west (Bursa, Istanbul, Belgrade, Edirne), in Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), in Iraq
(Baghdad) and the Black Sea littoral. Constantinople, renamed Istanbul after its
conquest by the Osmanlis in 1453, grew exponentially, primarily through in-
migration. Peasants from overpopulated Anatolia fled into the city, while the
sultans worked to restore the city as a trade emporium, distributing privileges to
traders and attracting artisans. Accordingly, the city’s population grew by over 80
percent in the sixteenth century.
The story in China is similar: the alluvial plains of the eastern coasts and Yangtze
and Pearl River deltas were overly densely settled and had been areas of intensive
agriculture for centuries. By contrast, China’s western and northwestern frontiers
were sparsely settled. All in all, trends are as significant as numbers. Across the early
modern centuries, despite the rigors of a Little Ice Age, warfare and disease, people
coped. They designed political economies that kept them alive, aided in Russia
by the copious supply of forest for farming and hunting. Part of what fueled
and supported growth were the global interactions that kept Europe and Eurasia
interconnected.
GLOBAL INTERCONNECTIONS
For millennia Europe and Asia had been connected in what historians call the
“Afro-Eurasian”zone, stretching from China to northern Africa and the Mediter-
ranean through the fabled east–west“Silk Road(s).”The Silk Road was not one, but
many; its multiple routes served diverse trade emporia and shifted in response
to regional political and religious developments for millennia. Routes traveled
between China and Central Asia, diverging from there generally south of the
Caspian Sea to India, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Black Sea, and the
Mediterranean. Historians argue that the Silk Roads created a single“world system”
carrying luxury goods and slaves as far back as 2000BC. The generally east–west Silk
Roads relied on north–south offshoots that supplied the transit trade and served
regional markets. In Russia’s part of the world (some call it western Eurasia), by the
tenth century trade networks along the Volga, Kama, and Dnieper ushered forest
products from the Baltic and western Siberia to the Byzantine empire, Middle East,
China, and India.
Over the centuries of their existence pan-Eurasian Silk Roads waxed and waned
with conditions on the steppe. In the best of times, steppe empires created a stable
trade environment, paralleling the Romans’fabled“pax Romanorum.”The Mongol
empire’s“pax Mongolica”endured from the Black Sea (Pontic) steppe to China for
about a century. But the norm was usually smaller nomad confederations ruling a
segment of steppe, sometimes combining to maintain steady trade, sometimes (as
in the seventeenth century in Central Asia) descending into internecine struggles
that disrupted caravan trade and moved routes elsewhere.
As Moscow rose to regional prominence in thefifteenth century and became an
increasingly important global player in the centuries thereafter, it did so as a
participant in and beneficiary of the new global world. Jerry Bentley argues that
32 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801