the disintegration of the empire 111
the great traveller was treated as an unusually esteemed guest by the
authorities wherever he went: the governors of solkhat and tana received
him with much honour, and fed and lodged him, and furnished him for
the road, their generosity only surpassed by that of the khan Özbek him-
self and some of his wives.222
it is plausible that ibn Baṭṭūṭa was only lavished with such attentions
because he comported himself, as he himself never fails to emphasise, as
a pious muslim at all times, and thus met with great sympathy from his
high-ranking coreligionists among the Jochids. even though in all these
cases their shared faith certainly had some part to play, in at least one
instance, when he met and spoke with Özbek himself, there was much
more at stake, that is to say, the state policy toward foreign visitors. from
this perspective, the franciscan missionary John of marignolli is an infor-
mative source, since he spent the winter of 1339/40 in the lands of the
golden horde while travelling from the Black sea and caffa, then took
the well-known route from almalïq to china: the muslim khan showered
the catholic missionary223 with no fewer gifts and no less favour than he
had ibn Baṭṭūṭa a few years earlier.
Özbek’s consistent and many-pronged strategy of promoting trade
and commerce was as profitable as the cuman steppe mongols could
have hoped: the horde reached the peak of its commercial and political
development under his rule,224 and these parallel processes were recip-
rocally determined, however indirect and relational the link may have
been. his successors supplied negative proof that this link had existed
under Özbek.
certainly nobody could have suspected that the traders’ paradise which
Özbek established would come to such a sudden end: the “total war”
which Janibek unleashed against Western merchants in 1343 destroyed his
which probably represents the same word as old romanian haraba, in use in moldavia
until the last century.
222 ibid., pp. 359–361, 374–375, 447.
223 Wyngaert, Sinica Francsicana, i, p. 527: Inde ad primum Thartarorum Imperatorem
Usbec pervenimus et obtulimus litteras, pannos, dextrarium, cytiacam et dona Pape, et post
hiemem bene pasti, vestiti et remunerati magnifice et cum eius equis et expensis pervenimus
in Armalec [.. .].
224 Berindei, veinstein, “tana-azaq,” p. 135, set out a comparative analysis and con-
clude: “le règne du khan Özbek a été incontestablement marqué non seulement [.. .] par
l’existence d’un ‘grand commerce’, sans doute alors à son apogée, mais aussi par un dyna-
misme certain dans le domaine du trafic des produits locaux.” spuler, Horde, pp. 87, 99,
and grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 90, 262, note that the development of golden horde
state and political structures reached its apogee at this time.