The Silk Road is the conventional name for the network of overland trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world to East Asia from roughly the 2nd century BC to the 15th century AD. The term itself is a 19th-century invention: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined Seidenstrasse in 1877 to describe the principal routes by which Chinese silk reached the Roman world, and the name stuck. Under the Mongol Empire in the 13th and early 14th centuries, the Silk Road reached the apex of its historical importance, and the period is sometimes called the “Golden Age of the Silk Road” — though, as the historian Valerie Hansen has argued (The Silk Road: A New History, 2012), the Silk Road was less central to the medieval economy than the popular account suggests, and most of the long-distance trade was actually maritime.
The Silk Road was not a single road but a network of routes that ran across the Eurasian landmass, with multiple branches and feeder routes connecting the major cities of the ancient and medieval worlds. The main trunk ran from Chang’an (modern Xi’an) in China, through the Hexi Corridor to Dunhuang, then through the Tarim Basin (with branches to the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert) to Kashgar, then across the Pamir Mountains to Samarkand and Bukhara, then to Merv, then to Hamadan and Baghdad, then to Antioch or Constantinople. From these Mediterranean termini, the goods that had travelled the Silk Road were carried by ship to the markets of Italy, the Levant, and the Black Sea.
The Silk Road Before the Mongols
The Silk Road existed in some form from the Han Dynasty (2nd century BC), when the Chinese general Zhang Qian opened the routes to Central Asia (c. 130 BC) and the Chinese began the long-distance horse trade with the Sogdians of Transoxiana. The early Silk Road was used for silk, of course, but also for the exchange of other luxury goods — spices, precious stones, metals, glassware, and (in the later period) ceramics, paper, and ideas. The route was dangerous and slow, and the volume of trade was limited by the political instability of the regions through which it passed.
The Silk Road experienced a partial revival under the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when the Chinese Empire was once again unified and the overland routes were relatively safe. The Tang period saw an enormous expansion of trade with Central Asia, India, and the Middle East, and the major cities of the Silk Road — Chang’an, Dunhuang, Kashgar, Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv — became centers of cosmopolitan culture. The Tang period also saw the spread of Buddhism from India to China along the Silk Road, and the establishment of major Buddhist monasteries in many of the route’s most important cities.
The Silk Road entered a long period of decline in the 10th and 11th centuries. The fall of the Tang in 907 was followed by a long period of political fragmentation in China; the rise of the Song Dynasty in 960 did not immediately restore the Silk Road to its former importance. The Karakhanid Turks in Central Asia, the Seljuk Turks in Persia, and the Khwarezmian Empire in Transoxiana all fought wars that disrupted the overland trade. The major trade routes shifted to the sea — the maritime route from China through the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, and the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean — and the overland routes became increasingly marginal.
The Mongol Revival of the Silk Road
The Mongol conquests of the 13th century revived the Silk Road as a major artery of Eurasian trade. The Pax Mongolica made the overland routes safer than they had been in centuries, and the yam postal system made it possible to travel across the empire with unprecedented speed. The volume of trade on the Silk Road increased significantly in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, and the major cities of the route experienced a period of extraordinary growth. The modern historian Valerie Hansen argues that the increase was less dramatic than the romantic account suggests, but the basic fact of a revival is not in dispute.
The Mongols were particularly interested in the Silk Road for both economic and strategic reasons. The economic interests were obvious: the overland trade generated large customs revenues, and the luxury goods that came from China, India, and the Middle East were essential to the imperial court. The strategic interests were equally important: the Silk Road was a vital military and political artery, and the Mongols were determined to keep it open. The Yassa code of law established severe penalties for robbery on the trade routes (death for the first offence, in the standard account), and the imperial government maintained a network of inspectors to oversee the major markets and to enforce the law.
The Mongol revival of the Silk Road had a transformative effect on the cities of the route. The most dramatic example is the city of Samarkand, which had been devastated by the Mongol conquests of 1220 — the population fell from perhaps 500,000 in 1220 to a fraction of that number by 1222 — but which was rebuilt under the Mongol Empire as one of the most important commercial centers of the medieval world. The city was a major center of the textile trade, of metalwork, and of paper manufacturing; the paper mills of Samarkand produced the paper that was used in the chancelleries of the Ilkhanate, the Yuan Dynasty, and many other medieval governments.
The Travelers of the Mongol Silk Road
The Mongol revival of the Silk Road made possible an extraordinary series of long-distance journeys. The most famous of the travellers is the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who according to the text of Il Milione himself spent roughly seventeen years at the Yuan court (1275–1292) — though, as noted in the Pax Mongolica cluster, modern scholarship (Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, 1996) has questioned whether he was ever there. The Travels of Marco Polo was widely read in Europe and was one of the main sources of European knowledge of China and the Mongol world for several centuries.
Other famous travellers of the Mongol Silk Road include the Franciscan missionaries John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who travelled from Europe to the Mongol heartland in the 1240s and 1250s and left detailed accounts of the Mongol court. The Italian merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti wrote a merchant’s handbook called the Pratica della mercatura (c. 1340), which described the trade routes of the Mongol world in remarkable detail and is the principal source for the prices and commodities of the Pax. The Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta, who travelled in the early 14th century, left an account of his journeys that is one of the most important sources for the history of the medieval Islamic world. The Nestorian monk Rabban Bar Sauma (c. 1280), who travelled from Beijing to Rome, left the only East-to-West traveller’s account of the period.
The travellers of the Mongol Silk Road came from all over Eurasia: Europeans, Persians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Arabs, Armenians, Georgians, and many others. The Silk Road was a meeting point for the cultures of the medieval world, and the travellers who used it helped to spread ideas, technologies, and artistic traditions across the continent.
The Decline of the Mongol Silk Road
The Mongol Silk Road entered a long period of decline in the mid-14th century. The Black Death, which swept across Eurasia in the 1340s, killed millions of people and disrupted the trade routes that had made the Pax Mongolica possible. The collapse of the Ilkhanate in 1335 and the Yuan Dynasty in 1368 removed the two khanates that had been the principal guarantors of the peace. The rise of the Ming Dynasty in China, the Timurid Empire in Central Asia, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow in Russia created new political configurations that were less favorable to long-distance trade.
The Ming Dynasty, in particular, was a serious blow to the overland trade. The Ming court withdrew from Central Asia and adopted a relatively isolationist foreign policy, and the overland routes from China to Central Asia became more dangerous and less heavily used. The rise of the maritime trade routes, which the Ming court actively encouraged (the Zheng He voyages of 1405–1433 are the most spectacular instance), drew trade away from the overland routes and made the Silk Road progressively less important.
The decline of the Silk Road was a major turning point in the history of Eurasia. The overland trade routes of the continent became more dangerous and less heavily used, and the centre of economic gravity shifted from the interior of the continent to the maritime periphery. The age of European exploration that began in the 15th century was, in a real sense, a response to the breakdown of the overland trade routes: the European voyages of discovery were attempts to find new routes to the east that did not depend on the Silk Road.
Sources
- Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012) — the standard modern corrective to the romantic account.
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London, 2015) — the more romantic account, well written and well sourced.
- 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 (Cambridge, 2001).
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford, 2007), ch. 6.