preliminary remarks 3
affairs—as in so many other instances in medieval history—is the scarcity
of source material.
1.1.1 Sources and Historiographical Concepts
one of those who deplored the paucity of information on trade during
the time of Mongol rule was Bertold Spuler, unsurpassed as a scholar of
chinggisid history. his remark on the situation in the tartar 4 state in Iran
is indeed discouraging.
Surviving written sources from the Ilkhanate6—where, as is well
known, the long-established persian bureaucracy continued to function
with a high degree of efficiency under the Mongols—give some idea, how-
ever exiguous, of merchant activity and of the policies which this or that
ruler may have adopted regarding the merchant class. It is no surprise
then that a genuine steppe empire, as the Golden horde was, left incom-
parably fewer documents as evidence. Indeed the output of documents
issued by the khans of Desht-i Qïpchāq7 seems, by all appearances, to have
been already very modest, and the number that has survived the ravages
of time is so low that they can be counted on one’s fingers. nor is there
any hope of supplementing this scanty internal source with information
from private documents, since these too are notably absent. equally dis-
couraging to researchers is the situation regarding narrative sources, since
none of the rulers of the ulus of Jochi8 in the cuman steppe departed suf-
ficiently far from nomad habits to feel any need to immortalise his deeds
through the efforts of court chroniclers.
By contrast, in the neighbouring Ilkhanate—as in china—the genius
loci displaced at least a part of these established customs. In the fertile
cultural soil of persia, works of history and literature flourished under
Mongol rule which were no lesser in quality than those composed in other
epochs under the patronage of local rulers.9 For instance, the works of
4 on the relation of the ethnonyms Mongol and Tartar, which were often synonymous
in the Middle ages, cf. ciocîltan, “evoluţia.”
5 Spuler, Mongolen, p. 356 note 2: “es sei hier nochmals darauf hingewiesen, dass über
den handel keinerlei originalzeugnisse (abrechnungen, Geschäftsbücher usw.) vorliegen,
so dass hier nur einige notizen über diesen Gegenstand gesammelt werden können.”
6 on the meaning of the term, see below, chapter 3.1.
7 this persian expression for the ‘cuman steppeʼ is widely used in the oriental
sources.
8 this is the common eastern term for the Golden horde; ulus “appanages, state, peo-
ple” (CH Inner Asia, p. 487), and Jochi, the first-born son of chinggis Khan.
9 Browne, History, III.