African gold traveling Mongol routes carried the Black Death to Europe

Evidence

By the 1240s, after a series of exchanges between Mongol capitals and armies and Frankish lords and popes, Christendom had been disabused of its error. It learned that: “The program of the Mongols was wholly and entirely based on a rule given by Chingis-khan: ‘There is only one God in heaven, and on earth there is only one sovereign, Chingis-khan.’” The Mongol Empire ordered the Pope and the Christian kings to submit. Still, by the 1260s Mongol and Franks were formally agreeing to joint crusades against the Muslim Mamelukes, and by the first decades of the fourteenth century the Italian “merchant republics” and the Mongols had established treaties of commerce. This meant that whatever other significances Mongol stability, trade, and technological exchange (e.g., China’s gunpowder and printing techniques) would have for a Europe still compelled by Christian dogma to abhor and shun the southern infidels, the gold, which was largely brought out of Africa, found its way to central and eastern Asia only to pave the route to Europe of the Black Death. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Eurasian trade-web historiography (William McNeill, Kenneth Pomeranz) and to the plague-as-hinge-of-history literature. — connects to: The Black Death followed Mongol trade routes and killed tens of millions; The Black Death restored Europe’s degraded ecosystems as population collapsed — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 269
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 470

Broader Connections

• The Black Death followed Mongol trade routes and killed tens of millions #corroborates (0.85)