preliminary remarks 5
pegolotti, who wrote a detailed and voluminous guidebook for those of
his contemporaries who wished to travel the transcontinental routes; and
Marino Sanudo, one of the most clear-sighted thinkers on the problem of
long-distance trade in the context of the crusades.
Such contributions led to the creation of a framework and integra-
tive vision of eurasian trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
this strongly-founded structure has lost none of its relevance down to
this day. It has remained, whether acknowledged or tacitly, the basis for
all modern attempts to reconstruct organically this important historical
phenomenon.
one of the cardinal virtues of the conceptual framework which West-
ern veterans of the long-distance trade drew up is that it aligns the con-
tent of various reports and sources, and organises them in a coherent,
intelligible system. this imposition of ‘structure’ on the sources has a fur-
ther use, which should by no means be overlooked: it also reveals where
there are gaps in the information about merchants and their trade. his-
torians’ attempts to garner useful information about trade from the huge
and polyglot mass of both eastern and Western sources15 has cleared up
remarkably many aspects of this complex of questions, but far too many
still languish in obscurity. examination of the sources and the secondary
literature leads to an inescapable conclusion: the volume of trade-related
information is far too small to allow any scholar to write a ‘compact’ history
of trade in the Mongol period. although it is not uniform, the sparseness
of source material which Spuler noted in the case of the Ilkhanate is also
encountered throughout the period of tartar rule, and across the whole
area in which they governed.
Despite his largely justified misgivings, Spuler’s pessimism is contra-
dicted by countless works proving that historians did not resign them-
selves to merely gleaning a few notes and queries, but made decisive
strides toward our understanding of various aspects of eurasian trade in
the chinggisid era, and indeed toward understanding its very nature.
how was such progress possible?
13 cf. polo/Benedetto, pegolotti/evans, Sanudo/Bongars.
14 the importance of Western sources in general, and of Italian sources in particular,
for the history of trade in the Mongol age becomes clear in the synthesis by heyd, Histoire,
II, pp. 3–253.
15 cf. the impressive bibliographies on the chinggisids at the end of the volumes by
Spuler, Horde, and Mongolen.
16 the chapters which Spuler devoted to commerce in the Golden horde and in the
Ilkhanate (cited above, note 5) are themselves little more than dry inventories.