The stories were greeted with wonder. There was an island beyond China, according to Marco Polo, where the ruler’s palace had golden roofs and golden walls several inches thick. In India, the same author revealed, animal flesh was thrown into steep ravines that were filled with diamonds – but also infested with snakes – in order to attract eagles who would then fly down to retrieve the meat bringing the gems that were impressed into it up with them, to be collected later and more easily. Pepper, noted another traveller from this period, came from swamps filled with crocodiles that had to be frightened away by fire. In the accounts of contemporary travellers, the wealth of the east was legendary – and stood in sharp contrast to that of Europe.24
This conclusion should have been neither surprising nor new. The themes were familiar from the classical texts that were starting to be read again as society and economy developed in continental Europe, and intellectual curiosity began to return. The reports brought back by Marco Polo and others struck an obvious chord with accounts by Herodotus, Tacitus, Pliny and even the Song of Solomon of bats using their claws to guard marshes where cassia grew, of venomous flying serpents protecting aromatic trees in Arabia, or of phoenixes building nests of cinnamon and frankincense which they then filled with other spices.25
Naturally, the mystique of the east – and tales of the dangers involved in gathering goods that were rare and highly prized – was closely linked to expectations of the prices the goods would fetch when brought back to Europe. Goods, produce and spices that were dangerous to make or harvest would naturally be very costly.26 In order to be better informed, handbooks and compendia started to appear around 1300 on how to travel and trade in Asia – and, above all, how get a fair price. ‘In the first place, you must let your beard grow long and not shave,’ wrote Francesco Pegolotti, the author of the most famous guide of this period; and be sure to take a guide along for the journey – you will more than make up in savings whatever you pay extra for a good one, he advised. But the most important information he set out was what taxes were due in what locations, what the difference in weights, measures and coinage were, and what different spices looked like – and how much they were worth. In the medieval world as in the modern, the point of these guidebooks was to avoid disappointment and to reduce the chances of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous merchants.27
That Pegolotti himself was not from Venice or Genoa, the two powerhouses of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, but from Florence was itself revealing. There were new upstarts eager to get a piece of the action in the east – such as Lucca and Siena, whose traders could be found in Tabriz, Ayas and other trading points in the east – buying spices, silks and fabrics from China, India and Persia as well as elsewhere. The sense of new horizons opening up was nowhere better expressed than on the map that hung in the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena: designed to be rotated by hand, the chart showed the world centred on the Tuscan town, setting out distances, transport networks and Siena’s very own network of agents, contacts and intermediaries stretching deep into Asia. Even obscure towns in the centre of Italy were starting to look to the east for inspiration and profits and thinking in terms of establishing their own connections to the Silk Roads.28
Fundamental to European expansion was the stability that the Mongols provided across the whole of Asia. Despite the tensions and rivalries between the different branches of the tribal leadership, the rule of law was fiercely protected when it came to commercial matters. The road system in China, for example, was the envy of visitors who marvelled at the administrative measures in place to provide security for travelling merchants. ‘China is the safest country and best country for the traveller,’ wrote the fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Baūa; this was a place where a reporting system that apparently accounted for each outsider on a daily basis meant that ‘a man travels for nine months alone with great wealth and has nothing to fear’.29
It was a view echoed by Pegolotti, who noted that the route from the Black Sea as far as China ‘is perfectly safe, whether by day or by night’. This was partly the result of traditional nomad beliefs about the hospitality that should be shown to strangers, but it was also a function of a wider view that commerce should be encouraged. In this sense, the competitive taxes levied on goods passing through the Black Sea found obvious echoes on the other side of Asia, where maritime trade passing through ports on China’s Pacific coast also grew thanks to deliberate efforts to increase customs revenues.30
One area where this proved highly effective was in the export of fabrics, the production of which received a major boost in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The textile industries in Nīshāpūr, Herat and Baghdad were deliberately built up, while the city of Tabriz alone expanded in size by a factor of four over the course of just over a hundred years, to accommodate traders as well as the craftsmen and artisans who were conspicuously well treated in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests. Although there was a near-insatiable demand for fine cloth and fabric in markets to the east, increasing quantities were exported to Europe from the late thirteenth century onwards.31
Horizons expanded everywhere. In China, ports like Guangzhou had long served as windows on to the world of southern Asia. Such major commercial hubs were well known to Persian traders, Arab geographers and Muslim travellers who left accounts of bustling street life in towns on the coast as well as in the interior and provided reports of a churning, cosmopolitan population. Such was the level of interaction and exchange that Persian and Arabic provided many loan words and idioms still common in modern Chinese.32
China’s knowledge of the outside world, on the other hand, had been distinctly sketchy and limited, as a text shows that was written in the early 1200s by an imperial official in charge of foreign trade in Guangzhou in southern China, a site blessed with an outstanding natural harbour in the delta of the Pearl River. The account, designed for merchants, sailors and travellers, makes a valiant attempt to explain business practices in the Arabic-speaking world and beyond, listing goods that could be bought, and describing what Chinese traders might expect. But, like many travellers’ accounts of this period, it is riddled with inaccuracies and semi-mystical beliefs. Mecca, for example, was not home to the house of the Buddha, nor a location where Buddhists came once a year on pilgrimage; there was no land where women reproduced by ‘exposing themselves naked to the full force of the south wind’. Melons in Spain did not measure six foot in diameter, and could not feed more than twenty men; nor did sheep in Europe grow to the height of a full-grown man, to be cut open each spring in order to allow a dozen pounds of fat to be taken out before being stitched up again with no after-effects.33
When much of Asia became united under the Mongols, however, there was a sharp improvement in maritime trade links, particularly in places of strategic and economic significance – such as in the Persian Gulf – that were subject to extensive oversight by the new authorities, keen to encourage long-distance commercial exchange and boost revenues.34 As a result, the cultural climate of Guangzhou during the thirteenth century became far more knowing and less provincial.
By the 1270s, the city had become the central point for China’s maritime imports and exports. For every ship that set sail for Alexandria with supplies of pepper for Christian lands, reported Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century, more than a hundred put in to the Chinese port – a comment that finds a neat echo in Ibn Baūa’s comments, written soon afterwards, that on his arrival in the city he saw a hundred ships sailing into the gulf of Guangzhou, as well as innumerable smaller vessels.35 Commerce in the Mediterranean was large; trade in the Pacific was huge.
We do not have to rely solely on ambiguous or unreliable written sources to establish how important the city became as a commercial centre.36 A shipwreck from the bay of Guangzhou dating to precisely this period reveals that goods were being imported from all over southern Asia and in all likelihood from the Persian Gulf and East Africa too. Pepper, frankincense, am
bergris, glass and cotton made up just a part of a valuable cargo that went down off the coast of China in or soon after 1271.37 Merchants could be found crossing the South China Sea in ever greater numbers, establishing trading posts in Sumatra, on the Malay peninsula and above all on the Malabar coast of southern India, home to the world’s great supply of pepper – long established as a favoured commodity in China as well as in Europe and elsewhere in Asia.38 By the middle of the fourteenth century, so many ships were sailing to towns like Calicut that some observers commented that all maritime transport and travel in this part of the Indian subcontinent was being undertaken in Chinese boats. An example of their typical flat-bottomed design has been recently identified wrecked off the coast of Kerala.39
The lubricant in this long-distance trade was silver, which took on the form of a single currency across Eurasia. One reason for this was the innovation in financial credit in China that had been introduced before Genghis Khan’s time, including the introduction of bills of exchange and the use of paper money.40 Adopted and improved by the Mongols, the effect was the liberation of enormous amounts of silver into the monetary system as new forms of credit caught on. The availability of the precious metal suddenly soared – causing a major correction in its value against gold. In parts of Europe, the value of silver plunged, losing more than half its value between 1250 and 1338.41 In London alone, the surge in silver supply allowed the royal mint to more than quadruple output between 1278 and 1279 alone. Production rose sharply across Asia too. In the steppes as well, coin production took off as rulers of the Golden Horde began to strike coins in large quantities.42 New regions were stimulated too. Japan, which had relied heavily on barter or on payments in products such as rice as an exchange mechanism, shifted to a monetary economy and became increasingly active in long-distance trade.43
The most important effect that the Mongol conquests had on the transformation of Europe, however, did not come from trade or warfare, culture or currency. It was not just ferocious warriors, goods, precious metals, ideas and fashions that flowed through the arteries connecting the world. In fact something else entirely that entered the bloodstream had an even more radical impact: disease. An outbreak of plague surged through Asia, Europe and Africa threatening to annihilate millions. The Mongols had not destroyed the world, but it seemed quite possible that the Black Death would.
As well as being home to livestock and nomads for thousands of years, the Eurasian steppe also forms one of the world’s great plague basins, with a string of linked foci stretching from the Black Sea as far as Manchuria. The ecological conditions of arid and semi-arid landscape lend themselves perfectly to the spread of the bacterium Yersinia pestis that is transmitted from one host to another principally by fleas through blood feeding. Plague was spread most effectively and quickly by rodent hosts such as rats, although camels could also become infected and play an important role in its transmission – as research closely linked to the Soviet Union’s biological-warfare programme during the Cold War period showed.44 Although plague can be spread by consuming or handling host tissues or by inhaling infected materials, transmission to humans is most commonly effected by fleas vomiting bacilli into the bloodstream before feeding, or by bacilli in their faeces contaminating abrasions in the skin. Bacilli are then carried to the lymph nodes, such as in the armpit or the groin, multiplying rapidly to cause swellings or buboes that Boccaccio, who lived through the plague, described as growing as large as an apple, or the size of an egg ‘more or less’.45 Other organs are then infected in turn; haemorrhaging causes internal bleeding and the distinctive black bags of pus and blood that make the disease as visually terrifying as it is lethal.
Modern investigation into Yersinia pestis and plague has made clear the crucial role played by environmental factors to the enzootic cycle, where seemingly insignificant changes can transform the disease from being localized and containable to spreadable on a large scale. Small differentials in temperature and precipitation, for example, can dramatically change the reproductive cycles of fleas crucial to the development cycle of the bacterium itself, as well as the behaviour of their rodent hosts.46 A recent study that assumed an increase of just one degree in temperature suggested that this could lead to a 50 per cent increase in plague prevalence in the great gerbil, the primary host rodent of the steppe environment.47
Although it is not clear precisely where the ultimate origin of the disease of the mid-fourteenth century lay, plague spread rapidly in the 1340s as the outbreak moved out of the steppes through Europe, Iran, the Middle East, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula.48 It really took hold in 1346 when what an Italian contemporary described as ‘a mysterious illness that brought sudden death’ began to sweep through the Golden Horde by the Black Sea. A Mongol army laying siege to the Genoese trading post of Caffa following a dispute about trade terms was annihilated by illness that killed ‘thousands and thousands every day’, according to one commentator. Before withdrawing, however, ‘they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside’. Rather than being overwhelmed by the smell, it was the highly contagious disease that caught hold. Unknowingly, the Mongols had turned to biological warfare to defeat their enemy.49
The trading routes that connected Europe to the rest of the world now became lethal highways for the transmission of the Black Death. In 1347, the disease reached Constantinople and then Genoa, Venice and the Mediterranean, brought by traders and merchants fleeing home. By the time the population of Messina in Sicily realised there was something wrong with the Genoese who had put in, arriving covered with boils, vomiting incessantly and coughing up blood before dying, it was already too late: although the Genoese galleys were expelled, the disease took hold and devastated the population.50
It spread rapidly northwards, reaching the cities of northern France and Bavaria by the middle of 1348. By that time, ships putting in to ports in Britain had already brought ‘the first pestilence . . . carried by merchants and sailors’.51 So many began to die across towns and villages in England that the Pope in ‘his clemency granted a plenary indulgence for confessed sins’. According to one contemporary estimate, scarcely a tenth of the population survived; several sources report that so many perished that there were not enough people to bury the dead.52
Instead of bringing goods and valuables, ships criss-crossing the Mediterranean brought death and devastation. Infection was not only spread by contact with plague victims or by the rats which were always a feature of maritime travel; even the goods in the hold turned into lethal cargoes as fleas infested furs and food destined for mainland Europe as well as for ports in Egypt, the Levant and Cyprus, where the first victims tended to be infants and the young. Soon the disease had been transmitted along the caravan route to reach Mecca, killing scores of pilgrims and scholars and provoking serious soul searching: the Prophet Muammad had supposedly promised that the plague which ravaged Mesopotamia in the seventh century would never enter the holy cities of Islam.53
In Damascus, wrote Ibn al-Wardī, the plague ‘sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and decimating the population’.54 The roads between Cairo and Palestine were littered with the bodies of victims, while dogs tore at the corpses piled up against the walls of mosques in Bilbais. In the Asyut region of Upper Egypt meanwhile, the number of taxpayers fell from 6,000 before the Black Death to just 116 – a fall of 98 per cent.55
Although such population contractions may also reflect people fleeing their homes, there can be little doubt that the death toll was enormous. ‘All the wisdom and ingenuity of man’ was powerless to prevent the spread of disease, wrote Boccaccio, the Italian humanist scholar, in his introduction to the Decameron; in the space of three months, he noted, more than 100,000 lost their lives in Florence alone.56 Venice was all but depopulated: accounts agreed that no less than three-quarters of its citizens died during the outbreak.57
To many, it seemed to signal the end of the world. In Ireland, one Franciscan monk concluded his account of the ravages caused by plague by leaving blank space ‘for continuing [my] work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future’.58 There was a sense of impending apocalypse; in France chroniclers reported that it ‘rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions and many other similar poisonous animals’. There were signs from the sky that made God’s displeasure clear: enormous hailstones struck the earth, killing people by the dozen, while towns and villages burnt down after being set ablaze by thunderbolts that produced ‘stinking smoke’.59
Some, like the King of England, Edward III, turned to fasting and prayer, with Edward ordering his bishops to follow suit. Arabic handbooks written around 1350 provided guides for the Muslim faithful to do much the same, advising that saying a specific prayer eleven times would help, and that chanting verses relating to the life of Muammad would provide protection from boils. In Rome, solemn processions were held where the penitent and fearful marched barefoot in hair-shirts, flagellating themselves to show contrition for their sins.60
These were among the least creative efforts to appease God’s wrath. Avoid sex and ‘every fleshly lust with women’, urged one priest in Sweden, and for that matter also do not bathe, and avoid the south wind – at least until lunch time. If this was a case of hoping for the best, then a counterpart in England was at least rather more direct: women should wear different clothes, urged one English priest, for their own sake, as well as that of everyone else. The outlandish and revealing outfits they had got used to sporting were simply asking for divine punishment. The trouble had started when ‘they began to wear useless little hoods, laced and buttoned so tightly at the throat that they only covered the shoulders’. That was not all, for ‘in addition, they wore paltoks, extremely short garments . . . which failed to conceal their arses or their private parts’. Apart from anything else, ‘these misshapen and tight clothes did not allow them to kneel to God or to the other saints’.61
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