Download PDF | Peter Jackson - The Mongols and the West_ 1221-1410-Routledge (2005).
449 Pages
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
In this timely book, Peter Jackson introduces us to the last great pulse of nomads from the inner Asian steppe to encounter the utterly different world of sedentary, urbanized European peoples. The military context of this story is a long front along the eastern fringe of late medieval Christendom, from Poland to the Crusader strongholds on the Syrian coast. Its cultural context is one of prejudice and curiosity stretching from Scotland to Japan, for this narrative of military encounters and diplomatic manoeuvring is set against a backdrop of fears of the unknown, rumours — frequently apocalyptic — and the details of everyday life which characterize one culture rather than another.
In a fascinating exploration of the interactions between the Mongols and the Latin West, Professor Jackson invites the reader to follow Mongol armies west to Germany and to travel east to China with Christian missionaries, diplomats and traders, stopping at courts and camps at all points in between. This latest addition to the Longmans Medieval World series is thus a sustained reflection on what makes one culture, or civilization, different from another, and reminds us that the history of the European Middle Ages has a world historical context.
In the chapters which follow, we meet many famous men, real and imagined, who have excited the European imagination: Chinggis Khan, Temiir (Tamerlane), Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus; Prester John, ‘Sir John Mandeville’, Gog and Magog. With skilful analysis, sensitive scholarship and wry humour, Jackson locates their actions — or stories about their actions — in a world characterized by the immense difficulty of long distance travel.
It is a world of challenges: those facing nomads as they sought pasturage for their horses in the Syrian desert, the linguistic difficulties to be surmounted by Italian friars trying to preach Christianity to speakers of Turkish and Mongolian, the efforts of scholars in quiet European libraries trying to make sense of the limited information and mass of hearsay about the world beyond their direct experience. This is a story of the adjustments of reality to imagination — and of imagination to reality — on a vast geographical canvas, a story Peter Jackson tells with immense learning and deep humanity. I welcome it for that very reason.
Julia M.H. Smith
PREFACE
Three fortunate circumstances are responsible for the fact that this book has not taken rather longer to appear in print. The first is the enthusiastic response in 1997 of Andrew MacLennan, at that time History editor for Longman, to the information that I was contemplating a book on the Mongols and the Latin West. Andrew’s support at an early stage was instrumental in persuading me to undertake to write the book. I am also grateful to his successor, Heather MacCallum, for her sustained interest in the manuscript and for seeing the finished product into the first stages of publication.
Secondly, the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offered me a Visiting Fellowship for six months in 2000, when I participated in a workshop on ‘Turco-Mongolian Nomads and their relations with China and Iran’, jointly chaired by Dr (now Professor) Reuven Amitai and Dr Michal Biran. The opportunity to work alongside colleagues in my own and closely related fields was invaluable, and my wife and I both still recall with warm appreciation the hospitable welcome we received in a Jerusalem that was then a happier place than it has become in more recent years.
The third fortunate circumstance was the award of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the period from October 2000 to September 2003, which provided my department with full-time replacement teaching and was accompanied by a substantial sum for research travel. Nobody who has worked within a UK university over the past twenty years can have any illusions about the difficulty of reading, thinking and writing without being exempt from teaching and administration over a sustained period. It is a pleasure to be able to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust in this preface.
I have also accumulated many other debts. Thanks are due to the inter-library loans section of Keele University Library for obtaining for me numerous books and articles over the years. I am also grateful for the assistance of the staff of Cambridge University Library and of the Seeley Historical Library, Cambridge; the British Library, and the Libraries of the Institute of Historical Research and of the Warburg Institute, in London; the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), Kew; the Bodleian Library; the John Rylands University Library of Manchester; the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool; the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Archives Nationales, Paris; the Bibliotheek te Rijksuniversiteit Leiden; Innsbruck Universitatsbibliothek; Universitatsbibliothek Graz; Magyar Orszagos Levéltar (Hungarian National Archives) and Orszagos Széchényi Konyvtar (Széchényi National Library), Budapest; and Wroclaw University Library.
In addition, I greatly appreciated the promptness and courtesy of Dr Rudolf Lindpointner, of the Oberésterreichische Landesbibliothek (formerly Studentbibliothek), Linz, in sending me a digitized image of the ms. 446, fo. 267vb (the report of the Russian ‘archbishop’ Peter); of Herr Jens Altena, of the Niedersachsische Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Géttingen, in supplying me with a printout of ms. 4 Hist. 61, pp. 276-301 (Carpini’s Ystoria Mongalorum); and of Herr Hans Stein, of the Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha, for providing a printout of ms. Orient. A1559 (the first section of al-Jazar’s Hawadith al-zaman). 1 should also like to acknowledge here the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to reproduce an illustration from ms. 16 (Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora) in the Parker Library. For the production of the maps I am indebted to my colleague, Andrew Lawrence, in the Keele University Digital Imaging /Illustration Services.
I have benefited greatly from the opportunity to try out parts of this book at seminars and conferences. Professor David Cannadine, then Director of the Institute for Historical Research, invited me to read what proved to be a remote forebear of chapter 6 as a plenary lecture at the 68th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, where the theme was ‘Race and Ethnicity’, in June 1999. Subsequently I was given the chance to experiment with the material now in chapter 10, both in Jerusalem in March 2000 and at the Conference on ‘Conversion: a Medieval and Early Modern Experience’, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, in May 2001. An early draft of chapter 12 was read as an inaugural lecture at Keele University in January 2002, and I profited a great deal from the questions and comments of my colleagues. I am grateful, lastly, to Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith for inviting me to deliver a version of chapter 8 to the Seminar on the History of the Crusades and the Latin East in Cambridge in November 2002.
A number of other historians have helped me in various ways. Professor Peter Hoppenbrouwers, of the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, kindly sent me a number of references to the Mongols in medieval sources from the Netherlands, which would otherwise certainly have escaped my notice. Professor Nicola Di Cosmo, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, generously provided me with the texts of two as yet unpublished conference papers. In addition, Reuven Amitai, Michal Biran, Ann Fielding and Noreen Giffney each supplied me with valuable references. I received help from various experts on medieval Hungarian history, a field into which I was venturing for the first time: Dr Nora Berend, of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge; Dr Nagy Balazs, of the Central European University, Budapest; and Dr Zsoldos Attila, of the Historical Institute in Budapest.
Three scholars have been good enough to read some or all of the book. Professor Tina Endicott read early drafts of chapters 1 and 2, and Dr Anthony Luttrell a draft of chapter 9. Professor David Morgan read a penultimate draft of the whole book on behalf of the press. I am grateful to all three for offering suggestions and for saving me from a number of errors. Naturally, I alone merit the obloquy directed at any faults that have survived their criticism.
The role of intelligent lay critic was filled admirably by my father-in-law, Tom Oswald, who read and commented on chapters 1 and 2, and by my wife, who read the entire manuscript. Without her untiring support, indeed, this book would not have been written. I dedicate it to her with love and gratitude.
Peter Jackson
Keele June 2004
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