The Mongol conquests of the 13th century killed, by some estimates, tens of millions of people. They destroyed cities, disrupted agricultural systems that had sustained populations for centuries, and redirected rivers of political power across a continent. To write about the Pax Mongolica — the relative peace that the Mongol Empire imposed across Eurasia between roughly 1250 and 1350 — without that context would be a kind of moral sleight of hand. The peace was built on the rubble of the conquest, and it lasted only as long as the empire held together.
But the Pax Mongolica was real, and its effects on trade were remarkable. For roughly a century, a traveller or a merchant with appropriate documentation — the paiza, a passport tablet issued by Mongol authorities — could move from the Pacific coast of China to the Black Sea ports with reasonable security. The great overland routes that had carried silk and other goods westward for centuries were now unified under a single political authority, and the Mongols, who were not primarily producers of goods themselves, had strong incentives to facilitate commerce: it generated tax revenue and supplied the empire with the luxury goods that the khans and their courts desired.
What Moved Along the Routes
The range of goods moving along these routes during the Pax Mongolica was extraordinary. Silk, as always, was the most valuable textile, but it now moved in both directions: Chinese silks went westward, while the fine woven textiles of Central Asia — the nasij, cloth of gold woven in Samarkand and Bukhara — went eastward to the Mongol court. The Mongols were particularly fond of cloth of gold and used it extravagantly in ceremonial contexts. The word baldachin — which now means a ceremonial canopy — derives from Baldacco, the Italian form of Baghdad, where a particularly prized cloth of gold was produced or traded.
The movement of people was as important as the movement of goods. Craftspeople — weavers, metalworkers, ceramicists — were relocated across the empire, sometimes by force, to supply the courts of the various Mongol khans. Chinese weavers were brought to Central Asia; Central Asian craftspeople were relocated to China. The result was a cross-pollination of techniques that left lasting marks on the textile traditions of the entire region. The distinctive cloud and dragon motifs that appear in both Central Asian and Chinese silks of the 13th and 14th centuries are products of this forced cultural exchange.
Marco Polo and the Western Eye
The most famous Western account of the Pax Mongolica comes from Marco Polo, whose account of his travels through the Mongol Empire and China (undertaken between approximately 1271 and 1295) is one of the most consequential travel narratives in history — even though its accuracy has been disputed by historians ever since it was written. What matters for our purposes is what Polo noticed: he records, with consistent admiration, the textiles he encountered. The silk of Kublai Khan’s court, the cloth of gold of the Central Asian cities, the cotton of India. His account reached European readers who had, at best, seen fragments of these fabrics in trade; Polo’s descriptions of the textile wealth of the East helped shape the commercial aspirations that drove European expansion for the following two centuries.
The Plague and the End
The Pax Mongolica ended for several reasons, among them the fragmentation of the empire into competing successor states and a series of ecological and political disruptions. The most catastrophic was the Black Death, which reached Europe via the Black Sea trade routes in 1347 — carried along the very pathways that the Mongol peace had made so efficient for commerce. The same infrastructure that moved silk from Cathay to Crimea moved Yersinia pestis with equal efficiency. The plague killed somewhere between a third and half of Europe’s population within a few years. The overland trade routes never recovered their Pax Mongolica-era volume. The focus of global trade shifted, slowly but irreversibly, toward the sea.