Pax Mongolica

The Pax Mongolica, or Mongol Peace, refers to the roughly century-long period from the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s during which the Mongol Empire's unified control over Central Asia, China, Persia and much of Russia allowed the Silk Road trade routes to operate with unusual safety and continuity. Merchants, missionaries and diplomats, Marco Polo among them, could travel across Eurasia under a single set of protections and tolls, and the era saw an unprecedented exchange of goods, technologies, ideas and diseases, including the westward spread of the Black Death along the same routes that carried silk and spices. The peace fragmented as the unified Mongol Empire split into rival successor khanates and finally collapsed with the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China and the breakup of the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde in the mid-to-late 1300s.