On the northern road, you don’t need to pay much for shipping. If your merchandise does not exceed 25,000 golden florins in value, you will need only sixty to eighty silver bars in total to reach Khanbalik (Beijing), and it may cost you even less on the way back. Always invest in small, easily packed luxury items, such as silk, because you’ll need to trade some of it for silver when you return home. That’s because, in China, the Mongols will ask you to exchange your metal bars for banknotes. It’s the only money they accept in this area. After you turn around, stop again in Urgench to exchange your silk for new silver bars.
Don’t worry about thieves; the Mongol laws protect foreign merchants and harshly punish robbery. But certain precautions are necessary in order to ensure that the law is on your side. Most importantly, don’t venture into Mongol lands without a business partner. If you die on your trip, everything you bring with you goes to the khan—unless you have a companion who can claim your goods. Also, make sure you get the news from the Mongol lands, because when there is no khan—or if many khans are fighting for power—the roads are hazardous for foreigners. Otherwise, the northern road is safe day and night.1
* * *
Such was the advice of Francesco Pegolotti, a merchant working for the Compagnia dei Bardi, a Florentine banking company. We know very little of Pegolotti, except that he stayed at various Bardi trading posts and wrote a handbook for traders some time between 1335 and 1343. Based on his own experiences and the oral reports he heard from long-distance traders, he compiled a set of recommendations—paraphrased above—for those who wished to journey into the Horde and on to China.
In the fourteenth century, merchants had a choice between two long-distance routes that crossed the Mongol landmass, a southern and a northern route. The southern route, by land and sea, was mostly in the hands of the Ilkhanids and the Toluid great khan. The trip from Tabriz to Khanbalik was exhausting and unpredictable—it could take as little as three and a half months and as long as three years. The way was also perilous and the itinerary ever-changing, thanks to political upheaval underway in the Toluid territories throughout the early fourteenth century. A trader could never be sure which markets would be open, which yam stations would be in operation, and which roads would be passable. The northern steppe route, controlled by the Jochids, was safer and more predictable, although it could be tricky when passing through the fractious territory of Qaidu. The trip from Tana to China lasted seven to eleven months, but contemporary travelers considered this fast enough. Most importantly, the itinerary was fixed, and so were the taxes and shipping costs, which were kept low. Based on Pegolotti’s reports, we can estimate that the tax was equal to no more than 1.6 percent of the value of the goods.2
Pegolotti had good advice, but he did not know about the Siberian Road, the far-northern caravan track through Ordaid territory and on to Qaraqorum and China. The Siberian Road branched off the northern route Pegolotti described, but his sources would never have been able to survive the cold and snow. Only nomads, fur hunters, and seasoned trackers had the skills and equipment—including dogsleds—to take advantage of the far-northern route, which skirted the Arctic Circle. The stations of the Siberian Road are not recorded, but the route must have linked the Ural River to the Irtysh River and passed through the Altai Mountains. By means of the Siberian Road, one could reach or exit Yuan China without having to worry about the political situation in Qaidu’s land.3
Today we commonly speak of a Silk Road that connected east and west, but in truth the Silk Road was several routes, two of them controlled by Mongols: the northern, Jochid-dominated route and the southern one, which was largely under Ilkhanid control. The entirety of the northern road, including its subarctic offshoot, was one of the keys to Jochid power. In the fourteenth century, Jochid rulers continued to prioritize commercial relations, operating flexibly to preserve their tax base and productive capacity among sedentary subjects while using soft and hard power to maintain leadership of the Eurasian trade network—all in support of the circulation and redistribution that enabled political strength and the balance of the Mongol universe. In the first half of the 1300s, the Horde firmed up its domination of the kniazia, with major consequences for the future of Russian politics. The Jochids masterfully manipulated the Mamluks, Genoese, and Venetians, enriching themselves and their subjects. And, finally, the Horde came away with the biggest prize of all: freedom from the Ilkhanid threat. Between the 1330s and 1350s, the Ilkhanids collapsed, ending competition from the southern road and leaving the Jochids the undisputed masters of trade in Eurasia. At least for a time.
Toqto’a Consolidates Power
In 1298 the Ordaid horde lost its leader, Qonichi. Qonichi had been a very large man. According to Rashīd al-Dīn, “day by day he grew fatter,” to a point where he could no longer ride a horse and had to travel in a cart instead. Qonichi’s contemporaries claimed he was crushed to death by the excess fat around his neck. Historically obesity was rare among nomads, though more common among the wealthy city inhabitants who stayed within their four walls. But at this point the nomadic elites were so prosperous, and their supplies so well organized, that the mobile courts consumed as much food and drink as the biggest cities of Eurasia. Mongol diets had also changed, too rapidly incorporating goods such as sugar introduced by traders.4
The Mongol exchange, c. 1300–1330.
Qonichi’s heirs clashed over succession, and they soon involved their Mongol neighbors in the conflict. The Ordaids had been peaceful for half a century; their abrupt fighting sent a shockwave across the whole of Mongol Eurasia. Qaidu and the Chagatayids supported Qonichi’s cousin, but the Jochid khan Toqto’a and the great khan in the east supported Qonichi’s son Bayan. Each camp provided warriors to support their candidate. In 1304 the Mongol leaders agreed to a general truce. But the official peace did not fully dissolve the tensions among the Ordaids, and sporadic fights continued for several years. It was only when Qonichi’s grandson Sāsī Buqa inherited the throne, around 1312, that the conflict truly ended and the Ordaids reunited.5
The truce, however, had purposes other than ending the Ordaid war. The primary goal of the peace was to reassert the domination of the Toluids and Jochids over Mongol Eurasia. By 1304 Qaidu was dead, and it was clear that the Jochid Toqto’a and the Toluids formed a powerful coalition, far stronger militarily than any of the other Mongol groups. Together, the Jochids and Toluids were the decision-makers. Other members of the golden lineage were reduced to a subordinate position: they could either submit or rise up and rebel. Thus, in 1304, the Ilkhanid ruler, a Toluid, wrote, “We … descendants of Chinggis Khan spent forty-five years recriminating against each other. Now, under the protection of Tengri, we elder and younger brothers have reached a mutual agreement. Our states are one, from southern China, where the sun rises, as far as the Talu Sea.”6
Qonichi’s death, and the general truce, provided an opportunity for Toqto’a to assert himself. With Qonichi and Nogay out of the picture, the Jochids faced a power vacuum, which Toqto’a rushed to fill. Meanwhile the agreement among the Chinggisid rulers enabled Toqto’a to expand his trading partnerships throughout the empire. He used the Mongol roads to reach deeper into the Eurasian landmass, ensuring that the Horde remained the chief beneficiary of the Mongol exchange.7
Toqto’a also restarted the pressure campaign against the Ilkhanids. Unlike Nogay, Toqto’a insisted that the descendants of Hülegü had usurped the lands of Arran and Azerbaijan and that the Jochids had to take them back. Through diplomacy, Toqto’a persuaded the Ilkhanids to reopen the Caucasian road south of Derbent. But he wanted more than that: he wanted full access to the southern road, extending to the Far East. This would require more than diplomacy, so in 1304–1305 and again in 1306–1307 Toqto’a sent envoys to the Mamluk sultan urging him to attack the Ilkhanids. The Ilkhanid ruler Öljeitü struck back by offering the sultan an exchange of prisoners and promising to let Mamluk merchants trade in his territory. Keen to send their traders
to Tabriz and Baghdad, the Mamluks agreed to a temporary truce with their old enemies, the Ilkhanids. Soon after, the Mamluks officially rejected Toqto’a’s plan for a joint campaign.8
A few months later, in November, Toqto’a punished the Mamluks for supporting the Ilkhanids. He ordered the Genoese—the Mamluks’ best middlemen—chased out of the Horde and had their goods seized. Toqto’a did not go too far: he wanted to change the Mamluks’ minds, not permanently sour relations, so he allowed Mamluk envoys themselves to continue visiting the Horde. To justify evicting the Genoese, the khan publicly accused them of trading children on his territories and selling them to the Mamluks. In the Latin world, this was a grave accusation. Not only did the Catholic Church prohibit human trafficking, but the Pope also excommunicated anyone who provided Muslim rulers with weapons, wood, and soldiers.
By May 1308 the Genoese abandoned Caffa. They had been under siege for about seven months, were short on supplies, and could no longer defend the harbor. Indeed, throughout the northern shore of the Black Sea, Italian business was on hold, tensions with the Mongols were high, and Christian conversions decreased, to the detriment of the entire Latin network. All this unnerved the Franciscans, who blamed the Genoese merchants, accusing them of practicing illegal trading activities, spying on the Mongols, and feigning loyalty simultaneously to the Mamluks, Ilkhanids, and Jochids.9
Unlike his predecessor Möngke-Temür, Toqto’a did not see the Genoese as key trade partners. Their expulsion was therefore not a significant issue. Toqto’a’s attention was directed at the lower Volga and the flourishing central Eurasian economy that buoyed the region. Toqto’a’s horde was in the middle of the northern route and, more specifically, a trade corridor that reached from northern Khwarezm to the northern Caucasus. This long stretch of land was the khan’s private domain; his keshig exerted direct control over it. To contemporaries it was Ulugh Kul, the Great Center.10 Situated at the intersection of the east-west Silk Road and north-south fur road, the Great Center was a series of thriving nodes, where the nomads of the Eurasian hinterland traded weapons, tools, grains, animals, and clothes.
To better exploit his advantageous position in the Great Center and encourage more trade, Toqto’a began implementing monetary reforms in 1306–1308. The commercial situation had changed since the last monetary reform in Möngke-Temür’s times, and the coinages of the four most productive Jochid regions needed significant reconfiguring. Foreigners often complained that their silver bought them old coins of lesser value than the more recent ones. There was also a problem of standardization. Old coins had been struck according to various metrics of weight and material purity. As a result, not everybody agreed on the value of a given coin, which led to disputes. There were too many different monetary issues in circulation, creating an urgent need to standardize the weight system.11
The khan’s advisers, accountants, and ortaqs (official traders) came up with a plan to tackle the most important issues: replacing old silver coins with newly minted and better standardized ones, ensuring that foreigners used local currency when they traded in Jochid territory and dissuading people from taking Jochid coins across the border. All of this would be achieved without eliminating the benefits of diversity, which the Mongols had long recognized. While new standards were implemented, Toqto’a never sought to establish a common coin for the entirety of the Horde. Rather, he unified the monetary and weight systems in each region so that regional systems would be internally coherent but would still differ from each other. And while Toqto’a banned the use of foreign coins in much of the Horde, they could still be tendered in border settlements. Finally, the new, standardized coins largely maintained earlier regional variations in shape, size, and markings, which bolstered people’s trust in both the currency and the regime. As ever, merchants and taxpayers felt more comfortable using coins referring to their own traditions and belief systems, and Toqto’a left in place the Turkic, Muslim, and other symbols and scripts that users preferred.12
The goals of Toqto’a’s reforms were not purely economic. They were also political, which is why he had his tamga, his lineage mark, removed from the coins struck in the Great Center. Whereas previous Jochid khans felt the need to assert their authority over lands in which Mongols were an alien presence, by this point, no one doubted who was in charge of the territory ruled directly by the khan, leaving Toqto’a no reason to publicly claim what was indisputably his. On top of his lineage rights, his military successes made him powerful, safe, and confident in the mandate that Tengri had bestowed on him. Only the coins issued in the city of Bulgar and in Crimea, the lower Don, and the lower Danube showed the khan’s mark, for these were the Jochid borderlands, where the khan’s authority was indirect.13
A final political goal of the reform was to balance Jochid power against the Ilkhanids. Toqto’a’s reform came as a response to the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan, who had just launched his own currency policy. The Horde did not comply with the new exchange rules implemented in Azerbaijan and Iran, the Ilkhanid regions that bordered the Jochid territories. Instead the Horde reinvented its own system to be more competitive against the Ilkhanids’.14
It took the Jochids almost thirty years to complete Toqto’a’s reform. Beginning in Khwarazm and Crimea, and later in the lower Volga and Bulgaria, old coins were recalled, repurposed as jewelry, or melted and recycled into new coins, tools, weapons, and other everyday utensils. The Jochids took their time because they understood the importance of continuity in assuring economic growth and political stability. Making people change their habits required persuasion, diplomacy, and patience, and Toqto’a, his associates, and his successors were willing to invest the necessary time and effort.
Around 1311 the cold war that had prevented the Mamluks from trading with the Horde via the Genoese came to an end. To show that the khan was eager to reopen commercial relations, his envoys presented the sultan a hundred slaves and a pile of luxury furs. It was a clear message that Mamluk trade was welcome again in the Horde. The news spread that the khan had reconciled with the sultan and that the Jochid coin system had been improved, offering better conditions for trade, resulting in renewed growth in human trafficking in Crimea. Delighted, the sultan sent the khan envoys carrying a thousand pieces of armor including headgear, belts, and barding. But when the envoys arrived at the khan’s camp, they discovered that Toqto’a had recently died, apparently drowned in a shipwreck on the Volga. Keeping to business as usual, the Mamluks gave the gifts to his successor.15
The Mongol ruler Ghazan, seated on the throne with his wife, from a c. 1430 edition of Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh. The royal couple is placed on equal footing, a Mongol rule that also applied in the Horde. (De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images)
Controlling the Competition
Some of Toqto’a’s contemporaries claimed that his drowning was in fact a murder and that his nephew Özbek was involved. Özbek’s role is uncertain, but it is not hard to see why he might have had a vendetta against the khan. During the coup of 1291, Toqto’a killed Özbek’s father Toghrilcha. Adding to the list of grievances, Toqto’a had married Bayalun, Toghrilcha’s chief wife and Özbek’s stepmother. In the view of some Mongols, Toqto’a’s fratricide and usurpation of the throne marked him for revenge. Whatever the case may be, his transgressions weighed on the next generation and resurfaced when the time came for a transfer of power.16
The question was whether the next khan would be Toqto’a’s chosen successor, his son Tükel Buqa, or else Özbek. As a youth Özbek had been banished from the khan’s court, and most likely spent his time in northern Khwarezm, where he held a position in the army. Tükel Buqa, by contrast, had enjoyed the honors, resources, and gifts bestowed on him by his father, thereby gaining much political prestige. Even so, Özbek had his supporters. Preliminary debates over the succession, most likely held at Sarai, were heated. Some of the Jochids and the qarachu begs supported the rights of Toqto’a’s house and others the rights of Toghrilc
ha’s. Influential religious elites interfered, exacerbating tensions. Buddhists supported Tükel Buqa and Muslims Özbek, who, according to Muslim sources, promised that he would publicly convert to Islam upon taking the throne. Indeed, it was the head of the Muslim begs, Qutluq-Temür, who invited Özbek to return to Sarai and vie for the throne. Özbek also had the support of Bayalun, newly widowed once more. In the eyes of his followers, Özbek would restore Möngke-Temür’s direct line of succession, which Toqto’a had misappropriated.
In early 1313, with the lunar new year approaching, the hordes converged on the lower Volga for festivities and the enthronement of their new khan. But no consensus had been reached. During the festival Özbek learned that, in the event he was enthroned, his opponents were preparing a coup against him. Upon hearing the news, he rushed out of his tent, gathered his men and allies on the outskirts of the festival site, and then returned in full force. Outpacing his enemies, Özbek slayed Tükel Buqa, while Özbek’s men killed the begs and princes who opposed him. Özbek seized the throne, and in the succeeding months, he and Qutluq-Temür chased the fleeing members and supporters of Tükel Buqa’s house. More than a hundred were executed.17
Soon after taking the throne, Özbek married his stepmother Bayalun. By doing so, he reestablished his deceased father in the direct lineal succession, erased Toqto’a and his descendants from the line, and tightened his own control over the ruling lineage. As a Muslim, Özbek was forbidden from marrying his stepmother, but the khan’s jurists circumvented the issue by claiming that Bayalun’s previous marriages were not valid, because her former husbands had not been Muslim. Such creative legal thinking was to Özbek’s benefit but also Bayalun’s. She was no passive instrument of legitimation; on the contrary, Bayalun had been at the center of power for more than twenty years, and she was keen to maintain her influence.18
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