The Pax Mongolica
One authority from Korea to Hungary makes the Silk Road safe, and moves more than goods.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Mongol rule over most of Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries makes overland travel unusually secure, and merchants, missionaries and envoys cross the continent — Marco Polo among them, and the Moroccan Ibn Battuta covering even more ground. Technologies, crops and ideas move with them. So does plague: the Black Death almost certainly travelled the same routes, which is the darkest illustration of how connected the world had become.