The Pax Mongolica — literally, the “Mongol Peace” — is the conventional name for the roughly 120 years, from the early 1220s to the early 1340s, in which the overland trade routes of Eurasia were policed by a single imperial system and were safer and more heavily used than they had been in centuries. The phrase is borrowed from the Latin Pax Romana and was first used in this context by the British historian H. G. Wells in The Outline of History (1920), and it has stuck — though it has been criticised by some recent historians (Beckwith 2009, Allsen 2001) as a romantic overstatement that flattens the violence of the Mongol conquests.
The basic phenomenon is real. The Mongol Empire at its height (c. 1290) reached from Korea to Hungary and from the Arctic to the Persian Gulf. For about 60 years, a single set of institutions — the postal relay (yam), the paiza safe-conduct pass, the Yassa commercial code, the standardized silver ingot (suk) — made it possible for a merchant to travel from Khanbaliq (Beijing) to the Crimea with a single passport and one set of weights and measures. The same period saw the largest sustained increase in long-distance trade volume in the pre-modern world, the largest single movement of people (slaves, soldiers, settlers) since the Arab conquests, and the first systematic transfer of military and industrial technology between China and the Latin West.
It is also true that the Pax Mongolica ended in catastrophe. The Black Death, which probably travelled along the very trade routes that the Pax had made safer, killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population of Eurasia between 1346 and 1353. The Ilkhanate collapsed in 1335, the Yuan in 1368, the Golden Horde in 1502. By the 15th century, the overland trade routes that the Pax had policed were more dangerous than they had been in 1200, and the centre of economic gravity had moved to the maritime periphery — which is why the European voyages of discovery (Vasco da Gama 1498, Columbus 1492) are dated to the post-Mongol world, not the Mongol one.
The Institutions of the Pax Mongolica
Three institutions made the Pax work, and all three were Mongol inventions rather than inheritances from the Chinese, Persian, or Turkic empires that the Mongols had absorbed.
The first was the yam, the postal relay. The yam was a network of way stations, located at intervals of roughly 25 to 30 miles, where riders on imperial business could find fresh horses, lodging, and food. The system was already in use among the Mongols of the home plateau before 1206, but Genghis Khan’s Yassa required that the system be extended throughout the empire. By the 1240s, under Ögedei’s chancellor Yelü Chucai, the yam stretched from Karakorum to Beijing in one direction and to the Crimea in the other. The yam was, in effect, the medieval world’s first state-run communications infrastructure, and it was the model that the Russian and Ottoman postal systems copied in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The second was the paiza (Mongolian) or gerege (Turkish), a tablet or plaque of gold, silver, or wood that identified its bearer as a person under imperial protection. A paiza-bearing merchant could demand fresh mounts, lodging, and food at any yam station, was exempt from local tolls, and was guaranteed safe conduct under penalty of death for anyone who robbed him. European observers like John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who travelled on paizae in the 1240s and 1250s, were uniformly astonished at the efficiency of the system; the paiza is, in a real sense, the medieval ancestor of the modern diplomatic passport.
The third was the Yassa’s commercial provisions, which imposed the death penalty for robbery of a merchant on the imperial road and required all major markets to use a standardized set of weights, measures, and silver ingots. The Yassa’s provisions were not, in fact, very different from the commercial codes of the Song, Jin, or Khwarezmian empires the Mongols had conquered, but the enforcement was what made them work. Carpini, who had seen commercial law in the Latin West and in the Rus’ principalities, recorded that the Mongols’ enforcement was, by contemporary European standards, extraordinarily severe and effective.
The Trade Routes Under the Pax Mongolica
The principal artery of the Pax Mongolica was the Silk Road — the network of overland routes that had connected China to the Mediterranean since the Han dynasty (2nd century BC). The Mongols did not invent the Silk Road, and they did not “open” it in any literal sense (the routes had never been fully closed). What they did was to make the routes cheaper, faster, and safer in absolute terms, and to make the interior of the routes — the oases of Transoxiana, the cities of the Tarim Basin, the trading posts of the Volga — much more heavily used than they had been under the Tang or the early Song.
The commodities of the Pax are well documented in the merchants’ handbooks that survive. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s Pratica della mercatura (c. 1340) lists the prices and weights of every major commodity of the Pax trade, and from Pegolotti we can see that the principal items were: Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquerware (westward); Indian spices, precious stones, and textiles (westward); Persian carpets, metalwork, and glass (both ways); European woollens, furs, amber, and slaves (eastward); and Russian furs, wax, honey, and slaves (southward). The slave trade in particular was very large: the Ilkhanate, the Yuan, and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt all relied on Eurasian slave imports, and the Pax’s trade routes were the principal supply lines.
The maritime trade also expanded. The Mongol fleets, based in Quanzhou (Zayton) and Guangzhou, were active in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the Pax saw the first regular connection between the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf. Marco Polo’s return voyage (1292–1295) — by sea from Quanzhou to Hormuz — was an instance of this new connectivity, and the same period saw the first Arab and Persian merchants sailing directly into Chinese ports.
The Travelers of the Pax Mongolica
The Pax produced an extraordinary series of long-distance travellers, and the texts they left are the principal primary sources for the period. The most important, roughly in chronological order:
- John of Plano Carpini (1245–1247), a Franciscan friar sent by Pope Innocent IV to the Mongol court. His Ystoria Mongalorum is the first European account of the Mongols from the inside.
- William of Rubruck (1253–1255), a Flemish Franciscan who travelled to Karakorum and left a detailed account of the Mongol court, of Buddhism, and of Nestorian Christianity at the Mongol court.
- Rabban Bar Sauma (c. 1280), a Nestorian monk of Uyghur origin who travelled from Beijing to Baghdad to Europe, and whose travelogue is the only surviving East-to-West traveller’s account of the period.
- Marco Polo (1271–1295), the Venetian merchant. Il Milione (a.k.a. The Travels) was dictated to Rustichello of Pisa in a Genoese prison in 1298–1299 and is the most-cited European source on the Yuan. (Modern scholarship, notably Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, 1996, has questioned whether he was at the Yuan court at all; the question is open.)
- Pegolotti (c. 1340), whose Pratica della mercatura lists prices, weights, and routes for the Pax trade.
- Ibn Battuta (c. 1325–1354), the Moroccan jurist who left the longest single traveller’s account of the Pax world.
- John of Montecorvino (c. 1294), a Franciscan missionary in Beijing who established the first Catholic archdiocese in China.
These travellers were not isolated individuals. They were part of a network — they met each other (Rubruck met the captives of Möngke’s Hungarian campaign in Karakorum; Bar Sauma met the Pope in Rome), they shared the paiza and the yam, and their accounts reflect a shared mental world.
The Cultural and Intellectual Exchange
The Pax was, alongside its commercial and diplomatic effects, a period of large-scale transfer of technology and ideas between the civilizations of Eurasia. Some of the most consequential transfers:
- Papermaking: Chinese papermaking technology, which had been spreading west since the 8th century, was finally adopted in the Pax period in Ilkhanid Persia (the first paper mill in Persia dates to 1295, at Tabriz) and in Mamluk Egypt. Paper reached Christian Europe via the Italian ports of the Black Sea in the 1270s — about 200 years later than the Arab world.
- Gunpowder weapons: the huo pao (Chinese trebuchet-style gunpowder bomb) was in Ilkhanid service at the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and in Mamluk service by 1300. Hand-cannons (madfa’a) appear in Arab sources by the 1320s. The technology reached Europe via the Mamluk and Italian trade by the 1320s–1330s.
- The compass: known in China since the 11th century, known in the Arab world since the 12th, and used in European ocean navigation from the 1280s. The Pax trade is the period in which the compass became a reliable instrument.
- Paper money: the Yuan jiaochao was the model for the Ilkhanid experiment under Geikhatu (1294) and the Golden Horde experiment under Mubarak Shah. All three of these experiments failed, but they were the models for the European bank-note tradition that begins in 17th-century Sweden.
- Astronomy and cartography: the Maragheh Observatory (1259) of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and the Zij-i Ilkhani (1272) produced there, were the first systematic Islamic astronomical works to incorporate Chinese observational data.
- Botanical and zoological transfer: the Pax saw the first sustained transfer of plants (the sweet orange, sugar cane, the banana) and animals (the Persian cat, the Karabakh horse) between the East and the West in significant numbers.
On the religious side, the Pax saw the spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the Mongol heartland and to the Yuan court; the spread of Islam to the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, and the Ilkhanate; the establishment of Catholic missions in Beijing, Tabriz, and Karakorum; and the consolidation of the Nestorian Christian communities from China to Mesopotamia. The standard judgment (Allsen 2001) is that the Pax was a period of exchange rather than conversion: religious traditions spread into new political contexts without erasing the traditions already there.
The End of the Pax Mongolica
The Pax broke down in two stages. The first was the political collapse: the Ilkhanate fell in 1335, the Yuan in 1368, the Golden Horde in 1502. The political collapse removed the imperial framework on which the Pax’s trade, postal, and legal institutions depended. The second was the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death. Yersinia pestis probably emerged in the Central Asian or northern Chinese steppe in the 1320s, reached the Crimea by 1346, Constantinople and Alexandria by 1347, and Italy, France, and the English Channel by 1348. The plague killed between 30% and 50% of the population of the affected regions in the first wave (1347–1353) and recurred in waves until the 18th century. The plague rode the very trade routes the Pax had made safer.
The post-Pax world was, economically and politically, a different world. The overland trade routes became more dangerous, the volume of trade shrank, and the centre of long-distance commerce moved decisively to the maritime periphery. The 15th-century European voyages of discovery (Vasco da Gama 1498, Christopher Columbus 1492, Bartolomeu Dias 1488) are best read as a response to the breakdown of the Pax: they are the search for a new route to the East that does not depend on the now-fragmented land routes. The Mongol Peace and the European Age of Exploration are, in this sense, two sides of the same 13th- and 14th-century transformation.
Sources
- Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, 2009).
- Thomas T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge, 2001).
- Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989).
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007), ch. 6.
- Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (London, 2005), ch. 10–11.
- Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (London, 1996).