Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Mongols’ rampant territorial ambition and the scale of their conquests made it possible to travel thousands of miles beyond the horizon and come back again to tell the tale. Their rearrangement of central Asia, Persia, and the Kievan Rus’ was as cruel as any imperial expansion of the nineteenth century. But like the colonial scramble of the nineteenth century, the Mongols’ bloody rampage across the world map nevertheless opened up global trade and information networks that ushered in a new age in western history. Dreadful as were the means of the Mongols, the changes they wrought were astonishing and epoch shifting. Indeed, this transformation of trade is almost certainly the Mongols’ greatest significance to the story we are telling in this book. So it is to that part of their legacy that we will now turn, as we discover how intrepid merchants, scholars, and explorers from east and west flourished in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, exchanging ideas, goods, and wealth, and remodeling the western world and western minds as they did so.