Of the Mongol Hordes, the First Iron Curtain, Lost Opportunities, Inflation and Gutenberg’s Real Motives

“THE landfaring pioneers of Europe's first Age of Discovery who went eastward in the midthirteenth century needed resources quite different from those of the later, the seafaring, age. Columbus would have to raise a large sum of money, find ships, enlist and organise a crew, secure supplies, keep the crew happy and unmutinous, and navigate a trackless ocean.

Quite other talents were required of the earlier overland traveller. He could go with one or two companions along main-travelled roads - though the roads had not been frequented by Europeans before them. They could live off the land, finding food and drink along the way. While they did not need to be fundraisers or master organisers, they had to be adaptable and affable. Columbus' men became mutinous when the voyage stretched a few weeks beyond what they had expected, but the overland pioneers could extend their journey as long as necessary, by another month, another year, even another decade. While the seafarers went over long stretches of cultural emptiness, and at sea news usually meant trouble, the landfarers - merchants or missionaries - could practice their vocation along the way, learning as they went. If the solitary landfarer took ship for some stages of his trip, he was a passenger. The vessel was usually commanded and supplied by someone of the region. The landfaring pioneer would be both more lonely and less lonely than his counterpart an the sea. For if he lacked the companionship and support of fellow countrymen, like those who went with Columbus an the Santa María, yet he had the opportunity for many novel, warm, and casual associations an his days and nights along the way.

The perils of the sea were quite the same everywhere - wind and wave and storm, loss of bearings - but the perils of the land were as varied as the landscape, and helped make the journey interesting and suspenseful in surprising ways. Were robbers lurking in this inn? Could you digest the local food? Should you wear your own or a native costume? Would you be allowed entry in this city gate? Could you crash the barriers of an unknown language to explain your wants and show that your mission was harmless?
	Overland travel was not an adventurous communal leap, but a laborious, individual trek. From that age came our English word "travel" - originally the same as "travail," meaning labour, especially of a painful or oppressive nature - an accurate description of what it meant to go long distances overland. A few pioneers took up this travail and opened the way from Europe to Cathay.
While Europeans were still plunged in the darkness of dogmatic geography they had long been entertained by legends of the mysterious east. A few men and women enjoyed the exotic luxuries from that other end of the earth - sleek silk from China and sparkling diamonds from Golconda. In rooms draped with costly carpets from Persia, they feasted an dishes spiced from Ceylon and Java, and passed the hours with ebony chessmen from Siam.
	Yet the merchants of Venice, Genoa, or Pisa who prospered by selling these exotic Eastern commodities had themselves, of course, never seen India or China. Their Eastern contact was in the Levant ports in the eastern Mediterranean. Their precious stock had been brought by one of two main routes.
One, the fabled Silk Road, was an all-land route from eastern China through central Asia, by way of Samarkand and Baghdad, finally reaching the coastal cities of the Black Sea or the eastern Mediterranean.
	The other came through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea, either up the Persian Golf to Basra or up the Red Sea to Suez. To reach the European market these goods would still have to go overland, across Persia and Syria or else through Egypt.
On either of these routes, Frankish and Italian merchants found their way blocked as soon as they tried to advance eastward from the Mediterranean ports. Muslims gladly traded with them at Alexandria or even in Aleppo or Damascus, but the Muslim Turks would not allow Europeans to advance a step farther. This was the Iron Curtain of the late Middle Ages.
	Then for a single century, from about 1250 to about 1350, that curtain was lifted, and there was direct human contact between Europe and China. During this interlude the bolder and more enterprising Italian merchants no longer had to wait until their exotic goods reached Aleppo, Damascus, or Alexandria. Now they themselves took caravans across the Silk Road to the cities of India and China, where they could hear Christian missionaries, Frankish and Italian friars, saying mass. What might have been the beginning of a continuous mutual enrichment, a widening and enlivening of the visions both of East and of West, proved to be only a brief and tempting curtain-raising, an adventurous episode, after which the curtain again came down with a thud. This would prove to be another kind of interruption, an interlude of light in the darkness that for most of modern history blanketed both the Eastward and the Westward vision. Decades would pass before the discovery of the ocean would make it possible for Europeans once again to touch the coastal fringes of India and Southeast Asia. Centuries would elapse before Europeans were again permitted to visit the ports of China. Central Asia would remain long unvisited, and inland China, after an entr'acte of only two centuries, would remain inhospitable or hostile to visitors from the West.
It was not the march of Christian soldiers, nor the manoeuvres of European statesmen, that lifted the curtain. Like many other world-awakening events, it was a by-product. If credit must be given for opening the way to Cathay, it must go, surprisingly, to a people of the same stock as those Turks who so long blocked the way for Europeans - to a Mongol people from central Asia, the Tartars (or Tatars). A threat to Europe in the Middle Ages, they have been much maligned. Featured in our European historical pantheon as reckless destroyers, their very name has become an English synonym for barbarian. The word "horde," which has come to mean a disorderly swarm, came from the Turkish ordu, which simply meant a "camp." Their reputation has been fixed by European writers who knew, or who had heard of, the horrors of the first Tartar onslaughts an the West. But few of these writers had ever seen a Tartar, and they knew nothing of the remarkable solid achievements of the Tartar Khans.
	The Mongol empires were land empires, twice the size of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. Genghis Khan and his hordes came down from Mongolia to Peking in 1214. In the half-century after, they took nearly all eastern Asia, then turned westward across Russia, even into Poland and Hungary. When Kublai Khan came to the Mongol throne in 1259, his empire reached from the Yellow River in China to the shores of the Danube in eastern Europe and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. The Mongol Khans, from Genghis Khan through his sons and grandsons - Batu Khan, Mangu Khan, Kublai Khan, and Hulagu - were as able a dynasty as ever ruled a great empire. They showed a combination of military genius, personal courage, administrative versatility, and cultural tolerance unequalled by any European line of hereditary rulers. They deserve a higher place and a different place than they have been given by the Western historian.

Without the peculiar talents and special achievements of these Mongol rulers and their people, the way to Cathay would probably not have been opened when it was. When would there then have been a path for Marco Polo? Without Marco Polo and the others who stirred the European imagination with impatience to reach Cathay, would there have been a Christopher Columbus?
	In 1241 a swarm of Tartar horsemen ravaged Poland and Hungary, defeating an army of Poles and Germans at the Battle of Lignitz in Silesia, while another of their armies defeated the Hungarians. Terror struck Europe. In the North Sea, even the courageous fishermen of Gothland and Friesland were frightened into staying away from their usual herring grounds. The learned Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), a patron of science and literature, who had led the successful Sixth Crusade (1228-29), had actually captured Jerusalem and then made a ten-year truce with the sultan of Egypt, now feared that the Tartar flood would overwhelm Christendom. He called on King Henry III of England and others to unite against this new "Scourge of God," in the hope "that these Tartars would be driven finally down to their Tartarus" (ad sua Tartara Tartari detrudentur). Pope Gregory IX proclaimed a new crusade, this time against the Tartars. But because of the bad blood between the Pope and Frederick II, who had already been twice excommunicated, the King of Hungary's plea for help was answered only by words. After all, Europe was saved by an Act of God, when the Tartar hordes at the height of their successes received word that their great Khan Okkodai was dead in Asia and that they must hasten home.
Despite the alarms of Christian rulers, and the Tartar massacres of Poles and Hungarians, the Tartars would prove powerful allies against the Muslims and the Turks who blocked the eastward path. For the Tartars, after succeeding in their campaigns against the "Assassins," or Ismailians, on the southern shores of the Caspian, went on to overcome the Caliph of Baghdad and Syria. The conquering Tartar general in Persia had actually sent his embassy to Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France, who was then at Cyprus an a Crusade, offering an alliance and asking for collaboration. If Christian kings and the Pope himself had been willing to join in such an alliance, they might have shared the glory and the profit of the conquest of the Muslim Turks, and eventually have accomplished the aims of the Christian Crusades with pagan help. But instead of postponing conversion until after a worldly victory, they determined to ally only with fellow Christians, and so spent themselves on futile efforts to convert the Khans before joining them as allies. This mistake of judgement decisively shaped the future of much of Asia. The power of Islam was then in retreat. If Christian leaders had only been willing first to become comrades in arms against a common enemy, Pope Innocent IV and the Christian powers might soon enough have made them comrades in faith.
	Western Christendom vainly awaited the sudden conversion of the Khans. Meanwhile the Europeans would unintentionally profit from the religious vagueness, the indifference and tolerance of the Tartars. After the Tartars extinguished the Caliphate of Baghdad and took possession of Syria, Persia, and the lands that had become an Iron Curtain, the path was suddenly opened for the European traveller. The way of thinking of the Tartar Khans was most alien to the medieval Christian West. In 1251 at the court of Mangu Khan in the Tartar capital of Karakorum far north of the Great Wall, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck was surprised to find priests from all over and from all religions - Catholics, Nestorians, Armenians, Manichaeans, Buddhists, and Muslims - peacefully debating, vying for the support of the Khan. The Khans also believed in free commercial intercourse among nations. They made merchants welcome by lowering tolls and taxes, by protecting caravans, by guarding roads against bandits.
The "barbarian" Tartars, who did not care enough for any dogma to persecute in its name, opened the pathway from the Christian West. The Tartar conquest of Persia brought the usual Mongol policy of low customs, well-policed roads, and free passage for everybody - and so opened the road to India. The Tartar conquest of Russia opened the road to Cathay. The great overland Silk Road traversing Asia, though heavily travelled for centuries, was not frequented by Europeans until the years of Tartar conquest. Egyptian roads, still in the hands of Muslims, remained forbidden to Europeans, and goods passing there were so heavily taxed by the Mamluk sultans that Indian merchandise trebled in cost by the time it reached an Italian merchant.

When Marco Polo visited the China of Kublai Khan (1216-1295), he saw nothing worth reporting in their multiplying of sacred texts by block printing. But he did note with astonishment how Kublai Khan by a kind of "alchemy" had made printed paper, in place of precious metals, serve as currency.
	Of this money the Khan has such a quantity made that with it he could buy all the treasure in the world. With this currency he orders all payments to be made throughout every province and kingdom and region of his empire. And no one dares refuse it an pain of losing his life. And I assure you that all the peoples and populations who are subject to his rule are perfectly willing to accept these papers in payment, since wherever they go they pay in the same currency, whether for goods or for pearls or precious stones or gold or silver. With these pieces of paper they can buy anything and pay for anything. And I can tell you that the papers that reckon as ten bezants do not weight as one...
Here is another fact well worth relating. When these papers have been so long in circulation that they are growing torn and frayed, they are brought to the mint and changed for new and fresh ones at a discount of 3 per cent. And here again is an admirable practice that well deserves mention in our book: if a man wants to buy gold or silver to make his service of plate or his belts or other finery, he goes to the Khan’s mint with some of these papers and gives them in payment for the gold and silver which he buys from the mintmaster. And all the Khan’s armies are paid with this sort of money.
	What Marco Polo described was an old Chinese institution. By the eleventh century, shortages of metal and the need for more currency had produced a government-supervised system for issuing printed sheets of paper currency, four million in a single year. In the twelfth century the Sung Chinese financed their defence against the Tartars by printing paper currency, and after their defeat they continued to print money for tribute. In 1209 the notes promising to pay off in gold or silver were printed an paper made of silk and pleasantly perfumed, but even their fragrance could not stabilise the currency or stop runaway inflation.
The Sung historian Ma Tuan-lin, who lived through the worst of this inflation, chronicled the familiar consequences:

After having for years tried to support and maintain these notes, the people had no longer any confidence in them, and were positively afraid of them. For the payment for government purchases was made in paper. The fund of the salt manufactories consisted of paper. The salaries of all the officials were paid in paper. The soldiers received their pay in paper. Of the provinces and districts, already in arrear, there was not one that did not discharge its debts in paper. Copper money, which was seldom seen, was considered a treasure. The capital collected together in former days was … a thing not even spoken of any more. So it was natural that the price of commodities rose, while the value of the paper money fell more and more. This caused the people, already disheartened, to lose all energy. The soldiers were continually anxious lest they should not get enough to eat, and the inferior officials in all parts of the empire raised complaints that they had not even enough to procure the common necessities. All this was the result of the depreciation of the paper money.

A more frivolous form of blockprinting on paper may have been the vehicle that brought block printing to the West. Playing cards, like dominoes, appear to have originated in China. In the Sung and the Mongol eras complicated card games were being played with what they called "sheet dice" all across China. The fact that the Koran prohibited games of chance may help explain why no mention of playing cards has been found in medieval Arabic literature. But cardplaying seems to have been common in the Mongol armies moving westward, and was said to have entered Europe from the Land of the Saracens. Printed playing cards somehow leaped across the Arab world to Italy and Western Europe.

Handpainted cards were still ordered by the rich, but the populace had their cards in print. Printed playing cards, known in Germany and Spain by 1377, had soon become so popular that the alarmed Synod of 1404 forbade cardplaying by the clergy. In 1423 Saint Bernard of Siena's invective from the steps of St. Peter's exhorted his listeners to go home, to gather up their cards and burn them in the public square. Even before Gutenberg was printing books, printed playing cards were made in Venice, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, and in 1441 the Council of Venice had to pass a law to protect its domestic printers of cards. The mysterious Master of the Playing Cards (c. 1430-1450) produced an elegant set, of which sixty survive, with a finesse of engraved line that some attribute to Gutenberg himself. Perhaps Gutenberg's later experiments grew out of his efforts to perfect the printing of cards.”

From “The Discoverers” by Daniel J. Boorstin

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