This week brought upsetting news of more conflict and chaos in areas of the world that were once integral to the Silk Roads between China and Europe. Geopolitics has filled the streets of Georgia with protests. The violent struggle for power in Syria has re-erupted after a period of smouldering calm. My dream of a peaceful land journey from Beijing to Europe, retracing the steps of the Silk Road, seems more distant than ever. In my last Blog I wrote about the benefits of increasing trade links between China, Europe and Britain. Here I want to look back to a brief time in history when trade flourished across this region bringing remarkable connections between East and West.
We have to go back in time to the 13th and 14th centuries. The unlikely group of peoples we have to thank for this period of intercontinental stability were the Mongol tribes led firstly by Genghiz Khan and then his sons and grandsons. In the first quarter of the 1200’s, the Mongols used a mix of military brilliance and the strategic use of terror to take control of territories that swept from the Pacific coasts of China all the way west through what was then Persia and on into Georgia and the Caucasus. Genghiz died in 1227, but his death only paved the way for further conquests through Russia and into Eastern Europe, which only came to a halt when the son of Genghiz, Ogudei, died in 1241.
Of course, when you defeat so many people’s, you are bound to get a bad reputation, and so it is with the Mongols, characterised as savages and barbarians by centuries of history since then. Some of it is merited, you don’t make an empire from Korea to Constantinople without breaking a few heads. But there was method to the Mongol madness. Terror was used strategically, with one centre being destroyed utterly so that word of the defeat would spread to surrounding areas and increase the likelihood of peaceful surrenders elsewhere. What is more, the Empire was built out of allegiances and loyalties that brought rewards of trade and investment as resources moved from area to area. The result of this was a brief era now called ‘the Pax Mongolica’, a period of peace and stability across Eurasia. It was said that this peace was so strong that a girl could walk from West to East through the empire, with a gold coin in her hand and would not be troubled. The original ‘pax’, the ‘pax romana’, had brought the benefits of trade and cultural exchange to the lands around the Mediterranean. Opportunities now extended across Europe and Asia.
Mongol rule created the conditions for co-existence amongst the range of religions and cultures in this vast territory. Traditionally the Mongols tended towards the shamanistic worship of a Steppe spirit called Tengri. There was widespread tolerance for Islam, Buddhism and the eastern form of Nestorian Christianity. Defiance of the Khan was punished mercilessly, but there was no religious persecution. The first capital of the Empire was Karakorum, located in what is now north-central Mongolia. For a while this must have been one of the most multicultural places on Earth. The Pope and other western rulers sent envoys to Karakorum to learn more about the new rulers of Eurasia and sue for peace. In Karakorum people like Simon of St Quintin sent by Pope Innocent IV to the Mongols in 1247, will have rubbed shoulders with ambassadors from all over the Asian world. In 1271 the new Khan, Kublai, moved the capital of this Pax Mongolica to a city he founded from scratch in northern China. He called this city ‘Dadu’, now modern Beijing. Kublai established Mongol rule over China for almost the next 100 years, under a dynasty he named ‘yuan’ , or ‘the origin’.
A painted scroll showing Kublai Khan on a traditional Mongol hunting expedition. Painted by Liu Guandao, 1280 CE.
In his ‘The Story of China’, Michael Wood presents startling evidence of the multi-polar world which flourished in this fertile historical environment. We all know about the stories of Marco Polo and associate them with doubts about whether a westerner actually did travel in Yuan Dynasty China, as this period of Mongol rule has come to be called. Michael tells the story of the unearthing of archaeological evidence of an Italian community living and working in Yangzhou at this very period. Since the Tang Dynasty, Yangzhou had been a port and trade centre, being located at the meeting point of the Cháng Jiāng (the Yangtze) and the Dàyùnhé, the Grand Canal. When construction work was being done on the city walls, the fragments of two tombstones were found. It was immediately noticed that the inscriptions were an eclectic mix of eastern and western symbols. There were Italianate angels who resembled Buddhist spirits flying through the air. There was a representation of Mary, mother of Jesus, wearing a Buddhist crown and looking like the Chinese Buddhist figure of Guanyin. The tombstones record the deaths in 1342 and 1344 respectively of Katrina and Antonio Illioni. Historical records from the time, show that the Ilioni’s were an Italian trading family with connections across the ‘pax Mongolica’ world. Far from being wandering visitors, the tombstones suggest that Yangzhou at this time was home to a thriving ‘ex-pat’ Italian community, much as the nearby city of Shanghai is today, and that cultural fusion was just as much the fashion of the day as it is now.
It is clear then that this period of relative stability and peace in Eurasia allowed trade that spread and redistributed wealth across Europe and Asia. The later Italian Renaissance can be in part traced to the unimaginable wealth that cascaded into northern Italian towns such as Venice, Genoa and Pisa from markets to the east. Here and there we also have fleeting, tantalising glimpses of visitors from the east reaching Europe. Amongst these one surely stands out for us at SACU. The first recorded meeting between a Chinese person and an English person, well at least part Chinese and part English. The date is 1288 and the place, Bordeaux Cathedral. Our Chinese friend is Rabban Sawma, who was a Uyghur Turk by ethnicity but who had been brought up in Khanbaliq, another name for Beijing. Sawma was a Christian monk, with an intense longing to see the sights of the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem.
Sometime in the early 1270’s, Sawma and his best friend did what we could call a ‘reverse Marco Polo’ and travelled across Eurasia, in the relative safety of the Pax Mongolica. In Iraq the best friend became an archbishop, and when the Mongol leaders asked him to nominate an envoy to the Kings of Europe, he named Sawma. Thus it was in 1287 and 1288 that Sawma found himself first in Rome, then in Paris and finally in Bordeaux, where the Englishman he met was none other than King Edward 1. Edward and Sawma discussed signing a treaty of alliance between the Mongol Khan and the English crown, before worshiping together in the cathedral, where Sawma led the service in Syriac, a language linked to Aramaic, the ancient, Eastern language of Christianity. What an extraordinary event it must have been. Sadly it left no lasting patterns of friendship. Sawma died in 1294, in Baghdad, on his way home.
The events of the ‘pax Mongolica’ remind us there is nothing inevitable about any period of history. Connections and understandings are always there to be made. Tragically, the connections between East and West at that time broke apart in 1346, when the bubonic plague, that was to become known as the Black Death, come racing down the same trading and information networks. However, what once was, can be again. Even the most unstable of times, can bring unexpected rewards of friendship and understanding. Like some in the modern world today, the Mongols were disruptors, set on nothing but their own wealth and power, but their world created unexpected opportunities for east-west connections for those for those prepared to work at them.
You can find more information about the Mongol period and many other fascinating aspects of Chinese history on the China Sage website :
https://www.chinasage.info/mongol-conquest.htm
The author gratefully acknowledges the help and support of Rob Stallard with this article.