Over the past four decades, research into the economic history of the Mongol Empire has recentered the discourse on Eurasian trade patterns during the Middle Ages. Scholars like Janet Abu Lughod (1989) and Thomas Allsen (1997) have identified not only the importance of the Mongols in stimulating greater communication and exchange, but also their role as facilitators and agents of commerce between the Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.Footnote ¹ Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici’s book, Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World, advances this research a step further by suggesting that the expansion of Venetian traders into the Black Sea during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was contingent on a mutually supportive relationship with the Mongol khans of the Golden Horde (1242–1436). Indeed, their book makes it clear that it is impossible to understand Venice’s rise to become “Europe’s great emporium” without a proper appreciation of how the Mongol conquest reshaped trade patterns across Eurasia. Their study provides us with not only an invaluable exposition of Venice’s trade with the Mongol Empire, but also a better knowledge of Mediterranean and Pontic exchange patterns at the dawn of the Commercial Revolution.

Venice and the Mongols reconstructs the networks that allowed Venice to trade with the Mongols in two parts. The first half of the book explores the “New World Order” that accelerated Black Sea commercial traffic from the middle of the thirteenth century. In contrast, the second half of the book details the “People, Instruments, and Goods” that made this trade so profitable. The first two chapters introduce the Venetian Republic and the Mongol Empire as partners with a shared interest in promoting trade. The Venetians used trade to provide food and other commodities to their burgeoning population, who lacked farmland (p. 71). At the same time, the Mongols needed access to luxury goods, as their rapid imperial expansion created new demand for patronage among nomadic elites (p. 42). Together, they developed a sophisticated infrastructure to nurture and protect trade across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. For the Venetians, this meant negotiating a passage through the Adriatic and Aegean seas, which were in a constant state of upheaval. Successive crusades and internal conflict weakened the Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century, allowing Venice to seize control of important entrepots like Chios, Modon, Crete, and Negropont (chapter 3). Yet control of these routes did not go uncontested, and the authors are careful to situate the history of Venetian-Mongol trade in the wider political geography of the eastern Mediterranean. The rise of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1250, a Papal ban on trade with Egypt in 1313, civil war among the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate (1258–1335) and the Golden Horde, the plague (1346), and dynastic wars inside the Byzantine Empire are all shown to have affected trade patterns across the Black Sea. The authors therefore divide the history of Venetian-Mongol trade into four chronologically ordered chapters, which cover: early treaties with the Mongols and the establishment of a Venetian settlement in Tana (1319–1343, chapter 4), at the mouth of the Don River at the Eastern end of the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea; the disruption caused by the Black Death and the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire (1343–1360, chapter 5); the revival of Tana during the reign of Tokhtamysh Khan (1360–1395, chapter 6); and the collapse of the Golden Horde before the Ottoman conquest of Tana in 1475, which resulted in the expulsion of the Venetians from the Black Sea (1395–1475, chapter 7).

These chapters shed new light on the complex relationship between the Mongol Empire and foreign merchants, who are often ignored in the East Slavic and West Asian chronicles. Indeed, the authors stress that the treaties, contracts, and sales receipts that they draw upon for their research represent only half the story. They assert that Venice’s commercial frontiers were expanded by individual merchants, who initially explored foreign business opportunities without the doge’s backing (p. 90). Lacking support from the Venetian state, these early traders relied upon the khans, who provided accommodation at caravanserais, stationed guards to protect the roads, instituted a stable tax system, and even insured the merchants’ property against theft or attack (p. 199). Merchants secured these services by establishing personal relationships with the khan and his regional governors, who treated the Venetians as their personal vassals (p. 207). Indeed, Venice and the Mongols demonstrates that the Mongols established a highly sophisticated infrastructure for encouraging trade, and that they were active agents in building the commercial networks that characterized the Chinggisid Exchange. While this point may seem intuitive to some readers, the fact that so much of the history of the Mongol Empire was written in the languages of the conquered populations means that the Mongols’ own voices and motives are often obscured, allowing some modern historians to suggest that increased commerce was an incidental result of the Mongol conquest and not something the Mongol states consciously pursued. On the contrary, Venice and the Mongols makes a bold and broadly convincing case that the Mongols were every bit as important to the expansion of trade and communication in the Black Sea as the Venetians and Genoese.

The second section of the book elucidates which goods were traded and by whom. The authors rely primarily upon legal documents, such as treaties, wills, deeds of sale, and notarial records, to gauge the volume and frequency of commercial traffic. While these documents provide a wealth of data to chart the ebb and flow of trade, they often provide little narrative detail on how these transactions were facilitated. For instance, one notarial record indicates that a Crimean Muslim merchant named Coza Machomuth di Solgat loaned money to a Venetian for the purchase of wine but does not say how they met or what their relationship was like (p. 277). Similarly, we have detailed statistics for the number of “Tatar” slaves in Venice and Florence in the fourteenth century, but these figures reveal little about how they were enslaved or what their life in Italy was like after they were transported (p. 282). To fill this narrative gap, the authors turn to the most famous Venetian merchant in the Mongol Empire, Marco Polo, and his travelogue Il Milione (chapter 8). Their interrogation of this text not only provides a useful insight into how the Mongols interacted with foreign merchants, but also provides general readers with an overview of the most recent scholarship on Marco Polo and his travels. Drawing on Hans Vogel’s Marco Polo Was in China, among other sources, the authors present a compelling argument that a significant portion of Il Milione consisted of reports that Qubilai Khan commissioned Marco Polo to write (r. 1260–1294) (p. 205).Footnote ² Di Cosmo and Pubblici also draw upon Francesco Pegolotti’s merchant handbook and the Codex Cumanica to navigate the routes that Venetian merchants traveled in the Mongol Empire (chapter 9) and the instruments they used to make exchange possible, such as currency, interpreters, and legal contracts (chapter 10). The text concludes with a list of the goods that were most widely traded between Venice and the Mongol Empire (chapter 11) (including grain, slaves, timber, beeswax, and silks).

Di Cosmo and Pubblici’s primary thesis is that the Mongol Empire sparked a new age of globalization, linking together Europe, Africa, and Asia. They contend that the cornerstone of this global trade was the authority of the khan, which guaranteed the security of not only merchants and their property, but also the currencies they used. They point out that the Mongols established a silver standard, in which silver ingots could be traded as precious metals and minted into local currencies at major entrepots. The most sophisticated implementation of this silver standard could be found in China, where a paper currency (chao) was backed by the imperial treasury, which acted like an exchange house. Indeed, the authors suggest that the Yuan treasury also functioned like a warehouse for wealthy merchants and aristocrats looking for valuable exotica, in addition to silver (p. 212). The tax taken from these exchanges and other commerce in the Mongol Empire made up the bulk of the khan’s income. The silver standard, like Marco Polo’s travelogue and the Pontic slave trade, has already been well-studied by other scholars like Judith Kolbas (2005) and Akinobu Kuroda (2009), but Di Cosmo and Publicci manage to weave the existing literature together with their own interrogation of the Venetian records to make a highly compelling argument that the Mongol Empire catalyzed greater commercial and intellectual exchange across the Old World at the end of the Global Middle Ages.Footnote ³

The sheer scope of this work is daunting, and inevitably some points could have been elucidated further. The Ottoman conquest of Tana in 1475, ending the Venetian trade out of the Black Sea, is one topic that passes without much explanation. While the authors are undoubtedly correct in dating the end of Venice’s engagement with the Mongol successor states to this point, they never clearly explain why the Venetian traders were unable to build similar relations with the Ottomans to prolong their stay in the Black Sea. We may presume that, from its inception, the Ottoman beylik had its own urban and agrarian base for supplying the empire’s needs, so it did not need to engage in open trade in the same way as the nomadic Mongols. But the idea that the Mongols had an imperative to trade because their nomadic economy was unable to sustain their empire is also taken for granted and given little further explanation. Owen Lattimore’s old axiom that “it is the poor nomad who is the pure nomad” is still the underlying premise for many histories of the Mongols and other Steppe Empires, whose behavior is explained by their need to “trade or raid” to sustain themselves (Lattimore, 15).Footnote ⁴ Imperial expansion undoubtedly strained the latent Mongol Ulus’s resources, which encouraged its rulers to develop a vast trading infrastructure, but whether the nomads uniquely felt these pressures or whether they are common to all growing empires is a matter for debate. Di Cosmo is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the topic of Inner Asian state formation, so there is no question that the authors possessed the expertise to explain their ideas in more detail, but the sheer breadth of their topic meant that they had to make hard choices about what to include and what to exclude. At the very least, Venice and the Mongols provides a new angle from which to approach some of these old discussions, along with a rich bibliography for readers who would like to explore them in more depth.

Venice and the Mongols is the most comprehensive study to date of the commercial ties that bound the Italian merchant republics to the Mongol Empire. Its focus on Tana and the Black Sea, as opposed to Venice, allows for a more nuanced study of regional trade, which more accurately situates Western merchants in a much larger Eurasian historical context, making the book a necessary starting point for future research into the Black Sea trade and the Mongols’ commercial partnerships. The book is also eminently readable, making it accessible to a general audience and specialists alike. Indeed, the chapters on Marco Polo, the “Means of Exchange” and “Goods, Merchandise, and Slaves,” can easily be read in isolation, making them appropriate to assign to students of World History, Economic History, or the History of the Mongol Empire. As new research into the economic and cultural history of the Mongol Age rapidly reshapes our view of the Global Middle Ages, it is a great advantage to have a text such as this that can be easily taught. Venice and the Mongols will therefore play a critical role in shaping current and future research on how political, environmental, and economic shifts beyond Europe’s borders shaped its historical trajectory.