preliminary remarks 15
the Kievan rusʼ, destroyed the Khazar commercial centres in his cam-
paign of 962, among them the famous capital of Itil on the Volga, this was
a blow from which the empire never recovered. It should be remarked here
that the attack was launched against a weakened state that was unable to
defend itself as it had in the past against attack by the caliphate.45
as is well-known, the conquerors who took over in the Khazar territo-
ries had been both warriors and traders ever since the foundation of their
state. Kievan rusʼ was a political expression of the power gained by suc-
cessfully controlling the famous Dnieper route from the Varangian lands
of the Baltic all the way to Byzantium. the conflict between the rurikids
and the Khazars was generated (even dictated) by competition between
parallel trade routes, the Dnieper on the one hand and the Don and the
Volga on the other.
the second much-studied case which I have chosen here to exemplify
the symbiotic relationship between central power and transit trade is that
of the Mamluk sultanate.
the Mongol invasion, which culminated in 1258 with the fall of Bagh-
dad and the destruction of the abbasid caliphate, changed only the ruler-
ship over one part of the eurasian trade network, rather than changing
the routes themselves. the true end of this eurasian system came with the
great geographical discoveries at the close of the fifteenth century, when
long-distance trade shifted to other horizons, with other participants and
others who drew the profit. When Vasco da Gama made the first recorded
voyage to India by way of the cape of Good hope, at almost exactly the
same time as christopher columbus discovered america, these voyages
had fatal and irreversible consequences across the whole Islamic world,
which definitively lost its economic and political pre-eminence.46
this large-scale process is neatly illustrated on the smaller stage by the
long-drawn-out death throes of the Mamluk sultanate, which casts much
light on the symbiotic relationship between the ruler and the merchants.
even the very name of the state bears witness to its unusual economic
strength: the arabic word Mamlūk means slave, and the slave warriors
who made up the army and the political elite from 1250 to 1516 were in the
final analysis themselves a commercial ware, imported to egypt and Syria.
It is self-evident that the sultans had to spend enormous sums of money
45 nazmi, Relations, pp. 65–74 (chapter: ‘the Khazar-arab conflict’).
46 cahen, “Mots,” p. 32, found that there was a veritable consensus doctorum here: “on
dit souvent que l’événement principal qui a entrainé la décadence de l’économie musul-
mane consiste dans les Grandes Découvertes.”