142 chapter four
the arab chronicler Ibn al-athīr notes the earliest significant sequence
of events, set in motion when the Mongol generals Jebe and Sübödei led
their expedition through transoxiana in 1219 and onward into persia by
1223. their long campaign took them through the caucasian lands and
the cuman steppe, into Volga Bulgaria,3 and the incursions had an effect
on trade: “arriving at Sugdāq [= Soldaia], the Mongols took it, while the
inhabitants scattered to different destinations: some of them fled with
their families and possessions into the mountains, others crossed the seas
and arrived in the Land of rūm [= asia Minor], which is held by Muslims
from the nation of Kilij arslan.”4
Soldaia was the most important centre of the region to the North of the
Black Sea, and its destruction was a grave blow for all trade in the Black
Sea basin. the situation again became critical after the extended wars of
1223, when the Mongols shattered the army of the russian knyazï at Kalka,
having previously defeated the alans and the cumans. only the Bulgars
held out in their fortified capital on the Volga.5
there was thus a state of war in the crimea and the cuman steppe,
and total insecurity, so that from 1223 onwards merchants could not pur-
sue their trade: this led to a crisis on Near eastern markets which found
themselves starved of goods from the eurasian steppe and forest. again,
Ibn al-athīr takes up the story: “ties with the cuman steppe were broken
with the arrival of the Mongols, and no wares were received, no furs of
black fox or of squirrel or beaver, nor any of the other things which are
brought from that country; then once they [= the Mongols] returned to
their own country, the road was opened again and the goods began to a
rrive once more, as they had before.”6
although the arab chronicler’s account has to do with matters of the
day, it also gives indirect testimony, by his use of contrast, to the ‘nor-
mal’ state of affairs in the longer term, the constant and well-established
exchange of goods between the steppe to the North of the Black Sea and
the fertile crescent: a few months of turmoil in the sea’s vast hinter-
lands was enough for the distant markets of the Muslim east to feel the
3 See above p. 29.
4 tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I. p. 26; the events are also recorded by rashīd al-Dīn/arends,
I/2, p. 229, and in the synaxarion of Soldaia, which gives a date of 27th January 1223 (Nys-
tazopoulos, Sougdaia, p. 118); cf. Spuler, Horde, p. 12, Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, p. 50.
5 cf. Spuler, Horde, pp. 12–13, Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 50 ff.
6 tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I. p. 28; cf. Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 51–52.