Trade and commerce across Afro-Eurasia

RICHARD SMITH

In trade and commerce the Afro-Eurasian world was a very different place in 1500 than in 500. A more professional merchant class moved larger cargoes of more varied commodities longer distances to more destinations serving a wider consumer base than could have been imagined at the close of the fifth century.

A simple approach to imposing some order on the study of trade and commerce for the Middle Millennium is to divide Afro-Eurasia into three categories of zones: engines, passageways, and cul-de-sacs. Engines were the centers of production, consumption, and exchange and thus the driving forces for long-distance trade in a world where supply never caught up to demand. All zones had some engine qualities, so their impact was relative. Zones were also either passageways or cul-de-sacs depending on location (see Map 9.1).

The engines

The most dynamic engine was China. Fixed at the far end of the land mass, China was a cul-de-sac distanced from the other major zones by the highest

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Map 9.i. Major trade routes of Afro-Eurasia 1300 ce

mountains and some of the most dreadful deserts in the world. Nevertheless, China's assets, beginning with a rich agricultural base, an innovative indus­trial sector, a productive workforce, and an ample infrastructure of canals, roads, and bridges, more than compensated for location. Between the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, China's population doubled. Hangzhou, the Southern Song capital, was the largest city in the world of its time, with more than a million inhabitants,^[253] while Quanzhou and Guangzhou were likely the world's busiest ports. The internal Chinese market was of such size and wealth that its commercial energy rippled through much of the rest of Eurasia.

Over the millennium China's population shifted southward, a develop­ment that coincided with an equally dramatic change in China's external trade pattern from one based largely on overland routes through the Silk Roads system to one focused more on maritime outlets leading into the Indian Ocean. The Chinese state played a central role in regulating, super­vising, taxing, and to varying degrees engaging in foreign exchange. At the imperial court an ongoing debate simmered between advocates of foreign trade and a party of strict Confucianists who opposed it, preferring to keep foreign goods, ideas, and people out of China. That the pro-trade party often prevailed was due to the pressing need for revenue. Private trade meant taxes, and direct government involvement sometimes generated profits. The only other reason for countenancing external trade was to obtain exotic luxury goods for the court and elite. Policies favoring trade were not implemented to improve the lot of the common people by providing employment nor to encourage capital accumulation and reinvestment by the entrepreneurial classes.

Foreign trade became an important element in the overall Chinese econ­omy under the Song and Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties, which together are considered the great age of private commerce. The Ming (1368-1644) insti­tuted more restrictive policies designed to monopolize external exchange through the tribute trade system, which had been practiced in varying degrees by different dynasties since the Han (206 BCE-220 ce). Under this system, exchange was conducted only with official missions arriving from outside China bringing tribute in the form of rare goods to the emperor. In return, they received what were deemed to be “gifts” often worth more in value than what they had brought, the magnanimous gesture of a superior to an inferior. Such exchange sanctified an ideology that confirmed China as the center of the world. Embassies arrived on and off at various times during the Middle Millennium, bringing everything from yak tails and monkey skins to performing elephants and in, one instance, what was listed as “dried scrotum of Pacific seal.”^[254] For the Chinese, the official intention of tribute trade was not to realize a profit, although this depended to some extent on the dynasty in power: the Song, for example, often benefited while the Ming did not. Embassies were housed, feted, and provided with individual presents. Members of a mission took the occasion to engage in private trade so that often foreign traders not actually from the country offering tribute attached themselves to missions or even contracted the right from a foreign ruler to present themselves as official envoys.

Complementing China in the early centuries of the Middle Millennium as an engine powering Afro-Eurasian commerce was the Islamic heartland, a contiguous stretch of territory from Persia across Iraq, Syria, and Egypt with feeders into Anatolia, across North Africa to al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia), and south to the coasts of the Arabian peninsula. Lying at the intersection of the Eurasian and African land masses and flanked by the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, it was the consummate land-sea passageway, custom- made for middlemen. The Silk Roads system provided a direct link from Persia to China, India was a monsoon's sail, Europe was just across the Mediterranean, the Black Sea provided access to the Russian river system, and West Africa was connected by camel caravan. A hub of interlocking, intersecting commercial circuits with multiple points of entry and exit, the Islamic heartland became the great nexus of land and sea systems with much of its wealth generated from transit trade. It had an urban-based economy reaching back four millennia with active and savvy commercial classes, productive handicraft industries based on regional specialization, good ports, an experienced seagoing population, and a wide network of trade contacts already in place. Indeed the peoples of this zone had to rely on trade, since huge areas were wastelands and agriculture, still the basis of all large economies, was possible only in select areas. Lack of wood was a perennial problem, and much of the mineral wealth was exhausted. Another resource that had to be continuously supplemented was manpower, as this was a very large zone with a shortage of people in proportion to the role it played economically and geopolitically. To compensate, it sucked in people in a continuous flow of slaves from neighboring areas.

In many ways the Islamic heartland could hardly have been more different from China, yet together the two provided a good balance during the first half of the Middle Millennium.

Nor was the Islamic heartland reserved for the exclusive use of Muslim traders. In Baghdad Jews were prominent in finance, and under the early Caliphate an atmosphere of tolerance prevailed. The Radhanites were Jewish merchants who took advantage of the unity provided by the caliphate, traveling from Al-Andalus to India, buying slaves and furs in the west and musk, aloe, camphor, and cinnamon in the east, along with whatever other high-end commodities they happened upon. With their Muslim counter­parts, they traveled by sea to South China, at least until 878 when Chinese rebels sacked the port of Guangzhou, massacring a large number of foreign merchants. Thereafter the Radhanites stuck to the overland trunk routes. They enjoyed one great advantage: because they were regarded as neutral in the struggle between Islam and Christianity, they were able to cross hostile religious boundaries. The Radhanites did not comprise a formal association but more a loose network of merchants based in Jewish communities strung along the trade routes.

For the Islamic heartland the good times peaked between the eighth and tenth centuries, before the power of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate declined and eventually fragmented. Of the states that emerged from its collapse, the most successful was Egypt under the Fatimids (969-1171) and the Ayyubids (1174-1250). Egypt occupied the most strategic of all positions at the hinge binding the Eurasian and African land masses. Under the Fatimids the western maritime terminus shifted from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, in part reflecting the rise of Europe as a market for Asian goods. The government taxed this trade but did not interfere with it. Eventually it came to be controlled by a monopoly under an association of wholesale merchants and shipowners known as the Karimis. Egypt itself produced and exported large quantities of grain, cotton, sugar, linen, and glass. Cairo soon surpassed Baghdad as the hub of world commerce.

Trade through the Red Sea or Persian Gulf led to India, the most complex of the zones, a great commercial engine that was both a cul-de-sac in the north and a maritime passageway in the south. India was actually several places often going in different directions. Northern India had ties to Central Asia and Persia, but its extremities, Bengal and Gujarat, were sea-oriented. In the south, peninsular India was divided between coastal and interior regions that could be strongly interconnected or independent of each other. Coastal peninsular India was separated between west and east, each under its own monsoon wind regime. Malabar and the west coast looked to the Islamic heartland and beyond to Europe; Coromandel and the east coast opened on Southeast Asia and beyond to China. Different groups of merchants dealing in different commodities faced different conditions, opportunities, and challenges.

The complexity is extended by different interpretations of the economy of northern India during the early centuries of the Middle Millennium. In one view, the fall of the Gupta Empire in the late fifth century ushered in political fragmentation; what has been labeled as the great age of “Indian feudalism.” Urban market-based economy was replaced by self-sufficient village economy, coinage disappeared, trade routes withered, and the merchant class was reduced to petty peddling.^[255] These conditions lasted until the thirteenth century when northern India under the Delhi sultanate was absorbed into the world of Islam. But if Indian feudalism has been a compelling theory, mounting numismatic and archaeological evidence does not seem to confirm it. On the matter of money, for example, it is certainly true that northern Indian coinage consisted of base or heavily alloyed metals, but some scholars have seen this not as a sign of decline but instead the opposite. Because northern India lacked sufficient deposits of precious metals and much of what it had was hoarded in temples, they assert, it did not have enough gold and silver to keep up with its vibrant exchange economy.^[256] Overall, a mixed picture seems appropriate. Trade shifted and realigned, new patterns emerged, some places suffered, but others prospered. Commercial economy, including long-distance trade, continued and in some places was very brisk. In short, commercial growth and prosperity do not necessarily require political centralization or even stability.

Peninsular India, which had not been a part of the Gupta Empire, went in a different direction. On the Malabar coast the waning of Roman trade had a negative impact on some ports while the trade of Sri Lanka enjoyed a golden age. On the Coromandel coast expansion in the direction of Southeast Asia may have started as early as the seventh century and was thriving by the ninth. For much of this period peninsular maritime India and Southeast Asia formed more of an integrated zone than did southern and northern India. Traffic coming from one side of the Eurasian land mass to the other by sea was almost certain to make landfall somewhere on the Indian coast. In the early centuries pepper and spices remained the most important long-distance, high-value commodities, but the growth market was in cotton textiles, ranging in grade from extremely high quality to mass-produced, all sent seaborne to lands ringing the Indian Ocean. Imports ranged from Chinese porcelain and Southeast Asian tin to Arabian perfume and Mediterranean glassware, while horses in untold numbers were led in from Persia and Central Asia or carried by ship from Arabia for use in warfare and as a symbol of power and status. Overall, India enjoyed a favorable balance of trade that was covered by large imports of gold and silver. India also took the middleman's cut in transit trade, the most lucrative of which involved Chinese silk headed westward.

The passageways

India's connection to China required travel through one or other of the major passageway zones: Southeast Asia at the eastern entrance to the Indian

Figure 9.1 Bayon temple in Angkor, market scene (photograph by Benjamin Kedar)

Ocean; or Central Asia, the overland tie between China and the rest of Eurasia. Southeast Asia, running between the Malay peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo provided some local commodities including spices, incense, and medicinal products that could often be substi­tuted for similar but more expensive items produced farther away (see Figure 9.1). But neither in the production nor the consumption of goods did Southeast Asia have a sufficient impact on other zones to be considered a principal engine. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries the Straits of Malacca were dominated by Srivijaya, variously described as a thalassocracy, empire, or federation of cities or chiefdoms, or dismissed as little more than a figment of Chinese imagination.^[257] Its center is thought to have been near Palembang in southeastern Sumatra, from where it levied customs and port fees in return for providing a convenient and safe place for exchange, trans­shipment, and storage. Srivijaya also assumed control over Southeast Asian products headed into the long-distance network.

Srivijaya's dominance began to unravel after 1025, when a fleet from the Chola kingdom in southern India attacked and plundered Palembang and other Srivijayan cities. The Great Chola Raid has been dismissed as nothing more than an enormous plundering expedition, or construed as a calculated policy by the Cholas to break Srivijaya's stranglehold over trade between India and China.^[258] Srivijaya revived, but in weakened condition, its structure shaken enough to allow for the emergence of a rival centered in eastern Java, which became the dynamo of its own limited but very profitable commercial system. Eastern and central Java constituted one of Asia's most productive rice bowls, capable of generating huge surpluses. The source of all cloves, nutmeg, and mace, the most valuable of spices, was the Malukus, a collection of small islands at the eastern extremity of the Indonesian archipelago, much closer to Java than Sumatra. Land in the Malukus was too valuable for food production, so Javanese traders brought in boatloads of rice along with Indian textiles in return for spices, which they passed on to their Chinese, Arab, and Indian counterparts. The wealth generated from this business stimulated Javanese consumption, resulting in an influx of commodities from China and India. In the late thirteenth century Java became the center for a new power, Majapahit, whose commercial reach extended beyond that of Srivijaya at its peak. The Java trade became one component in a rising maritime system stretching from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean that became prominent between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a conse­quence of unhappy events to the north, where China, India, and the Islamic heartland all came under attack by Turkic and Mongol peoples.

The other great passageway zone both paralleled and contrasted with Southeast Asia. Central Asia lay far inland, north of India, west of China, east of the Caspian Sea, and south of the Siberian forests. The climate was cold and dry, and the land consisted mostly of steppe and desert punctuated by great mountain chains. To reach China overland from the Islamic heart­land or Europe, few viable alternatives to Central Asia were available. From India an overland passageway started in Assam and ran circuitously up and down rivers, over enormous peaks, and through almost impenetrable jungles across much of mainland Southeast Asia to Yunnan and eventually Sichuan. Shorter routes led over even more difficult paths through Ladakh and Tibet. Although Central Asia held many challenges, most traffic favored it as the best means of getting to China.

The common subsistence activities in Central Asia included oasis and river valley agriculture and nomadic pastoralism, a situation favoring exchange-based symbiotic relationships. Nomadic pastoralists needed grain, cloth, and manufactured goods in return for their surplus animal products. Central Asian nomads were usually eager traders, but resorted to more predatory activities when settled folk shut the door to them. Trade was usually facilitated when all or part of this zone came under the rule of nomadic empires beginning with the Turks in the late sixth century and culminating with the Mongols in the thirteenth. The Uighurs, whose empire succeeded the Turks, were especially trade-friendly. Nomadic pastoralists were not the only traders in Central Asia. On a larger scale, specialized merchants from the settled population did business at convenient commer­cial intersections. The biggest of the big dealers were the Sogdians, whose homeland lay between the Oxus River and the Pamir Mountains. Noted silk merchants with trade colonies as far east as the Chinese capital of Chang‘an, the Sogdians were favored under the Uighurs, who came to adopt many elements of Sogdian culture. After the fall of their empire, the Uighurs established themselves as an important trading people who played a noted role in northern China as moneylenders in long-distance trade.

The major trade arteries across Central Asia intersected in cities, which were also centers of production. Some manufactured commodities were consumed locally, others were sent to the nomads or forest peoples, and some entered the long-distance system for export out of the zone. Cities became widely known for specialized products: Samarkand for paper and brocade; Chach (Tashkent) for leather products, cotton fabrics, and medicine; and Bukhara for carpets and wines. Central Asia remained a major exporter of horses for the armies of China and India and of camels for transport across overland Asia. In the wake of the Arab conquest of the eighth century, the trading economies of the Islamic heartland and Central Asia became so intermeshed as to take on the characteristics of a single zone for a while.

The cul-de-sacs

While all the major zones experienced some degree of disruption at the onset of the Middle Millennium, the most challenging conditions existed in the far west. The Mediterranean basin had served as an important engine under the Roman Empire, but by the sixth century it had been dismembered. The regions of the zone and ultimately the districts within the regions broke off and drifted apart, albeit in a sort of slow motion. With periodic resurges here and there, the overall spin was downward, reaching its nadir in the seventh century. Political division, problems with maintaining order, endemic warfare, deurbanization, and the decline of market-directed agriculture all played important roles. Local products replaced imports as the breakdown in infrastructure led to disruption in the circulation of goods.

Although Europe was relegated to the periphery of Eurasian commerce, long-distance trade never completely died out. Specialized systems arose to address specific needs, two of the most notable originating in the far north beyond former imperial boundaries. Between the seventh and ninth centur­ies, the Frisians founded a system centered on new emporia scattered across the North Sea that traveled up Rhenish riverain routes into the interior. Trading textiles, weapons, glassware, and wine from Francia, furs and amber from Scandinavia, and silver and bronze prestige items, the Frisians served mostly kings, nobles, and monasteries. The Frisians did not operate past Denmark, but the Baltic did serve as the wellspring of another system. Originating in the late eighth century and reaching its high point in the tenth, this system ran across eastern Europe into the Russian river basins, then south to Transcaucasia, the Caspian Sea, the Byzantine Empire, the caliphate, and Central Asia, carrying slaves, wax, honey, and, above all, furs, the most valuable of which were sable, marten, and miniver to be made into hats or used in the lining of robes. In return, eastern luxury goods and especially silver coins went north. Hoards of dirhams minted in Samarkand, Chach, and Merv, from silver mines in Chach and Pendjir in Afghanistan, have been found in Scandinavia and isolated coins unearthed as far as England and Iceland. Securing the belly of this system were two rival khanates controlled by Turkic peoples, the Bulghars on the Middle Volga and, farther south, the Khazars, whose authority reached north from the Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea through the lower Volga and Don basins as far west as the Crimea. The conversion of the Khazar elite to a loose form of Judaism in the mid-eighth century also made their territory a popular transit point on the west-to-east Radhanite route, although the Khazars welcomed all traders so long as they paid a 10 per cent tax. The Khazars fed into the network almost no commodities of their own, nor were they notable as merchants themselves. Nevertheless, the wealth of this system eventually aroused the rapacity of the Rus', an amalgam of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Finnic peoples who controlled the northern stretch of the system and were known to have mixed commerce with plunder. In 965 the Rus' devastated the khanate, and trade shifted westward.

Once the commercial economy of the far west hit bottom it stabilized, and a transformation began taking shape. The ninth century is often seen as a crucial period beginning a trend toward a market-based economy that became more prominent in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This heralded a prolonged period of economic growth culminating in the momentous thir­teenth century now touted as the period of the “Commercial Revolution.” The fuel for sustained growth came from a demographic explosion during which the population of Europe doubled between 1100 and 1300.^[259] Towns became cities that represented concentrated demand and thus increased efficiency in distribution. The rise of centralized authority and the creation of larger integrated political units allowed for increased security in transpor­tation and a more predictable relationship between merchant and political establishment. The cost of doing business dropped.

As the economy became more commercialized, the need for money became more pressing. Silver was discovered in the late tenth century in the Harz Mountains of Saxony followed by other finds in central Europe, the last and greatest being Kutna Hora in Bohemia, which, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, was producing enough ore to mint millions of coins. Much of this was absorbed by the expansion of commerce within Europe, but tons of silver in the form of ingots were shipped to the Levant, Egypt, and the Black Sea to settle trade imbalances Europe accrued in its obsession with Asian luxury products. Nevertheless, silver production never met the demands of the expanding market, and while gold was used in large-scale transactions, metals alone could not satisfy the need. The re-emergence of banking out of currency exchange soon led to the practice of transferring credits on paper from one account to another. New credit instruments were developed, the most important being bills of exchange. Merchants from northern Italian cities led the way, assuming the position of middleman in the transit trade that brought Asian products into Europe and carried silver out. By the end of the thirteenth century, Europe had re-emerged as an engine in Afro-Eurasian commerce, if not yet on the scale of other engines, at least with considerable potential as partner or competitor.

The last of the major zones to connect into the Afro-Eurasian system was West Africa. There an intermesh of local circuits carrying goods of low value, principally foodstuffs and metal products, over short distances eventually merged into inter-regional networks extending from the oases and mines of the southern Sahara to the edge of the rainforests. The different ecological zones running in bands across West Africa provided different commodities for this system. Entrepots were established at ecotones where transportation modes changed, as in camels for donkeys, donkeys for human head­porterage, and overland for riverain. The middle course of the Niger and its tributaries represented a thousand-mile stretch of navigable waterways.

West African trade connected into the other zones of Afro-Eurasia through the Trans-Sahara. Commerce into and out of the Sahara existed from an early time, but a structured cross-desert system emerged only after the appearance of a high-demand product, which turned out to be gold, and the develop­ment of an efficient means of transport, which was made possible by the use of the dromedary as a pack animal. Gold began arriving in North Africa in noticeable amounts perhaps as early as the fourth century and certainly by the eighth,^[260] and camel caravans had become common in North Africa by the onset of the Middle Millennium. At the southern edge of the desert, the Trans-Sahara became grafted on to existing West African systems. Other goods going north included animal products, particularly hides and skins, some civet and ivory, and slaves for use as soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs. Goods coming south featured textiles and other manufactured items, warhorses, cowrie shells to serve as currency, and, most importantly, salt from mines in the northern Sahara.

Geography determined that West Africa would remain a cul-de-sac, but other factors limited its overall commercial potential. It exported too many raw materials and imported too many finished products, the type of relation­ship that builds dependency rather than partnership. Its elite classes were of the warrior-noble variety focused more on raiding and warfare than activities promoting economic development, while its merchant classes, typified by the Wangara (Juula), remained alien in-groups among the customers they served. No banking or credit systems evolved, nor did the economy become monetized: West African states did not use their own gold to mint coins. Cities were essentially commercial centers vulnerable to shifts in trade pat­terns that proved all too common. Nevertheless, the impact of West African trade on other zones can scarcely be overstated. By the fourteenth century, and probably earlier, West Africa was producing and exporting more gold than anywhere else in the world.^[261] This gold together with central European silver undergirded the monetization of Islamic and European economies and provided the lubricant for long-distance trade to India and beyond.

The cataclysms

Before the Middle Millennium drew to a close, the Afro-Eurasian world experienced two cataclysmic events that came as calamities in their imme­diate impact. Viewed from the longue duree, they can be seen as having stimulated complex processes that altered the trajectories of commerce in some places while accelerating existing trends in others. The first was the rise of the Mongol Empire built by Chinggis Khan and his heirs at an appalling cost. Cities were leveled, regions laid to waste, and populations annihilated. The two great engines that had earlier propelled Eurasia's commercial economy along with the land passageway between them suffered the most. North China was ruined, its population decimated, and its wealth plundered. South China, which had held out longer, suffered little damage, and its coastal regions prospered under the Mongol Yuan dynasty. In the Islamic heartland the ancient trade centers of Iraq and Persia were ravaged. Places were sacked often multiple times, and huge swatches of productive land became barren. Baghdad was devastated so thoroughly in 1258 that long-distance trade began to bypass what had once been a hub of the commercial world. In Central Asia the great caravan nexus became the special focus of Mongol wrath. Merv, Herat, Samarkand, and Nishapur were sacked and their populations slaughtered. Balkh was destroyed so utterly that archaeologists later found it difficult to determine its precise location.^[262]

Once the conquest was completed, the new system that was imposed, based on exploitation, continued to drive some sectors of the economy downward, especially agricultural production. Trade, however, was another matter. Like most nomads, the Mongols knew that a steadier source of income could be had from taxing than robbing caravans, and thus Mongol policies, chief of which was to provide security, were designed to foster long­distance trade. For merchants, protection costs were usually higher than carriage costs; now in one fell swoop a unified system replaced the hodge­podge of extorting entities that had existed from the Sea ofJapan to the Black Sea. For the merchant attempting to calculate his risks and profits, a new degree of predictability became possible. Some of the great caravan cities that had been destroyed were rebuilt, and along the routes way stations and caravanserais were established.

Under the Mongols the old network of Silk Roads that circled the Taklamakan Desert, crossed the Pamirs into Transoxania, then ran south­west through Persia to the Mediterranean experienced some rejuvenation. But the big surge took place several hundred miles north, bound for the Mongol capital at Karakorum, which emerged as an enormous center of consumption. This parallel passage, sometimes referred to as the Steppe Road, was an ancient route perhaps first described in Herodotus¹¹ that ran across open grasslands, skirting the northern edge of the Gobi, crossing the Altai and Urals, and connecting into the Russian river system or Black Sea. The Steppe Road enjoyed many advantages over the Silk Roads, not the least of which was that wheeled vehicles could be used across greater stretches of it. Nevertheless, most of the time it was more open to the depredations of marauders, making it a more dangerous passage than the Silk Roads; thus only in periods of imposed peace as under the Mongols was the Steppe Road extensively used. The Mongol Empire, however, did not last long. Its system of succession was more suited to a division of personal property than the transference of state power, and within a few generations the empire effect­ively became four separate entities. Although all four continued to encourage trade, low-grade warfare increasingly characterized relations between them, as did civil wars within each. Divisions soon became subdivisions, and by the late fourteenth century secure transcontinental travel no longer existed.

For trade and commerce the Mongol interlude was a very mixed bag. From the time the Tang dynasty had started its downward slide, the Silk Roads had been in decline due to unsettled conditions and a growing preference for shipping via the Indian Ocean. While overland trade revived somewhat under the “Pax Mongolica," it did so at a horrible price. The killing off of enormous numbers of people meant a loss in productive capacity that could not be compensated for despite the trade-friendly policies of the Mongols. And the Mongols never favored land over sea traffic. Once in control of South China, the Yuan continued the Song policy of encouraging maritime commerce, from which they received considerable financial bene­fits. When the overland routes subsequently waned, the sea routes continued to boom.

A sad sequel to the Mongol Empire came in the conquests of Timur (Tamerlane), a vain attempt to resurrect the Chinggisid trans-Eurasian world state. Timur had the viciousness of Chinggis without the vision. Between ^[263] 1370 and 1405 he left a trail of wanton slaughter and ruin, killing a reported 100,000 people in Baghdad and massing towers of severed heads in Delhi, Herat, and Isfahan as he built an empire stretching from northern Syria to northern India. While bestowing wealth and beauty on his beloved capital of Samarkand, elsewhere Timur disrupted trade routes, delivering another blow to the commercial infrastructure. As for the empire itself, Timur was too busy wreaking havoc to consolidate his rule, and after his death it disintegrated.

The second of the late Middle Millennium cataclysms was the spread of the great pandemic known as the Black Death. The origin of this virulent killer may have been a remote area around Lake Issyk-Kul in Central Asia that had easy access to both the Steppe Road and the Silk Roads. People, horses, and pack animals unwittingly carried the vectors of this disease over trade routes through the network of caravanserais into the centers of com­merce. Although contemporaries referred to it simply as the “Big Death,” most historians and epidemiologists think that the Black Death was bubonic plague, although some scholars dispute this.^[264] Whatever it was, the Black Death had the greatest impact on urban areas, especially ports from where it spread inland. It appears to have largely bypassed China and India, inflicting its deadliest havoc on the Mediterranean world. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were wracked between 1347 and 1349, the plague then reoccurring by one count sixteen separate times in Egypt and fifteen in Syria over the following century and a half.1^[265] For Europe the traditional account has it brought by ship from the Black Sea port of Caffa in 1347 to Sicily, then to Genoa and Venice, from where it became widespread. The result was a demographic catastrophe. General consensus puts the population of pre-plague Europe at 70-80 million, of which one-third died in the first four years. And the plague was a reoccurring affliction so that by the lowest point in the fifteenth century the population stood at between 50 and 60 per cent of its pre­plague numbers.^[266]

Recovery from a single disaster, however widespread, could have been effected with little long-term consequence, but waves of recurring plague over a century disrupted the economic order. A smaller population meant a decrease in production, a plunge in demand, and an overall sharp decline in prosperity. Long-distance trade experienced a drop in volume except for slaves, for which the market raged. Nor did the Black Death appear at a time in which the economy was poised to absorb such a shock. Despite a half­millennium of growth, the Afro-Eurasian commercial economy was still a very delicate edifice, still highly vulnerable to dislocation given the wrong set of circumstances. Before the Black Death appeared, such circumstances were already manifest. As the economy had grown, so had the population; often too much, given the available resources and level of technology. In some places in Europe depopulation seems to have already started before the pandemic. Nature soon joined the conspiracy. As early as the thirteenth century, the hitherto mild climate began turning colder with the onset of what has been called the “Little Ice Age,” resulting in sporadic crop failures in the fourteenth century and hitting a low in temperature in the fifteenth century.

Problems were compounded by the actions of various governments. Some like the Mamluks (1250-1517) in Egypt became more exploitative, while others took the opportunity to fight long, costly, destructive wars, a prime example being the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453)∙ In China the Yuan dynasty collapsed, to be replaced by the Ming amid much turmoil. In central Europe the silver lodes finally gave out, leading to the Great Bullion Famine of the mid-fourteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries. Many mints debased their coins, resulting in a lack of confidence in the monetary system, while others ceased production altogether. Creditors were unable to repay loans; banks, including some of the largest in Italy, collapsed; and credit dried up. People hoarded even badly debased money. India, often considered as Eurasia's bottomless pit for hoarded precious metals, suffered chronic bullion leakage as armies from beyond the Khyber Pass raked off plunder and tribute. In China paper money, which had been in use under the Song and Yuan, increasingly suffered bouts of inflation until the Ming ceased printing it altogether. By this time engine economies had become heavily monetized, but the money was not there.

Metamorphosis

Parts of the Afro-Eurasian economy did emerge from the abyss, beginning in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, although some areas and systems had been so badly hammered they did not recover. The days of large-scale overland caravan traffic, for example, had passed. The Steppe Road was permanently defunct, and the Silk Roads resumed their long decline, devolving into a series of connected local units, leaving Central Asia a passageway through which little passed. The Trans-Sahara eventually lost most of its gold trade and the international importance that came with it, but survived on the inter-regional trade in salt. The final triumph of the maritime routes resulted from the culmination of long-term trends rooted in return-to-cost ratios and technological innovations that allowed larger ships to travel more safely in shorter times than ever before. While earlier advances in navigation and maritime technology can be attributed to the Arabs, Indians, and Malays, from at least the twelfth century it was the Chinese who took the lead. They introduced the magnetic compass, pion­eered watertight bulkheads, utilized fore-and-aft rigging, built ships employing five or more mainmasts steered by rudders up to 50 feet in length, and greatly enhanced the seaworthiness of their ships by using iron nails instead of coir. With such innovations they were able to build the largest ships ever constructed up to that time, vessels over 400 feet in length, carrying 300 tons of cargo.

Chinese traders aboard Chinese vessels often based in Southeast Asian ports dominated the shipping lanes to southern India where cargoes were trans-shipped and taken on to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in a segmented system. Under the Song and Yuan, long-distance commerce had been largely in private hands, but this changed under the Ming. On their northern frontier the Ming refused to reach an accommodation with the Mongols, who controlled the overland routes to the west. Henceforth, long-distance trade would have to be done by sea, where early Ming policies, especially under the third emperor, Chengzu (1402-24), reverted to government-controlled tribute trade. Vast quantities of commodities did change hands in this way, but it was not the most efficient system of exchange: in effect a lose-lose situation for the Chinese, since private entrepreneurs were closed out while the government usually ended up giving more and receiving less in its dealings with supposed vassal states. Matters of power and prestige trumped profit.

Chcngzu's policy culminated in the voyages of the Treasure Fleets, seven enormous expeditions, under the command of the Muslim-Chinese eunuch Zheng He, that ranged across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433 to visit potential vassal states, enroll them into the tributary system, and ensure their symbolic submission to the universal sovereign. The size of these fleets was staggering, with the first alone containing 62 treasure ships, each with 9 masts and a crew of 500, along with 255 smaller ships. Each fleet carried tons of silk, porcelain, and other goods. Voyages took several years, the early ones calling at all major ports in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, the later ones venturing to the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and East African coast. On the return of the last treasure fleet, the voyages were abruptly terminated. Ships were scrapped, no new ones were allowed to be built, and shipyards were closed. The knowledge of large ship construction was eventually forgotten.

Speculation on the reversal in Ming policy has focused on political and economic factors. The political explanation points to an internal struggle at court between the anti-commercial Confucianist scholar-official bureaucrats and a eunuch faction that was identified with foreign trade and a forward maritime policy. The Confucianists appear to have won. The economic explanation maintains that the voyages were very expensive, and as condi­tions in China deteriorated due to a series of natural disasters, especially floods - augmented by peasant uprisings, piracy along the coast, an unsuc­cessful war with Vietnam, and border wars against the Mongols - the emperor could no longer afford the luxury of being recognized as universal sovereign.1⁵ And a purely practical consideration may have played some role. The huge Chinese ships with their size and seaworthiness are thought to have been originally designed for the trade in Malabar pepper, a commodity that enjoyed a galloping growth market at the time. When a pepper-growing industry developed much closer in Sumatra, the Chinese turned to using smaller, cheaper ships for this trade.^{[267] [268]} The Chinese withdrawal from the Indian Ocean left a vacuum that other traders, particularly Indian Muslims, quickly moved into. Doubtless there was some commercial disruption as the giant Chinese market contracted, although across the waters leading to the Mediterranean, demand was growing. As for the Chinese, they do not seem to have spent much time bemoaning their lost opportunity for maritime global hegemony. Trade on the eastern side of the Straits, both licit and illicit, forged ahead in ports on the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, and the Java Sea. China, the great eastern engine of Afro-Eurasia, was far from spent, and the Chinese commercial economy would subsequently enjoy a resur­gence that propelled it far into the early modern period.

On the other side of the Indian Ocean, China's erstwhile partner as the great Western engine of Afro-Eurasian trade, the Islamic heartland, was moving in a different direction. The fragmentation of the ‘ Abbasid Caliphate did not result in an immediate collapse of trade, but it did signal systemic issues that became amplified over time. Chronic warfare between the dynas­ties that succeeded the ‘Abbasids, compounded by waves of invasions coming out of Central Asia, destroyed cities, dislocated trade, and disrupted production through the forced deportation of skilled craftsmen. Recurrent plague, famine, and impoverishment sustained a long-term trend of depopu­lation. The most commercially active locations came to be ruled by military castes, mostly slave or mercenary soldiers of Turkish origin, not the opti­mum form of government for economic development. The main goal of those in charge was to enrich themselves as quickly as possible and to use their wealth to enjoy extravagant lifestyles. Burdensome taxes bordering on extortion, by predatory, rapacious regimes, increased the price of doing business, which raised the cost of merchandise, making zone-produced commodities less competitive on the international market. Private wealth was precarious and outright confiscation by those in power common. In Egypt the Mamluk regime continued to support long-distance trade but dispensed with the Karimi merchants and created its own monopoly. With some exceptions, the military-dominated governments of the Islamic heart­land during the late Middle Millennium were not only oppressive, they were incompetent and arbitrary, which made doing business unpredictable. If any single factor accounted for the lack of synergy between politics and econom­ics, it was the failure of the commercial classes to attain some measure of institutionalized political power. Cities often enjoyed considerable autonomy in dealing with local matters, but cities within larger states never became autonomous enough to negotiate with rulers over larger issues. Conse­quently, in setting priorities and making policies, governments did not have to take the needs of the merchant class or commercial matters in general into consideration.

Bad government was one important ingredient in a larger mix that featured other fundamental issues. A deficiency in natural resources made the Islamic heartland more dependent on trade than other engines. Its role as the ultimate passageway was enhanced by the revival of Europe; after the fall of the caliphate, the growing European economy helped to keep much of the Islamic heartland in business. Egypt, in particular, had been able to offset a steady drain in its balance of trade eastward with income from the West by selling its own products. This changed in the early fifteenth century, when the industries of Egypt and Syriajoined in the general collapse that had been evident for much longer in other parts of the zone. This was foremost a matter of technological innovation, or the lack thereof. Industries did not adapt to new technologies and more sophisticated forms of commercial organization, thus becoming less competitive - a legacy, in part, of govern­ment monopolies - while in private circles, a conservative business culture still dominated on the highest levels by household enterprises proved resist­ant to change. European goods became cheaper, allowing Italian exporters to dump products on Syrian and Egyptian markets, ruining local industries. Nor could a decline in manufactured goods be offset by agricultural products. The excessive taxation of an impoverished, poorly producing, and techno­logically disadvantaged peasantry together with the failure of an entrepre­neurial sector to emerge from the ruling classes to champion agricultural interests led to a drop in production. Egypt was still able to export some wheat and Syria some raw cotton, but for many products like olive oil, symbolic because it had been the original staple carried in long-distance trade as an export from this zone by the Phoenicians three millennia earlier, the Islamic heartland became a net importer.^[269]

Europe, long the Islamic heartland's bitter political and religious rival, while at the same time close trading partner, emerged from the wreckage of the fourteenth century bound on still another course. Western Europe did not suffer the devastation associated with the Mongol conquest but benefited from the temporary unity the Mongols imposed over other zones. While Europe did not escape the Black Death and the depression that accompanied it, the consequence proved to be more a correction than a coup de grace, a restructuring that led into a long period of growth. Signs of economic recovery are evident as early as the fifteenth century, albeit with considerable regional variation. While overall consumption fell with the drop in popula­tion, labor scarcity caused wages to rise, boosting per-capita buying power and charting a new direction in consumerism. Starting in Italy and spreading north and west, population grew, urbanization revived, production increased, commodity prices stabilized, and trade and commerce flourished. The growing political power of the merchant class and its alliance with the state protected and encouraged capital accumulation and investment.

Underpinning the revival of trade was the discovery of new sources of silver in central Europe, while advances in mining technology allowed for the reopening of old mines, replenishing the supply of much needed coinage.

The growth of maritime traffic was a favorable trend for Europe perched at the far end of Eurasia, with a coastline far out of proportion to its interior. European sea traffic was itself poised for a shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In 1434 Gil Eannes sailed past Cape Bojador on the western coast of Africa and returned safely to Lisbon, disproving the commonly held belief that seawater boiled from this point south. In 1471 the Portuguese reached the Gold Coast and began carrying back significant amounts of gold. In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut on the Malabar Coast. Despite his shoddy cargo of goods, considerable friction with local authorities, and the loss of two of his four ships, da Gama returned with merchandise worth sixty times the cost of his voyage. Heavily armed, the Portuguese were soon back in the Indian Ocean intent on imposing a commercial monopoly. The world was changing.

Nevertheless, from the vantage point of 1500, European global hegemony was still far in the future. Nor was the commercial world a zero-sum game. The rise of Europe did not necessarily mean that other zones would follow the Islamic heartland and Central Asia into eclipse. Both India and Southeast Asia were on the verge of new commercial expansions, and until at least the end of the eighteenth century, China remained the world's largest economy with a scale of trade still enormous by anyone's standards. If after 1500 the velocity of change began to increase exponentially, it did so within the framework of trends laid down in the Middle Millennium, at least until the Industrial Revolution fundamentally transformed all aspects of world economy.

FURTHER READING

Primary sources

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Goitein, S. D., trans. and ed. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton University Press, 1973. Goitein, S. D. and M. A. Friedman. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (India book). Leiden: Brill, 2008.

Iludiid al-‘Alam: ‘The Regions of the World,' A Persian Geography 372 A.H.-982 a.d. Trans. V. Minorsky. London: Luzac & Co., 1937.

Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta a.d. 1325-1354, 5 vols. Trans. H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham. London: Hakluyt Society, 1958-2000.

Ibn Hauqal. Configuration de la Terre (Kitab Surat al-Ard) 2 vols. Trans. J. H. Kramers and G. Wiet. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001.

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Muqaddasi, Shams al-Din Abu Abd AUah Muhammad b. Ahmad. The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions (Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma‘rifat al-Aqalim). Trans. B.A. Colins. Reading: Garnet, 1994.

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