products from across North Africa, Europe, and Asia to be joined by salt
from mines located in the northern Sahara. These were exchanged for the
special products of West and Central Africa: skins, ivory, civet (a secretion
from the wild civet cat used in perfumes), luxury slaves (women, eunuchs,
and bodyguards), and later kola nuts, malaguette pepper, and ostrich feath-
ers. But the product that drove Berber merchants southward and Wangara
merchants northward was gold, which came from three different goldfields
scattered around West Africa that were exploited in succession. By the
fourteenth century, West Africa was the largest producer of gold in the
world and would remain so until the discovery of the Americas.
In East Asia in the centuries following the fall of the Tang, the fortunes of
the Silk Road continued to oscillate in response to the risings and fallings of
various nomadic groups. The greatest of these, representing the culmination
of empire building on the steppe, came under the Mongol Empire of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The creation of this empire was a horri-
bly destructive process, which included the obliteration of some trade cities
and significant damage to the commercial infrastructure in certain places.
However, the Mongols, who were not a mercantile people themselves, were
not anti-trade or anti-merchant; quite the contrary. Nomads had always
depended on traders and usually appreciated their role more than most set-
tled folks. Under their empire merchants from many different lands supplied
the Mongols in their newly conquered cities with luxuries and staples and in
the process helped dispose of their war booty. For a while, the largest land
empire in history became a vast trade zone although the major trans-Asian
routes shifted to the open steppeland north of the old Silk Road.
The halcyon days of Mongol trade lasted only about a century before the
empire split into rival khanates that were frequently in conflict with each
other. Under such conditions Central Asia again became a barrier rather than
a corridor for Chinese contact with the west. Towns along the Silk Road
decayed, and some ceased to exist. In the fourteenth century the Black
Death, an enormous demographic and economic catastrophe, traveled across
the old land routes further dislocating an already reeling commercial system.
Areas like Southwest Asia, parts of which had not recovered from the
Mongol devastation, suffered increased impoverishment and economic stag-
nation. Mesopotamia, thefirst great core of long-distance trade and for four
millennia a major player, faded into periphery status.
In the past when conditions on the land route took a turn for the worse,
the parallel sea route usually picked up the slack. Although they both car-
ried goods between one side of Eurasia and the other, the Silk Road and the
Indian Ocean maritime system were never locked in head-to-head competi-
tion. Rather they tended to complement each other, and in good times both
prospered without any appreciable damage to the other. In thefirst half of
the second millennium, however, the dynamics of both systems changed,
sending them down different paths. If the land route enjoyed one really good
Epilogue 139