The Mongol empire was now bigger than ever. And it connected regions of the world that had for a long time been cut off from one another. As a result, from the middle of the thirteenth century, intrepid explorers began to strike out into strange new lands, documenting what they saw and describing the exotic conditions that existed under the command of a superpower of a size unseen in the whole of the Middle Ages. 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
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