How Silk Helped the Armies of Genghis Khan Conquer Asia
At least until the spring of 1221, Merv, now in Turkmenistan, from which the tiny eggs of Bombyx mori had moved to Persia and the lands to its west, was still a most splendid city. Around March 6 of that year, it ceased to be so.
Genghis Khan had taken its golden throne and ordered the city burned to the ground. Its sweet watermelons were no longer cut into strips and dried on its washing lines; scholars put down their pens and abandoned its libraries; astronomers scattered from the observatory; poets forgot their words; and weavers left their looms still interlaced with unfinished fabrics of silk and cotton and ran from their workshops along the still waters of the Majan Canal. All Mongol soldiers were issued a decree from the khan such that each was to end the lives of three to four hundred distraught souls.
“That city,” it was said, “which had been embellished by great men of the world, became the haunt of hyenas and beasts of prey.” Smoke rose over its palaces and groves, gardens and streams. Books that had held the learnings of centuries blackened and curled in the intense heat, before crumbling into ash. Its canals were destroyed, orchards of its celebrated fruit trees felled, oasis fields that produced its sweetest watermelons salted.
