Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

More than any empire since pre-Christian Romans, they were largely relaxed about religious dogma (although Genghis Khan forbade Islamic ritual halal slaughter of animals), relatively flexible about permitting local customs under the umbrella of Mongol rule, and respectful of religious leaders without preferring one sect or faith to another.

Fortunately, when Temüjin and his family fell on hard times, conditions on the steppe were uncommonly gentle. Studies of ancient trees in the pine forests of central Mongolia have shown that during the exact time that Temüjin was growing up, the area enjoyed fifteen consecutive years of mild weather and abundant rainfall.8 This was the most hospitable period of weather the region had experienced in eleven hundred years.

Physically strong and energetic, with darting eyes like a cat’s, he was making his way in nomadic society. But rejection shaped him in ways that would inform his leadership ever after. Temüjin grew up to be extraordinarily tough and self-disciplined, and placed a higher value on loyalty than anything else: he would never tolerate even a whiff of betrayal or dishonesty, and reacted ferociously when he was rejected, resisted, or thwarted.

The reasons for his success were simple but effective. Besides a personal talent for fighting and marrying, both of which were essential tools of steppe diplomacy, he had also lighted upon some radical reforms to traditional Mongol tribal and military organization. Like Muhammad uniting the bickering tribes of Arabia during the seventh century a.d., Temüjin saw that bonds of clan and blood repelled as often as they attracted, and that by weakening them in favor of a direct bond to himself, he could create a whole that was much more powerful than its constituent parts.

At this time the rulers of Persia and many surrounding territories were the Khwarazmians, Turks who had once been mamluks, but had risen up to become the masters of their own huge empire, which sat across the rich cities and Silk Roads of central Asia. In 1218 Genghis Khan planned to negotiate a trade deal with their leader, the Khwarazm-Shah, so he sent him a diplomatic delegation of one hundred Mongol officials. Unfortunately, on their way to the Khwarazm-Shah’s court, the envoys were stopped at the Khwarazmian city of Otrar (modern Kazakhstan). All were summarily executed on suspicion of spying. Needless to say, Genghis did not find this amusing. He vowed “to take revenge to requite the wrong,” a policy that he carried out with extreme prejudice.

From Georgia, the generals Jebe and Subedei raced out onto the Russian steppe. As they approached Crimea, they were met by envoys from the Republic of Venice—who had demonstrated only a few years earlier on the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople that they were almost as capable as the Mongols of ruthlessness in the pursuit of profit. The Venetians struck a deal by which the Mongols agreed to attack their trading rivals, the Genoese, in their lucrative colony at Soldaia, on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. This was the start of a lasting partnership between Venetian doges and Mongol khans, which endured well into the fourteenth century, paving the way for the famous adventures of Marco Polo (see chapter 10) and making the Republic of Venice very rich. Devils, it seemed, could ride together.

The same year—1227—the fierce conqueror died, in the second half of August. The cause of his death is now unknown, but a number of colorful explanations were given during the Middle Ages: it was variously said that Genghis was struck by lightning, poisoned by an arrow, or fatally wounded by a captive queen who went to his bed with a razor blade hidden in her vagina.20 Whatever the case, it was in bed that he died, and his last orders were fitting: he demanded his successors build a new city called Karakorum to serve as the capital of the Mongol empire and then gave instructions for the mass execution of the Tangut emperor Modi and the royal family of the Western Xia, against whom his armies had recently been fighting.

Shortly after Easter in 1241, fourteen years after Genghis’s death, Mongol armies were back in the west. They scored two stunning battlefield victories in central and eastern Europe, which, occurring within just seventy-two hours of one another, seemed to set the stage for the Mongolization of the whole continent. On April 9, Mongol generals called Baidar and Kaidan scythed down a combined force of Polish, Czech, and Templar soldiers near Legnica (today in southern Poland). They killed Henry II, Duke of Lower Silesia, and took his head on a spike to parade before the horrified inhabitants of Legnica itself.

in the 1240s the Mongols still ruled a gigantic area of the world’s landmass. During the fourteen years of Ögödei’s reign they had added relentlessly to their dominions, deploying new siege technology they had adopted from their Chinese and Muslim subjects.25 Azerbaijan, northern Iraq, Georgia, and Armenia were all under Mongol overlordship, as was Kashmir. Seljuk Asia Minor was being lined up for invasion.

For all that they had destroyed worlds, the Mongols had also opened them up for exploration. Even during Roman times, the Far East had been beyond the horizon of a single traveler—the silk and other commodities traded from China had arrived only via indirect trade, and India was scarcely any better known.

the globetrotter who wrote the first western account of life on the ground among the Mongols, was an Italian friar turned clergyman who went by the name of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine.

To get to Mongolia, del Carpine traveled initially through Prague and Poland and on through the lands of the Rus’ toward Kiev. Five years previously the Mongols had laid the city waste: around 90 percent of its inhabitants were killed and most of its important buildings burned to the ground.

And in mid-1247 he was back in Europe to deliver the khan’s letters to the pope at Lyon, tell his tale, and receive his reward: promotion to the posts of archbishop of Antivari, in Montenegro, papal legate and ambassador to King Louis IX of France, who himself had a keen interest in all matters Mongol. Del Carpine survived only another five years—his life perhaps truncated by the hardships of his adventure.

The Mongol capital remained very rich and a hub for merchants and envoys from all corners of the globe; it was not unusual to see an Indian dignitary parading down the street with a train of horses carrying grayhounds or leopards on their backs. It was also a home to a smattering of western and Christian expatriates: a Nestorian Christian who served as Möngke’s private secretary, a Parisian called William Buchier who worked as a court goldsmith,

Möngke told Louis he would only rest “when in the power of the everlasting God the entire world, from the sun’s rising to its setting, has become one in joy and in peace.” Geography would be no protection against the Mongol war machine, he warned, for “if, on hearing and understanding the order of the everlasting God, you are unwilling to observe it . . . and say, ‘Our country is far away, our mountains are strong, our sea is broad,’ . . . how can we know what will happen?”

The fact is that the Mongol empire, which had functioned very effectively across such a huge expanse for the first half of the thirteenth century proved unable to hold together when its guiding principle—unwavering loyalty to the authority of a single, undisputed leader—was challenged.

Regional commanders who had been sent into China, central Asia, Persia, and the Russian steppe had, over the course of a couple of generations, started to feel a stronger degree of affinity for their own patch of the empire than they did for the concept of the Mongol dominions as a whole. Some gained a fondness for urban living rather than life under the felt of the ger. Some adopted local religions, professing Tibetan Buddhism or Sunni Islam, abandoning the shaman-led paganism of the old country. This was, perhaps, only natural: not even the mighty Roman Empire had managed to prevent its regional commanders from going native sooner or later.

In 1295 the Ilkhan Ghazan converted from Buddhism to Sunni Islam—quite a decision for the great-grandson of Hülagü to take, because it was the latter who had literally put the Abbasid caliph to death in 1258. This irony aside, Ghazan was a cultured and farsighted ruler. But after he died, the first half of the fourteenth century saw the authority of the Ilkhans gradually beginning to fracture, and petty regional emirs began to exercise their own power; by the middle of the century it was barely recognizable as a Mongol state at all.

the Mongols were in large part responsible for the boom in global trade that occurred along these routes from the thirteenth century onward, and the Golden Horde was a vast intermediary market for commercial goods ranging from silk, spices, precious metals and stones, furs, salt, skins, and enslaved people.

Sometimes he left in peace Christian communities in the provinces he ruled, demanding only that they pay him tax and tribute for the privilege. At other times, however, he liked to pose as a jihadi Sunni Muslim (despite his absolute ease with killing other Muslims when it suited him). Certainly he persecuted to virtual extinction the Nestorian Christians of Persia and central Asia.

The Golden Horde, having been severely disrupted by Temür’s invasion in the 1390s, fell finally and comprehensively to pieces in the fifteenth century, leaving behind it a smattering of independent “Tartar” khanates. Two of these—the Crimean state sometimes called Little Tartary and the Kazakh Khanate, which is roughly congruent with modern Kazakhstan—survived the Middle Ages. In Afghanistan and northern India, Temür did leave an important imperial legacy, through his descendant Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire at Kabul in the early sixteenth century.

Then, of course, there was religion. The Mongols’ initial laissez-faire attitude toward religious dogma seems refreshing when set against the bigotry of the crusading age—and one modern scholar has even argued that it set such a fine historical example that the principle of religious freedom enshrined in the west in general and the U.S. Constitution in particular had its origins in the philosophy of Genghis Khan.47 But alongside that, the Mongols also made sweeping changes to the religious composition of Eurasia. By converting to Islam, the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate, Chagatai khanate, and Golden Horde together created a vast Islamic zone that stretched all the way from the Tian Shan to the Caucasus, where it connected with the Turkish and Arabic realms of the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa.

the Republic of Venice and Republic of Genoa. Located on opposite sides of the Italian peninsula—Venice in the northeast and Genoa in the northwest—these ambitious, autonomous cities (along with a third rival, the Republic of Pisa) had been at loggerheads for nearly fifty years.

At the turn of the fourteenth century, this was no small prize. World trade was booming. Commodities and luxury goods were flying halfway around the globe at a pace seldom seen before in the whole of human history. Commercial dominance in this age was worth fighting—and dying—for.

The clash in the strait of Curzola was a bloody, one-sided affair. The brilliant Genoese admiral, Lamba Doria, a member of a swaggeringly famous noble family, had significantly fewer ships than his opposite number, Andrea Dandolo—a relative of the old doge Enrico Dandolo who had burned Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. But Doria had luck and the tides with him. As the galleys clashed oars, his captains drove the Venetian ships into shallow waters, where many were run aground. The Genoese boarded the stricken enemy vessels, slaughtering and taking prisoners as they pleased, before scuppering almost the entire Venetian fleet. As many as seven thousand Venetian sailors were killed in the fighting.

The battle of Curzola would not be remembered as Venice’s finest hour.

1298 AD. A Venetian sailer and ex-merchant was captured in the battle: Marco Polo

Giovanni da Montecorvino was sent to Khanbaliq (Beijing) in the 1290s under papal instruction to establish himself as the city’s first archbishop; he led a successful mission in Mongol China for nearly twenty years, preaching and converting people at the churches he founded, and translating the New Testament into the Mongol tongue.

Kublai Khan

KUBLAI KHAN- HỐT TẤT LIỆT BATU - BẠT ĐÔ ODOGEI KHAN - OA KHOÁC ĐÀI

Marco was an evangelist for the Mongol regime, which, for all its severity and illiberality, kept the peace and allowed trade to flourish safely and securely over a hitherto unimaginable span of territory, joining up the Christian west directly with the Chinese and Indian east, and making overland travel through Islamic Persia safe and reliable. This was not a totally benign judgment: for millions of massacred civilians and their families, the Mongol advance of the thirteenth century had not been so much an economic miracle as a cataclysmic tragedy. But in the amoral worldview of the profit-hungry salesman, the khans had ushered in a boom.

Major changes were happening closer to home. During Marco’s lifetime and the century after it, the western world underwent sweeping economic changes, with increasingly sophisticated ways of trading and financing business invented, and new markets opened up. The name historians have given to the changes that took place in this age is the Commercial Revolution, and this is a deservedly grand term.

Commercial Revolution placed power in the hands of new agents besides emperors, popes, and kings. It allowed the merchant to assume a prominent place in medieval society and culture. It gave cities in which merchants dominated newfound political status and independence.

In the fifth century b.c. the Greek historian Herodotus described several successful long-distance trade expeditions: he included in his Histories the story of a ship captained by a man called Colaeus, whose crew were the first Greeks to venture all the way from Greece to “Tartessus” (southern Spain) and back. “The profits made . . . on their cargo, once they had returned home, were larger than those of any other Greek trader for whom we have reliable information,” Herodotus wrote.

Compared with the rest of the known world, from the sixth century onward Europe became a commercial backwater, with little to export except for Baltic furs, Frankish swords, and enslaved people.

From around the year 1000 Europe’s population boomed, in tandem with a surge in agricultural production. The Medieval Climate Optimum was kind to farmers, and huge new tracts of land were brought under the plow through forest clearances and marsh draining.

And from the time of Charlemagne onward, western Christian monarchs slowly began to stake their claims to ever-larger kingdoms, subjecting them to deeper mechanisms of royal control and governance that (in theory at least) made longer overland trading journeys safer and more secure.

In the eleventh century, markets began to grow and expand in towns across Europe, at predictable times of the week, month, or year. Here, surplus grain could be exchanged for wine, leather, worked metal, or livestock, which was distributed by traveling traders. Over the next two hundred years, markets and fairs (originally markets associated with a religious festival or holiday) became an increasingly important part of economic life in Europe.

Between the ninth and eleventh centuries Jewish people all over the west became prominent in moneylending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine, and enslaved people throughout the old Roman world.26 Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution,

One of the most famous trade hubs to emerge in the reinvigorated medieval world could be found in the county of Champagne, east of Paris. From the twelfth century, this county—which clung fiercely to its independence from French royal oversight—became home to an annual series of trade fairs. There were six main fairs, held in the four towns of Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins, and Troyes, according to a calendar in which each fair lasted six to eight weeks.

By the late thirteenth century a visitor to the fairs in Champagne or Flanders could expect to find representatives of Italian business consortia bargaining with agents representing multiple northwest European wool producers and cloth manufacturers, drawing up contracts for payment schedules with debts to be cleared at future fairs months or even years in advance.28 Champagne’s fairs were not the only marketplaces of their sort—nearby Flanders also hosted large-scale exchanges in towns like Ypres, where a bustling cloth-making industry was emerging in the later Middle Ages.

The city nicknamed La Serenissima had not even existed during Roman times, but during the sixth century a settlement developed around the lagoon and its islands. Initially it was ruled from Constantinople (via the Exarchate of Ravenna), but by the ninth century the doges of Venice had shaken off Byzantine oversight and started to build up their independent power along the shores of the Adriatic. In their early days the Venetians manufactured salt and glass, but as the Middle Ages wore on, they found there was better business to be done as professional middlemen, who took advantage of their blessings of geography and the necessity of making a living without any farmlands to fall back on, to link together the markets of Arab north Africa, Greek Byzantium, and the Latin west, importing and exporting commodities and luxury goods.

The city’s patron saint was (and is) Saint Mark the Evangelist, to whom the famous basilica on the Rialto is dedicated, but even he was, in a sense, stolen goods. In 828 a pair of Venetian merchants thieved Mark’s relics from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, smuggling the saint’s bones through customs inside a barrel of pork, which they trusted—rightly—the Muslim inspectors would not investigate too closely.

Their favored status and insular expatriate lifestyle did not always win them friends, and murderous riots against Italian merchants were a regular event throughout the later Middle Ages. In 1182 Constantinople witnessed the dreadful Massacre of the Latins, when tens of thousands of Italian merchants were murdered or enslaved, in a frenzy of anti-western bloodletting encouraged

The Black Sea, where the Genoese had a special interest, gave access to the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and the lands of the Rus’. During the eleventh century, Pisan merchants took a keen interest in the ports of north Africa, and Pisan ships sent troops to sack both Carthage and Mahdia to attempt to permanently yoke them to Pisa’s rule. Meanwhile, traders from a fourth Italian city-republic, Amalfi, could also be found in most major Mediterranean ports,

There was intense competition between the Italian cities, and none of them were ever overburdened by moral compunction. During the thirteenth century Genoese traders in the Black Sea port of Caffa struck a deal to run slaves captured in the Caucasus by the Mongols to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, shipping them to the Nile delta via the Black Sea and Mediterranean, whereupon the captives would be impressed into the Mamluk army. Effectively this meant that the Christian Genoese were directly responsible for supplying workers to a power that was doing its best to crush the western crusader states of Syria and Palestine.

The Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini wrote of the Mongol empire that fear of the khans made the roads so safe that “a woman with a golden vessel on her head might walk alone [across it] without fear or dread.”29 The Italians did not carry gold vessels on their heads, but they took full advantage of conditions nonetheless.

This was where the other side of the medieval Commercial Revolution came in. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new financial tools and institutions emerged that could help businessmen realize the goal of making money without traipsing relentlessly around the world in person. These new moneymaking devices lent merchants enormous power, both in their hometowns and beyond.

The wool tax was one of the most important. It was white gold. And it did not just enrich the crown. Thanks to the demand for English wool, English sheep farmers thrived. Many of the biggest wool growers were monasteries: to take just one example, the monks of Rievaulx in Yorkshire, which had been England’s first Cistercian abbey when it was founded in 1132,

It was said in 1297—with only a little exaggeration—that 50 percent of England’s wealth came from wool.

The first western bank had been created in Venice in the twelfth century. But by the early fourteenth century the most successful houses were the Florentine-based Bardi, Peruzzi, and Frescobaldi. (The most famous banking dynasty the Middle Ages produced was the Medici—who in the fifteenth century rose from Florentine financiers to a dynasty of oligarchs, popes, and queens.

The interlocking set of English interests that attracted both the Frescobaldi and the Bardi was considerable. Most obviously, English kings borrowed heavily from Italian bankers, first relatively small sums—a few thousand pounds here and there—and later, from 1310 onward, huge ones, equivalent to multiples of the crown’s annual revenue, which were repayable out of revenues from the wool trade, which the Florentines were licensed to collect directly.