Artisans and Material Production in the Early Mongol Empire

Between 1206 and about 1260, Mongol rulers drew on two linked kinds of production. Pastoral households made portable shelters, clothing, containers and equipment from wool, hide, wood and other materials. At courts and in settled towns, specialists shaped metal, wove fine cloth and made objects that depended on particular tools and skills. Conquest connected these settings by moving materials, finished goods and people, sometimes by force.

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Wool, felt and portable households

A ger, or felt-covered dwelling, began with a collapsible wooden lattice and a circular roof frame. Sheep’s wool became the thick covering and door panels. William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar who travelled through Mongol territories from 1253 to 1255, described the frame, white felt, decorated roof opening and embroidered entrance pieces in detail. He measured one dwelling at roughly thirty feet across and counted twenty-two oxen pulling a large household’s house on a cart. The account shows that portability could require extensive equipment and animals, especially for wealthy households.

Felt is made when loose animal fibres tangle and bind into a sheet rather than being interlaced as in weaving. The basic work involves preparing and loosening the wool, laying it in overlapping layers, wetting it, then pressing and rolling the mass until the fibres hold together. The resulting sheet could cover the dwelling frame or serve as a floor covering or bag. In Rubruck’s account, felt pieces were not merely plain insulation: makers embroidered colored vines, trees, birds and animals on panels near entrances. The process explains how loose fibres could become sturdy coverings and bags; Rubruck’s account supplies the thirteenth-century examples of their use.

Households also worked hides into practical goods. Rubruck reports that people used ox hide to make large vessels or bags and shaped horse hide into shoes. These examples show how animal materials served storage and travel needs.

Cloth, tools and regional skills

To weave cloth, makers first spun cleaned fibres by drawing and twisting them into thread. They stretched lengthwise threads on a loom, then passed crosswise threads over and under them to form cloth, which could be cut and sewn into clothing or furnishings. Gold brocade is a patterned fabric woven with gold thread. Silk and brocade depended on specialist skills found in settled production centers.

The historian Michal Biran describes how conquest generated captives who were allocated among members of the imperial family and assigned to imperial needs. Captive labor existed alongside other dependent forms of service.

Metalwork for court and daily use

Metalworkers made objects through distinct processes. Smiths shaped heated metal by hammering it, or cast it by pouring molten metal into a mold. They could then file, join or engrave the piece. These methods supplied fittings and tools as well as vessels, weapons, ornaments and ceremonial objects.

Karakorum, in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia, became a place where household needs, trade and court demand met. Chinggis Khan selected the location for a camp in 1220. His successor Ögedei developed it as a city and added a palace in 1235. Güyük ruled from 1246 to 1248, after the city was established and before the building programme concluded under Möngke (1251–1259).

Archaeologists have combined magnetic and topographic surveys with aerial photography and fieldwalking to map streets and areas of differing occupation and activity. Excavations in the central settlement have recovered evidence of metalworking, pottery, glass and other craft activities, showing that the city’s makers worked in varied materials rather than one palace workshop. Excavators identify workshops for gold and silver, copper and other metals, and iron. These remains chiefly document shaping and finishing; excavators have not found evidence of local smelting furnaces in the central area. The excavated craft quarter spans multiple settlement periods and building phases in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, extending beyond the united empire’s final decades.

Rubruck’s 1254 account places Chinese artisans in one part of the city and Muslim merchants in another, alongside the palace and court. Archaeology adds a physical map to this written description. The city’s workshops and trading quarters supplied a capital whose court and residents relied on goods arriving from elsewhere.

Guillaume Boucher’s silver tree

The clearest account of a named artisan’s work comes from Möngke’s palace. In 1254, Guillaume Boucher, a Parisian goldsmith, completed a large silver tree for the palace entrance, where drink could be served without bringing skins and containers of liquid into the hall. Rubruck describes four silver lions at the base, with conduits that delivered mare’s milk, and four pipes rising through the tree for wine, fermented mare’s milk, honey drink and a rice-based drink. Each liquid ran into a separate silver bowl.

The system depended on people working behind the visible display. The drinks were stored in a cellar outside the hall. When the chief cupbearer called for service, a man concealed beneath the tree blew air through a pipe so that a figure of an angel sounded a trumpet. Servants in the cellar heard the signal and poured each drink into its proper conduit; palace attendants then carried the filled bowls to guests. Rubruck says Boucher first tried bellows but found that they did not provide enough air, so the concealed operator supplied the force. The object joined metalwork, drink service and performance, with servants coordinating the signal and filling each bowl.

The court used the tree at its large seasonal feasts, where nobles gathered and the ruler distributed robes and gifts. It made the court’s command of specialists, precious metal and imported drink visible to an audience. Boucher had been taken captive during warfare in Hungary before he worked at the court.

Production across a connected empire

Karakorum concentrated court demand, workshops and trade while rulers and households continued to rely on the mobile economies of the steppe. After the united empire divided in the 1260s, its successor states developed separate court and production networks.