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.
