problems in trade under Mongol patronage, yet despite all these reservations they far surpass any other sources in the precision of the information they offer.!
The absence of internal sources mentioned above is indeed to a great extent compensated by the Italians, who either found themselves physically and geographically in the thick of the action, or else were at least much concerned with the problems connected to the trade, and who built the structures whereby we generally understand Eurasian trade in Chinggisid times. Among many illustrious names, it suffices here to mention Marco Polo, a tireless and well-informed observer of the trade conditions he came across on his famous voyage to China; Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, who wrote a detailed and voluminous guidebook for those of his contemporaries who wished to travel the transcontinental routes; and Marino Sanudo, one of the most clear-sighted thinkers on the problem of long-distance trade in the context of the Crusades.
Such contributions led to the creation of a framework and integrative vision of Eurasian trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This strongly-founded structure has lost none of its relevance down to this day. It has remained, whether acknowledged or tacitly, the basis for all modern attempts to reconstruct organically this important historical phenomenon.!*+
One of the cardinal virtues of the conceptual framework which Western veterans of the long-distance trade drew up is that it aligns the content of various reports and sources, and organises them in a coherent, intelligible system. This imposition of ‘structure’ on the sources has a further use, which should by no means be overlooked: it also reveals where there are gaps in the information about merchants and their trade. Historians’ attempts to garner useful information about trade from the huge and polyglot mass of both Eastern and Western sources! has cleared up remarkably many aspects of this complex of questions, but far too many still languish in obscurity. Examination of the sources and the secondary literature leads to an inescapable conclusion: the volume of trade-related information is far too small to allow any scholar to write a ‘compact’ history of trade in the Mongol period. Although it is not uniform, the sparseness of source material which Spuler noted in the case of the Ilkhanate is also encountered throughout the period of Tartar rule, and across the whole area in which they governed.
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Despite his largely justified misgivings, Spuler’s pessimism is contradicted by countless works proving that historians did not resign themselves to merely gleaning a few notes and queries, but made decisive strides toward our understanding of various aspects of Eurasian trade in the Chinggisid era, and indeed toward understanding its very nature.'®
How was such progress possible?
To answer this question, it is enough to compare the contrasting findings of studies in trade and commerce by scholars with differing ideas on what commerce is.
Here I refer on the one hand to Spuler’s chapter, already frequently mentioned, where he collected those few scattered reports on merchant activity in Persia under the Mongols, and on the other hand to the substantial chapter on the Ilkhanate in Wilhelm Heyd’s monograph on the history of Levantine trade.!” The formal constraints imposed by the different themes of these two works—one concerned to present an overall view of the Ilkhanate, in which trade was necessarily given only a limited space, the other primarily examining the historiographical problems of commerce, and presenting these as a unitary whole—does not explain the fundamental difference in their approach to the matter under discussion. The two historians were at odds in their essential concept of trade, more precisely in the way they understood the concept and its extent. Thus in Spuler’s view, trade primarily means the sum of all activities undertaken by professional merchants, as reflected in a specific set of documents (account books, registers etc.). For Heyd, the same word has a much larger and more complex meaning, and it cannot be understood in its true scale outside of the geopolitical context created by the Mongol conquests, the determining framework for the concrete conditions under which goods where produced and traded. The state of the roads, security and ease of transport, customs duties and many other ‘peripheral’ matters all entered into this extended definition of trade.
Basing his concept on such considerations, Heyd included the Mongol khan, alongside the merchants, as an essential player and participant in the process of trade and exchange. The khan was the main actor in assuring those conditions which the professional merchants needed to practice their trade. The sources consistently attest that the Chinggisid rulers made sustained efforts to create and to maintain an infrastructure for long-distance trade, and sought, through a series of liberal measures, to make the territories which they controlled as attractive as possible for foreign merchants.
Such are the broad outlines of the portrait of the Mongol ruler as protector and promoter of trade, as this can be found in contemporary accounts and specialist literature; furthermore, they also indicate the extent of his powers and ability to affect the sphere of trade. Despite inevitable variations over time and in different lands, the trade policy of the Mongol khans was relatively stable in its characteristics, a circumstance which makes it much easier to define and to classify this policy.
As it is, most historians have understood matters in the same way as Heyd, considering that trade is a part of the ruler’s power when this power is exercised in economic affairs, especially touching trade.!® According to the established view in the historiography of the topic, the extent of Chinggisid powers and interests covered approximately the same field of problems as a Minister for Trade’s portfolio ordinarily includes today.
There are strong indications that even such an understanding is too restricted to do justice to the overwhelming importance that the Mongol khans gave to trade, or to fully convey the stranglehold which trade policy had on other spheres of activity. It is not merely that such a presentation arbitrarily cuts off the side-branches which run out from trade and commerce into various other areas of the economy and social life; there is another aspect which is much more prejudicial to a full understanding of the importance of trade from the perspective of the Mongol rulers.
Taken in isolation, trade policy appears to be a self-contained matter which is subordinate to other decisions taken at a higher level. Admittedly, such a subordinate status cannot be disproven, and it accordingly features, either tacitly or overtly emphasised, in works on the topic. The opposite argument, namely that trade and commercial considerations determined wider Chinggisid state policy, has not been advanced to anything like the same extent. Even if a few historians have suspected that, for example, strong commercial impulses may have underlain some of the great trends in foreign policy (while the sources passed over these motives in silence) there has so far been no systematic research into the way such considerations may have impacted the great business of state.!9
From this perspective, the khans’ “interventionist” approach favouring the merchants not only attests to a sphere of activity well beyond the traditional limits of trade policy stricto sensu, but it also confirms the suspicion that merchants fulfilled a central function in the Chinggisid state.
Any study hoping to establish the exact degree of mutual dependence between the khan and the merchants can only reach provisional conclusions, but it is inevitable that we set out the nature of the bond as a premise for further argument if we are to discern those instances where trade considerations weighed in a political decision, especially in those cases where the sources keep silent.
11.2 The Khan and the Merchants: A Symbiotic Relationship
The cohesion of a band of armed men is based on a contract: the members of the group offer their captain their “services,” while he in turn is obliged to ensure the success of their raids. The booty is divided up among the participants according to no fixed set of rules, and serves to reward effort and encourage loyalty—it is a guarantee that these joint actions will continue. The prestige and the power of the leader depend on the amount of treasure that each of his men can heap up. This law of do ut des is an objective, widespread law in history, and also runs through the history of the Chinggisids from start to finish.
In this respect as in many others, the assembly of princes and high officials (qurultai) of 1206 was a memorable occasion: our most significant internal source, referring to this gathering of the members of Chinggis Khan’s family and the Mongol nobility, mentions the lordly manner in which Chinggis Khan rewarded each companion who had stood beside him in battle, whether famous engagements or obscure skirmishes, up until that moment.?° This was an exemplary action by the founder of the empire, who thereby elevated such behaviour to a principle of government which all his successors would be obliged to respect.?! It was an unnecessary precaution: his successors knew that their rule was endangered as soon as their retinue’s thirst for profit went unsatisfied, and this argument was far more persuasive than any demonstrative legacy.
Fulfilling this need was always a pressing problem. The ongoing answer was of course “the war that feeds on war.” Indeed, from China all the way to Central Europe and the shores of the Mediterranean, plundered booty fed the Mongol armies’ taste for combat. Moreover, since the resources available grew as the conquests went on, the business of conquest, planned and carried out on a transcontinental scale, swept along with it enormous quantities of material resources and immense numbers of men. The Chinggisids proved to be unrivalled in the art of mobilising such vast resources for war.
Armed raids for plunder, however, also brought with them a consequence that was seriously inconvenient for the invaders as well as for the victims: the massacres and looting which the Mongols indulged in wherever they went destroyed livelihoods and production, so that captains were forced to lead their men onwards, in search of plunder, to ever new horizons. Since there were objective limits, the Mongol khans found that they could not satisfy the need for more and more loot, neither in day-today conquest nor, evidently, in the (infinitely) long run. One of Chinggis’ councillors had advised him that “the empire was created from horseback, but it cannot be ruled from horseback”*2—an undeniable truth.
The Mongol rulers’ leadership qualities were also much in evidence, though in less spectacular fashion, in peacetime. Their achievements as peacetime rulers are all the more remarkable because the chronic problem of finding sources of income to support their military and civilian retinues became acute once the wars of conquest had ceased. Until this point, the stability of their power had been assured by the very dynamic of its expansion—a process comparable to a man riding a bicycle, who can only keep his balance while he is in motion—but now it had to be guaranteed by other means.
The task of converting a war economy into a system for making the best use of human potential and material resources began early; it was a long process, with many twists and turns, and never succeeded in supplanting the empire’s fundamentally military structure, nor that of the Mongol successor states. The administrative apparatus had already taken shape during the period of expansion, and it was progressively built upon and perfected. Run by predominantly Muslim or Chinese personnel, the system was primarily aimed at collecting revenue for the khan’s treasury. The great census of the population all across the empire, carried out at the great khan Méngke’s orders in the mid-thirteenth century in order to improve tax-gathering, is the most developed expression of this underlying concern.”
However efficiently the apparatus worked—and this was only rarely the case?4—the endemic poverty of the rural and urban tax base, exacerbated dramatically by the devastations of the invasion era and the savage extraction of wealth which followed, was a harsh reality with severe repercussions for the balance between income and expenses.”5 In this regard, it was an additional disadvantage that by the nature of things, most taxes were raised in kind and in produce.” The khans, however, needed precisely movable wealth and precious goods—and they never had enough of exactly these.
A convincing number of sources show that in the most authentic ‘barbarian’ tradition, the Chinggisid rulers preferred these forms of concentrated wealth as payment.2” Alongside lesser expenses that devoured their budget, their army was top-heavy when compared to the available economic base and was the principal, and always insatiable, consumer of this wealth.28 Whether we are discussing the unitary empire at the height of its strength?9 or the fragments that were left when the empire was carved up,2° an inherent weakness was always gnawing inexorably away at the state’s strength: the khans’ revenues did not keep pace with the expenses which their position as rulers obliged them to meet. This discrepancy was at the root of several crises which led the state to the brink of collapse.
This being the case, it should be no surprise that merchants were seen as the saviours of state finances thanks to both the volume and the nature of their payments toward a budget which was never sufficient to needs. In this context, the IIkhan Ahmad Tegiider expressed an opinion which was surely widely shared by the other Chinggisids when he called the merchant the “foundation of the state.”°? Timur Lenk (Tamberlane) was even better placed to judge the importance of merchants in Eurasian long-distance trade, ruling as he did over such vast territories: the ‘world-conqueror’ applied all his energies to rebuilding the Mongol empire, and shortly after his victory in the battle of Ankara (1402) he wrote to Charles IV of France that merchants were the basis of all prosperity, and invited the king to join him in protecting them.%%
Timur Lenk’s conduct toward the merchant class was by no means innovative: his Mongol predecessors took the same benevolent attitude, offering patronage which made their mercantile policy one of the brightest pages in their history—in stark contrast to the barbarity of the conquests. Various different sources agree that this was characteristic for all the khans, from the all-powerful rulers of the unitary empire down to the epigonal princelings of the ages of decline.3+ No effort was spared to encourage all kinds of commercial activity: they allowed unhindered access for foreigners in the lands which they governed,®° guaranteed safety for travellers and ensured the proper conditions for transport of goods, which of course also included setting customs duties at an attractive level. Any measure which would increase trade was considered good.*°
The unprecedented amount of transcontinental trade in the Chinggisid era is clear proof that the khans’ efforts were successful. In turn, the scale of their achievements is an indication of the economic constraints which forced the Mongol rulers, at all times and in all their realms, to work to the advantage of the merchants. If we are to judge exactly how far any given Chinggisid ruler depended on income drawn from trade, we need to establish its relative importance in the balance of income and expenditure. Sadly, any such calculations are ruled out, since the quantitative information available does not allow any such estimation even in exceptional cases.3”
In my view, the problematic effects of this paucity of sources can be reduced to some extent if we include the Mongol case in a whole series of others such, a larger Fallreihe where the vital relationship between rulers and merchants is the common denominator. Therefore, before going on to analyse the economic basis of power in the Chinggisid Empire and its successor states in concrete terms, I will compare the convergent findings of other scholars of the medieval era who have examined the matter from the same perspective using cases from outside the Mongol realm.
The effects of this “unwritten law’ become especially evident at moments when long-distance trade stops contributing to the treasury for one reason or another. Below are a few instructive examples of the symbiotic relationship between state power and trade beyond the lands under Mongol rule.
The scholar who has written most memorably on the subject, in work which has long counted as a classic of historiography, was Henri Pirenne. Whether or not we agree with the thesis that Islamic expansion caused the cessation of commerce in the Merovingian state, his conclusion that the end of long-distance trade caused the decline of the first Frankish dynasty has become a model of historical reasoning.
In his view, after the death of Dagobert I in 639 the reduced flow of material goods to the central power shifted the balance of forces between the monarch and the aristocracy, as so often happens. While trade flourished and kept the royal exchequer well-supplied, the king had enough resources to maintain a personal guard (trustis) which could keep the lay and ecclesiastical grandees in check. Once customs receipts began to drop in the latter half of the eighth century, the nobility wrung ever more extensive privileges from the king, and anarchy became widespread.3® Pirenne considered that by the nature of things, trade held a crucial position in the Merovingian state economy, above other sources of income, including the land tax.39
The same dependence between central authority and trade which Pirenne demonstrated in the case of the Frankish Merovingian kingdom can also be found, not just in those states which we are accustomed to call merchant republics, above all Venice and Genoa, but in many other states which in the Middle Ages profited so much from trade revenues that they tied their fortunes irrevocably to the ups and downs of trade fluctuations.
The ability to profit from such an advantage depended, above all, on a given state’s position on the trade routes, which were more or less intensively used from one epoch to the next in response to geographic, economic and political changes in the region and world-wide. The role of intermediary proved to be unusually profitable, and was reserved to a lucky few. I will mention only two cases to give an idea of their characteristic features, though a long series of further examples might be cited.
While the Merovingian kingdom was in decline in the West, the Khazar Empire began its ascent in Eastern Europe. This steppeland state, ruled by a Jewish aristocracy, was situated on the middle and lower courses on the Volga and the Don, and drew immense revenues from the transit trade along the two rivers between its Southern neighbours, the Umayyad caliphate (after 750 the Abbasid) and Byzantium, and the Volga Bulgars, Russians and Scandinavians to the North.*° One of the most consistent features of the Khazar khagans’ trade policy was the complete freedom of movement granted to foreign merchants, and it seems that the Khazars did not have their own commercial class. The principle products from the North, furs and slaves, were much in demand in the Muslim world and were mostly paid for in dirhems, the silver coinage of the caliphs.*!
The revenues drawn from the 10% customs duty, imposed ad valorem on the transit trade, formed the basis for the Khazar rulers’ power, although of course they were not the sole component.”
According to the analysis by Th. S. Noonan, the most thorough scholar of Khazar economics, “the lucrative international trade provided immense income for the state [ie. Khazar Khaganate]. These revenues were used, among other things, to reinforce the army through the employment of large numbers of Muslim auxiliaries from Khwarezm. This enlarged army, in turn, ensured the collection of tribute from the 25 or more dependent peoples and provided the security that made Khazaria a safe place for merchants to do business.”43 As in the Merovingian case as well, the khagans depended entirely on the Volga-Don trade, as Noonan notes. “The prosperity and political viability of the Khazar khaganate were based on the existence of both lucrative international trade and a well developed domestic commerce. [...] The shift of the main trade route from the Islamic world to European Russia via Bulghar ca. 900 caused a sharp drop in Khazaria’s income which threatened its political power. [...] The highly diversified internal economy could not compensate for the loss of so much revenue derived from foreign commerce.”“* As a result, when Svyatoslav, ruler of the Kievan Rus’, destroyed the Khazar commercial centres in his campaign of 962, among them the famous capital of Itil on the Volga, this was a blow from which the empire never recovered. It should be remarked here that the attack was launched against a weakened state that was unable to defend itself as it had in the past against attack by the caliphate.*5
As is well-known, the conquerors who took over in the Khazar territories had been both warriors and traders ever since the foundation of their state. Kievan Rus’ was a political expression of the power gained by successfully controlling the famous Dnieper route from the Varangian lands of the Baltic all the way to Byzantium. The conflict between the Rurikids and the Khazars was generated (even dictated) by competition between parallel trade routes, the Dnieper on the one hand and the Don and the Volga on the other.
The second much-studied case which I have chosen here to exemplify the symbiotic relationship between central power and transit trade is that of the Mamluk sultanate.
The Mongol invasion, which culminated in 1258 with the fall of Baghdad and the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate, changed only the rulership over one part of the Eurasian trade network, rather than changing the routes themselves. The true end of this Eurasian system came with the great geographical discoveries at the close of the fifteenth century, when long-distance trade shifted to other horizons, with other participants and others who drew the profit. When Vasco da Gama made the first recorded voyage to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, at almost exactly the same time as Christopher Columbus discovered America, these voyages had fatal and irreversible consequences across the whole Islamic world, which definitively lost its economic and political pre-eminence.*®
This large-scale process is neatly illustrated on the smaller stage by the long-drawn-out death throes of the Mamluk sultanate, which casts much light on the symbiotic relationship between the ruler and the merchants.
Even the very name of the state bears witness to its unusual economic strength: the Arabic word Mamluk means slave, and the slave warriors who made up the army and the political elite from 1250 to 1516 were in the final analysis themselves a commercial ware, imported to Egypt and Syria. It is self-evident that the sultans had to spend enormous sums of money to acquire the slaves which they imported from the regions North of the Black Sea in numbers sufficient to turn back the Mongols in 1261 and to keep them from crossing the Euphrates in subsequent decades. It was no secret that the sultans’ fabulous wealth came from levies imposed on transit trade especially in spices from India; the Venetian Marino Sanudo says that the customs levy was one-third of the value of goods, while other sources put it at 10% or 20%.*” Such high levies were possible because of the reduced costs of transport, almost entirely by water, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, then after a short overland portage, along the Nile as far as the port of Alexandria,*® which William of Tyre justifiably called forum publicum utrique orbi.*9 The city held the staple right and offered Italian merchants, mostly Venetian, spices and other botanicals in much greater quantities and at much lower prices than anywhere else on the Mediterranean.°°
Alexandria enjoyed uncontested pre-eminence at least from the tenth century, but was pushed aside by Portuguese entrepreneurs in the space of only a few years. The Portuguese had rounded Africa under Vasco da Gama and landed on the Western coast of the Indian subcontinent for the first time on 20th May 1498. His compatriots then launched expedition after expedition at a feverish rate, buying spices directly at source, and in a short time succeeded in making Lisbon the principle marketplace in Western Europe for Oriental wares. The diversion of the flow of trade around the Cape of Good Hope was already causing a collapse on the Egyptian market in 1502, along with a substantial increase in prices,>! which led to concern in Venice, whose merchants had traditionally been the most important Western and Central European importers and redistributors of these goods. The Senate was aware that the fate of the Republic was at stake, and in the same year they sent Benedetto Sanudo to the sultan al-Ashraf Qansih al-Gawri to warn him of the seriousness of the danger they were facing together, and to recommend counter-measures. The sultan’s reaction could hardly have been slower or more lethargic.52 He did not send ships to combat those who were destroying the “foundation of his power and wealth” until 1509.59 These ships were promptly sunk by the fleet under Francesco Almeida at Diu, which put a stop to the sultan’s naval campaign against the Portuguese®* and allowed them to consolidate their position in the region: in 1510 Goa became the capital of their colonial empire.®®
Thus the stages of Portuguese triumph marched closely in step with Mamluk decline. When the Ottoman Selim I attacked and conquered Egypt in 1516, he had a relatively easy task, since he encountered an enfeebled state whose great trade route, which had once fed its strength, had ceased to function.>®
The Golden Horde belongs in the same category as the Mamluk sultanate and the Khazar Empire, sharing with the latter not just the same heartland but a similarly structured economy, which was just as fatally dependent on trade. It is thus obvious that, mutatis mutandis, these two steppeland states flourished and then declined in similar ways.
Reliable sources record that the majority of the Horde’s population lived a pastoral life, which gives the misleading impression that even after the Mongol armies dismounted and settled down, the nomads continued their ancestral way of life in the Cuman steppe in every particular, with its loose forms of association. In fact, from 1242 onwards the vast steppe was occupied by a state in the full sense of the word, which showed exceptional order and rigorous centralism for a remarkably long time. Like any other state, the Golden Horde was an expensive business. However, the besetting problem which overshadowed the fates of all the Mongol states was more severe in the case of the ulus of Jochi than elsewhere, since on the steppe, the material resources needed to maintain great-power status were rarer than in the settled lands which fell under Mongol rule elsewhere.” However hard the Jochid khans tried to squeeze their vassals and their own subjects, the Horde’s resource-hungry economy was far too fragile a base to support the crushing burden of their rule.
The reputation which the khans of the Golden Horde enjoyed as protectors of long-distance trade necessarily resulted from the same fatal flaw.5® The results obtained by efforts to redress this structural infirmity in the Golden Horde’s economy were nevertheless remarkable; the scarcity of resources was a problem from the very beginning of the state’s existence.5? The Pax Mongolica not only led to a greater volume of trade in the established goods on the North-South axis; the Jochid rulers also succeeded in connecting the Golden Horde to the trunk roads of trade linking China and Central Asia to the Mediterranean-Black Sea economic area via their own route, developed under their rule.6°
Such trade links, developed by mutually advantageous cooperation between the khan and the merchants, prove that despite appearances the Golden Horde was never an autarchy. Like the Khazar Empire, it had a more diversified economy than is commonly believed, but for all that it drew its lifeblood from the arteries of Eurasian trade. Here, far more than in other Chinghizid territories, the merchant truly deserved to be called the foundation of the state.
The Jochid state’s extreme dependence on trade harboured the same dangers as in the Mamluk sultanate and the Khazar empire. The success of Timur Lenk’s campaign in 1395-1396, which destroyed the Golden Horde’s commercial centres (Sarai, Astrakhan and Tana), paralysed commercial activity in the Cuman steppe and brought on the Horde’s true death throes (c. 1430)® but his victories were certainly made easier by the material losses incurred once Janibek had launched the war against the Genoese and Venetians in Crimea in 1343:5% the war led to a drastic drop in trade, which in turn caused two decades of internal strife in the Horde and softened it up for the blow. Here Timur’s actions can properly be compared with those of Svyatoslav and Selim I, not just taken in isolation but also in terms of background and consequences: all three conquerors encountered states weakened by a severe economic crash, which loosened state structures and made them ready for unravelling.
The khanates which emerged from the collapse of the Golden Horde offer even more convincing proof of the symbiotic relationship between the khan and the merchants. These Jochid successor states survived not in the open steppe, as might be expected, but in and around the great commercial centres. Even the names of these khanates are instructive: Crimea, Astrakhan, Kazan. These were the true commercial strongholds, islands of trade in a surrounding nomadic landscape.
It is hard for us, accustomed as we are to the realities of today, to imagine the truly exceptional importance of the transit trade in the Middle Ages as a source of revenue. Its role only began to decline with the start of industrialisation, which increased productivity many times over and stimulated activity enormously in many different sectors of the economy which then became major contributors to the budget. As a result, the transit trade’s remarkable significance in the Middle Ages as a resource supplier to the state can only be explained on the basis of a general feebleness in the rest of the economy. Setting aside regional variations here and there, and notable exceptions, this was the predominant state of affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Under these conditions, it should be no surprise that in every state that took shape in this vast area, where trade was a mainstay of power, a relationship of interdependence grew up: the rulers were principally responsible for safety and security, and the great merchants were the principal contributors to the budget. This being the case, it is clear why every ruler had to make his mark as a protector of commerce, and furthermore why the governing power so often needed help and support from trade. The numerous wars for control of the routes also attest to this truth, in the Mongol world as elsewhere.
11.3 The Silk Road as the Spine of Eurasian Commerce
The vast network of Eurasian trade routes made up a system stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from the taiga to the Indian Ocean. Certainly, not all routes were equally important within the network, nor were the towns and regions that they connected. From this perspective, the Silk Road linking China to the Eastern Mediterranean was far and away the most important, forming the veritable backbone of Eurasian trade. A few preliminary observations are in order if we are to understand its anatomy and physiology.
In premodern times, goods were transported either by water or overland. Although there are no exact quantitative data to help us grasp the comparative advantages or disadvantages of one or the other mode of transport, it may be instructive to draw an analogy from precise figures available in our own day. Thus for instance, where it costs €45.21 to transport a ton of goods 1,000 kilometres by road freight and €48.42 by rail freight (Deutsche Bahn), the same payload and distance costs only €12.60 by river and canal.®° Thus prices are at a ratio of 41 in favour of water transport, and this disproportion can only have been greater in the Middle Ages when road transport relied on animal power, either yoked or harnessed to carts, or loaded directly as pack animals; the inconvenience of such freight compared to modern mechanised transport can easily be imagined, especially given the deplorable state of the roads.**
Under such conditions, it is understandable that the sea or river routes were always preferred wherever possible. Merchants in particular always paid close attention to the costs of transport, since they were always seeking to maximise profits and these costs contributed to the final price of goods. However, during the Chinggisid era, when most of Asia and Western Europe enjoyed open borders thanks to the Pax Mongolica, a “single global market” developed, from the latter thirteenth century onwards. A Genoese merchant travelling on the Silk Road, for example, needed to know how much he could buy a bale of silk for in China, how much his transport costs would be, the rate of the customs levy and so forth, if his wares were to compete on the European market against similar goods which had come via the sea route through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. One tactic which the merchant handbooks recommended was to trade in the wares known as merces subtiles, light, low-volume goods with high unit value (silk, precious stones and metals, pearls etc.).6° It was not only the merchants who were forced to keep an eye on transport costs; their partners, the Mongol khans, also had their own economic interest in keeping the wares moving. One excellent indicator of the Golden Horde’s commercial policy clearly shows how well they understood the unchanging laws of market forces: the Tartar customs at Tana at the mouth of the Don, where the so-called Tartar route linking the Black Sea to Central Asia and China ended, never exceeded 3-5% by value of goods,®® while the Mamluk sultans could afford to impose rates several times higher in Alexandria,®’ on the wares brought via the Red Sea and the Nile.
Many more such observations could be made, and these all tend to yield another “law”; that water transport makes goods cheaper whilst overland transport makes them more expensive. It is self-evident, then, that states with access to sea and river routes for trade could build up much greater concentrations of capital, much more quickly, than states which were land-locked, and this had immense effects not just in the economic sphere but also politically, socially and culturally. Along with the well-known merchant maritime republics, especially Venice and Genoa, we might also include Athens in the same category, unimaginable without Piraeus just as Rome is unimaginable without Ostia.®°
It was not just the sea that brought these benefits: so too did the great waterways, when used to transport wares. This category includes the Khazar state, Kievan Rus’ and the Tartar Horde of the Eurasian steppe, along with the succession of unifying powers that arose in the great cultures of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt.
In the light of what has been said above, it seems that the Silk Road was a paradox in need of explanation, since it was a land-locked trade route par excellence, immensely long and yet of singular importance in the Eurasian trade network. This trans-Asiatic trade route was named in 1877 by the German Sinologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, whose coinage Seidenstrafse was taken up and adopted into various languages thanks both to the historical precision of the term and the aura of legend it conjured up: it was used not just by specialist writers, but by the public at large.”° The name was justified not just because silk was indeed probably the principal product traded on the route but also because, as well as being a manufacture in its own right, it also served as a hard currency: none of the various coinages issued could compete in widespread acceptance.
Most historians follow von Richthofen’s concept of the Silk Road as a via magna which for thousands of years linked the Far East, via Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria or Asia Minor, to the Mediterranean, with greater or lesser detours over time.”! Other historians however consider that this classic definition needs to be abandoned, albeit that it contains a kernel of truth, since the luxury products under discussion here were also transported via other routes, so that instead of talking of one Silk Road, they write of several silk roads.”* The present work uses the term in its original meaning.
The Silk Road, in Ferdinand von Richthofen’s sense, suggests one long route stretching across Eurasia, with towns upon it like beads on a string. This image is somewhat over-simplified, and does not truly reflect either the actual anatomy or the physiology of the Silk Road. The principle settlements were not just simple stopovers, rather they were cross-roads where the main East-West highway intersected with North-South routes. Thus Samarkand drew goods in from the North via its entrep6t at Urgench in Khwarezm, which collected products from the steppe and the taiga, while it also commanded the Southern corridor via Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan and along the valley of the Indus into India; Tabriz had two Northern channels, either through Derbent in the Caucasus or through Erzurum, Trebizond and the Black Sea, and also a Southern route through to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean; Baghdad had the river route down to Basra and thence, again, to the Gulf, while it could also reach the Eastern Mediterranean via Mosul, Damascus and Aleppo. Constantinople was similarly well-placed.
The value of a market-place depends, of course, on the quantity of goods exchanged but also on their variety and how well the goods on offer complement other wares. Thus every one of the major metropolitan centres mentioned—Samarkand, Tabriz, Baghdad and Constantinople—collected and redistributed wares from four major Eurasian areas, each offering a specific range of goods: the Far East, Europe in the Western reaches, the steppe and taiga in the North, and in the South the Indian Ocean.
Another “unwritten law” dictated the position of these major markets, which were always optimally placed to serve as meeting-points for merchants from all four of the major zones. From this perspective, Samarkand, Tabriz and Baghdad satisfied the requirement, and their geographical position made them true commercial centres. Thus the East-West trade route which has gained wider fame as the Silk Road also served, through its lateral branches and supply chains, as the backbone of a whole network of Eurasian commerce.
As a result, although it was entirely land-locked, this principal axis of long-distance trade was able to compete with the parallel sea route via the Indian Ocean both in classical times and in the Middle Ages, even though sea transport was at least ten times cheaper: the Silk Road owed this competitive advantage to its central position par excellence. All the determining factors, geographical and economic, worked to assure its continuing good health: whenever the political circumstances were also favourable, the Silk Road was reborn from its own ashes, with only the minimum of diversions and new routes.
11.4 The Nomads and the Silk Road
The Mongol expansion was essentially nothing more than another nomad incursion into settled lands. The most characteristic feature of Chinggis Khan’s deeds, and those of his followers, was the sheer scale. Here the Mongol achievements can be compared to those of the Arab nomads who set out, in the early years of Islam, to conquer the world. The similarities do not end with scale alone. A comparison of the two episodes of expansion reveals fundamental problems and solutions, including in the reign of long-distance trade.
The warriors around the Prophet Muhammad, like those around Chinggis Khan, came from peripheral areas of the world economy, and their most striking common feature is the shared form of motivation. Living conditions in the Arabian Peninsula, like those in the Mongol steppe, were precarious at best, and when the call to arms came, those who lived in the areas responded en masse to the prospect of material wealth. There is no doubt that the principal enticement for Bedouins called to jihad was the chance of prizes taken in war (gana’im in Arabic),’° just as it was for the Mongol warriors, who were not impelled by any particular religious motives.”4
The wealth available in settled lands has surely represented a temptation from time immemorial, but it was not in itself enough to draw the nomads out from their native lands. They were members of kinship societies governed by the /ex talionis, and their energies were largely used up in unending internal feuds and squabbles in pre-Islamic Arabia’® as in Mongolia up until the time of Chinggis Khan’s youth.” A new individual and group identity had to be forged, superseding tribal sentiment, in order to put an end to such chronic instability and open the way for political unification. Just as the Muslim faith overcame tribal divisions and permitted the formation of a larger Islamic community (the wmma) whose members were at least in theory all equal and bound together by submission to Allah,”” similarly Chinggis Khan’s reforms, decreed at the qurultai of 1206, marked the triumph of a new identity with similarly allencompassing values.
When the same assembly of nobles saw the proclamation of empire, this was a marked break with the tribal past. The military was reorganised on the lines of units of ten men, then of a hundred, a thousand and so on upwards in a unitary principle,’® and this too marked a decisive point in the long process of breaking up the kinship society. Blood ties had been a source of strength but also of wider disunity, and now they gave way to a new, feudal or vassal loyalty.’? This supplanted tribal or clan solidarity or enmity, and opened the way to a new, imperial identity for the nomads as the Mongol ulus, formed and proclaimed at the qurultai®° At the same time, the imperial army took shape. This was to be a formidable instrument in future conquests, and was born of the mass movement ushered in by these radical changes in the world of the steppe-dwellers. Chinggis Khan was the son of this revolution.
In both cases rigorous monotheism contributed decisively to cementing nomad power, whether this was focused on Allah,®! or on the cult of the Eternal Blue Heaven (K6k Tengri).8?
Chinggis Khan has the distinction not only of having brought the nomad fighting forces together under one banner with exemplary organisational skills, but also, equally important, of having enthused them with a mobilising ideal above and beyond their expectations: his imperial vision was ideologically present, albeit only in nuce, as early as 1206. The underlying idea of world conquest soon became state doctrine and thereby the ultimate goal of expansion. By the mandate of Heaven, Chinggis Khan and his family were designated as the executors and beneficiaries of the mission. From the Chinese emperor to the pope in Rome, those who did not submit to the ultimatum of unconditional surrender were considered “rebels” and treated as such. The talk was no longer of raiding expeditions but rather of world domination. This sets the Mongol expansion clearly apart from the usual run of nomad raids beyond the limits of their steppeland.8? Only when gathered in greater than usual numbers, and tightly bound together, did the Bedouin, and the pastoralist Mongols, have the necessary strength to pour forth from the deserts of Arabia, or from the Mongol steppe, in an irresistible tide that swept across the areas of the older civilisations.
Furthermore, these new forms of organisation, with their universalist tendencies, allowed the conquerors to incorporate the conquered into their ranks, meaning that there was in theory no limit to the growth of Mongol and Arab military growth, gathering strength like an avalanche.
The invaders from the Arabian Peninsula and from Mongolia chose the same targets in Asia once they had put some distance between themselves and the poor living conditions of their home regions, aiming for the same great centres on the Silk Road. In a short time the Muslims, like the Mongols after them,®* had conquered the greater part of the long-distance trade networks.8> Once expansion had ground to a halt and there was no more booty to reward warriors for their exertions or other servants for their deeds, the caliphs, just like the Chinggisid khans, were forced to find new resources to maintain the apparatus of state.
Given this necessity, it became an absolute priority to revive longdistance trade.8° This pressing need led both the Arab and the Mongol rulers to do everything in their power to serve the interests of the merchants, given that these were fundamentally their own interests as well.8” As a result, commerce developed in step with the internal organisation of these two empires, both able to ensure appropriate law and order and the necessary infrastructure for trade over vast areas. Early in their histories, both states took shape as large realms where trade routes linked islands of urban exchange.®®
Of cardinal importance for the whole economic, political and cultural history of the Islamic states and of the Mongol Khanates was their geographical position, whereby they controlled trade on an intercontinental scale and played the very lucrative role of principal intermediaries in interstate trade.8° The central sections of the great routes, the Silk Road with its side-branches and the spice route via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, crossed their territories, bringing in wealth and assuring longterm stability. In taking Baghdad and toppling the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, the Mongols changed the ownership of the routes but not the routes themselves, which only changed radically two and a half centuries later in the era of the great discoveries.9°
The ambition to rule over all inhabited lands called for a global strategy from the start. The logical progression of the great campaigns up to 1260 suggests that there was indeed a coherent plan with a set of long-term goals.
However universal the khans’ ambitions to rule—symbolically affirmed by the adjective ‘oceanic’ which was always part of their titles—Mongol power did not spread out evenly, in a perfect circle. The stages of expansion reveal well-defined directions and objectives to this growth.
Medieval sources give a consistent account of the invasions as an overwhelming force which the settled populations had no hope of opposing. Chroniclers—and indeed the majority of later historians—paid far less attention to the enormous difficulties which the horse-nomads encountered once they had left their familiar grasslands. However, if these are lost sight of, one of the most important aspects of the Mongol expansion cannot be understood.
When we measure the conquerors’ achievements against their constantly-proclaimed goal of world domination, the final analysis shows that the strength of the Mongol armies was not inexhaustible. The Chinggisids themselves had a precise definition for the limits of their constantly expanding empire, which was to reach “wherever the Mongol horses place their hooves.” Without the extraordinary endurance of their mounts, which contemporary sources always praised, the breathtaking achievements of Chinggis Khan’s dynasty would be unimaginable. Nevertheless the horse, in the final analysis, set the final limits to empire, just as it was responsible for the initial astonishing expansion.
As in so many other similar cases, the Mongols achieved superiority of force over their enemies where it counted through a successful combination of speed and numbers. Such advantages were of course only possible thanks to the horse, the quintessential military transport at the time.9! Once they emerged from their accustomed territory and crossed large stretches of arid or cultivated land, neither with sufficient grazing, in search of plunder, the nomad cavalry had to rise to the unceasing, unsparing task of finding fodder for their steeds in the settled lands. The difficulty of meeting this need increased daily, proportionately with the number of horses in a campaign. Though the Chinggisid military superpower kept the pastoral economy of the Eurasian steppe well supplied, the solution to this logistical problem nevertheless largely depended on the Mongol armies’ ability to strike hard and move fast in a hostile environment.”
From this perspective, Chinggis Khan and his descendants were unique in the scale and ambition of their attempt to bridge the gulf that had divided the nomadic and settled populations of the vast Eurasian habitat for millennia. The weakness of forces dependent on grazing land was a permanent problem that followed the invaders wherever they went outside of the steppe, with some local variation. We already encounter it in the Mongol case during Chinggis Khan’s own day.
When the Mongol generals around Ogédei suggested turning all of Northem China into pastureland, by killing or deporting the inhabitants, razing their settlements to the ground and letting the arable ground go to seed, this was not an expression of mindless barbarism but rather a response to the strategic need to secure a green corridor to carry the imperial cavalry onward to the Southern lands ruled by the Song dynasty.
The invaders found the huge stretches of land without sufficient grazing in Central Asia, Iran and the Near East equally unwelcoming. The Western drive of their conquests ran into delays from the very start, in a foretaste of the problems to come in the following decades: in 1218 Chinggis Khan was impatient to send his horsemen into Transoxiana to take Muhammad II Khwarezmshah by surprise, but was forced to postpone the campaign by a year for lack of forage.°* A lesser number of cavalry was then sent out under the command of the generals Jebe and Siibédei to pursue the enemy,?° indicating that the terrain in Persia could not support the great numbers of horses in the main army without considerable logistical groundwork. Chinggis Khan responded to the situation by ordering wholesale destruction in Eastern Persia to turn the region into continuous pastureland.9°
This shortcoming considerably delayed the advance of Mongol power in Western Asia, but was partially redressed by one natural advantage, the importance of which in Chinggisid history is impossible to overemphasise: this was the pastureland of Azerbaijan and Arran, fed by many rivers and covered in grass all year round, forming a veritable oasis for all Turanic populations. It is no wonder that the Turanic peoples with their rich herds and flocks were always drawn to the Transcaucasia. This nomad enclave is geographically situated between the settled lands of the Caucasus and Persia, and was predestined to exercise power throughout the region: the Chinggisid strategists appreciated its qualities early on.
Occupying this bridgehead was already a priority in 1229, the first year of the great khan Ogédei’s reign. It was probably due to the difficulties set out above that the emir Chormaghun was unable to fulfil his mission and take Transcaucasia until 1232.97 From that point onward however it would serve as the base of Mongol power in the Near and Middle East until the collapse of the IIkhanate in 1335.
The Hungarian puszta (Pannonia) historically played the same role in the heart of Europe, as the frontier of the great Eurasian steppe. Unlike in Azerbaijan and Arran, the Mongols were not able to take full advantage of these qualities on the Danubian plain as their Hun and Magyar precursors had done, turning the region into a permanent settlement. There were various reasons why the puszta was abandoned once and for all in the spring of 1242, among them the general loss of interest in the Western front among all the Mongol powers—including the ulus of Jochi, newly settled in the Cuman steppe—in favour of a far more rewarding region, economically speaking, than Europe at the time: this was the Levant, and at its heart, the Fertile Crescent.98
We can thus trace Mongol expansion on the map of Eurasian physical geography and reveal how tightly bound up the limits of Chinggisid power were to the existence of pasture for their horses.99 Another factor was equally significant but worked to counter the limits of grassland, drawing the nomads from their habitual environment: this was the attraction that the settled lands held. The deeds of Chinggis Khan and his descendants were carried out between these two poles: the grasslands of home and the great cities of the Silk Road. These two worlds formed the horns of the essential dilemma of Mongol expansion.
1.2 The Mongols and the Black Sea
Medieval chronicles and miniatures show the Mongol warrior on horseback, armed with the typical nomad weapon of all epochs, the bow and arrow. Although a simplification, this classic image reveals the fundamental nature of the armies which Chinggis Khan and his successors used in their projected world conquest: excellently well suited to land-based campaigns, the Mongol cavalry was however entirely ineffective as a fighting force on water. All attempts to overcome this weakness were doomed to failure.
1.2.1. Continental Possessions, Maritime Horizons
In this respect, the failure of the great khan Qubilai’s expeditions to conquer Japan, launched from China in 1274 and 1281, are highly significant, with far-reaching consequences.!°° The greater part of the 150,000 soldiers who took ship in 1281 died; compared to these enormous losses, the defeat of Janibek’s attempts at naval domination in the Black Sea was a side-show. In the mid-fourteenth century the khan of the Golden Horde tried to create naval supremacy at a critical moment in Tartar relations with the Genoese, by launching ships under the Horde’s own flag to break the Italian power. The Genoese got wind of the plan and in 1345 their squadrons destroyed the vessels hastily being built in the port of Cembalo (Balaklava) in Crimea; at the same time they destroyed any hopes that the khan harboured that a continental great power could also become a great naval power.
The Tartars were lords over many lands, but were also land-locked: even though almost all European and Asian coasts of the Black Sea were under direct or indirect Mongol rule by the mid-thirteenth century, fate would have it that they played a passive role in events on the water.!°?
When the nomads poured forth from the depths of Asia, the landlocked nature of their rule became so evident that some observers had the impression that the Mongols as a nation suffered from hydrophobia. Later scholars of the medieval history of the Black Sea, perhaps taking over this error, have also paid remarkably little attention to steppeland influence over the course of events, generally considering that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the sea was the almost exclusive domain of the Italian naval republics, with Genoa exercising unquestioned supremacy. The bibliography on the Black Sea issue in the period is most instructive in this regard.103
One source in particular casts new light on the overly narrow and excessively Mediterranean perspective which most modern scholars take on the matter. In a treaty of December 1347 concluded between the Golden Horde and the Venetians, the khan mentioned above, Janibek, succeeded in including a warning clause: “On the sea, our word shall prevail and we shall have the command.
Although hardly two years had passed since the Genoese had moved to forestall the khan’s attempts at building his own warships, this was no empty claim. Despite having no fleet with which to control the Black Sea, the khan was able to make good the lack by other means, so that his word was indeed respected by all those who sailed there. In the first place, he held the Northern shore of the sea and all its ports, flourishing centres of commerce which drew merchants from many lands. Foreign merchants wishing to take part in the lively trade here depended on the Volga khan’s goodwill. For instance, in the treaty in question, Janibek grants the Venetians the right to trade, on condition that they do not attack ships carrying Muslim passengers.!°> This is one of many indications that even without a naval force as such, the Golden Horde had its own interests on the Black Sea, and the wherewithal to enforce them.
Although, unlike the Golden Horde, it had no control over any Black Sea coasts, the Ilkhanate in Persia also influenced the medieval history of the sea, albeit more discretely and more intermittently. For instance, a warship under Ilkhanate colours was hunting pirates in the Eastern waters of the sea at the end of the thirteenth century.!°°
1.2.2 Expansion and Blockade
Various important enterprises and expeditions reached their peak in the first half of the fourteenth century, and the Western merchants and missionaries travelling in Asia deserve especial mention here. Although the famous names in transcontinental exchange visited Mongolia and China in the previous century, these being the Franciscan friars John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, the busiest period in such long-distance travel was certainly the four decades 1300-1340, even if they do not yield such well-known names. Although Europeans travelled in Asia, there are no recorded Asian travellers visiting Europe during this period. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that Europeans would never have been able to cover the vast distances to the East had it not been for the Pax Mongolica, indispensible to the safety of foreign travellers. Chinggis Khan’s successors kept this peace across an enormous stretch of territory, from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Borders in Asia were open as a result of Chinggisid conquests in the previous century. On the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea, this Westward expansion from the Far East encountered a similar but opposite movement.!°”
The Crusades were an expression of a reinvigorated European drive for expansion after several centuries of relative passivity since Late Antiquity. Though it began with largely (but by no means unmixed) religious impulses among those who “took the Cross,” in the early thirteenth century, other motives accreted onto the Crusading movement, unmistakably secular: when in 1204 the Fourth Crusade veered away from its proclaimed target, the Holy Sepulchre, toward Constantinople, where the Western knights deposed the Byzantine emperor and founded their own Latin Empire, this was at the instigation of Venice, which thus furthered the interests of its merchants in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The other great Italian commercial republic, Genoa, also sought to exploit the Crusading wars for its own purposes, but won its preeminence in the Levantine trade mostly by its own efforts.
There were thus two distinct waves of expansion, from the East and from the West, and in between was a major barrier made up of two distinct parts: the Muslim blockade in the Near and Middle East, and the Byzantine obstacle between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
These two sides of the barrier already came under pressure in the eleventh century, and held up to varying extents. Early in the century the Byzantine emperors had already been forced to grant commercial privileges to the Italian merchants, creating a breach which was never closed until the end of the empire in 1453. In the best case, rulers of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles who wished to remain on the throne in Constantinople had to allow the Venetians and Genoese the freedom of the Black Sea, along with complete exemption from customs duties. The imbalance of power became even more obvious in 1204, when the Crusaders obeyed the doge of Venice’s instructions and installed a Latin power at Constantinople, in the heart of the Byzantine world, which lasted until 1261. In that year the usurpers were expelled and the Byzantine Empire restored under Michael VIII Palaiologos, but this fragile restoration could only be kept on its feet with the protection furnished by Genoese galleys. Their services were rewarded on the same terms: freedom to sail in the Black Sea, and customs exemption.
By securing passage through the Straits in this manner, Western merchants were one step closer to an important approach to the grand trunk routes of Eurasian trade, and after 1261 the region would play a central role in transcontinental commerce. The Black Sea took on this additional function because the Islamic blockade in the Fertile Crescent withstood all attempts to break it, from both East and West.
The Crusader footholds on the Eastern Mediterranean coast and hinterland, of which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was the most important, were mere dents in this Muslim barrier, and never created a corridor to allow Western merchants access to the routes through Persia to Central Asia, or through Iraq or Egypt to the Indian Ocean. Genoa’s involvement in the Crusades in 1218/9 and 1249/50, and in the Ilkhanate’s campaigns against the Mamluk sultan in Egypt and Syria in 1288-1290, certainly aimed to remove this Muslim barrier to trade.1°9
Attempts from the East fared no better. A Mongol army was defeated in 1260 by Mamluk troops at the battle of ‘Ayn Jalut in Palestine, and they never recovered from this loss: the battle definitively fixed the border between the two powers at the Euphrates, despite countless later attempts by the Ilkhans to change it, either on their own or in combined operations with Western powers.
The decisive moments in the confrontation came in 1285 when the kingdom of Cilician Armenia passed from Ilkhanid suzerainty into Cairo’s sphere of influence, and in 1291 when the Mamluks took Acre, the last important position held by the Western European Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean. These gains sealed Mamluk supremacy in the Near East, and since the Christian outposts had also been outposts for long-distance trade, the change in ownership brought about a large shift in the structure of Eurasian commerce. Many of those who now found it impossible to trade in Mediterranean turned to the Black Sea to seek compensation."
1.2.3 The Black Sea—A Crossroads of Eurasian Trade
As mentioned above, the Romanian historian Gheorghe Bratianu coined a phrase to explain the commercial boom of the Black Sea in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the sea, he said, was a “plaque tournante” of long-distance trade. His characterisation has long been adopted into the historiography hereabouts, and is particularly appropriate for the situation after the wholesale transfer of Western merchants into the Black Sea region, caused by catastrophes suffered in the Eastern Mediterranean. At this point the Black Sea picked up the slack created with the loss of these positions, and became Western Europe’s outpost in Eastern Europe, as a gateway to Asian trade."
The gateway opened wide to allow merchants and missionaries unhindered access to limitless horizons because the Black Sea basin was part of the Chinggisid hegemony. Unlike the Byzantine empire or the Muslim rulers of the East, who worked to protect their own merchants’ interests against outside competition, the Mongol khans had no commercial class of their own and did everything they could to encourage foreign merchants to traverse the territories they controlled: the Chinggisids offered merchants from other lands safety in which to travel, and various transit facilities, in order to draw the greatest possible profit via customs levies and the exchange of goods. This income provided an important remedy for the chronic budgetary short-comings, though it could not save a situation in which expenditures always exceeded revenue.
Around 1261 the Mongol empire fractured into several successor states: in the West of the empire’s territory, these were the Golden Horde on the Eurasian steppe, and the Ilkhanate in Persia. This grand reorganisation of power relations generated a series of rivalries within the Mongol world and at its edges, largely commercial in nature. Clashes over the control of the trade routes led to major changes in the Eurasian network, which came out very favourably for the Black Sea region.
When the Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde clashed over control of the Silk Road, part of the traffic which travelled that route was diverted from the region of the Aral Sea, through the steppe, to the ports on the Northern Black Sea coast, Tana, Caffa or Soldaia.
The Ilkhanate’s conflict with the Mamluk sultanate, and consolidation of the Muslim barrier in the Eastern Mediterranean, led to blockade on both the Silk Road itself and the Iraqi end of the spice route from the Indian Ocean via the Tigris and Euphrates to Syria and Cilician Armenia. The Ilkhan Arghun worked closely with the Genoese merchants to shift trade from the Iraqi river routes to the overland route through Persia, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea via Ormuz, Tabriz and Trebizond.
As a result, the Black Sea region was connected to the flow of trade on the Silk Road and on the spice route, a situation which is probably unique in all of history and certainly during the Middle Ages. Significantly, all great merchant expeditions or missionary journeys after 1300 went via the Black Sea. Numerous sources attest to Western merchants travelling these two routes in the first half of the fourteenth century, raising them to the rank of major commercial arteries.
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