Tag: #FOWC

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S is for Samarkand

No one still lives in Babylon. Luxor is an open-air museum, ancient ruins for tourists. Alexandria was burned down, Tenochtitlan is underground, and Çatalhöyük can hardly be spelled, let alone found.

Registan square in Samarkand, built @800 BCE. Wikipedia photo.

It’s not the oldest continuously inhabited city, yet 2800 years seems a pretty good pedigree. And if you’re going to write about the center of the Silk Road, only ONE city in the center, Samarkand would be it.

Samarkand survives.

“Samarkand” painted by Zommer, late 19th c. Wikimedia.

Oasis in the Desert

Remember the Oxus, remember the Hindu Kush and the Kushans a few alphabetic posts back? The Kush is a mountain range in northern India, and the Kushans and Sogdians spread across the land to its northwest. The Oxus, today the Amu Darya, flows from the those mountains to the northwest, to the Caspian and the once Aral Sea.

Above the Oxus, nestled in a long and unusual stripe of green across those mix of foothills, dirt, desert, and mountains, is the ancient city of Samarkand, the second-largest city in Uzbekistan. If you were to take a map of Asia and North Africa, squint and put your finger on the middle, you might exactly touch Samarkand.

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R is for Republics

Genoese ships in the Black Sea, photo from memorients.com.

Via della Seta. That, Google Translate tells me, is the Italian expression for “Silk Road.”

The city-states, for Italy was nowhere near being Italy back in 1100, were duking it out for supremacy. Although Rome was sucking wind, trying to recover and build St. Peter’s, and Florence was still finding itself, the big tunas in medieval Italy were the coastal cities. So the Via della Seta was not about carts rumbling down the road to markets but ships sailing across the big Mediterranean Sea to the little seas… the Red Sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Aegean, Adriatic, Ligurian, Ionian–the Black Sea.

The sea dogs were traders and carriers of cargo and ships and horses. Knights in armor especially in 1099. The Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor were trumpeting up a holy war to push back the Saracens and Ottomans who were all over the place, suggesting there might be a competitor to the one true religion. The Republics answered the call by carrying men in heavy armor from France, England, and Germany in their ships down the coast. Some of them even joined the fight.

Medieval map of Pisa @1200s. Wikipedia.
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Q is for Qara Qorum

In Qara Qorum did Ogedei Khan
A stately Mongol palace built
A courtyard tree sounded angel horns
And snakes of silver guilt

Kajmeister, riffing on Samuel Coleridge
A monastery sites on the site of Qaraqorum (Karakorum today), from remote lands.com

The Mongols swept across Asia in the early thirteenth century, conquering the cities along the Silk Road, using a combination of brutal and brilliant military tactics accompanied by innovative siege weaponry. They extracted wealth from places like Merv, Zhongdu, Baghdad, and Samarkand on a massive scale, until the cartloads of goods flowed into Mongolia like a “river of silk” as Mongolian chronicler Jack Weatherford said.

It was as though [Chinggis] Genghis Khan had rerouted all the different twisting channels of the Silk Route, combined them into one large stream, and redirected it northward to spill out across the Mongols steppes.

Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

A Palace of Their Own

What might a nomadic people do with all that treasure? Ogodei, son of Chinggis Khan, built a palace. It was called Qara Qorum or Kharakorum, meaning black walls, tall with “lofty pillars” according to Rashad al-Din, the historian. It was a place that looked good for a large camp of Mongols nomads, with ample water, high winds to drive away bugs, and mountains as a sanctuary for the herds.

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