One problem still bedeviled the Horde, though. Directly to the south, the Ilkhanids maintained the competing southern route, hampered mobility in the Caucasus, and countered Jochid interests at the Mamluk court. And there was no reason to believe the longstanding rivalry with the descendants of Hülegü would end any time soon. The early fourteenth century had been a time of crisis for the Ilkhanids, as high-ranking officials battled each other for control while a child Ilkhan, Abū Sa‘īd, awaited his opportunity to rule. But the regime survived, and in the 1320s Abū Sa‘īd rose to the occasion, asserting himself on the throne and improving relations with the Mamluks and Venetians. His domains were vast, including the present-day countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran and parts of what are now Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Even when Özbek stole the Venetians away in 1332, no one would have thought that the breakdown of Abū Sa‘īd’s regime was imminent.
But then, in November 1335, Abū Sa‘īd died at the age of thirty-one, likely from poisoning. He left multiple wives and at least one daughter but no son. The Ilkhanid succession had often generated conflicts, but this time no descendant of Hülegü was strong enough to compensate for the lack of an heir. That left the throne to contenders from secondary lines. At least three princes and one princess, Abū Sa‘īd’s sister, as well as high officials from various Mongol families asserted claims. Even the Mamluk sultan interfered with the succession crisis, backing his own candidates. There were capable people among the contenders; the Mongol officials had considerable administrative and military experience, and they were Muslim, which was an important source of legitimacy. But the contenders were not members of the golden lineage, making Abū Sa‘īd’s succession the first in which nonmembers of the golden lineage dared claim the throne of a key Mongol territory. Ultimately none of the contenders possessed enough prestige, warriors, or money to assume leadership. The Ilkhanids fragmented, never to regain their former unity. As contemporaries put it—reflecting both the Muslim and Mongol view that khans prospered under a divine dispensation—the Ilkhanids had lost the mandate of heaven.64
Several causes lay behind the abrupt collapse of the Ilkhanids, some of which were deeply rooted in the structure of the regime. In particular, the Ilkhanids had always been disjointed, as eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Iran constituted a dizzying patchwork of lands, peoples, and powers. The Mongol regime kept them together for almost a century, but regional divisions remained strong, fostering endless competition among ambitious emirs and noyans and denting the ruler’s prestige. The dysfunction was clear before Abū Sa‘īd’s death and was one of the causes of the wars that marked his childhood. These frictions among cities, regional forces, and nomadic elites were much more intense in the Ilkhanid territory than in the Horde, where relations between the Jochids and their sedentary subjects, especially the Russians, fostered stability. Internal competition was not the only factor to blame for undermining the Ilkhanid regime, but it cannot be dismissed either. Regionalism certainly complicated the task of central administration and, notably, the powers that emerged from the ashes of the ulus often broke along the same lines as the Ilkhanid provinces. That regional rivalries became geopolitical ones suggests that the Ilkhanid state had not been terribly cohesive to begin with.65
Internal pressure was joined by external pressure from the Horde. The growing success of the northern route in the 1330s meant the decline of the southern route. With the southern route faltering, there was little common cause for the Ilkhanids’ Mongol commanders and regional elites to rally around. The economic loss meant that the top of the hierarchy could not afford to uphold the downward redistribution system, further alienating dominated parties. The dissolution was slow but by the late 1350s, the Ilkhanid regime had completely lost its hold on military power and its once-conquered territories.
The end of the Ilkhanids was an opportunity for the Jochids. Not only were they free of the encumbrances caused by their longstanding rival, but they also had a chance to take over their former rivals’ lands. Under Janibek, Özbek’s son and successor, the Jochids led an army through the Caucasian pass of Derbent-Shirvan in winter 1356–1357. The Jochids followed the coastline of the Caspian Sea down to Tabriz, in Azerbaijan, the last Ilkhanid capital and the door to the southern route. The Azerbaijan region was ripe for the taking, having fallen under the control of the despised Malik Ashraf. The grandson of a powerful Ilkhanid commander, Malik Ashraf was rejected by Muslims as both sinful and illegitimate, and the people of the region rallied around the Jochids. According to a number of sources, Azerbaijani Muslim elites even requested that Janibek depose Malik Ashraf, which is precisely what the khan did.66 The conquest of Tabriz marked the first time since Batu’s rule that the Jochids were rewarded for their military operations beyond Derbent. The Jochids captured other cities, too, along with the surrounding grasslands, which had been the Ilkhanids’ winter grazing territory. For the Jochids, this was revenge a century in the making.
The contemporary author Abū Bakr al-Qutbī al-Ahrī celebrated the Horde and its massive display of force, claiming that the khan had raised up to 300,000 warriors. Today’s scholars believe the number was perhaps a third of that, but whatever the number, the campaign was a stunning success. Now that the Toluid family had lost their western territories, the Jochids expected to take the lead in the Mongols’ world empire. To promote his victory, Janibek ordered coins bearing his name minted in Tabriz, and he bragged to the Mamluk sultan.67 The khan headed back to the lower Volga with substantial spoils and captives. He left his son Birdibek in charge of Tabriz, the Azerbaijan region, and its people. Malik Ashraf had been hanged, and most of the Azerbaijani emirs had submitted to the Horde. Their vassalage was still superficial, but in time Birdibek would overcome the insubordinate emirs and complete the conquest of the Ilkhanid heartland.
A major effect of the Ilkhanids’ decline was a boost in trade in the Jochid territories and the revival of connections that had been neglected while merchants took southerly routes. Traders now prioritized the long-distance road that linked Otrar and Almaliq, the Jochid-Chagatayid border cities, to the Horde. This was the pivotal route that the Florentine merchant Pegolotti described in his handbook for traders. The road went to northern Khwarezm and up to Saraijuq and the Ural Valley. The journey between Urgench and Saraijuq was a harsh and dry one, yet caravansaries—roadside inns—and wells popped up to support travelers. In the 1330s there were at least fifteen caravansaries located at a distance of roughly eighteen miles from each other, just like yam stations.68
With the northern road flourishing as never before, and the far-northern Siberian Road now connected to the clear favorite of the Silk Road’s two main thoroughfares, the Jochids firmly controlled the crossroads of Eurasia. They dominated the north-south fur road and the east-west Silk Road, consolidating their economic dominance. At last the Jochid-Ilkhanid rivalry that belied the so-called Pax Mongolica was over, and the Horde had become the uncontested gravitational center of the Mongol exchange. Yet, while the collapse of the Ilkhanids removed a formidable and longstanding opponent, enabling further Jochid thriving, that collapse also created a power vacuum on the Horde’s southern border. This would challenge and change the Horde in unexpected ways.
7
Withdrawal
In September 1343 a street fight overturned the Horde’s relations with the Latins. Hajji ‘Umar, a Jochid beg, had humiliated Andreolo Civran, a Venetian nobleman and merchant, in Tana. Seeking revenge, Civran and his men ambushed Hajji ‘Umar and killed him along with his followers and family. Venetians, Genoese, Florentines, and Pisans—Janibek Khan immediately ordered all of them expelled from their trading posts on the Don and the Black Sea. The khan also confiscated their goods and ships. The merchants sought shelter in the Genoese fortress at Caffa, but Janibek’s armies pursued them and laid siege to their refuge. The murdered beg was an important official—a tax collector—and the khan could not let the killers escape without punishment and
serious compensation.1
The Venetian Senate condemned Civran and a few others for their roles in the murder. All of them were temporarily exiled from Venice and forbidden from returning to Tana. Then the Senate sent envoys to negotiate with Janibek. Negotiations went slowly, but by April 1344 the envoys brought home news that the khan was ready to reach an agreement. Janibek was open to granting the Latin traders a new contract, but he also demanded that a Jochid court judge Andreolo Civran’s case according to Mongol rules, a condition the Venetians could not accept.
To compel Janibek to agree to their terms, the Genoese and Venetians temporarily allied and enforced a devetum, a trade embargo, on the Horde. The khan responded by placing his own embargo on the Latins and by again sending troops to besiege Caffa in 1345. Janibek also prohibited grain exports, a blow to the Genoese and Venetian economies and the cause of bread shortages in Constantinople. Caffa withstood the siege thanks to its harbor, which received supplies the khan’s troops were powerless to intercept. Janibek raised a fleet of thirty ships in order to expand the blockade to the sea, but the Genoese, superior sailors, destroyed one Mongol vessel after another. There were high losses on both sides. At the end of 1346 or in early 1347, Janibek lifted the siege and negotiations resumed, soon producing a new agreement.2 The Venetians received authorization to resettle in Tana, but Janibek also raised the comerclum, the trade tax, from 3 percent to 5 percent.3
It was never the khan’s goal to expel the Venetians and Genoese. Rather, he wanted to show that he was in charge. The Genoese, in particular, were obstinate: they considered Caffa their own, claiming it did not belong to Janibek’s empire. The khan would lay siege to Caffa again in 1350, to remind the Genoese that they were guests on his lands. And as guests, they were subject to the khan’s will. He could change the terms of their welcome, demanding higher taxes and using force of arms to ensure that he collected. Janibek’s embargo was effective in spite of his fledgling navy; his ground troops cut Caffa off from the grain loads that typically arrived from points north, enforcing the prohibition on grain exports. But Janibek’s objective was no more to starve Constantinople than to eliminate the Latin presence in the Horde. It was all business.4
It was not quite business as usual, though, because the Horde was facing a challenge far greater than insubordinate Italians. The Horde was also facing the plague—the Black Death. Gabriele de’ Mussi, an Italian notary, recorded that during the siege of Caffa, an epidemic broke out in the Jochid ranks. The mortality rate was so high that, reportedly, no more than one in twenty Mongol warriors survived. Mussi also provides an early account of biological warfare, as the Jochids apparently catapulted infected body parts into the fortress. Unable to defend themselves from land-based attackers, the Caffans eventually abandoned the city then sailed to Pera, their trading post in the suburbs of Constantinople, and from there sailed into the Mediterranean, carrying with them “the darts of death” with which the Mongols had assaulted them. Mussi claimed this was how the plague spread from Asia to Europe.5
Mussi’s story is almost certainly untrue in important respects, although it is nonetheless revealing. We can be confident of its inaccuracy for several reasons. First, Mussi witnessed none of the events he described. At the time they supposedly transpired, Mussi was in his hometown of Piacenza, north of Genoa. As a notary, he probably heard stories secondhand, through Genoese arriving from the Black Sea. Second, it makes little sense that Mongol warriors would have handled plague-infected bodies. If they understood that the infected dead could be a weapon—as Mussi’s story implies—then they would also have known the risk of interacting with the bodies. And there is indeed evidence that the Mongols understood the danger of contact with infected people and so avoided them. On top of that, Mongols normally showed deep respect for their own dead, even during war campaigns. Finally, the epidemic struck Crimea in fall 1346, yet it reached Constantinople only in September 1347, Alexandria in October, Genoa in November, and finally Venice in February 1348. The gap in outbreaks rules out the possibility of a direct spread from Caffa to the Mediterranean via germ warfare. The plague did cross the Black Sea and penetrate the Mediterranean, but not as a result of the Caffa siege.6
If Mussi painted an inaccurate picture of “mountains of dead … thrown into the city,” his fears of transmission were certainly understandable. In late 1347 and early 1348, when the plague reached Italy, locals grasped that Asia had already been struck and further understood that the epidemic could have reached them via places like Caffa and Tana, the portals connecting Western Europe to the Mongol colossus.7 In early spring 1347, the embargoes were over and goods were leaving Tana for Europe again. Those goods were very likely contaminated: a year earlier, a Byzantine source reported that Tana was a plague-infected harbor. Food supplies were a major means of plague transmission, especially from the Horde’s Italian-operated ports. Warehouses were full of previous seasons’ harvests, as the embargoes had prevented grain from circulating for more than two years, and rodents had proliferated in the stores. The trade ships from the Horde that reached Italy in summer 1347 carried not only grain but also infected rats, mice, and fleas.8
For the Jochids, the second half of the fourteenth century was the polar opposite of the first. The plague, combined with disastrous internecine conflicts elsewhere in the Mongol Empire, enervated the Horde. By the 1360s, the ulus of Jochi would crack into three parts: the remnant of the khan’s horde in the center and, to the east and west, larger and more powerful clusters of hordes that picked over the bones of declining cities like Sarai. But it was not just external pressure that undermined the Horde. Also significant was the Jochids’ changing political culture. Under Toqto’a and Özbek, authoritarianism and centralization had seeped into the Horde’s governance, replacing the old, stabilizing institutions of consensus-building and power diffusion. Meanwhile the khans’ political purges hollowed out the golden lineage, leaving the Horde without a ruling class strong enough to assert itself and opening the ulus to rebellion, secession, and schism. The result was a period of unstable governance and social and economic deterioration known as bulqaq—anarchy.
It turned out that the Ilkhanids’ gradual collapse between the 1330s and 1350s was just a harbinger of the most consequential global political phenomenon of the fourteenth century: the disintegration of the Mongol Empire. The Horde succumbed to infighting, the ulus of Chagatay split, and the Yuan, the Toluid regime in the far east, was ejected from China. All these changes were hastened by the Black Death, which revealed weaknesses in the larger world system stewarded and relied on by Chinggis’s heirs. With the global economy shattered by the pandemic, trade and circulation—the lifeblood of the Chinggisid regimes—drained away. By the end of the fourteenth century, there was still a Horde, there was still a Yuan dynasty, and there was still a people that called themselves the ulus of Chagatay, but all of these looked dramatically different from the sturdy polities of decades earlier.9
The Black Death Spreads
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, is an age-old organism carried by the burrowing rodents of the Eurasian steppe. Y. pestis does not transfer easily from wild animals to humans, who are not its natural hosts. To spread across species, the bacteria require an assistant, some other animal that serves as a vector from the rodent body to the human. Historically that vector has been fleas. After fleas feed on plague-infected blood, they may transmit the bacterium to their next target, and while fleas prefer the blood of rodents, they will settle for any mammal when they must—as, perhaps, when they find themselves in the bowels of a ship, far from the soil and its creatures. This is how Y. pestis escaped the wild and became the most dangerous source of disease humanity has ever known. The Black Death was not humanity’s first encounter with an outbreak of disease caused by Y. pestis—that was the Plague of Justinian, in the sixth through eighth centuries. But the Black Death was far more acute, killing perhaps twice as many people in just a few years.10
The str
ain of Y. pestis that caused the Black Death arose sometime between 1196 and 1268, owing to genetic mutation. But it was not just the new strain that was responsible for the extent of the sudden outbreak of the mid-fourteenth century. Something pushed it along. Indeed, several things: the entire system of human relations with the natural world would have to have changed in order for the mutant strain to become so consequential. In this respect, it would be fair to say that Mongols were at least partially responsible for the spread of plague, even if they did not fling infected corpses at European traders.11
The natural environment of Y. pestis was disrupted by earthquakes, wildfires, climate change, and human activity. During the Mongol conquests, long sieges, mass migrations, and the movements of armies—with their herds of camels, horses, and heavy carts furrowing the ground—all disturbed the plague’s habitat. And Mongol interference did not end with conquest; the development of Chinggis Khan’s gigantic empire made for lasting environmental change. Through the movement of goods, animals, and people, the Mongols brought an increasing number and diversity of ecological zones into contact. There was also a great deal more interaction between humans and other animals as herds grew, hunting intensified, and the fur trade blossomed.12
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