the disintegration of the empire 101
them in the horde, the warm welcome accorded them, and not least the
prices he paid for their gemstones evidently represented a lively attempt
to interest foreign merchants in coming to do business with the golden
horde. in the same vein must be mentioned the khan’s achievement of
opening to Western merchants the road to central asia, and thus onward
to india and china.174
after this promising start, there then follows a long and mysterious
period of silence about the trade route in the sources. as with so many such
lacunae, here too the most plausible cause is that the mongol authorities
involved in opening up trade simply produced few documents,175 along
with the general discretion in which merchants themselves always shroud
their business.176 We can also invoke blind chance to explain this unusu-
ally large gap in the sources, selecting and discarding quite at random
what little material was written down in this place at this time. there is a
whole array of indirect evidence that merchants from both the east and
the West continued to ply their trade on the route from northern Black
sea port cities to the trading cities of central asia,177 an assumption also
174 Within the empire, foreigners could only travel with express permission of the chief
of the ulus whose territory the petitioner intended to cross; permission, once granted, rep-
resented protection from on high, so that the authorities were obliged to help the traveller
however they could. this system did not guarantee total comfort, but it did function and
fulfilled its intended purpose (see the franciscan accounts mentioned above, Wyngaert,
Sinica Franciscana, i, pp. 27–130 and 165–332, which are unusually informative about how
travel was conducted in the golden horde). the same strictness was applied to locals
travelling within the empire, who were not permitted to leave the territories which the
khan had assigned them for pastureland (ibid., pp. 68 and 108).
175 see chapter 1.2.1 on the generally patchy situation for sources on trade.
176 this is suggested by petech, “marchands,” pp. 551–552, who holds that it illustrates
“une règle presque absolue” for the epoch.
177 during negotiations brokered by the pope in 1269, the genoese imposed one single
clause on a treaty that they would sign with the venetians; a pledge from their rivals not
to put in at tana (cessi, “tregua,” p. 10; cf. Brătianu, Recherches, p. 254, and idem, “véni-
tiens,” pp. 15 and 33; papacostea, “tana,” pp. 202–203); there is ample documentation from
later epochs that its location at the mouth of the don, as the easternmost trading post
in the Black sea, made it the most convenient collecting point for goods from the eura-
sian steppe and forests as well as for caravans from Khwarezm and transoxiana; judging
by such evidence, we may assume that the genoese demand is also evidence of active
and large-scale trade in Jochid-held territory in the 1260s; certainly the stipulation was
a fixed part of their anti-venetian policy in the northern Black sea (papacostea, “tana,”
pp. 203 ff.). a Byzantine-mamluk treaty of 1281 points to the same state of affairs, paying as
it does special attention to egypt’s trade ties with the golden horde (canard, “le traité,”
pp. 673–674, 679–680). a notarial ledger preserved from the same year primarily records
contracts between genoese merchants at pera, which in themselves prove that there was
intense commercial activity in the ports of gazaria—caffa and soldaia—trading in typi-
cally regional goods; slaves, oxhides, wax, squirrel and ermine pelts, cheese (Brătianu,