Ortogh, also ortoq (Turkic: ortaq; Mongolian: ортог; Persian: urtak) was a merchant partnered with the state and individual aristocrats in the Mongol Empire. The term derived from the Turkic word ortak, meaning "partner." The institution allowed merchants to pool their resources and thereby reduce the risk of failed caravans, allowing for the expansion of long-distance trade and a substantial reduction in its costs.
Ortogh, also ortoq (Turkic: ortaq; Mongolian: ортог; Persian: urtak) was a merchant partnered with the state and individual aristocrats in the Mongol Empire. The term derived from the Turkic word ortak, meaning "partner." The institution allowed merchants to pool their resources and thereby reduce the risk of failed caravans, allowing for the expansion of long-distance trade and a substantial reduction in its costs.
The institution of ortogh began when Chinggis Khan had his family members and military commanders select Muslims, mainly Uyghurs or West Turkistanis, to entrust with gold and silver ingots for trade purposes. The merchants were usually offered very high commissions and permitted to use official relay stations as long as they did not interfere with military actions. The Mongols also offered low-interest loans to merchants if they belonged to an ortogh. In 1268, Kublai Khan created the General Administration for the Supervision of Ortogh to lend them money at low interest.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).