Q.Look at Map 2 (The Mongol Campaigns). Can you place the missing city? Could it have been on the Silk Route in the twelfth century? Why not?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The missing city on Map 2 is Bukhara, and it could not have been on the Silk Route in the twelfth century because the route had shifted northward, away from the old oasis cities of Transoxiana, long before the Mongols arrived.
The map of Mongol campaigns is a study in geography as much as in warfare. When you look at the sweep of arrows — from Karakorum westward across the steppe, curling south of the Caspian, then driving into Persia and the Caucasus — you are seeing the path of an army that moved faster than any before it. But the map is also a record of trade, because the Mongols did not march through empty land. They followed the arteries of commerce, the same roads that carried silk, paper, and ideas between China and the Mediterranean.
The missing city on that map is almost certainly Bukhara. It sits in the valley of the Zeravshan River, in what is now Uzbekistan, and in the early thirteenth century it was one of the great intellectual and commercial centres of the Islamic world. When Genghis Khan's forces crossed the Syr Darya in 1219 and struck at the Khwarazmian Empire, Bukhara was one of the first major prizes. The city fell in 1220, and its fall was so complete that the historian Juvayni, writing a generation later, described the Mongols entering the city and herding the surviving inhabitants into the great mosque, where they trampled the Quran underfoot. That is the kind of detail that sticks in the memory, and it is why Bukhara is the natural candidate for the blank on the map.
Now the second question: could Bukhara have been on the Silk Route in the twelfth century? The answer is no, and the reason is a shift in geography that had been underway for centuries.
The Silk Route was never a single road. It was a network of corridors, and the choice of corridor depended on politics, security, and the state of the steppe. In the early medieval period, the southern route through Transoxiana — through cities like Bukhara, Samarkand, and Merv — was the main artery. Caravans from China crossed the Tien Shan, passed through the Fergana Valley, and then followed the Zeravshan westward toward Persia and the Mediterranean. Bukhara was a jewel on that string.
But by the twelfth century, the centre of gravity had moved. The rise of the Qara-Khitai in Central Asia and the growing power of the Khwarazmian Empire made the southern route less secure and less profitable. Meanwhile, the northern route — running from China through the steppe north of the Caspian, past the Aral Sea, and on to the Black Sea — became more attractive. It was shorter in some stretches, and it connected directly to the trading cities of the Volga and the Crimea, where Italian merchants from Genoa and Venice were establishing their own networks. The old oasis cities of Transoxiana, including Bukhara, were increasingly bypassed.
This is not to say Bukhara was abandoned. It remained a wealthy and cultured city, and it still traded with its neighbours. But it was no longer on the main trunk line of the Silk Route. The route had shifted, and Bukhara was now on a branch, not the highway. …
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