In the 13th century a new and unexpected power exploded onto the scene, rapidly conquering the entire length of the Silk Road from Chang’an in the east to Antakya (Antioch) in the west, bringing the whole of the passage under the umbrella of a single empire for the first time in history. This produced the last great flourishing of Silk Road trade before its final decline and gradual disappearance in the 15th and 16th centuries. The engine for this new empire was the drive for Mongol expansion, and the man who made it happen was a nomadic ruler called Temujin, who would later assume the title Genghis Khan (1206–27). His name is remembered with a shudder by all the settled peoples from Chang’an to Baghdad, and with fierce pride by the nomadic Mongols themselves.
14th-century portrait of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), founder of the Mongol Empire.
Public domain
He was born around 1162 not too far from Ulaanbaatar, the present capital of Mongolia. Despite enduring a difficult childhood and relative poverty, he showed remarkable willpower and military ability, gradually defeating his clan enemies until, in 1206, he united the feuding Mongol tribes under his sole leadership as Great Khan. He lived for a further 21 years, during which time his armies conquered the greater part of Asia, including the Silk Road between China and the Caspian Sea. On his death in 1227, the Mongol Empire is estimated to have encompassed 26 million sq km (10 million sq miles), an area about four times the size of the Roman or Macedonian empires at their peak. It covered 22 percent of the earth’s land surface and lorded over 100 million people.
Russia’s capital destroyed
In 1246 Giovanni de Plano Carpini, papal envoy to the Mongols, gave an eyewitness account of the khan’s ruthless methods: “The Mongols attacked Russia, where they made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia; after they had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the inhabitants to death. When we were journeying through that land we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev… has been reduced almost to nothing… and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery.”
Despite his ruthless efficiency as a military commander, Genghis was remarkably enlightened in matters of religion and culture, allowing his many conquered subjects considerable freedom. He also set the seal on another aspect of Mongol policy – the encouragement of trade relationships between the increasingly far-flung corners of the empire. His rule generally brought destruction to most of Persia, including the removal of the Assassins, but spared certain centres, including the city of Tabriz, close to the border with Azerbaijan and Turkey.
The highly efficient Mongol shuudan or postal service used horse-relay stations similar to the US Pony Express. As most Mongol officers were illiterate, orders were communicated in verse so that instructions were transmitted correctly.
This enlightened policy caused a brief but dazzling resurgence of the ancient Silk Road, as all merchants and ambassadors carrying proper documentation and authority were permitted, and indeed encouraged, to travel throughout the vast Mongol realm under imperial protection. As a consequence, overland trade between Asia and Europe greatly increased. During the 13th and early 14th centuries this policy encouraged hundreds, perhaps thousands of Western merchants to travel the Silk Road to China, the most celebrated of whom was Marco Polo (for more information, click here).
Division of the spoils
Genghis Khan was succeeded by several wise and highly competent rulers, notably his third son Ogedei Khan (1229–41) and his grandson Kublai Khan (1260–94). Kublai, who had studied Chinese culture, became the first emperor of China’s Yuan Dynasty in 1271, and under his rule Mongol power and prosperity reached new heights. Yet the seeds of future imperial decline were already sown before Kublai attained manhood. In his will, Genghis had ordered the Mongol Empire divided into four separate, notionally allied khanates. In fact, four rival kingdoms emerged. In the east, the greatest of all was the Empire of the Great Khan, soon to become the Yuan Dynasty of China. The greater part of Central Asia, including both Kashgar and Samarkand, became the Chagatai Khanate. Most of Persia and the Middle East became the Ilkhanate, centred on their capital at Tabriz. Finally the vast Russian steppe stretching from the Altai Mountains to Kiev was incorporated in the fabled Golden Horde.
Mongol mounted archer.
SuperStock
This political division of the Mongol realms was soon to become a cultural divide as well. Quite simply, the Mongols were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the settled peoples they now ruled, and they were also deeply influenced by the more sophisticated cultures they had conquered. Thus Kublai Khan, who founded Beijing in 1272, was an enthusiastic student of Chinese culture and rapidly became sinicised. The rulers of the Chagatai Khanate adopted Islam and were soon absorbed into Central Asian Turkic culture. To the west, the Ilkhans similarly converted to Islam and, renouncing all loyalty to the Great Khan, became deeply influenced by Persian and Arab mores.
Gur-i-Mir, the sumptuous mausoleum of the Central Asian Conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), in Samarkand, Uzbekistan
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Timur’s glories
Meanwhile, to the north and west the Golden Horde fell increasingly under Tatar influence and abandoned its Mongol allegiance before being fatally weakened by the great Turkic-Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane, 1336–1405). Timur was not only a military genius, but also a patron of the arts, and his rule inspired the creation of some of the greatest works of architecture ever built, including the Registan, the Bibi Khanum Mosque and his own tomb of Gur-i-Mir in Samarkand, as well as buildings in Bukhara, Shakhrisabz and elsewhere in Central Asia.
“In all the other parts of the world light descends upon earth. From holy Samarkand and Bukhara, it ascends.” Tajik saying
Timur’s descendants would go on to found the Mughal Dynasty in India (1526–1867), while the Golden Horde finally succumbed to Muscovite Russia in the 16th century. The later Safavids, who established the first lasting Shia state in Iran, emerged from the northern Iranian city of Ardebil. They also set their capital at Tabriz, but it was always too close to the border with the emerging Ottoman Empire, so they moved to Isfahan.
Decline and demise
The gradual disintegration of the Mongol Empire also brought about the collapse of Silk Road prosperity as the brief political and cultural stability of Pax Mongolica disappeared. The eastern part of the Silk Road passed from the short-lived Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) to the sphere of the Ming Empire (1368–1644). At the same time, to the west of the Pamirs, the old Silk Road came under the control of various decentralised Turkic kingdoms, including the Chagatai, Timurid and subsequently Uzbek khanates, while the Middle East and Anatolia unified under the new power of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), which would become the centre of interaction between the Eastern and Western worlds for more than six centuries. But the great trans-Asian highway that had for so many centuries served as a link between East and West was already fatally ruptured. Trade flourished in the East under the Ming, and in the West under the Ottomans, but overland trade between the two was never fully re-established, due both to Central Asian instability and to two seminal changes that would irreversibly change the nature of commerce between Europe and China.
The first of these was the isolationism of the Ming Dynasty, which turned its back on Central Asia and fixed the limits of its territorial ambitions within the traditional Chinese cultural sphere. China increasingly became inwardlooking, despite being the richest, most populous and – for a time – the most powerful state in the world. Eventually the empire lost touch with reality and failed to keep pace with the startling changes beginning to sweep the West.
Chinese ships at anchor.
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Exploration by sea
Secondly, an emerging Europe was hungry for spices and trade with the Orient, but often cut off from China by a Muslim world that treasured its trade monopoly and drove prices ever higher. The resultant European search for new routes to the Orient led to Christopher Columbus’s discovery in 1492 of the New World, which he mistakenly thought was “The Indies”. Just six years later, Vasco da Gama reached Cochin on the Kerala coast by sea, establishing a direct link for the first time between Western Europe and India. Both the Ottoman and the Chinese empires were about to be outflanked by merchant navigators from Spain and Portugal, closely followed by the Dutch and British.
In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan completed the work of Columbus when he reached the Philippines, establishing a direct link between Europe and Asia across the Pacific for the first time. With two direct maritime routes established between Europe and the Far East, it was not long before Chinese waters were dominated by aggressive European sailors, while China had no effective naval response.
The demise of the overland Silk Road owes much to the development of the silk route by sea, where it became easier and safer to transport goods in ships that were stronger and more reliable. Over the following couple of centuries trade centres were established along the Indian Ocean coastal route, opening up opportunities for the Europeans and making new contacts. The new Safavid capital at Isfahan, for example, prospered on a trade route that connected the Persian Gulf with the Black Sea.
China refused any trade with the British, and in 1793 Emperor Qianlong informed the Macartney embassy that “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures”. The emperor made it clear that he regarded the embassy as a tributary mission, and sent a message to King George III warning that British vessels putting ashore at any point other than Guangzhou would be immediately expelled.
Marco Polo
The description of the Italian’s adventures to the court of Kublai Khan is one of the Silk Road’s greatest historical records.
During the 13th and 14th centuries, Venetian merchants dominated much of the trade in rare and exotic goods trafficked between Europe and Asia by way of the Mediterranean and Red seas. It was a source of great wealth to the tiny but prosperous Venetian Republic. But the lure of the Silk Road still attracted the interest of ambitious Venetian merchants who sought to profit overland as well as by maritime trade. Two such merchants were brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, who set out to trade in the region of the Volga steppes.
Depending on one’s interpretation, their luck was either bad or exceedingly good, as their venture coincided with the wars of conquest of the expanding Mongol Empire, which prevented the brothers’ return home. Instead, in 1264, they decided to accompany a tributary mission from the Volga region to Khanbaliq, the seat of Kublai Khan, near present-day Beijing. They were well received and hospitably treated by the Great Khan, who enjoyed religious and philosophical debate. At the end of their visit Kublai Khan sent them back to Venice under his protection with a request that they should return to China together with “one hundred learned Christians” able to debate and argue the cause of their religion at the Mongol court.
The second journey
In 1271 the Polo brothers set out on their return journey to Beijing accompanied by Niccolo’s 17-year-old son, Marco, who would find especial favour with the Great Khan. The Polos travelled overland, by way of Central Asia, passing through Persia and staying three years in Bukhara before crossing the Pamirs into present-day Xinjiang. Here they took the Southern Silk Road via Kashgar and Khotan before passing through the much-feared “Desert of Lop”, which Marco describes as a howling wilderness inhabited by malevolent demons intent on luring men and beasts into the sandy wastes of the Taklamakan Desert.
Marco Polo spent 17 years in China, much of it in the service of the Great Khan, before leaving for Europe in 1291. Interestingly his return route was a two year sea journey to the Straits of Hormuz and then overland via Trebizond on the Black Sea. He reached Venice in 1295, reportedly laden with concealed rubies and other jewels, but was captured and briefly imprisoned by the Genoese in 1298, during a short war between Venice and Genoa. While in prison, he dictated an elaborate account of his travels to a fellow prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, which was subsequently published as Il Milione, known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo. The popularity of his journey gave many people the impression of merchants travelling the full length of the Silk Road, but in practice most traders covered much shorter sections before returning with exchanged goods.
The veracity of Marco Polo’s account of his travels in China and beyond has been called into question by some authorities. Why, for example, does he not mention the use of chopsticks, or the Great Wall? Yet these apparently glaring omissions fade to almost nothing when compared with the information Marco did bring back, much of it arcane and arbitrary, but also clearly verifiable today. Il Milione was an immediate success, stimulating interest in the Orient across Europe. Christopher Columbus, who would discover the New World in his quest for a western maritime route to Asia, is known to have owned a heavily annotated copy.
Marco Polo in caravan.
Art Archive
The great powers at play
Less than half a century later, in 1842, China was resoundingly defeated by Britain in the First Opium War; maritime trade in the Far East was securely in European (and later American) hands. The great, ancient Silk Road, long ago abandoned and remembered only at the best-surviving oases, was all but forgotten.
Rivalry for these forgotten territories of Central Asia and western China resurfaced throughout the 19th century when Britain wanted to prevent Russia expanding its territories southward. Britain’s manoeuvrings for control to halt this threat to India, its “Jewel in the Crown”, became known as the Great Game. At a time when boundaries were becoming increasingly important, much of the area remained unmapped, which added to the uncertainty, but also offered opportunities to seize land regardless. The impasse was superseded by the onset of World War I, as Russia and Britain found themselves allied against Germany.
“Do not say that you were not warned in due time! Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!” Emperor Qianlong’s message to King George III
Ambassador George Macartney and his delegation grovelling before Emperor Qianlong in 1793.
Public domain
At the beginning of the 20th century, vast areas of Central Asia were swallowed up in the expanding but isolationist Soviet Empire: the lands of the former Golden Horde and the khanates of Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand were divided up on ethnic rather than cultural lines, ensuring ongoing instability. But the end of World War I also saw the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and the emergence of new identities such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Equally momentous changes occurring at the end of the century led to the collapse of the Soviet ideal, once again freeing the Central Asian states and creating a complex jigsaw of new nation-states and nationalisms in the process.
China takes the sea route
The third Ming emperor, Yongle (1402–24), was unique in the annals of Imperial China in that he pursued an active maritime policy, sending his favourite admiral, the Yunnanese Muslim eunuch Zheng He (1371–1433), to explore Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean as far as the Red Sea and the East African Coast. Starting in 1405, Yongle sent Zheng He on six major naval expeditions at the head of a fleet of hundreds of “treasure ships”. His purpose was to extend Chinese control over Nan Yang, the “southern seas”, by imposing imperial control over trade and overawing the peoples of the littoral into paying tribute to the Ming throne.
For almost 1,500 years, the Silk Road had held a unique role in Asian foreign trade and political relations, but today the story is far from over. Like a disused railway line given a new lease of life, a booming Chinese economy is giving the modern Central Asian republics an opportunity to reuse the Silk Road, with new roads, pipelines and rail links. They continue to carry the latest commodities (such as oil and gas) from one region to another, which has always been the main reason for the Silk Road.
