By 1307, the once-unified Mongol Empire had splintered into competing khanates that had spent decades at war with one another. A general peace, negotiated in the early 1300s, allowed trade routes across Eurasia to reopen and diplomatic missions to flow between courts from Beijing to Tabriz to the Volga steppe.
The grandsons and great-grandsons of Genghis Khan had turned his unified empire into a battlefield of rival cousins, each claiming legitimate descent and each commanding armies that dwarfed most kingdoms. The peace of the early fourteenth century was less a resolution than an exhausted truce among exhausted khanates.
What made this settlement remarkable was its reach: merchants, missionaries, and diplomats could once again travel the Silk Road under something resembling safe passage, from the Yuan court in China to the Ilkhanate in Persia. Marco Polo's era of relatively open travel had depended on exactly this kind of fragile cooperation.
The peace proved temporary, as all Mongol truces did, but for a brief window it restored something like the old Pax Mongolica, allowing ideas, diseases, and goods to move faster across the continent than at almost any point before the age of steam.