The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  9Juvaynī, History of the World Conqueror, 3, 1, p. 26.

  10This process had already started by the middle of the thirteenth century, as accounts by missionaries and envoys show, G. Guzman, ‘European Clerical Envoys to the Mongols: Reports of Western Merchants in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 1231–1255’, Journal of Medieval History 22.1 (1996), 57–67.

  11William of Rubruck, Mission of Friar William, 35, pp. 241–2.

  12J. Ryan, ‘Preaching Christianity along the Silk Route: Missionary Outposts in the Tartar “Middle Kingdom” in the Fourteenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern History 2.4 (1998), 350–73. For Persia, R. Lopez, ‘Nuove luci sugli italiani in Estremo Oriente prima di Colombo’, Studi Colombiani 3 (1952), 337–98.

  13Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 224–6; de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, pp. 160–78; also J. Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient au moyen age (XIIIe–XVe siècles) (Rome, 1977), pp. 144ff. John blames the Nestorians for the fact that not more were converted, saying that they accused him of being a spy and a magician: rivalries between Christians played out in China, just as they had done in Persia and elsewhere.

  14P. Jackson, ‘Hülegü Khan and the Christians: The Making of a Myth’, in J. Phillips and P. Edbury (eds), The Experience of Crusading, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2003), 2, pp. 196–213; S. Grupper, ‘The Buddhist Sanctuary-Vihara of Labnasagut and the Il-qan Hülegü: An Overview of Il-Qanid Buddhism and Related Matters’, Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 13 (2004), 5–77; Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road, p. 122.

  15S. Hackel, ‘Under Pressure from the Pagans? – The Mongols and the Russian Church’, in J. Breck and J. Meyendorff (eds), The Legacy of St Vladimir: Byzantium, Russia, America (Crestwood, NY, 1990), pp. 47–56; C. Halperin, ‘Know Thy Enemy: Medieval Russian Familiarity with the Mongols of the Golden Horde’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 30 (1982), 161–75.

  16D. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 1998); M. Bilz-Leonardt, ‘Deconstructing the Myth of the Tartar Yoke’, Central Asian Survey 27.1 (2008), 35–6.

  17R. Hartwell, ‘Demographic, Political and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (1982), 366–9; R. von Glahn, ‘Revisiting the Song Monetary Revolution: A Review Essay’, International Journal of Asian Studies 1.1 (2004), 159.

  18See for example G. Wade, ‘An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900–1300 ce’, Journal of Southeast Asia Studies 40.2 (2009), 221–65.

  19S. Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate’, Modern Asian Studies 43.1 (2009), 72–6.

  20P. Buell, E. Anderson and C. Perry, A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-hui’s Yin-shan Cheng-yao (London, 2000).

  21P. Buell, ‘Steppe Foodways and History’, Asian Medicine, Tradition and Modernity 2.2 (2006), 179–80, 190.

  22P. Buell, ‘Mongolian Empire and Turkization: The Evidence of Food and Foodways’, in R. Amitai-Preiss (ed.), The Mongol Empire and its Legacy (Leiden, 1999), pp. 200–23.

  23Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, pp. 1–2, 18; J. Paviot, ‘England and the Mongols (c. 1260–1330)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 10.3 (2000), 317–18.

  24P. Freedman, ‘Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value’, Speculum 80.4 (2005), 1209–27.

  25S. Halikowski-Smith, ‘The Mystification of Spices in the Western Tradition’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 8.2 (2001), 119–25.

  26A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3–63.

  27Francesco Pegolotti, Libro di divisamenti di paesi (e di misure di mercatantie), tr. H. Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols (London, 1913–16), 3, pp. 151–5. Also here see J. Aurell, ‘Reading Renaissance Merchants’ Handbooks: Confronting Professional Ethics and Social Identity’, in J. Ehmer and C. Lis (eds), The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times (Farnham, 2009), pp. 75–7.

  28R. Prazniak, ‘Siena on the Silk Roads: Ambrozio Lorenzetti and the Mongol Global Century, 1250–1350’, Journal of World History 21.2 (2010), 179–81; M. Kupfer, ‘The Lost Wheel Map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, Art Bulletin 78.2 (1996), 286–310.

  29Ibn Baūa, al-Rila, tr. H. Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1994), 4, 22, pp. 893–4.

  30E. Endicott-West, ‘The Yuan Government and Society’, Cambridge History of China, 6, pp. 599–60.

  31Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, pp. 31–9.

  32C. Salmon, ‘Les Persans à l’extrémité orientale de la route maritime (IIe a.e.–XVIIe siècle)’, Archipel 68 (2004), 23–58; also L. Yingsheng, ‘A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road: Persian Language in China between the 14th and the 16th Centuries’, in R. Kauz (ed.), Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road from the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea (Wiesbaden, 2010), pp. 87–95.

  33F. Hirth and W. Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chi (St Petersburg, 1911), pp. 124–5, 151, 142–3.

  34See R. Kauz, ‘The Maritime Trade of Kish during the Mongol Period’, in L. Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden, 2006), pp. 51–67.

  35Marco Polo, Le Devisament dou monde, tr. A. Moule and P. Pelliot, The Description of the World, 2 vols (London, 1938); Ibn Baūa, 22, Travels, 4, p. 894.

  36For Marco Polo, see J. Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book (Aldershot, 1992), and now see H. Vogel, Marco Polo was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues (Leiden, 2013).

  37C. Wake, ‘The Great Ocean-Going Ships of Southern China in the Age of Chinese Maritime Voyaging to India, Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries’, International Journal of Maritime History 9.2 (1997), 51–81.

  38E. Schafer, ‘Tang’, in K. Chang (ed.), Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspective (New Haven, 1977), pp. 85–140.

  39V. Tomalin, V. Sevakumar, M. Nair and P. Gopi, ‘The Thaikkal-Kadakkarapally Boat: An Archaeological Example of Medieval Ship Building in the Western Indian Ocean’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 33.2 (2004), 253–63.

  40R. von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China 1000–1700 (Berkeley, 1996), p. 48.

  41A. Watson, ‘Back to Gold – and Silver’, Economic History Review 20.1 (1967), 26–7; I. Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Age: Continuing Afro-European Supremacy, 1250–1450 (Stuttgart, 2001), 3, pp. 945–8.

  42T. Sargent and F. Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, 2002), p. 166; J. Deyell, ‘The China Connection: Problems of Silver Supply in Medieval Bengal’, in J. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern World (Durham, NC, 1983); M. Allen, ‘The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470’, Economic History Review 54.4 (2001), 606–7.

  43This is clearly shown from the case of Japan in the fourteenth century, A. Kuroda, ‘The Eurasian Silver Century, 1276–1359: Commensurability and Multiplicity’, Journal of Global History 4 (2009), 245–69.

  44V. Fedorov, ‘Plague in Camels and its Prevention in the USSR’, Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 23 (1960), 275–81. For earlier experiments, see for example A. Tseiss, ‘Infektsionnye zabolevaniia u verbliudov, neizvestnogo do sik por poriskhozdeniia’, Vestnik mikrobiologii, epidemiologii i parazitologii 7.1 (1928), 98–105.

  45Boccaccio, Decamerone, tr. G. McWilliam, Decameron (London, 2003), p. 51.

  46T. Ben-Ari, S. Neerinckx, K. Gage, K. Kreppel, A. Laudisoit et al., ‘Plague and Climate: Scales Matter’, PLoS Pathog 7.9 (2011), 1–6. Also B. Krasnov, I. Khokhlova, L. Fielden and N. Burdelova, ‘Effect of Air Temperature and Humidity on the Survival of Pre-Imaginal Stages of Two Flea Species (Siphonaptera: Pulicidae)’, Journal of Medical Entomology 38 (2001), 629–37; K. Gage, T. Burkot,
R. Eisen and E. Hayes, ‘Climate and Vector-Borne Diseases’, Americal Journal of Preventive Medicine 35 (2008), 436–50.

  47N. Stenseth, N. Samia, H. Viljugrein, K. Kausrud, M. Begon et al., ‘Plague Dynamics are Driven by Climate Variation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103 (2006), 13110–15.

  48Some scholars suggest the earliest identification may come from tombstones in a cemetery in eastern Kyrgyzstan dating from the 1330s, S. Berry and N. Gulade, ‘La Peste noire dans l’Occident chrétien et musulman, 1347–1353’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 25.2 (2008), 466. However, this is based on a misunderstanding. See J. Norris, ‘East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977), 1–24.

  49Gabriele de’ Mussis, Historia de Morbo, in The Black Death, tr. R. Horrox (Manchester, 2001), pp. 14–17; M. Wheelis, ‘Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 8.9 (2002), 971–5.

  50M. de Piazza, Chronica, in Horrox, Black Death, pp. 35–41.

  51Anonimalle Chronicle, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 62.

  52John of Reading, Chronica, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 74.

  53Ibn al-Wardī, Risālat al-naba an al-waba, cited by B. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977), pp. 57–63.

  54M. Dods, ‘Ibn al-Wardi’s “Risalah al-naba” an al-waba’, in D. Kouymjian (ed.), Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History (Beirut, 1974), p. 454.

  55B. Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, pp. 160–1.

  56Boccaccio, Decameron, p. 50.

  57de Mussis, Historia de Morbo, p. 20; ‘Continuation Novimontensis’, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, 9, p. 675.

  58John Clynn, Annalium Hibernae Chronicon, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 82.

  59Louis Heylgen, Breve Chronicon Clerici Anonymi, in Horrox, Black Death, pp. 41–2.

  60Horrox, Black Death, pp. 44, 117–18; Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, p. 126.

  61Bengt Knutsson, A Little Book for the Pestilence, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 176; John of Reading, Chronica, pp. 133–4.

  62S. Simonsohn (ed.), The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents, 492–1404 (Toronto, 1988), 1, no. 373.

  63In general here see O. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 380ff.

  64O. Benedictow, ‘Morbidity in Historical Plague Epidemics’, Population Studies 41 (1987), 401–31; idem, What Disease was Plague? On the Controversy over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past (Leiden, 2010), esp. 289ff.

  65Petrarch, Epistolae, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 248.

  66Historia Roffensis, in Horrox, Black Death, p. 70.

  67S. Pamuk, ‘Urban Real Wages around the Eastern Mediterranean in Comparative Perspective, 1100–2000’, Research in Economic History 12 (2005), 213–32.

  68S. Pamuk, ‘The Black Death and the Origins of the “Great Divergence” across Europe, 1300–1600’, European Review of Economic History 11 (2007), 308–9; S. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (London, 2000), pp. 19–26. Also M. Bailey, ‘Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research’, Economic History Review 49 (1996), 1–19.

  69H. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300–1460 (Cambridge, 1975); D. Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, 1997).

  70D. Herlihy, ‘The Generation in Medieval History’, Viator 5 (1974), 347–64.

  71For the contraction in Egypt and the Levant, A. Sabra, Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt 1250–1517 (Cambridge, 2000).

  72S. DeWitte, ‘Mortality Risk and Survival in the Aftermath of the Medieval Black Death’, Plos One 9.5 (2014), 1–8. For improved diets, T. Stone, ‘The Consumption of Field Crops in Late Medieval England’, in C. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron (eds), Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition (Oxford, 2006), pp. 11–26.

  73Epstein, Freedom and Growth, pp. 49–68; van Bavel, ‘People and Land: Rural Population Developments and Property Structures in the Low Countries, c. 1300–c. 1600’, Continuity and Change 17 (2002), 9–37.

  74Pamuk, ‘Urban Real Wages’, 310–11.

  75Anna Bijns, ‘Unyoked is Best! Happy the Woman without a Man’, in K. Wilson, Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens, 1987), p. 382. See here T. de Moor and J. Luiten van Zanden, ‘Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, Economic History Review (2009), 1–33.

  76J. de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54.2 (1994), 249–70; J. Luiten van Zanden, ‘The “Revolt of the Early Modernists” and the “First Modern Economy”: An Assessment’, Economic History Review 55 (2002), 619–41.

  77E. Ashtor, ‘The Volume of Mediaeval Spice Trade’, Journal of European Economic History 9 (1980), 753–7; idem, ‘Profits from Trade with the Levant in the Fifteenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38 (1975), 256–87; Freedman, ‘Spices and Late Medieval European Ideas’, 1212–15.

  78For Venetian imports of pigments, see L. Matthew, ‘“Vendecolori a Venezia”: The Reconstruction of a Profession’, Burlington Magazine 114.1196 (2002), 680–6.

  79Marin Sanudo, ‘Laus Urbis Venetae’, in A. Aricò (ed.), La città di Venetia (De origine, situ et magistratibus Urbis Venetae) 1493–1530 (Milan, 1980), pp. 21–3; for changes to internal space in this period, see R. Good, ‘Double Staircases and the Vertical Distribution of Housing in Venice 1450–1600’, Architectural Research Quarterly 39.1 (2009), 73–86.

  80B. Krekic, ‘L’Abolition de l’esclavage à Dubrovnik (Raguse) au XVe siècle: mythe ou réalité?’, Byzantinische Forschungen 12 (1987), 309–17.

  81S. Mosher Stuard, ‘Dowry Increase and Increment in Wealth in Medieval Ragusa (Dubrovnik)’, Journal of Economic History 41.4 (1981), 795–811.

  82M. Abraham, Two Medieval Merchant Guilds of South India (New Delhi, 1988).

  83Ma Huan, Ying-yai sheng-lan, tr. J. Mills, The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (Cambridge, 1970), p. 140.

  84T. Sen, ‘The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia, 1200–1450’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 49.4 (2006), 427, 439–40; H. Ray, Trade and Trade Routes between India and China, c. 140 BC–AD 1500 (Kolkata, 2003), pp. 177–205.

  85H. Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (New York, 1996), p. 148; T. Ju-kang, ‘Cheng Ho’s Voyages and the Distribution of Pepper in China’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1981), 186–97.

  86W. Atwell, ‘Time, Money and the Weather: Ming China and the “Great Depression” of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, Journal of Asia Studies 61.1 (2002), 86.

  87T. Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 107–9.

  88Ruy González de Clavijo, Embajada a Tamorlán, tr. G. Le Strange, Embassy to Tamerlane 1403–1406 (London, 1928), 11, pp. 208–9.

  89Ibid., 14, p. 270.

  90Ibid., pp. 291–2. For the dissemination of the Timurid vision in art and architecture, see T. Lentz and G. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 159–232.

  91Khvānd Mīr, Habibu’s-siyar, Tome Three, ed. and tr. W. Thackston, The Reign of the Mongol and the Turk, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 1, p. 294; D. Roxburgh, ‘The “Journal” of Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, Timurid Envoy to Khan Balïgh, and Chinese Art and Architecture’, in L. Saurma-Jeltsch and A. Eisenbeiss (eds), The Power of Things and the Flow of Cultural Transformations: Art and Culture between Europe and Asia (Berlin, 2010), p. 90.

  92R. Lopez, H. Miskimin and A. Udovitch, ‘England to Egypt, 1350–1500: Long-Term Trends and Long-Distance Trade’, in M. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam
to the Present Day (London, 1970), pp. 93–128. J. Day, ‘The Great Bullion Famine’, Past & Present 79 (1978), 3–54, J. Munro, ‘Bullion Flows and Monetary Contraction in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries’, in J. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, NC, 1983), pp. 97–158.

  93R. Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 48–51.

  94T. Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, 1998).

  95N. Sussman, ‘Debasements, Royal Revenues and Inflation in France during the Hundred Years War, 1415–1422’, Journal of Economic History 53.1 (1993), 44–70; idem, ‘The Late Medieval Bullion Famine Reconsidered’, Journal of Economic History 58.1 (1998), 126–54.

  96R. Wicks, ‘Monetary Developments in Java between the Ninth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Numismatic Perspective’, Indonesia 42 (1986), 59–65; J. Whitmore, ‘Vietnam and the Monetary Flow of Eastern Asia, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Richards, Precious Metal, pp. 363–93; J. Deyell, ‘The China Connection: Problems of Silver Supply in Medieval Bengal’, in Richards, Precious Metal, pp. 207–27.

  97Atwell, ‘Time, Money and the Weather’, 92–6.

  98A. Vasil’ev, ‘Medieval Ideas of the End of the World: West and East’, Byzantion 16 (1942–3), 497–9; D. Strémooukhoff, ‘Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine’, Speculum (1953), 89; ‘Drevnie russkie paskhalii na os’muiu tysiachu let ot sotvereniia mira’, Pravoslavnyi Sobesednik 3 (1860), 333–4.

  99A. Bernáldez, Memorías de los reyes católicos, ed. M. Gómez-Moreno and J. Carriazo (Madrid, 1962), p. 254.

  100I. Aboab, Nomologia, o Discursos legales compuestos (Amsterdam, 1629), p. 195; D. Altabé, Spanish and Portuguese Jewry before and after 1492 (Brooklyn, 1983), p. 45.

  101Freedman, ‘Spices and Late Medieval European Ideas’, 1220–7.

  102V. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992), pp. 47–64.