초록/요약

The Mongol conquests led Europeans and Asians to get in touch with each other. Safe passages guaranteed by the Mongols allowed European missionaries and merchants to travel to the Far East. Several historians argue that the Pax Mongolica from the 1280s to the 1360s established a global trading network across Eurasia from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean. Hodong Kim says that many more people moved across the continent and their movement covered much longer distances. During this period, long-distance travel and cross-continental interactions reached a level that human history had never seen before. However, there are some other views that transcontinental traffic across the Mongol realm did not continue on unhindered throughout the Pax Mongolica. In fact, some fragmentary documents prove that the frequent wars among the Mongols themselves in Central Asia hampered considerably overland trade between China and the West in the late thirteenth century and the first decade of the fourteenth century. In fact, military confrontations and disturbances among the Mongols themselves from the 1260s to the 1310s prevented European merchants from making their way to Beijing across the Eurasian continent. Italian merchants' active trade with the Mongol world was limited mainly to the Black Sea and its surrounding regions during the entire period of the Pax Mongolica. Secondly, spices, principal goods of East-West trade, continued to flow into Europe from India mainly along the existin