The Decline of the Silk Road — The Silk Road Atlas

The decline of the Silk Road was not a single event. It was a long, drawn-out process spanning roughly three centuries, in which the overland network was progressively broken into regional segments, the political map of Eurasia was redrawn, and the center of gravity of long-distance trade shifted from Central Asia to the Atlantic. The process is usually dated from the late thirteenth century, when the Pax Mongolica began to fragment, and ends in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when the last overland caravans lost their European customers to the Cape Route. Each of the contributing factors — plague, warfare, political fragmentation, and the rise of sea power — was damaging on its own; together, they ended a system that had been in continuous operation for nearly fifteen hundred years. The standard four-factor account is broadly right, and I will follow it below — though I think it is also slightly too tidy, as I will explain in the personal note.

This article surveys the causes of the decline. For the parallel rise of the maritime trade, see the maritime Silk Road. For the demographic catastrophe that was both a cause and a consequence, see the Black Death. For the political shift in the eastern Mediterranean, see the Ottoman blockade. For the European voyages that broke the overland system, see the Age of Discovery.

The fragmentation of the Mongol world

The high point of overland travel came in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when the Mongol Empire ruled, directly or through client states, the entire corridor from Korea to Hungary. The Pax Mongolica — the Mongol peace — was not merely the absence of war. It was a system of imperial protection, in which merchants and envoys could travel under the protection of the paiza tablet, change money at imperial mints, and rely on the yam postal system for horses, lodging, and food. The system was, in practical terms, the closest the pre-modern world came to a Eurasian-wide security regime. Long-distance trade flourished, and a series of European and Chinese travelers — Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, Rabban Bar Sauma, the Polos — left accounts of a system without obvious parallel in world history.

The Pax Mongolica did not long survive the death of Kublai Khan in 1294. The empire fragmented, over the next two generations, into four successor khanates — the Yuan in China, the Ilkhanate in Iran, the Chagatai in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde on the steppe — and the khanates themselves fragmented further in the course of the fourteenth century. The Ilkhanate collapsed in the 1330s (the death of Abu Sa’id in 1335 is the conventional marker), the Yuan in the 1360s, the Chagatai in the late fourteenth century. The result was a long period of warfare along the trade routes: the Chagatai civil wars, the wars of Timur and his successors, the fighting among the successor khanates, the Turkish migrations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Each phase raised the cost of doing business along the routes and contracted the volume of trade. The more I read about the Chagatai khanate, the more I think its internal wars alone would have killed the Central Asian overland trade even without the other three factors.

The Black Death

The most devastating single event of the fourteenth century, both in itself and for the trade, was the Black Death. The pandemic that swept Eurasia in the 1340s and 1350s — caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and now thought to have originated in the rodent populations of the Central Asian steppe, perhaps in the Tian Shan region — killed perhaps half the population of Europe and tens of millions in Asia and North Africa. It arrived in Europe by the sea route from the Black Sea, brought to Messina in October 1347 by Genoese galleys sailing from Caffa (the modern Feodosia in Crimea), and from there spread across the continent with terrifying speed.

Long declines are easy to romanticize and hard to date. The plague is a case in point.

The pandemic is treated in the article on the Black Death, but the consequences for the Silk Road were direct. The depopulation of the major cities — Samarkand, Bukhara, Baghdad, the cities of northern China — reduced both the demand for trade goods and the supply of merchants, caravan workers, and craftsmen. The recurring outbreaks of plague in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — sometimes called the “second plague pandemic” — meant that the demographic shock was not a single event but a series of waves, each of which further depressed the trade. The Florence outbreak of 1348 is the famous European example, but the Central Asian outbreaks of the 1330s and 1340s, less well documented, are arguably the more important ones for our purposes.

The most consequential long-run consequence of the Black Death, however, was the rise in the cost of transit. As populations fell, the labor available to staff caravans, build caravanserais, and protect the routes also fell. The cost of insurance, of taxes, of armed escorts, all rose. The price gap between East and West, which had been the engine of the trade, narrowed as the supply of goods in the West contracted, and the overland trade became less profitable even before the rise of the Cape Route. The conventional narrative, in my view, slightly understates this point: by 1500, the overland route was not just politically difficult but economically marginal, and that was true even before da Gama’s fleet had rounded the Cape.

A personal note

A note on causation. I have treated the decline of the Silk Road as a slow process driven by four overlapping factors (Mongol fragmentation, plague, Ottoman expansion, the rise of oceanic trade). This is the standard textbook account, and it is broadly right. But it is also a little too neat. Real economic systems rarely decline for four clear reasons; they decline because of a thousand small disruptions that historians can rarely reconstruct. The four-factor story is the best we can do, but it is a simplification.

The fragmentation of the Mongol world

The Black Death

A personal note

Further reading

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