11Crises and Recovery in Eurasia

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A painting depicts a group of people carrying coffins. Many of them carry coffins by themselves, holding it over their heads with both arms. A group of four people carry a coffin using rods that stick out of the sides of the coffin. Two people hold either end of a coffin. Two other people hold either end of a body wrapped in cloth. Several people dig holes in the ground.

When Mongol armies besieged the Genoese trading outpost of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, they not only damaged trading links between East Asia and the Mediterranean but also unleashed a devastating disease: the bubonic plague. Defeated Genoese merchants and soldiers withdrew, unknowingly taking the germs with them aboard their ships. By the time they arrived in Messina, Sicily, half the passengers were dead. The rest were dying. People waiting on shore for the ships’ cargoes were horrified at the sight and turned the ships away. Desperately, the captains went to the next port, only to face the same fate. Despite these efforts at isolation, Europeans could not keep the plague (later called the Black Death) from reaching their shores. As the disease spread from port to port, it eventually contaminated all of Europe, killing nearly two-thirds of the population.

This story illustrates the magnitude and complexity of the connected world created by the Mongol invasions. They devastated polities, ravaged trade routes, and unwittingly unleashed the bubonic plague. The invasions left behind a series of khanates ruled by local warlords, rather than a centralized state. But Mongol invasions had also intensified cultural and political contacts. The channels of exchange—the land trails and sea-lanes of human voyagers—accidentally became conduits for deadly microbes. Indeed, these pathogens devastated societies far more decisively than did Mongol warfare. They were the real “murderous hordes” of world history. So staggering was the Black Death’s toll that population densities did not recover for 200 years. Most severely affected were regions that the Mongols had brought together: settlements and commercial hubs along the old Silk Roads and around the Mediterranean and South China Seas. While segments of the Indian Ocean trading world experienced death and disruption, South Asian societies, which had escaped the Mongol conquest, also escaped the great loss of life and political disruptions associated with the Black Death.

Out of the rubble of Mongol conquest and disease emerged the green shoots of a new world. This chapter explores the ways in which Eurasian peoples restored what they thought was valuable from pre-pandemic ways and discarded what they thought had failed them in favor of radically new institutions and ideas. Much of the recovery had striking parallels across Eurasia, as societies reaffirmed their most deeply held and long-standing beliefs with modifications that took into account changed circumstances. Chinese rulers looked to Confucian thought and well-known dynastic institutions to provide guidance going forward. In the Muslim-controlled heartland, a small band of Turkish-speaking warriors—the Ottomans—channeled the energies of a revived Islam to expand their own territory and the Islamic world. Europeans also invoked their traditions. In the Iberian Peninsula, political elites used a resurgent Catholicism to advance their political power, while driving Muslim communities out of Europe. Europeans also created new dynastic monarchies, while looking to the continent’s distant Greek and Roman past for inspiration.