The Mongol rulers formed a symbiotic relationship with merchants from all over Eurasia as the booty from their conquests became increasingly insufficient to
finance the Empire’s administration. To supplement their finances, the Mongols sought to derive profit from trade across their domains. They were, Ronald Findlay tells us, the ‘natural supporters of “free trade” as the Mongols mate-rially benefitted from the free flow of goods and factors across their domains since this increased the wealth they could extract for themselves’.76 Merchants thereby became the ‘foundation of the state’.77 In search of a steady stream of income, the Mongol rulers therefore actually sought to promote trade, making them a key agent in the rise of the virtual ‘world market’ of the 13th and 14th centuries. ‘No effort was spared to encourage all kinds of commercial activity’, Virgil Ciocîltan writes, as:
they allowed unhindered access for foreigners in the lands which they governed, guaranteed safety for travellers, and ensured the proper conditions for transport of goods, which of course also included setting custom duties at an attractive level.
Any measure which would increase trade was considered good.78
The Mongols were ‘exceptional’ in their willingness and capacity to provide the infrastructural foundations for intersocietal trade even when the formal backing of European states was lacking or absent.79
The establishment of the Pax Mongolica was then a major boon for overland trade connecting East to West, which notably benefited Northwestern Europe.
It created a transcontinental trading system in which commerce, trade, technol-ogies and ideas travelled along the Silk Road like never before.80 This has led Figure 3.2 Master of Busico, Kublai Khan giving support to the Venetians, 1412 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kublai_giving_support_to_the_Venetians.jpg (accessed 27 October 2014).
some scholars to go so far as to attribute the origins of ‘globalisation’ to the unification of the Eurasian land mass accomplished by the Mongols.81 Having connected the disparate regions of Eurasia under a single authority for ‘the first and indeed only time in history’,82 the Mongols contributed to the emergence of a nascent ‘world economy’ by facilitating ‘land transit with less risk and lower protective rent’. Merchants and goods were now able to travel more safely over
‘these vast distances’, thereby establishing a trade route which briefly ‘broke the monopoly of the more southerly routes’.83
This was particularly beneficial for the ‘proto-capitalist’ merchants of the Italian city-states Venice and Genoa, for whom Mongolian protection in Central Asia was central to their preponderance and growth in the Black Sea region.84 The activities of Italian merchants crucially depended on the Mongols’ will-ingness and capacity to create and maintain favourable trading conditions.85 While a number of historians have emphasised the importance of the Treaty of Nymphaeus (1261) in establishing Genoa’s commercial monopoly east of the Bosporus, less noted is the fact it was the Mongols that allowed its merchants to
‘set up shop’ in the Crimea in the first place.86
What is more, the decreased transaction and protection costs across the overland trade routes resulted in an ‘unprecedented expansion of the market for Western European cities’, in turn promoting growing and complexified divisions of labour in most European urban industries.87 In particular, the expanded international demand for cloth stimulated the textile industry in the Low Countries,88 which proved critical to the ‘urban-agrarian’ symbiosis that characterised the rise of capitalist social relations in parts of the Late Medieval Netherlands (see Chapter 6).89 The widened market for wool in Flemish towns would in turn encourage English landowners in the Stuart period to convert to commercial agriculture.90 For these reasons, Mielants concludes, it would be
‘Eurocentric to claim that “medieval development” in Europe was nothing but
“auto-development”’.91
In all these ways, the Mongol Empire provided the propitious geopolitical conditions for the extensive development of market relations, trade, urban growth, and perhaps most importantly an increasingly complex division of labour in Western Europe – the latter constituting an integral aspect of the development of the productive forces. To be clear, this did not automatically entail the advent of capitalist relations of production, but it did provide the preconditions for their subsequent emergence.92 For growing urban centres provided not only the gravitational pull on peasants seeking to escape serfdom, but also a growing demand for agricultural products, which were increasingly produced for the market. As Terence Byres explains, ‘The sizeable market for agricultural products was the outcome of considerable urban development, and the consequent existence of considerable urban demand, and the emer-gence of an enormous network of smaller markets and craft centres’.93 The
development of complex commercial networks of interconnected city sites was, then, an important aspect of the story of capitalism’s emergence – one signifi-cantly enhanced by the intensification and securing of long-distance trade relations under the Pax Mongolica.
Although trade between ‘West’ and ‘East’ would significantly decrease with the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, European interest in trade with the Far East never died. Memories of the commerce carried on by European merchants, and especially Marco Polo’s stories, maintained knowledge of the Far East, and the desire for renewed access to it. Moreover, by unifying hitherto isolated ‘civil-isations’ as interactive components of a single geopolitical system, the Mongol conquests significantly altered the conceptual and ideological horizons of the Europeans as they came to view the world as a unified whole. This widened conception of the world would eventually prove a further motivation for long-distance voyages among Europeans in the age of expansion, instigating Genoan-Portuguese ventures around the Cape of Good Hope, as well as the accidental discovery of the Americas.94 Consequently, as S. A. M. Adshead puts it, ‘[i]f Europe came to dominate the world, it was possibly because Europe first perceived there was a world to dominate. There is a straight line from Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus, the eastward-looking Venetian to the westward-looking Genoese’.95
Finally, we must note the important benefits afforded to Europe in the wake of the Mongol Empire’s collapse. For after Pax Mongolica had established the trade links and intersocietal exchanges facilitating the first ‘world system’, its fall provided critical advantages for Europe’s subsequent rise to global domi-nation. First, it was precisely the disintegration of the Mongol Empire that provided the propitious geopolitical space through which the societies of Europe could make strident developmental gains. This was because the increase in protection and transportation costs on the overland route, and the concomitant shift to maritime trade in the Indian Ocean littoral, precipitated a political crisis in numerous Inner Asian states.96 In this sense, as Janet Abu-Lughoud notes, it was the ‘Fall of the East’ that set the conditions for the later ‘Rise of the West’, as the ‘devolution of this pre-existing system’ established by the Pax Mongolica
‘facilitated Europe’s easy conquest’.97
In yet another instance of the ‘gift of external opportunity’, Europe conquered or subsumed commercial routes and networks that had been previously devel-oped by the Pax Mongolica over the Long 13th Century. The Europeans ‘did not need to invent the system, since the basic groundwork was in place by the thir-teenth century when Europe was still only a recent and peripheral participant’.98 But, moreover, the commercial shift to the Indian Ocean intersected with Europe’s own entry into these maritime routes, forming a crucial economic and strategic platform from which particular European powers (especially Britain) would later launch their drive to global domination (see Chapter 8). The rise
and fall of the Pax Mongolica were thus crucial moments in kick-starting the developmental trajectory that eventually led to the rise of capitalism in Europe, while providing the critical intersocietal conditions from which Europe would begin its ascent to global supremacy.