The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire

By Thomas T. Allsen

In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas.

Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce.

In Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812295900

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The Steppe and the Sea

ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA

Victor H. Mair, Series Editor

Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road in all of its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia.

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

The Steppe and the Sea

Pearls in the Mongol Empire

Thomas T. Allsen

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5117-3

For Lucille

once again

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I. FROM THE SEA TO THE STEPPE

Chapter 1. Properties of Pearls

Chapter 2. Fishing and Processing

Chapter 3. Accumulation of Pearls

Chapter 4. Treasures and Treasuries

Chapter 5. Display and Redistribution

Chapter 6. A Consumer Culture

Chapter 7. Fecundity and Good Fortune

Chapter 8. Pearls After the Empire

PART II. COMPARISONS AND INFLUENCE

Chapter 9. Prices of Pearls

Chapter 10. Myths and Marketing

Chapter 11. Substitutes and Counterfeits

Chapter 12. By Land and by Sea

Chapter 13. Balance of Trade

Chapter 14. Sea Frontiers

Conclusion

List of Abbreviations and Primary Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

At its height the Chinggisid imperium, commonly known as the Mongol Empire, was by far the largest contiguous land empire in history.¹ And, as the paramount power of the age, its influence and reputation spread well beyond its frontiers. Mongolian courts were thus able to attract natural products and cultural wares from the subarctic to the subtropics. Even after the empire’s division, one of its successors, the Yuan Dynasty, continued to exercise such powers. European accounts of Qubilai and his successors flying gyrfalcons from elephants north of Dadu documented and dramatized the Mongols’ ability to obtain prestige goods from the principal ecological zones of Eurasia.² None of the empire’s predecessors or contemporaries enjoyed a comparable range of choices. Among the most beautiful and precious of these resources was the pearl, which came to play a central role in the political and economic life of the empire, a role noted by Marco Polo among many others.

Part I, From the Sea to the Steppe, investigates the importance of pearls in Mongolian political culture. Since these treasures of the sea had great market value and at the same time carried extensive ideological baggage, their bestowal provided the Chinggisids with a political currency to attract and reward a large and extremely diverse group of servitors from across Eurasia.

The lavish use of pearls in portraits of emperors and their wives documents their value not only as decorative objects—earrings, necklaces, and designs on clothing—but also as symbols of status and power, a topic explored in chapters focused on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and cultural-political meaning of pearls. In addition, I examine subjects that have received little attention to date: foremost among these is the amounts, management, and movement of prestige goods accumulated at the Mongols’ highly mobile royal courts and the emergence of what can fairly be called an unrestrained consumer ethos among their core supporters. The creation of rising expectations and their fulfillment constitute key features of Chinggisid statecraft.

This book encompasses the entire history of the empire. For our purposes this can be divided into two stages. The first, the early empire, extends from the formal elevation of Chinggis Qan (r. 1206–27) to 1260, a period of explosive and unprecedented expansion that saw the Mongols’ subjugation of southern Siberia, Manchuria, Korea, North China, Tibet, Turkestan, Iran, Mesopotamia, Transcaucasia, the Rus principalities, and the entire steppe zone. The second stage, a lengthy period of internecine conflict, division, and decline, lasted from 1260 to about 1370. Because of rivalries between the ever-multiplying princely lines and the sheer size of their imperium, four autonomous qanates emerged in the course of a protracted and indecisive civil war between the Yuan Dynasty and its ally, the Il-qan state, and the Chaghadai Qanate and the Golden Horde.

The Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), founded by Qubilai (r. 1260–94), a grandson of Chinggis Qan, controlled the Mongolian homeland, China, and much of continental East Asia. As possessors of the original seat of empire, the Yuan emperors or qaghans were intermittently recognized by other princely lines as the titular sovereigns of the Yeke Mongghol Ulus, the Domain [or Empire] of the Great Mongols.

The Il-qan state (1256–1335), which included Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Transcaucasia, was founded by Hülegü (r. 1256–65), a grandson of Chinggis and brother of Qubilai. Throughout their history they remained close allies of the Yuan in their joint struggles with rival lines.

The Chaghadai Qanate (1221–ca. 1370), named after the second son of Chinggis, originally embraced most of western Turkistan and later on parts of eastern Turkistan. In alliance with other dissident princes, especially the descendants of Ögödei (r. 1229–41), the successor of the founding father, they were often in conflict with the Yuan.

The Golden Horde (1237–ca. 1500), properly the Domain (Ulus) of Jochi, Chinggis Qan’s eldest son, was centered on the lower Volga and held sway over the western steppe, the Rus principalities, Volga Bulgharia, the Crimea, and Khwārazm. Its largely autonomous eastern wing, the socalled Princes of the Left Hand descendent from Jochi’s eldest son, Orda, controlled central Siberia and the present-day Kazakh steppe and shared a common frontier with the Yuan in the vicinity of the Yenisei River.

The differences that separated the two sets of adversaries extended well beyond family and political antagonisms. There were in addition fundamental differences in their social-ecological characteristics, divergences that have a direct bearing on the principal themes and arguments of this book. First, unlike the Golden Horde and the Chaghadai Qanate, whose core territories were located in or immediately adjacent to the steppe zone, the Yuan and Il-qans shared geographical and cultural space with their far more numerous sedentary subjects, a situation that encouraged differing governing strategies and styles.³ Second, the Mongolian regimes in China and Iran controlled far more diverse and productive economies than their steppe rivals and therefore had greater access to prestige goods of every kind, including vast quantities of pearls from the southern seas.⁴ With these resources they were able to build and sustain the much larger political structures needed to govern settled societies with high population densities.

As regards sources, I have made extensive use of the standard narratives and court chronicles prepared in China and Iran but have by no means exhausted the data on pearls in the Mongols’ transcontinental empire. Much remains untapped in local histories, administrative handbooks, treatises on medicine and natural history, encyclopedias, and the literary collections (wenji) produced by scholar-officials of the Yuan. Still, despite the limitations and lacunae, the assembled documentation is sufficient to construct a meaningful historical narrative of the subject at large and to ensure that the specific questions raised here are addressed in a substantive manner.

Sources available on the constituent parts of the empire vary significantly in number and quality. The Yuan domain is by a wide margin the best documented, followed by that of the Il-qans, a situation that of course accurately reflects the living cultural and bureaucratic traditions the Mongolian conquerors encountered and exploited in China and Iran. In contrast, the information available on the Chaghadai Qanate and Golden Horde is much more limited in scope and derives in large part from fragmentary, external accounts, since the original body of internally generated sources was smaller in number and of these fewer have survived. The result is an obvious but unavoidable imbalance in geographical coverage. What we do know, however, about the use of pearls and other prestige goods in the latter two realms is consistent with the much fuller data from China and Iran.

The concentration on pearls inevitably magnifies their importance and thereby creates another kind of imbalance. For this reason, I wish to state from the outset that I am not advancing a reductionist argument that pearls made the empire of the Great Mongols great. Pearls are diagnostic, not determinative. My purpose is to use pearls as yet another window on the Mongols’ political culture and its profound influence on the circulation of cultural and commercial wares throughout Eurasia.

MAP 1. Map of Eurasia, ca. 1250. Cambridge University Press.

Part II of this book places the modes of this circulation as well as the nature of the influence exercised by the empire in a much broader chronological and comparative framework in order to identify longer term trends and patterns.

In tracing the movement of pearls into Inner Asia and the steppe over the longue durée, two complementary and compatible perspectives are particularly fruitful. In one, first articulated by Lynda Shaffer, this movement can rightly be viewed as one strand in the larger process of southernization, the dispersal of cultural traits, including maritime and subtropical products and their associated technologies, from the Indian Ocean littoral northward in the period between the fifth and fifteenth centuries of the Common Era.⁵ One might even extend the geographical range and the chronological depth of this movement and argue that southernization was an ancient, permanent, and fundamental feature of Eurasian cultural history.⁶ Such an approach offers one further benefit: investigations into the circulation of natural and cultural commodities tend to concentrate on its East-West axis, while the southernization thesis shifts needed attention to the North-South axis.

Addressing the same issue through a different analytical framework, David Christian argues that besides the highly visible and widely acknowledged East-West civilizational exchanges, equal attention should be paid to the less investigated but no less consequential North-South trans-ecological exchanges, the movement of goods between zones of the continent with decidedly different natural and cultural histories. And, as he rightly concludes, these two movements readily merge, forming a single interactive, integrated, and continentwide network of exchange.⁷

By means of these perspectives the movement of pearls can be used to cast additional light on a closely related and equally long-term historical problem, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade. In the present instance, the Mongolian Empire’s active engagement with the southern seas illuminates one example of these interactions, the study of which suggests parallels in the continental circulation of other commodities and precocities both before and after the Chinggisid age.

Other problems can be profitably pursued in the same manner. For one, it will help to establish similarities in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires through time. As others have observed, under premodern conditions luxuries were necessities in political mobilization, playing an essential role in the creation of ramifying chains of clientage and in the elaboration of court cultures.⁸ While the vital importance of luxuries in the political economy of imperial centers is now generally recognized, the consequence of the circulation of such goods for local and regional economies deserves greater attention. In this regard, the history of pearls is again quite suggestive concerning the movement of other kinds of luxury goods and their unintended economic consequences, their secondary effects commonly manifested in the local production of lower-cost substitutes and counterfeits. While a number of studies on specific commodities and regions have appeared in recent decades, a fuller appreciation of the frequency and extended geographical distribution of such production for the economic history of Eurasia calls for a larger, comparative perspective.

Although tracking the circulation of pearls across time offers insights into their long-term price fluctuations and is interesting in itself, these fluctuations have much wider implications, more particularly the relative weight and importance of different modes of exchange—booty taking, tributary arrangements, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving—in premodern economies. During the Mongolian era all of these modes were in play and all highly interactive, which opens another productive line of comparative research into the circulation of other prestige goods.

Pearls can also tell us much about another little studied but widespread phenomenon, the crafting of cross-cultural marketing strategies under premodern conditions of transportation and communication. In many cases, these strategies drew heavily on a body of myths and tales that were themselves widely diffused across the Old World. In long-distance exchange, as we shall see, all things come with a story, and all such stories have commercial applications.

The story of pearls, of necessity, requires investigation of Mongolian maritime history, and this leads to an important and as yet inadequately addressed question: since the Chinggisids held sway over vast and diverse territories, how did they go about extracting resources from lands with decidedly different environmental and cultural characteristics? To what extent did this entail variations in their policy goals, personnel choices, and techniques of resource mobilization? The answers say much about their adaptability and their success.

Last, in combination these comparisons will help situate the formation of the Mongolian Empire in a proper historical perspective that is sometimes blurred or misconstrued because the Mongols’ imperial venture was in some respects groundbreaking and extraordinary. The Mongols, however, did not operate in a vacuum; they had models and made extensive use of them, building upon long-held and widely shared imperial traditions of both nomadic and settled peoples. Once again, pearls help identify and illuminate these connections and continuities, which in turn allow us to answer with greater precision three further and closely related questions, that of Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the Mongols’ unprecedented engagement with the sea, and the much discussed Mongolian impact on subjects and successors, to whom they left an extremely diversified portfolio of institutions and ideologies for consideration, selection, and assimilation.

PART I

From the Sea to the Steppe

CHAPTER 1

Properties of Pearls

Humans’ fascination with pearls is connected with their mysterious origins. The emergence of a beautiful, lustrous object from an unattractive sea creature seems a most unlikely phenomenon. We can begin with a summary of current scientific understanding of the natural properties of pearls and then turn to an examination of the cultural meanings that humans regularly ascribed to them, thereby adding to their value.

In general terms, pearls are calcareous concretions of living mollusks organically produced in response to the invasion of a foreign body, itself usually of organic origin.¹ In reaction to the irritation the mollusk coats the invader, the nucleus, with calcium carbonate in concentric layers over a period of years.

The phylum Mollusca consists of more than a hundred thousand living species, many of which produce pearls, commonly from nacre, the aptly named mother-of-pearl. Pearls are first attested in the fossil record about 200 million years BP and become common in the Cretaceous Period, 65–145 million years BP. While many species produce pearls, only a few bivalves produce those of commercial value. For our purposes these can be divided into two categories: saltwater oysters and freshwater mollusks. Of the former, the best known come from the genera Pinctada found in tropical seas. Of the latter, pearls are produced by a great number of genera found in the rivers and lakes of Eurasia and the Americas.

As early hominids sought mollusks as a food source, human engagement with pearls goes back several million years. Because pearls deteriorate over time, however, the earliest evidence of human association with them are those excavated from graves located around the head of the Persian Gulf and in Mesopotamia dating to the fourth and third centuries BCE, and the earliest literary references appear later in Near Eastern epics.²

The property of pearls most attractive to humans is their luster, reflectivity, and transparency. These special optical properties are connected with their composition, which scatters light within the constituent crystalline structure, and their spherical shape, which makes it appear that reflected light is emanating from the pearl’s interior.

As regards their physical properties, pearls are relatively soft compared with gemstones but nonetheless difficult to crush because of their crystalline structure. The color of pearls varies greatly—they may be white, black, red, gold, blue, or green—and generally reflects the color of the interior surface of the shell. Weight and size are equally variable. Their specific gravity is 2.6–2.8, and they are thus light in contrast to gemstones. The largest known pearl measured by its maximum length is 23.3 cm, but natural pearls exceeding 8 cm are extremely rare, and those less than 3 mm have limited commercial value, while those below 2 mm are termed seed pearls.

The shape of pearls is also endlessly variable: round, teardrop, flattened, elongated, and irregular, called baroque. A round shape, even in the smaller sizes, is unusual, perhaps only one in a thousand. Since as size increases round varieties become increasingly rare, large spherical pearls have long been the most valuable.

Given the intrinsic attractiveness of pearls, it is not surprising that human communities across the Eurasian landmass responded positively to them or that they readily embellished and magnified their natural attributes, regularly imputed to them extensive spiritual-magical powers, or placed upon them such elevated market values.

The inclination to add value to objects has several important implications that are elaborated in subsequent chapters. First, pearls do not stand alone in this regard; many other commodities have a prime or prestige value but no use or utilitarian value. The former, as Colin Renfrew argues, can be attributed to the human proclivity to give a social and symbolic significance to material goods that are not adaptive but enhance status and political influence. The possession and ceremonial use of such goods, moreover, is not merely a reflection of that status but the means by which it is achieved and broadcast.³ This perspective is in full accord with political processes frequently observed at Chinggisid courts.

Next, while the purpose of utilitarian objects can often be inferred from their structure and other physical properties, the purpose of purely symbolic goods is more variable, culturally specific, and harder to read.⁴ And in selling such goods from distant lands, merchants had to take into account their varied local, regional, and international cultural meanings and thereby became deeply involved in the dissemination of these images through space and time.

The images and popular tales surrounding pearls, their high value, strange origin, and unique power are extensively documented. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages the wealth of the sea was measured by its yield of pearls; other marine products such as coral and ambergris were valued but were clearly of secondary importance.⁵ Their elevated status among the treasures of nature is indicated by the frequent use of pearls in figures of speech to communicate notions of value, beauty, rarity, excellence, and esoteric knowledge in major languages of Eurasia, including those like Turkic that evolved far from the sea, evidence that the pearl culture of the south diffused steadily north.⁶ There was in fact a common and coherent set of aesthetic qualities imposed on pearls that crossed innumerable temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. While the symbolic and spiritual associations attached to pearls were more variable, the essential point is that everywhere they possessed such properties.

Though pearls as a class of objects were held in the highest esteem, it was also recognized that there was great variation in their individual quality, which ranged from those fit for a king to the cheap and unsorted varieties.⁷ For the nonprofessional, works on collecting and connoisseurship were composed in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese.⁸ The basic standards were established early and lived long. Already in the first century CE Pliny asserted that the value of pearls is determined by their brilliance, size, roundness, smoothness and weight, criteria that are found in the ninth-century Arabic commercial handbook attributed to Jāḥiẓ.⁹

Specialists, naturally, developed an elaborate vocabulary to convey information on the qualities of individual pearls to indicate slight variations in shape, size, color, and luster. And, of course, each major trading community had its own, similarly elaborate vocabulary.¹⁰ Consequently, to operate successfully in the international pearl market, a merchant needed to command several hundred technical terms and their equivalents in a number of foreign languages.

In various times and places pearls of different and unusual colors, sometimes used in combination, were in vogue. Sasanian women reportedly dressed their hair with pearls of five distinct colors, and at the court of Maḥmūd of Ghazna (r. 998–1030) pearls of strange hues, some with black dots, were valued and displayed as rarities and anomalies.¹¹ There is, however, little doubt that white was long the great favorite among elites and connoisseurs for adornment, display, and gift giving.¹²

As for shape, roundness was preferred and tested by rolling a pearl about on a plate.¹³ Also much esteemed were any pair of pearls that were identical, especially those extremely rare twins found in the same oyster. For the Muslim collector of the Middle Ages, such twins constituted the ultimate matched set.¹⁴

Size and weight were also critical; they were normally sorted into a dozen grades from small seed pearls to extra-large pearls, the latter known interchangeably in Arabo-Persian as durr or ḥabb.¹⁵ Those of great size were extolled in poetry and described in prose with a number of stock literary formulas.¹⁶ More concretely and helpfully, pearls are sometimes said to be the size of sheep dung in the Mongolian tradition or the size of sparrow eggs or hazelnuts in Islamic literature.¹⁷ It is indicative of the penetration of West Asian standards to the East that Chinese sources also make reference to pearls as large as hazelnuts.¹⁸

Since, however, pearls were such a valuable commodity, merchants and jewelers relied on more exact means of determining their weight. In Muslim lands, this was most often expressed in terms of coinage, since official currency had a measure of stability.¹⁹ Pearls were at times weighed by the mithqāl, about 4.5 grams, a unit that was also used to establish the mint weight of coins, which for dirhams in the early Muslim era was set at seven-tenths of a mithqāl.²⁰ As a matter of practice, however, the weight of pearls was equated to that of coins in circulation, most commonly the gold dinar.

The final criterion for judging pearls was provenance. This was an important consideration because it was well understood by early specialists on precious gems, such as the famed polymath al-Bīrūnī (973–ca. 1050), that each of the major oyster fishing beds from China to East Africa and the Red Sea produced pearls with distinctive and desirable characteristics.²¹ That premodern connoisseurs regularly made clear distinctions among the pearls from across the southern seas that come from only two species, Pinctada radiate and Pinctada maxima, leads to the conclusion that the slight variations in their development had much more to do with local environmental conditions and harvesting methods than with the kind of oyster producing them.²²

There were, then, many options available to premodern consumers in Afro-Eurasia. Starting in Northeast Asia, the source closest to the Mongolian homeland, were the "northern pearls (beizhu)" taken from mussels in the Sungari and other rivers of Manchuria. Their harvest was a component of the mixed economy of the Jürchens during the pre-imperial and Jin eras (1115−1234), and their extraction, though greatly diminished, continued to the end of the Qing.²³ Japan, as noted by Marco Polo, produced saltwater pearls in white and red that were imported to the mainland.²⁴ China, too, had pearl fisheries along its lengthy shoreline; the most famous were off the Hepu, west of the Leizhou Peninsula, and at Yaizhou, on the northeastern corner of Hainan Island. Both had been worked by indigenous non-Chinese people since the early Han and very likely long before.²⁵ And in the myriad rivers and lakes found throughout southern and southwestern China there were also abundant supplies of freshwater pearls; these are first attested in Guilin during the Former Han (202 BCE–9 CE) and were still harvested in the early twentieth century.²⁶

MAP 2. Distribution map of Pinctada radiate and Pinctada maxima. American Philosophical Society.

The fisheries of mainland Southeast Asia and those of the Philippines, Java, and Sumatra were known to the Chinese and Muslims through