From the Migration Period to the Pinnacle of Nomadic Power: The Mongol Eurasian Empire

This chapter focuses on CA’s economic evolution from the migration of the peoples to the pinnacle of nomadic power. The region initially re-stabilized under the Turkic Empire, whose Sogdian merchants reanimated transcontinental trade. Tang China, the caliphate, and partly Khazaria shared in the second apex of the SR from the late seventh to the late ninth century. Chinese know-how (silk production, papermaking, and the compass) were transferred westward in this time. Notwithstanding weaker international trade following the caliphate’s demise, C Asian intellectual and cultural achievement in the early second millennium CE boasted world renown. While the Mongol conquest of CA and of most of Eurasia brought unprecedented destruction and bloodshed, this was followed by the third heyday of the SR (second half of the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries): Security was strictly upheld, and trade encouraged on a giant bicontinental and politically integrated playing field (Pax Mongolica). In this sense, the Mongol Empire may have been a driving force of early globalization. Paper money, playing cards, engraving printing, gunpowder, the abacus, and other inventions spread along the Mongol SR. Gathering political instability, imperial disintegration, and the “Black Death”—a second demographic catastrophe—hailed the collapse of Mongol rule and the renewed shrinkage of SR trade.