The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

Bohemond, son of a Norman legend who had made a name for himself in southern Italy and Sicily, was the star of the earliest accounts of the First Crusade.

New colonies were founded in Outremer – literally ‘overseas’ – ruled over by new Christian masters. It was a graphic expansion of European power: Jerusalem, Tripoli, Tyre and Antioch were all under the control of Europeans and governed by customary laws imported from the feudal west which affected everything from the property rights of the new arrivals, to tax gathering, to the powers of the King of Jerusalem. The Middle East was being recast to function like western Europe.

The bloodlust was directly linked to the idea that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion and that the lands of Israel should be held by the Christians of Europe. Nothing would get in the way of new connections being burrowed into the Levant.

The Crusade might be best remembered as a war of religion, but it was also a springboard for accruing serious wealth and power.

Hearing of the plan to take Jerusalem, ‘Roger raised his leg and then gave a loud fart. “By the truth of my religion,” he said, “there is more use in that than in what you have to say.”’

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, wrote the North African historian Ibn Khaldūn, Muslim fleets had such complete command of the seas that Christians were not even able to float a plank in it. 15 But although the Muslims had long dominated the Mediterranean, they were about to lose control of the waves to a new set of rivals: the city-states of Italy were the latest additions to the great trading networks of the east.

This fuelled economic growth back in Italy, where such great riches were being generated in Pisa in the late eleventh century that the bishop and citizens imposed limits on the height of towers built by nobles keen to show off their wealth. 17

Venice emerged as the clear victor. This owed much to the city’s geographic position in the Adriatic, which meant a shorter sailing time to Venice than the trip to either Pisa or Genoa; it also helped that anchorages on this route were better, making it a safer journey too, at least once the treacherous Peloponnese had been negotiated. That Venice’s economy was stronger and more developed was also important, as was the fact that the city had no local competitor to bog it down – unlike Pisa and Genoa, whose intense rivalry removed both from the Levant at crucial moments as they competed over control of their coastlines and above all that of Corsica.

Genoa, Pisa and Venice stimulated the growth of a string of other towns around them – just as Kiev had done in Russia.

It was Adelard who scoured the libraries of Antioch and Damascus and brought back copies of algorithmic tables that formed the foundation for the study of mathematics in the Christian world. Travelling round this region was to have one’s eyes opened. When he returned home, he ‘found the princes barbarous, the bishops bibulous, judges bribable, patrons unreliable, clients sycophants, promisers liars, friends envious and almost everybody full of ambition’. 42 These views were formed from the sanguine recognition of the east’s sophistication compared to the cultural limitations in the Christian west.

Texts produced in Constantinople were also translated into Latin, such as the commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics commissioned by Anna Komnene, daughter of Alexios I, which eventually found their way to Thomas Aquinas – and thence into the mainstream of Christian philosophy.

Textiles from the city such as ‘Cloth of Antioch’ were marketed so successfully and became so desirable that King Henry III of England (ruled 1216–72) had ‘Antioch Chambers’ in each of his principal residences: the Tower of London, Clarendon and Winchester Palaces, and Westminster.

It is amazing to see, wrote Ibn Jubayr, that ‘the fires of discord burn’ between Christians and Muslims when it comes to politics and fighting; but when it comes to trade, travellers ‘come and go without interference’.

Whatever the truth, barely two months after the battle Jerusalem surrendered peacefully to the Muslims, its gates flung open after terms had been agreed to spare the city’s inhabitants.

For centuries, men had looked east to make their fortunes and realise their ambitions – whether spiritual or material. The sack and capture of the biggest and most important city in Christendom showed that the Europeans would stop at nothing to take what they wanted – and needed – to get closer to the centre of where the world’s wealth and power lay.

he had established himself as the undisputed master of the Mongolian steppes by 1206. Attention then turned to the next ring of peoples, such as the Kyrgyz, the Oirat and the Uighurs situated to the west of China in Central Asia, who submitted and swore formal oaths of allegiance.

The Uighurs’ elevated cultural status was one reason for the recruitment into service en masse of their scribes and bureaucrats – including a certain ‘Tatar Tonga’, who became tutor to Genghis Khan’s sons.

1211, the Mongols forced their way into China under the rule of the Jin dynasty, sacking the capital, Zhongdu,

The Mongols cultivated such fears carefully, for the reality was that Genghis Khan used violence selectively and deliberately. The sack of one city was calculated to encourage others to submit peacefully and quickly; theatrically gruesome deaths were used to persuade other rulers that it was better to negotiate than to offer resistance. Nīshāpūr was one of the locations that suffered total devastation.

Stories such as that of a high-ranking official who was ordered into the presence of a newly arrived Mongol warlord and had molten gold poured into his eyes and ears became widely known – as was the fact that this murder was accompanied by the announcement that this was fitting punishment for a man ‘whose disgraceful behaviour, barbarous acts and previous cruelties deserved the condemnation of all’.

It was a pattern repeated time and again: money poured into towns that were rebuilt and re-energised, with particular attention paid to championing the arts, crafts and production. Blanket images of the Mongols as barbaric destroyers are wide of the mark, and represent the misleading legacies of the histories written later which emphasised ruin and devastation above all else. This slanted view of the past provides a notable lesson in how useful it is for leaders who have a view to posterity to patronise historians who write sympathetically of their age of empire – something the Mongols conspicuously failed to do.

The terror the Mongols aroused was reflected in the name by which they were soon being referred to: Tatars, a reference to Tartarus – the abyss of torment in classical mythology.

In fact, the Mongols were simply uninterested in what western Europe had to offer – at least for the time being.

was his son Ögödei who oversaw the expansion that massively increased the extent of Mongol lordship, masterminding campaigns that extended into the Korean peninsula, Tibet, Pakistan and northern India

Expeditions were sent to what remained of China until it capitulated completely in the late thirteenth century, at which point the ruling Mongol dynasty adopted the imperial title of Yüan and founded a new city on the site of the old city of Zhongdu. This now became the Mongol capital, designed to crown the achievements of taking control of the entire region between the Pacific and the Mediterranean. The new metropolis has retained its importance ever since: Beijing.

In the case of Egypt, the new masters known as Mamlūk, as a result of being largely descendants of slaves (mamalik) who had been taken from the tribal constellations north of the Black Sea and traded through the ports of the Crimea and the Caucasus to serve in the Egyptian military.

The battle for the medieval world was being fought between nomads from Central and eastern Asia.

The westerners were saved by the intervention of their sworn enemy – the Mamlūks of Egypt – who moved northwards to confront the army that was ripping through Palestine. 44

the Mongols who dominated the steppes of Russia and beyond into central Europe came to be known as the Golden Horde, while in Greater Iran the rulers were known as the Īlkhānids – a reference to the title of Īl-Khān that marked them as subordinate to the main branch of the Mongol leadership.

holding Jerusalem was wonderful in theory, in practice it was difficult, expensive and dangerous. And so, after being placed at the centre of European consciousness for two centuries, the Holy Land quietly slipped out of view. As the poet William Blake put it in the early nineteenth century, it would be infinitely preferable to build Jerusalem in an easier and more convenient location – such as ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. 51

Although later Persian historians were highly vocal in asserting that the Mongols were disengaged from the process of administering their empire, preferring to leave such mundane tasks to others, recent research has revealed just how involved they were in the detail of everyday life.

instead. As a matter of course, those who submitted or were conquered were dispersed across Mongol-controlled territory to weaken bonds of language, kinship and identity and to aid the assimilation process. New names were introduced in place of ethnic labels to underline the new way of doing things.

Genghis himself ‘viewed the Muslims with the eye of respect, so also did he hold the Christians and “idolaters” [that is, Buddhists] in high esteem’,

In Russia, the blanket exemption of the church from all taxes and from military service was met with jubilation, just one example showing that sensitive handling could generate goodwill even after brutal conquest. 15 Likewise, devolving responsibilities was a highly effective way of reducing animosities and tensions.

The effects were deep – and long lasting: some scholars have argued that it was the Mongols’ system of government that laid the ground for Russia’s transformation into a fully fledged autocracy by empowering a small handful of individuals to lord it over the population, as well as over their peers. 16

Fundamental to European expansion was the stability that the Mongols provided across the whole of Asia.

One reason for this was the innovation in financial credit in China that had been introduced before Genghis Khan’s time, including the introduction of bills of exchange and the use of paper money.

the effect was the liberation of enormous amounts of silver into the monetary system as new forms of credit caught on.

The ecological conditions of arid and semi-arid landscape lend themselves perfectly to the spread of the bacterium Yersinia pestis that is transmitted from one host to another principally by fleas through blood feeding.

plague spread rapidly in the 1340s as the outbreak moved out of the steppes through Europe, Iran, the Middle East, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula.

‘All the wisdom and ingenuity of man’ was powerless to prevent the spread of disease, wrote Boccaccio, the Italian humanist scholar, in his introduction to the Decameron;

It was dangerous to have different beliefs at times of crisis.

And yet, despite the horror it caused, the plague turned out to be the catalyst for social and economic change that was so profound that far from marking the death of Europe, it served as its making. The transformation provided an important pillar in the rise – and the triumph – of the west. It did so in several phases. First was the top-to-bottom reconfiguration of how social structures functioned. Chronic depopulation in the wake of the Black Death had the effect of sharply increasing wages because of the accentuated value of labour.

Lower rents, fewer obligations and longer leases all had the effect of tilting power and benefits towards the peasantry and urban tenants.

This was further enhanced by a fall in interest rates, which declined noticeably across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

With wealth now more evenly distributed through society, demand for luxury goods – imported or otherwise – soared as a result of more consumers being able to purchase items that had previously been unaffordable.

notably the shift in favour of the working young, who were best placed to take advantage of new opportunities opening up before them. Already less disposed to saving because of their close shave with death, the new up-and-coming generation, better paid than their parents and with better prospects for the future, set about spending their wealth on things they were interested in – not least of which

the rise in wealth led to better diets and to better general health.

statistical modelling based on these results even suggests that one of the effects of the plague was a substantial improvement in life expectancy. London’s post-plague population was considerably healthier than it had been before the Black Death struck – raising life expectancy sharply.

Economic and social development did not occur evenly across Europe. Change took place most rapidly in the north and the northwest of the continent, partly because this region was starting from a lower economic point than the more developed south. This