On the Silk Road and the Cities of the Golden Horde

Thanks to the prodding of some colleagues, I’ve been trying to globalize my knowledge of the Middle Ages. Medieval Europe and the Middle East-North Africa are both quite familiar to me, as is a bit of medieval China, but I’ve been trying to look for texts that put these regions in conversation with one another. Reading about Marco Polo (for instance, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World) is an obvious way to do this, but reading about Western emissaries isn’t quite enough. As a result, I decided to track down this book by Russian archaeologist, German A. Fedorov-Davydov.

I don’t know that I would call this book transformative, but I did find it interesting. When I first sought to track the book down, I thought it was going to be a traditional history. Then, seeing the cover, I thought maybe it was a child’s book (it’s not) or an art history text. The last guess is the closest—the book relies heavily on plates showing archaeological artifacts, but it situates the subject in a historical context.

Although a bit simplistic, with introductory-level treatment of its various topics, I found that almost everything contained in this book was new to me. Fedorov-Davydov begins the book with a brief overview of Genghis Khan’s empire and its successors: Yuan China, the Central Asian Chagatai Khanate, the Persian Il-Khanate, and, of course, the Golden Horde (which was centered around the Volga in modern Russia). Fedorov-Davydov goes on to give examine the experiences of some European emissaries who traveled to Mongolia to broker treaties (or proselytize) the great Khan before moving to an analysis of European maps of the Golden Horde and finally breaking down some of the insights that archaeology offers regarding this state. The bulk of the book deals with two cities: “Old” Sarai and “New” Sarai, near the Caspian Sea, but there’s also some content here on Simferopol and other parts of the Golden Horde.

I don’t expect that this book transformed the field, but it’s a nice taste of what lesser-covered regions (in Anglophone historiography, at least, I know that Russians tend to write a lot more about the Mongols) can offer world historians.