The Mongol Empire and the Silk Road

No single political transformation affected the Silk Road as decisively as the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. From the moment Chinggis Khan united the Mongol tribes in 1206 to the fragmentation of the successor states in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the entire land corridor from Korea to Hungary was, for the first and last time in history, ruled by a single dynasty. The resulting security produced the most intense burst of long-distance travel the world had seen, a period that is conventionally called the Pax Mongolica. It also made possible the great plague, the most lethal pandemic in recorded history.

This article describes the relationship between the Mongol Empire and the Silk Road, with attention to the political conditions that secured the routes, the institutional arrangements that made travel possible, the visitors who used them, and the long-term consequences of the Mongol century for Eurasia. The political background to the period of security is treated in the article on the Pax Mongolica. The most famous European visitor of the period is the subject of the article on Marco Polo, and the broader pattern of cities and stopping points is described in the article on Silk Road cities. The longer-term cultural consequences are surveyed in the article on cultural exchange along the Silk Road, and the larger chronological framework in the history of the Silk Road.

The making of the empire

The Mongol rise was extraordinarily rapid. Chinggis Khan (c. 1162–1227) united the Mongol tribes and conquered the Khitan, the Uighur, and the Tangut kingdoms by the 1220s. His sons and grandsons extended the empire with ferocious speed: the Jin dynasty of northern China fell in 1234, the Khwarezmian empire in Central Asia and Persia in 1221, the Kievan Rus principalities in 1237–1240, the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary in 1241–1242, the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in 1258, the Song dynasty of southern China in 1279, and the Mamluks’ rivals in Syria in 1260. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Mongol Empire or its successor states stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea, and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. The pace is what gets you. Sixty years, from a tribal confederation on the Onon to a continental empire.

The Mongol conquests were exceptionally violent by the standards of the time. Cities that resisted were sacked, populations massacred, and agricultural land devastated. The cumulative death toll of the Mongol conquests is one of the great demographic disasters of the medieval world, comparable in scale to the Black Death that would follow. Yet once a region had been conquered, the Mongols were, as a rule, remarkably pragmatic in their administration. They required tribute and military service, but they generally allowed local religious and commercial life to continue. The result was a degree of religious and commercial tolerance that, while not unique, was unusual for the thirteenth century. I think the conventional narrative oversells the tolerance — the records of the daftars show plenty of confiscated monasteries and reassigned land — but as a generalisation it is defensible.

The Mongols were, in the most literal sense, the single largest political fact in Silk Road history.

The Pax Mongolica

The Pax Mongolica, the term used for the period of relative security across the Mongol-ruled lands, lasted from roughly 1250 to 1350, with its high point in the late thirteenth century. For the first time in centuries, a merchant could travel from the Levant to Beijing with a reasonable expectation of arriving alive and with his goods intact. A point that is often missed: “alive and with his goods” was the test, and the Pax Mongolica was the first system since Roman times to pass it on that scale.

The Pax Mongolica rested on a deliberate Mongol policy. The early khans had a strong interest in promoting long-distance trade, both because it generated revenue and because it helped knit together the disparate parts of the empire. Foreign merchants were welcomed, given tax exemptions, and protected. The most famous example of this policy is the treatment of the Polo family, the Venetian merchants who arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in the 1270s and were received with extraordinary favour, including appointments to administrative posts in the Mongol administration in China. Their story is told in the article on Marco Polo. I have always thought the Polos were unusual enough as a case that they should not be treated as typical — most foreign merchants in Yuan China did not become provincial officials.

The foreign merchants who used the Pax Mongolica included Buddhist monks, Nestorian and Catholic missionaries, Muslim scholars and merchants, and European envoys. The most famous of the European visitors were Marco Polo, who spent seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan, and William of Rubruck, the Franciscan friar who travelled to the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1253–1255. To these European names must be added the Nestorian monk Rabban Bar Sauma, who travelled in the opposite direction, from Beijing to the courts of Europe in the 1280s, and the Arab scholar and merchant Ibn Battuta, who used the Mongol-era routes to travel from Morocco to China in the 1320s and 1330s. The chronological spread is the point: you can stand in Karakorum in 1255, in Cambaluc in 1280, in Quanzhou in 1325, and the corridors are the same corridors, secured by the same political order. That kind of continuity is rare in pre-modern history.

A personal note

I have used “Mongol” throughout, but the ruling class of the empire included Mongol, Turkic, and sometimes Uyghur, Tibetan, and Persian elements. The steppe aristocracy that ruled the empire was ethnically diverse from the start, and the cultural unity of the empire was not the unity of a single ethnic group. Treat “Mongol” as a political label, not an ethnic one.

The making of the empire

The Pax Mongolica

A personal note

Further reading

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