114 chapter three
that the east-West route was literally vitally important for the exchequer
at sarai, regardless of what its absolute volume may have been—which is
very hard to judge. When the route vanished, this set off a classic chain
reaction: the state budget, even in the best of times strained to its limits,231
could no longer match its costs, and the central institutions which had
been a lynchpin for cohesion in the ulus shrivelled away and gradually
stopped working, so that the impressive foundations which Batu Khan
had laid for his state in 1242 had crumbled by about 1430.232
to conclude, the silk road’s branch route on the cuman steppe had
been developed by the Jochid khans to compensate for the loss in 1261
of their direct link to the main artery of eurasian trade, and answered a
fundamental need for the golden horde—a gigantic steppe polity which
suffered from an inborn economic defect which shortened its lifespan,
just as had happened to all the empires which arose in this geographic
region over time.
3.4.2 The Ilkhanid Branch: Tabriz-Trebizond
chance would have it that the mongols in iran were also using the Black
sea, and reaping the benefits, at the same time as their rivals and kins-
men in the cuman steppe. setting aside the countless small differences
in detail, the same basic cause, rooted in the problems of eurasian long-
distance trade, was at work in the ilkhanid court as in sarai, and produced
the same result, by re-directing a large flow of asian commerce toward the
Black sea basin.233
the immediate cause of this profound shift in transcontinental trade
networks was the regime change in cilician armenia, the entry-way for
long-distance trade. here the fierce rivalry between the ilkhanate and the
mamluk sultanate over the fertile crescent reached a decisive point in
1285, when cilicia ceased to be a vassal of the mongols and became instead
231 see for instance the precarious situation even in Özbek’s day, when the Jochid state
was at the peak of its prosperity (cf. above, p. 10 note 25, p. 165 note 90).
232 the correlation is noted by İnalcık, “Question,” p. 86: “timur’s intervention in the
internal struggles of the golden horde in the last decades of the fourteenth century not
only contributed to the fall of azak (azov), saray and astrakhan as international trade
centers, but, perhaps more importantly, by destroying the rising power of toqtamïsh, fur-
ther accelerated the process of the dissolution and polarization of the tribal confedera-
tions in the eurasian steppes.”
233 on the golden horde, see chapters 3.1, 3.3.1, 3.4.1.