by Qiu Jiangning
Zhejiang Normal University
Compared to the powerful Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE) and Tang (618-907) periods, which were indeed more cosmopolitan and outward facing than most other periods in Chinese history, the world under the Pax Mongolica during the 13th-14th centuries was much more multicultural and interconnected. The Mongols arose in East Asia in the early 13th century and within less than a century had swept across two thirds of the world in a wave of conquest and subjugation. The territory of their empire at its height stretched from East Asia to Central Asia, West Asia and Eastern Europe; it was the largest empire the world had ever seen. The establishment of the Mongol empire greatly accelerated cultural and technical exchanges between East and West. Under its dominion, the entire Silk Road was controlled for the first and last time by one empire, resulting in smoother trade and other contact and exchange along this route than ever before.
To be sure, the Mongols faced challenges concerning geopolitics, multipolarity, multicultural and religious conflicts, as well as encounters with civilizations that were different from their own. However, to some degree, these issues can be seen as part of a globalization process that has much in common with the experience of the world today. The area ruled by the Mongol empire was much more closely integrated into transportation and communication networks during this period than it ever was before or after, until the 21st century.
The brutality of the Mongol conquest cannot be denied. However, most historians also recognise that the Mongol conquest led to an increase in East-West contact and an acceleration of the process of globalization in a pre-electronic, pre-internet age. Since the last century, many works have been written or edited by scholars who have highlighted this increase in intercultural communication. These include the volume on “Alien Regimes and Border States” in the Cambridge History of China, edited by Denis Twitchett and Herbert Francke, and a series of books and articles written or edited by Morris Rossabi (see Bibliography). The opinions articulated in these books and papers have directly inspired recent research into issues of globalization in the present world, in the age of electronics and the internet as well as advanced science and technology. They have also promoted deeper research into the Mongols themselves and the Mongol period in China and elsewhere. We can now take advantage of the huge databases of information that exist, and the seamless electronic resources provided by the internet. Before the pandemic of 2020-2022, we enjoyed an ease of travel to different parts of the world, which facilitated this research, and we hope these opportunities will come again in the future. Meanwhile, even without such travel opportunities, 21st century scholars have been able to delve more deeply into these subjects while also extending their knowledge more widely, discovering more detailed and precise information than ever before about the context in which Mongols and their contemporaries lived.
The project entitled “Impressions of the Silk Road in the Pre-modern Era and Globalization: Cultural Interconnections across Eurasia under the Pax Mongolica”, funded by the Chinese government with the Centre of Development Studies in the University of Cambridge and the History Department of Zhejiang Normal University as its dual centres, and carried out between 2017 and 2022, has created alliances among scholars in related fields in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, India, China and the Middle East, and revealed the various processes by which globalization occurred in the pre-modern era during the 13-14th centuries. It examines the Mongol era from a variety of perspectives, including history, economics, climate change, geography, literature and art, in order to document and analyse the changes that occurred during this time. The focus is on material objects and material culture as well as on written descriptions of the West and East by those who travelled between them on the Eurasian Silk Road, or wrote about them, to discover what has been lost, and to trace the impressions that people from different cultures had of each other. Description and analysis are provided of historical cases and cultural contexts with a view toward rediscovering the cultural and commercial interconnections that existed across Eurasia and under the Pax Mongolica, and integrating these with the spirit of the “Belt and Road” initiative currently being implemented by Chinese government.
Regarding Odoric of Pordenone, the author of the Introduction to the new edition of Henry Yule’s translation, The Travels of Odoric Pordenone, whose name is Paolo Chiesa, says that Odoric’s journey “became in fact part of a rich tradition of travel that brought many European clerics to the East. These expeditions generally combined spiritual intentions (that is, the conversion of pagan peoples) with more earthly aims, particularly those of a diplomatic and exploratory nature.” (p. 17)