the golden horde and the black sea 143
cessation of ‘cuman’ commerce acutely, as an unusual interruption to a
dependable import trade.
this commercial route had been in place since at least the beginning
of the thirteenth century. the same chronicler mentions it in describing
an event that had taken place around 1205: “Ghiyāth al-Dīn Ḥasan Shah,
the Seljuk prince of rūm, prepared to march on the city of trebizond, and
besieged the ruler of the city to punish him for his disobedience. for this
reason, links with asia Minor, with the lands of the russians, the cumans
and others were broken, by sea and by land. Nobody from these regions
any longer came into the lands of Ghiyāth al-Dīn. this was the cause of
much suffering among the Muslims, for they traded with those nations
and visited them. Merchants from Syria, Iraq, Mosul, Mesopotamia and
other lands would travel there. Many of them also came to the city of
Sivas. While the roads were closed, they suffered great losses, so that those
who managed not to lose their capital were very happy.”7
although Ibn al-athīr gives little information, it is enough to allow us to
reconstruct a North-South trade axis crossing the Black Sea at its narrow-
est point, Soldaia-Sinope, in the first half of the thirteenth century, and
crossing asia Minor via Sivas and Kayseri to reach Syria or Iraq.8
It should also be remarked here that alongside the furs mentioned by our
chronicler, the same route from the steppes and forests was used for the
export of slaves, much appreciated in the east for their military virtues.9
this commercial link seems to have been the principal route for Black
Sea trade at the time, and was doubtless no less profitable to the cumans
than it was to their trading partners, the Seljuk sultans, whose power was,
not coincidentally, at its peak in the period when they controlled the asia
Minor stretch of this route, in the first half of the thirteenth century.10
7 Ibn al-athīr/RHC HO, II/2, pp. 101–102; cf. Vasiliev, Goths, pp. 158–159, Brătianu, Marea
Neagră, II, p. 25.
8 cf. cahen, “commerce,” pp. 92–95, on the Seljuk sultans’ initiatives to bring trade
onto this route, and their attempts to capture the whole of anatolian commerce, including
the trebizond trade mentioned.
9 the Mamluk Sultan Baybars was shipped from Soldaia as a young man, and sold as a
slave at Sivas (thorau, “Battle,” pp. 19, 35–36; cf. the studies collected in ayalon, Outsiders,
and below, chapters 4.2.3, 4.2.4, 4.2.5).
10 cf. ibid. the Mongols ended their prosperity, not only defeating them decisively with
military force at Köse Dagh but reorganising the eurasian trade networks in the wake of
the battle, from which the Seljukid state could only lose. In the context of the trade war
between the Jochids and the Ilkhanids, once these latter had brought the Seljukids under
their suzerainty they forbade the import of cuman steppe slaves along this route, since
these swelled the ranks of the Mamluk army, with whom the Ilkhans were almost con-
stantly at war. Starved of this vital export trade, and most probably of other articles from