Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (36 page)

Only a few years after uniting China under his rule, Khubilai created the Academy for Calendrical Studies and a printing office to mass produce a variety of calendars and almanacs. If a ruler had the Mandate of Heaven to rule over his people, then he had to display an ability to mark time, to forecast the phases of the moon, the changing of seasons, and, possibly most important for public prestige and opinion, the timing of lunar and solar eclipses. The Mongol rulers, however, faced a much larger problem with their calendar. In a traditional empire with a single court and capital, a single official calendar sufficed, and it mattered little that other nations kept other calendars. In the multiheaded Mongol Empire, capitals were scattered across great distances, and it became important to coordinate them in order to manage the movement of the large armies and massive amounts of goods. East Asians utilized a twelve-year animal cycle, while Muslims used a moon calendar of progressive years beginning with the foundation of their religion. Persians marked the beginning of the year by the equinox of the sun. Some events were marked by the movement of planets, particularly Mars and Venus, or by the stars. Europeans used a solar calendar, except for religious celebrations such as Lent, Easter, and Epiphany that were calculated on the lunar calendar. Even the Christian sects disagreed on the timing of these events, with the result that despite constant adjustments, their calendars failed to coincide.

As the Mongol empire of conquest expanded into an even larger empire of commerce, it became increasingly important for the Mongols to have a smoothly functioning calendar that operated according to the same principles throughout the empire. With the need to coordinate activities and regulate social life in places with such varied ways of marking time, the Mongols, almost as soon as they conquered an area, created observatories to accurately measure the movement of planets and stars for both practical and religious reasons. They built one immediately near Tabriz, but China needed a series of observatories erected across the land because it was so large. Mongol authorities had specific instructions from the central government to seek out astronomers and astronomical instruments and charts in each newly conquered land. Hulegu sent many of the astronomers captured in the Persian and Arab cities back to his homeland in Mongolia. These included Jamal ad-Din, who was one of the most brilliant astronomers of the era; he brought with him the blueprints for major astronomical devices and new means of scientific measurement unknown in China.

On a scale that surpassed prior civilizations, the Mongols needed to process and record massive amounts of numerical information in the censuses of people, animals, and buildings. Each year they had to settle the accounts for all the goods sent back and forth, as well as for the movement of herds, soldiers, and merchants. The new forms of agriculture, the demands of astronomy, the system of censuses, and myriad other issues of administration taxed the numerical knowledge and ability of the era. They necessitated new approaches to the handling of numbers. To make the needed calculations quickly and efficiently, the clerks working for the Mongols relied on the abacus, which, with the movement of a few beads, allowed them to calculate large sums mechanically with less mental effort than making the calculations mentally or through writing.

Always fastidious about numerical information and with hundreds of millions of people across the vast Mongol Empire, the Mongols searched for simpler methods, shortcuts, and ways of calculating ever-larger quantities and processing them in ever more complex sequences. The larger numbers of calculations required new ways of preserving information through the compilation of complex charts and the coordination of the number systems used in different countries. Mongol administrators found both European and Chinese mathematics too simple and impractical, but they adopted many useful innovations from Arabic and Indian mathematics. The cities of the Khwarizm empire had been a particularly important center for mathematic scholarship; the word
algorithm
was derived from
al Khwarizm
. The Mongols transported knowledge of these innovations throughout their empire. They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China.

Not just in numbers and calendars, but on many levels, life itself in various parts of the empire had to be coordinated in a way that prior history had not required. The writing of history proved too important to allow each civilization to proceed in its own manner and according to the conventions developed in their literary traditions. To control the way that they themselves were presented to their subjects, the Mongols had to make the local standards on writing history correlate and articulate with the Mongol story. Written history was much more than a means of recording information; it served as a tool to legitimize the ruling dynasty and spread propaganda about its great conquests and achievements. For the Mongols, written history also became an important tool in learning about other nations in order to conquer and rule them more effectively. Khubilai Khan established the National History Office in the 1260s. In keeping with Chinese practices, he commissioned the compilation of complete histories of the Jurched and Khitan kingdoms, as well as the Sung dynasty. The project was probably the most massive history project ever commissioned and took nearly eighty years, until the 1340s, to complete. In Mongol Persia, the Ilkhan Gazan commissioned the first history of the world from Rashid al-Din, a successor of Juvaini. Rashid al-Din orchestrated a massive undertaking that employed many different scholars and translators in order to create histories of the Chinese, Turks, and Franks, as the Mongols called the Europeans.

The volume of information produced in the Mongol Empire required new forms of dissemination. Scribes could no longer handle the flow by laboriously hand copying everything that needed to be written. They compiled the records, wrote letters, and sent information to those who needed it, but they did not have time to copy agricultural manuals, medical treatises, atlases, and astronomical tables. Information had to be mass produced for mass dissemination, and for this task, the Mongols turned again to technology, to printing.

The Mongols adopted printing technology very early. In addition to the printings sponsored by Toregene during the reign of her husband, beginning in 1236 Ogodei ordered the establishment of a series of regional printing facilities across the Mongol-controlled territory of northern China. Printing with movable letters probably began in China in the middle of the twelfth century, but it was the Mongols who employed it on a massive scale and harnessed its potential power to the needs of state administration. Instead of the printing with thousands of characters, as the Chinese did, the Mongols used an alphabet in which the same letters were used repeatedly. Under the Mongols, printers carved out many copies of each letter that could then be arranged into whatever word was needed. Each time the printer wanted a new page of print, instead of carving the whole text, he needed to merely place the right sequence of already carved letters into position, use them, and then wait until the next printing job, when they would be rearranged and then used again.

General literacy increased during the Mongol dynasty, and the volume of literary material grew proportionately. In 1269, Khubilai Khan established a printing office to make government decisions more widely disseminated throughout the population, and he encouraged widespread printing in general by nongovernmental groups as well. This included religious books and novels in addition to government publications. The number of books in print increased so dramatically that their price fell constantly throughout the era of Mongol rule. Presses throughout the Mongol Empire were soon printing agriculture pamphlets, almanacs, scriptures, laws, histories, medical treatises, new mathematical theories, songs, and poetry in many different languages.

Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.

In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system with the original Mongol emphases on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.

Although never ruled by the Mongols, in many ways Europe gained the most from their world system. The Europeans received all the benefits of trade, technology transfer, and the Global Awakening without paying the cost of Mongol conquest. The Mongols had killed off the knights in Hungary and Germany, but they had not destroyed or occupied the cities. The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes, listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard.

The Europeans easily forgot the hysterical commentary of chroniclers such as Matthew Paris and Thomas of Spalato, who wrote about the Mongol invasions back in 1240. Across the intervening century, the Mongols had come to represent sumptuous trade goods and luxurious rarities to the Europeans. The word
Tartar
no longer signified unbridled terror; instead, the Italian writers Dante and Boccaccio and the English writer Chaucer used the phrase
Panni Tartarici,
“Tartar cloth,” or “Tartar satin,” as terms for the finest cloth in the world. When King Edward III of England ordered 150 garters to be made for his Knights of the Garters, he specified that they be in Tartar blue. Such terms obviously did not apply to textiles or dyes made by the Mongols, but to ones traded by them or originating in their territory.

One technological innovation after another arrived in Europe. The most labor-intensive professions such as mining, milling, and metalwork had depended almost entirely on human and animal labor, but they quickly became more mechanized with the harnessing of water and wind power. The transmission of the technology for improving the blast furnace also arrived in Europe from Asia via the Mongol trade routes, and it allowed metalworkers to achieve higher temperatures and thereby improve the quality of metal, an increasingly important material in this new high-technology era. In Europe, as a result of the Mongol Global Awakening, carpenters used the general adze less and adapted more specialized tools for specific functions to make their work faster and more efficient; builders used new types of cranes and hoists. There was a quick spread of new crops that required less work to produce or less processing after production; carrots, turnips, cress, buckwheat, and parsnips became common parts of the diet. Labor-intensive cooking was improved by mechanizing the meat spit to be turned more easily. The new tools, machines, and mechanical devices helped to build everything, from ships and docks to warehouses and canals, faster and better, just as previously the improved Mongol technology of war helped to tear down and destroy quicker with improved cannons and firepower.

Something as simple as preparing a single page document on vellum or parchment required the labor of a long line of skilled workers. Aside from the herder who raised the sheep, the slaughtering and skinning were so important to make quality writing material that it required a skilled craft of skinners. Over several weeks, the skin had to be cleaned and scraped of hair on the outside and flesh on the inside, soaked in a sequence of chemical baths, stretched on a frequently readjusted frame, sunned, alternately wet and dried in a precise sequence, shaved, and finally cut into pages of the appropriate size. To make the pages into a book, a whole new sequence of trades were drawn on to make the ink, copy the text, illustrate it, color it, and bind it with leather that had already been through its own sequence of workshops.

The replacement of parchment by paper, a Chinese innovation already known but only rarely used in Europe prior to the Mongol era, required more skill in one worker but far fewer steps and thus, in the overall process, less energy and labor. The papermaker cooked down shredded rags and other fibrous materials, dipped a frame into the vat to coat it with a layer of the fibers, treated it with chemicals, and dried it.

The increased demand for paper arose with the spread of printing. One of the most laborious tasks in medieval society had been the copying of manuscripts and documents, all of which had been done by hand in monasteries that functioned as book factories with scribes carefully copying all day in a large scriptorium. Aside from the cost of their meager food and basic upkeep, the labor was free and the money earned from the sale went to other uses within the church. Johannes Gutenberg completed the adaptation with his production of two hundred Bibles in 1455, and started the printing and information revolution in the West. The new technology made the relatively minor trade of book making into one of the most potent forces of public life. It stimulated the revival of Greek classics, the development of written forms of the vernacular languages, the growth of nationalism, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the birth of science, and virtually every aspect of life and learning from agronomy to zoology.