The Pax Mongolica — The Silk Road Atlas

The Pax Mongolica — the Mongol peace — is the name given by historians to the period, roughly 1260 to 1360, in which the Mongol Empire and its successor states guaranteed the safety of overland travel across the central Eurasian landmass. For the first and last time, a single imperial system knit together the entire corridor from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea, and a merchant could travel from the Levant to Beijing with a reasonable expectation of arriving alive. The Pax Mongolica was the political precondition for the great age of Silk Road travel in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and its long-term effects — including, paradoxically, the Black Death — shaped Eurasian history for centuries afterwards.

The making of the Mongol peace

The Pax Mongolica was the unintended consequence of nearly half a century of conquest. Between 1206, when Temüjin was proclaimed Genghis Khan at the kurultai on the Onon River, and 1260, the Mongols had conquered every state along the overland corridor from Korea to Hungary: the Khwarezmian Empire in 1220–1221, the Jin in 1234, the Russian principalities in 1237–1240, the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, and the Anatolian Seljuks in 1243. The wider political story is treated in the article on the Mongol Empire and the Silk Road. I have always thought the term “unintended consequence” is a bit of a stretch — the early khans clearly understood that secure trade routes were useful to them, and the protection of merchants was a deliberate policy choice, not an accident of conquest.

The Mongol peace was, in the literal sense, unprecedented.

The political effect was a single, continental-scale legal and military order. The Great Khans issued firmans (the Persian-derived term used in the Persianate successor states; the Mongol original is jarligh) guaranteeing the safety of merchants and envoys; local officials who robbed or killed travellers were punished severely. The system was not perfectly secure — there were plenty of brigands in the margins, and the khanate of the Golden Horde was a particular hazard after about 1290 — but it was good enough to allow regular long-distance travel on a scale that had not been seen before and would not be seen again for centuries. A point that is often missed: the “peace” applied primarily to merchants and envoys carrying the appropriate documentation, and the rural population along the routes was generally as poor and as insecure as it had always been. The Pax Mongolica was a peace for caravans, not for villagers.

The Yam postal system

The single most important administrative innovation of the Pax Mongolica was the yam, the Mongol postal and relay system. Established in its mature form under Ögedei Khan in the 1230s (the jamm is described in detail in the Jami’ al-tawarikh of Rashid al-Din, written in the early fourteenth century), the yam was a network of relay stations placed at intervals of roughly 25 to 40 kilometres along the principal routes. Each station kept a stock of horses and mules and provided food and lodging to travellers carrying a paiza — a Mongol passport tablet in gold, silver, or bronze, depending on the bearer’s status. The Mongol word is gerege or paiza; the Chinese sources call the tablets hufu or paiizi. The system is, in my view, the closest pre-modern equivalent to a state-run courier service, and the operational details (number of horses per station, change-over times, penalties for delay) are laid out in surviving jarligh decrees.

A mounted courier could travel from Karakorum in Mongolia to the Caspian in about a month. Merchants, missionaries, and envoys who secured the appropriate documentation could move more slowly but with comparable reliability, drawing fresh horses at each station. Most of the great travellers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including Marco Polo and the Franciscan William of Rubruck, used the yam for at least part of their journeys. Rubruck’s account (he travelled in 1253–1255, in the reign of Möngke Khan) is the single most detailed European description of the system in operation — he gives the station intervals, the food allowances, and the prices of fodder. Popular accounts tend to oversell the system’s comfort; the yam was reliable but not luxurious, and the standard traveller’s diet was, by all accounts, mutton and millet.

A personal note

The term Pax Mongolica is widely used and was coined by the historian John Andrew Boyle in 1946, not by a medieval source. Medieval travelers, including the ones described in this article, did not think of the period as a “peace”; they thought of it as a system of imperial protection that worked most of the time but not always. The label is a modern convenience and should be used with caution.

The making of the Mongol peace

The Yam postal system

A personal note

Further reading

Related pages