About 1340
Eurasia in 1340
In 1340 the heirs of Genghis Khan rule most of Asia. The Golden Horde of Khan Özbeg holds the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea from its capital, Sarai on the lower Volga. The Chagatai Khanate holds Central Asia, and the Yuan emperors hold China. In Iran the Ilkhanate has broken up among rival khans since the death of Abu Sa’id in 1335.
Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, on Angelino Dulcert’s sea chart, Majorca, 1339. The legend reads: Here rules Özbeg, lord and emperor of Sarai.Wikimedia Commons, Angelino Dulcert, public domain
Merchants cross these lands on caravan roads. The Florentine merchant Francesco Pegolotti, in a handbook for traders written about 1340, describes the road to China. It starts at Tana at the mouth of the Don and goes by ox wagon to the Volga, by river to Sarai and Saraichuk, and by camel to Urgench and Otrar. Pegolotti writes that the road is safe by day and by night, by the word of the merchants who have used it. Another road runs south to Tabriz, where Italians buy Persian silk.
At the western end of the roads, Genoa and Venice keep trading ports. Genoa holds Caffa in the Crimea and Pera across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, and both republics have a quarter at Tana. Their ships carry silk, spices, furs, wax and grain to Genoa and Venice. They also carry boys and girls bought on the steppe to Alexandria, where the Mamluk sultans of Egypt train the boys as soldiers.
Europe has about 80 million people, by the estimate that the historian Ole Benedictow uses.
The box at the top of the map counts the estimated deaths from the plague by the date of each page, from the outbreak at Caffa in 1346 on. The figure is a reconstruction, and the page “Counting the dead”, near the end of the story, explains how it is made.
Sources
- Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura (about 1340), ed. Allan Evans (1936).
- Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. 3 (1914), on Pegolotti’s road to Cathay.
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
- Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (1989).
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