In 1287 a Christian monk born near Beijing stood before the king of France. His name was Rabban Sauma, and he had set out years earlier on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Instead, the Ilkhan sent him to Europe to seek an alliance against the Mamluks. He met the kings of France and England, the latter in Gascony, and received communion from the pope. His travel account, first written in Persian, survives in a Syriac version. Rabban Sauma was a monk from China who visited Europe, the reverse of the journeys of European travelers, and his trip was possible because one family ruled most of the land in between.
The Mongol peace
Modern historians use the term Pax Mongolica, or Mongol peace, to describe safer travel across Mongol Eurasia in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The term is modern and somewhat misleading: the khanates often fought one another, and the conquests that created the peace killed vast numbers of people. But within each realm, the yam stations, the paiza passes and harsh punishment of robbers protected traffic. Goods moved in both directions: Chinese silks went west, while cobalt pigment from Iran reached Chinese kilns and helped make possible the blue-and-white porcelain of the fourteenth century. Mongol rulers prized trade and invested in it. An ortogh was a merchant partnership funded by nobles, who lent capital and shared the profits.
Moving people and ideas
The Mongols moved people on a scale few earlier empires had attempted. Conquerors routinely spared and deported skilled craftsmen, sending weavers, metalworkers and engineers thousands of kilometers to serve the khans. Persian astronomers worked in China; Chinese doctors served in Iran. In 1259 Hulegu founded an observatory at Maragha, in northwestern Iran, under the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Its astronomers produced new planetary tables, and some of al-Tusi's geometric models later turn up, by routes still debated, in the work of Copernicus. Rashid al-Din's world history, compiled with help from Chinese, Mongol, Kashmiri and European informants, was one of the first attempts to write a history of the known world. Persian painting absorbed Chinese landscape motifs. Foods, dyes and medical ideas moved along the same routes. Muslims formed the largest group of foreign officials in Yuan China, and Islam took root in Yunnan. Even cooking crossed borders: a Yuan court dietary manual presented in 1330 by Hu Sihui mixes Chinese, Mongol and Middle Eastern dishes.
Women of the empire
Steppe women ran households that moved, managed herds when men were at war, and had a voice in politics. European visitors such as Carpini remarked with surprise on how capably Mongol women drove carts, rode and managed camps. Mongol royal women went further. Only Borte's sons were considered for the succession to Chinggis. Royal daughters were married to allied rulers and often governed their husbands' lands. We have already met Toregene and Sorghaghtani Beki, who decided successions. Sorghaghtani's four sons were Mongke and Kublai, Hulegu and Ariq Boke, and all of them became khans or rulers of khanates, Ariq Boke only briefly. Later, Khutulun was Kaidu's daughter, a famed wrestler and warrior. Stories say she vowed to marry only a man who could beat her and won a herd of horses from each failed suitor. Her story comes through Marco Polo and Rashid al-Din and has surely grown in the telling, but her prominence at her father's side seems real.
The darker side of connection
Connections carry disease as well as goods. Many historians link the Mongol world to the spread of the Black Death, the plague pandemic that reached the Black Sea in the 1340s. One famous account by an Italian notary, Gabriele de' Mussi, describes how in 1346 a Golden Horde army besieging Caffa, a Genoese port in Crimea, was struck by plague and hurled corpses over the walls. De' Mussi was probably not an eyewitness, and plague more likely spread through rats and fleas than through corpses. Even so, ships leaving Black Sea ports probably did carry the disease to the Mediterranean. Scientists studying burials from 1338 and 1339 in what is now Kyrgyzstan have argued that the pandemic began in Central Asia, within the Chagatai realm. Whether Mongol trade spread it faster or simply provided the routes is still argued. Plague also struck the khanates themselves, weakening their armies and revenues. Exchange made the empire rich, and it made the empire vulnerable.
Worked example: one exchange, many winners and losers
Take a single Persian weaver deported to northern China in the 1220s. From the empire's point of view, his transfer was a success: his workshop produced luxury cloth that mixed Persian and Chinese designs, and historians today treat such textiles as evidence of creative exchange. From the weaver's point of view, he had seen his city destroyed, perhaps his family killed, and he had been marched across a continent to work for his conquerors. Both views are true. When historians praise the cultural exchange of the Mongol era, they should remember that much of it began with people who had no say. Recognizing the human cost does not cancel the creativity; it gives the story its full weight.