The Mongols traded horses with practically every civilization they came into contact with, from Chinese dynasties in the east to Italian merchant cities in the west. Horses were the Mongol steppe’s most abundant and valuable export, and they moved in enormous numbers. The traveler Ibn Battuta, visiting the Golden Horde in the 1330s, described horses “like sheep in ours, or even more numerous,” with a single herder owning thousands. These animals flowed outward to China, India, Persia, Russia, and Europe in exchange for the goods the grasslands couldn’t produce: grain, silk, metals, and manufactured goods.
China: Silk and Grain for Warhorses
China was the Mongols’ oldest and most important trading partner for horses. The grasslands north of China produced the warhorses that Chinese armies desperately needed but couldn’t breed in sufficient numbers on their own farmland. Long before the Mongol Empire formally took shape, steppe peoples leveraged this advantage. The Song Dynasty, which controlled southern China, paid enormous sums to keep northern rivals at bay. Under the Treaty of Shanyuan in 1005, the Song sent a hundred thousand taels of silver and two hundred thousand bolts of silk annually to the Liao kingdom. By 1042, those payments climbed to two hundred thousand taels and three hundred thousand bolts.
Once the Mongols conquered China and established the Yuan Dynasty, the relationship shifted from external trade to internal supply. Karakorum, the Mongol capital in the steppe, became a center of metallurgy where iron cauldrons, cart axle rings, and arrowheads were produced. But the surrounding grasslands couldn’t grow enough food. Much of the grain consumed in Karakorum had to be imported from China, creating a constant flow of agricultural products northward in exchange for livestock moving south.
India: Massive Horse Droves Heading South
India received some of the largest single shipments of Mongol and Central Asian horses anywhere in the world. Ibn Battuta recorded that horses were exported to India “in droves, each one numbering six thousand or more.” Indian kingdoms, particularly in the south, had climates poorly suited to breeding warhorses, which made them willing to pay premium prices for steppe-bred animals. This trade predated the Mongol Empire but accelerated under it, as Mongol control of Central Asian routes made long-distance transport safer and more predictable.
The Golden Horde and European Merchants
In the western reaches of the empire, the Golden Horde controlled territory stretching across modern Russia and the Caucasus. Its capital, New Saray on the Volga River, was described as “of boundless size, choked with its inhabitants,” with bazaars handling metalware, leather, silk, woolens, grain, furs, timber, and slaves. Traders from Genoa, Venice, Egypt, and Russia all operated in Golden Horde territory.
Black Sea ports served as the transfer points where steppe goods met Mediterranean commerce. Genoese and later Venetian merchants facilitated this exchange, carrying horses, furs, grain, salt, wax, and honey westward while bringing manufactured goods and silver eastward. These Italian trading colonies operated under Mongol protection, paying taxes that the Golden Horde collected partly in furs and silver coins.
Persia and the Ilkhanate
The Ilkhanate, the Mongol successor state centered in Persia and the Middle East, sat at the crossroads of trade flowing in every direction. Markets across the Ilkhanate were flooded with goods ranging from silk, cotton, and textiles to spices, wine, fruits, animals, silver, metals, and porcelain. Horses moved through these networks alongside other livestock, with Mongol-bred animals prized for their endurance and hardiness compared to Arabian breeds.
The Ilkhanate also traded with the other three Mongol khanates. Horses, along with diplomatic gifts and military supplies, circulated between the Yuan in China, the Chaghatai Khanate in Central Asia, the Golden Horde in Russia, and the Ilkhanate itself. This internal exchange kept all four successor states supplied with fresh breeding stock.
Why Horses Were the Steppe’s Currency
The Mongolian steppe was spectacularly good at producing horses and spectacularly bad at producing almost everything else a large empire needed. The grasslands couldn’t grow grain at scale. Iron had to be worked from limited local sources or imported. Silk, cotton, porcelain, and spices were entirely foreign products. Horses filled the gap. They were the one commodity the Mongols had in overwhelming surplus that every neighboring civilization wanted.
This wasn’t just an economic arrangement. Horses carried deep social and ritual significance on the steppe. Isotope analysis of horse teeth from a 3,000-year-old burial site in western Mongolia, published in PLOS ONE, found that at least one of seven horses buried in a single grave had come from a distant region. The finding suggests that horses circulated between herding groups through gifts, trade, or exchange long before the Mongol Empire existed. The practice of trading horses was thousands of years old by the time Genghis Khan formalized it into an imperial economy.
The Silk Road Under Mongol Control
What made Mongol horse trade different from earlier steppe commerce was its scale and safety. Before the Mongol conquests, the Silk Road network was fragmented among warring kingdoms, making long-distance travel dangerous and expensive. Once the Mongols unified the route from China to the Mediterranean under a single political authority, trade volume exploded. Horses, porcelain, jewels, silk, paper, and gunpowder all moved along these protected corridors.
European travelers like Marco Polo could journey from Venice to Beijing and back. Merchants no longer needed to pass through dozens of hostile borders, each extracting its own tolls. The Mongols standardized taxation, with payments collected in forms suited to each region: silk and silver in China, furs in Central Asia and the Middle East, silver coins in the Golden Horde, and paper money in Yuan China. This system kept goods, including horses, flowing efficiently across the largest contiguous land empire in history.
The sheer geographic reach of these trade networks meant that a horse bred on the Mongolian steppe could end up carrying a soldier in India, pulling a cart in Persia, or being sold by a Genoese merchant at a Black Sea port. No single civilization was the Mongols’ primary horse-trading partner. The entire connected world of the 13th and 14th centuries was their market.