The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

Silk performed a number of important roles in the ancient world apart from its value to nomadic tribes. Under the Han dynasty, silk was used alongside coins and grain to pay troops. It was in some ways the most reliable currency: producing money in sufficient quantities was a problem, as was the fact that not all of China was fully monetised; this presented a particular difficulty when it came to military pay since theatres of action were often in remote regions, where coins were all but useless. Grain, meanwhile, went rotten after a time. As a result, bolts of raw silk were used regularly as currency, either as pay or, as in the case of one Buddhist monastery in Central Asia, as a fine for monks who broke the foundation’s rules.47 Silk became an international currency as well as a luxury product.

In the event, the strain of trying to re-establish the empire wore Diocletian out, and he retired to the coast of Croatia, to turn his attention to matters that were more enjoyable than affairs of state. “I wish you would come to Salona,” he wrote to one of his former colleagues, “and see the cabbages I have planted myself”; they were so impressive, he went on, that “one could never be tempted by the prospect of power ever again.”

Two millennia ago, silks made by hand in China were being worn by the rich and powerful in Carthage and other cities in the Mediterranean, while pottery manufactured in southern France could be found in England and in the Persian Gulf. Spices and condiments grown in India were being used in the kitchens of Xinjiang, as they were in those of Rome. Buildings in northern Afghanistan carried inscriptions in Greek, while horses from Central Asia were being ridden proudly thousands of miles away to the east.

The world was divided in two: a realm of Iran where order and civilisation prevailed; and one of Turan that was chaotic, anarchic and dangerous. As a plethora of reports from travellers and geographers who visited the steppe lands to the north make clear, those who lived outside the Muslim world were strange, and while in some respects weird and wonderful, mostly they were terrifying.

A text compiled in Constantinople in the middle of the tenth century and based on information gathered by Byzantine agents, records the treacherous conditions that had to be negotiated on the voyage south. A set of rapids on the Dniester was particularly perilous: a narrow barrage had a lethal set of rocks in the middle of it, “which stand out like islands. Against these, then, comes the water and wells up and dashes down over the other side, with a mighty and terrific din.” This obstacle had been nicknamed with dry humour “Do Not Fall Asleep.”58

If you took Slavic twins, wrote one Arabic author in this period, and castrated one, he would certainly become more skilful and “more lively in intelligence and conversation” than his brother—who would remain ignorant, foolish and exhibit the innate simple-mindedness of the Slavs. Castration was thought to purify and improve the Slavic mind.

So great was the scale of traffic of Slavic slaves that it impacted the Arabic language: the word for eunuch (ṣiqlabī) comes from the ethnic label referring to the Slavs (ṣaqālibī).

So widespread was slavery in the Mediterranean and the Arabic world that even today regular greetings reference human trafficking. All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, “schiavo,” from a Venetian dialect. “Ciao,” as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean “hello”; it means “I am your slave.”

Although the Mongols seemed to be chaotic, bloodthirsty and unreliable, their rise was not the result of a lack of order, but precisely the opposite: ruthless planning, streamlined organisation and a clear set of strategic objectives were the key to establishing the largest land empire in history. The inspiration behind the Mongol transformation was a leader named Temüjin, or blacksmith. We know him by his title and nickname of “universal ruler,” or perhaps, “fierce ruler”: Činggis, or Genghis Khan.

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.21 Reports of their advance reached as far as Scotland while, according to one source, herring went unsold in ports on the east coast of Britain as merchants who normally came from the Baltic to buy it did not dare to leave home.22

Genoa had already shown how far it was willing to go to crush rivals, destroying the Pisan fleet almost in its entirety in 1282 and then refusing to ransom those taken prisoner. Pisa never recovered fully from the blow inflicted by its rival. Among those captured was a certain Rustichello, who spent more than a decade in prison before being joined by a fellow inmate also taken hostage during a Genoese naval victory—this time over the Venetians in the Adriatic. Striking up a friendship with him, Rustichello took to writing down his fellow prisoner’s memories of his remarkable life and journeys: we have Genoa’s brutality and relentless focus on the medieval struggle for power to thank for the recording of Marco Polo’s travels.

Such was the genius of the Mongols, in fact, that the platform for long-term success was established right from the very beginning. As Genghis Khan and his successors expanded their reach, they had to incorporate new peoples within a coherent system. Tribes were deliberately broken down, with loyalties refocused on attachments to military units and above all allegiance to the Mongol leadership itself. Distinguishing tribal features, such as how different peoples wore their hair, were stamped out, with standardised fashions enforced 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. All this in turn was reinforced by a centralised system of rewards where booty and tribute were shared out: proximity to the ruling dynasty counted for everything, in turn encouraging a broad if brutal meritocracy, where successful generals reaped rich rewards and those who failed were quickly rooted out.

Likewise, devolving responsibilities was a highly effective way of reducing animosities and tensions. The case of Russia is again instructive, with one local ruler who was singled out to collect taxes and payments being given a generous cut of the proceeds. Not for nothing did Ivan I, Grand Prince of Moscow, become known as “Ivan Kalita”—or Ivan the moneybags: he was in charge of gathering levies and taxes to fill the Mongol treasuries, evidently doing well for himself in the process. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of trusted figures like Ivan resulted in the emergence of a pre-eminent dynasty which could be relied on and which prospered at the expense of rival families.

Fundamental to European expansion was the stability that the Mongols provided across the whole of Asia. Despite the tensions and rivalries between the different branches of the tribal leadership, the rule of law was fiercely protected when it came to commercial matters. The road system in China, for example, was the envy of visitors who marvelled at the administrative measures in place to provide security for travelling merchants. “China is the safest country and best country for the traveller,” wrote the fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Baṭṭūṭa; this was a place where a reporting system that apparently accounted for each outsider on a daily basis meant that “a man travels for nine months alone with great wealth and has nothing to fear.”

It was no coincidence that there was a chronic contraction in the Ottoman Empire not long after the route via Manila had been established. While this owed something to domestic fiscal pressures and overspending on expensive military campaigns against the Habsburgs and Persia, the emergence of a new major crossroads for trans-continental commercial exchange thousands of miles away was also a factor in the Ottoman Empire’s declining revenues.

The mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who developed the binary system, was able to hone his ideas thanks to texts about Chinese arithmetic theories sent to him by a Jesuit friend who had gone to live in Beijing towards the end of the seventeenth century. Those who were in a position to take advantage of the new commercial or intellectual connections that were being made could do very well for themselves.

Dostoevskii put forward with passion his case that Russia ought not only to engage with the east but to embrace it. In a famous essay entitled “What is Asia to Us?,” he argued in the late nineteenth century that Russia had to free itself from the shackles of European imperialism. In Europe, he wrote, we are hangers-on and slaves; in Asia, “we go as masters.”

Nevertheless there was a frisson of excitement about the new worlds Russia was coming into contact with, as the Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Valuev, articulated in his diary in 1865. “Tashkent has been taken by General Cherniaev,” he wrote. “Nobody knows why or for what purpose…[but] there is something erotic in all that we are doing on the far frontiers of our empire.” The extension of the borders was marvellous, he wrote. First Russia reached the River Amur, then the Ussuri. And now Tashkent.

Awkward questions were asked about why the presence of a certain Dr. Paschooski in Bushihr had not been spotted more quickly, together with updates on whether his claims to be treating plague victims were really true; the visit of a Russian nobleman, identified as “Prince Dabija,” was likewise viewed with extreme suspicion, and the fact that he seemed to be “very reticent about his movements and intentions” duly noted and passed on.37 In London, Russia moved to the top of the agenda of Cabinet meetings, drew the attention of the Prime Minister himself and became one of the Foreign Office’s top priorities.

It was all very well criticising the ruling elite, but they had long been trained to behave in this way. The Shah and those around him were like over-indulged children who had been taught that if they held out long enough, they would be rewarded by the great powers, who were terrified that they would lose position in this strategically crucial region if they did not cough up.

This was typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades. In late antiquity, the equivalent would have been giving the prize to Rome a century after its sack by the Goths, or perhaps to the Crusaders after the loss of Acre for toning down anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Christian world. The silence of the guns, perhaps, owed more to the reality that there was nothing left to fight for than to the foresight of a succession of supposedly brilliant peace-makers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or to the wonders of an unwieldy international organisation of European states whose accounts have not been signed off by its own auditors for years.

In Afghanistan, a word was coined for the practice of seeking support from both superpowers: literally meaning “without sides,” bi-tarafi became a tenet of a foreign policy that sought to balance the contributions made by the USSR with those of the United States.

The shock was enough to prompt talk of developing new strategies that would reduce or even remove altogether dependence on Middle Eastern oil. On 7 November 1973 President Nixon gave a nationwide prime-time address on TV to announce a series of measures to address the uncomfortable fact that “in recent years, our energy demands have begun to exceed available supplies.” As a result, the President opined solemnly, power plants were to be converted from the use of oil to the use of coal, “our most abundant resource.” Fuel for aircraft was to be restricted with immediate effect; all vehicles owned by the federal government were to be prevented from travelling faster than 50mph, “except in emergencies.” “To be sure that there is enough oil to go around for the entire winter,” Nixon went on, “it will be essential for all of us to live and work in lower temperatures. We must ask everyone to lower the thermostat in your home by at least 6 degrees so that we can achieve a national daytime average of 68 degrees.” If it is any consolation, the President added, “my doctor tells me…that you really are more healthy” living at this temperature.

The volte face produced some unexpected side-effects. The general reduction of highway speed limits to 55mph, a step intended to slow consumption, led not only to a fall in consumption of over 150,000 oil barrels per day, but also to a major reduction in the number of traffic accidents nationwide.

Within hours of the attacks, strategies were being drawn up to deal with bin Laden. An action plan issued on the morning of 13 September set out the importance of engaging Iran and contacting the authorities in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China—Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours. A plan was set out to “[r]e-energize” them within the week that followed, with a view to preparing them for forthcoming military action against the Taliban.50 The first step of the response to 9/11 was to line up the countries of the Silk Roads.

Once, Central Asia was famous for Babur’s orange trees and, later, for the tulips that were so highly prized in capital cities across western Europe in the seventeenth century that canal houses in Amsterdam were exchanged for single bulbs.

In Tajikistan, after briefly holding the record for the world’s tallest flagpole, attention has now turned to building Central Asia’s largest theatre, to sit alongside the region’s largest library, biggest museum and most voluminous tea house.

To the east, these pipelines are bringing the lifeblood of tomorrow as China buys forward gas supplies on a thirty-year contract, worth $400 billion over its lifetime. This giant sum, partly to be paid in advance, gives Beijing the energy security it craves, while more than justifying the estimated $22 billion cost of a new pipeline, and providing Moscow freedom and additional confidence in how it deals with its neighbours and its rivals. It is no surprise then that China was the only member of the UN Security Council not to rebuke Russia for its actions during the Ukraine crisis of 2014; the cold reality of mutually beneficial trade is far more compelling than the political brinkmanship of the west.

New centres for the arts are likewise being built, from the extraordinary National Museum of Qatar to the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, to the Baku Museum of Modern Art—or imposing new buildings like the National Library in Tashkent or the Sameba Cathedral in Tblisi, paid for by the Georgian tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili who bought Picasso’s Dora Maar for $95 million at auction in 2006.