Download PDF | Peter Jackson - The Mongols and the Islamic World_ From Conquest to Conversion-Yale University Press (2017).
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PREFACE
I First CONCEIVED THE PROJECT of writing a book on Muslims under infidel Mongol rule in 2006. Heather McCallum at Yale University Press gave the idea a warm welcome, and I have greatly appreciated her continued enthusiasm and interest, over a considerably longer period than either of us anticipated. I am also grateful to both Heather and her colleagues Rachael Lonsdale, Melissa Bond and Samantha Cross for seeing the book through to publication, and to Richard Mason for being a thorough and efficient copy-editor.
While working on this book, I have incurred many debts. must mention the unfailing helpfulness, patience and courtesy of staff in the following institutions: Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, the British Library, the Warburg Institute Library, the Wellcome Library, the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Birmingham University Library and the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. From the last three of these institutions I have been able to borrow books under the SCONUL scheme, an invaluable privilege indeed that should not be taken for granted, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge here the assistance of the scheme. I am also grateful for the assistance of staff in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and (some years ago) in the Siileymaniye Kiitiiphanesi and the Topkapi Saray1 Miizesi, Istanbul.
I benefited greatly from the opportunity to try out an early version of part of chapter 6 at a symposium on “The Mongol Empire and Its World; organized by Professor David Morgan in April 2010 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I also benefited from reading papers relating to the Mongols and the Islamic world that, in different ways, incorporated ideas more fully developed in chapters 11, 12 and 13,at seminars in the Universities of Warwick, Birmingham, St Andrews, Sheffield and Keele, and at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition, I was glad of the chance to experiment with one of the themes of chapter 13, by delivering a paper with the less than electrifying title “The Conversion of the Chaghadayids in Comparative Perspective’ at a conference on ‘New Directions in the Study of the Mongol Empire’ in Jerusalem in June-July 2014, convened by Professors Michal Biran and Hodong Kim. I am especially grateful for the stimulating questions that the audience fired at me on each of these occasions.
Nobody who has worked since the 1970s on the Mongol empire and its successor-states can fail to be aware of the increase in the number of editions or translations of primary sources and, still more obviously, of the extraordinary explosion in scholarship on the subject in both article and book form. Personal contact with various academic colleagues in the field has proved a bigger boon to me, I am sure, than to them. To certain individuals, who provided me with photocopies or digitized copies of material unavailable in any repository within the UK - Professor Biran, Professor Anne-Marie Eddé, Dr George Lane, Dr Roman Pochekaev and Dr Miklos Sark6ézy - my obligation is considerable. In addition, Professor Peter Golden, Dr Colin Heywood and Professor Nikolai Kradin each kindly presented me with a copy of their collected articles. Several scholars have given me copies or offprints of articles that might otherwise have taken some months to come to my notice, and Professor Hodong Kim has sent me successive issues of the Journal of Central Eurasian Studies, published in Seoul. In many instances, my debt to colleagues is a matter simply of conversations, answers to questions or the sharing of a reference - by no means negligible favours. I am also extremely grateful to Professors Biran and Morgan, who read the penultimate draft on behalf of Yale University Press and whose comments and suggestions both refined my ideas and dispelled various errors and misconceptions. It goes without saying, naturally, that none of the help I have received diminishes my responsibility for any failings still to be detected in this book.
My last debt requiring a mention here, though far from the smallest, is the tireless support of my wife Rebecca, who has, on different occasions, read drafts of every chapter, in equal measure offering encouragement and challenging my arguments or my style. I dedicate this book to her, not least because without her I could not have written it.
Peter Jackson Madeley, Staffordshire September 2016
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Transliteration
For Mongol and Turkish proper names and terms, I have slightly modified the system adopted in J. A. Boyle’s translation of volume 2 of the first part of Rashid al-Din’s Jami‘ al-tawarikh: The Successors of Genghis Khan (1971). In particular, I give the title of the Mongol conqueror in its Mongolian form (Chinggis), rather than the form used by Persian authors (Chingiz) or its bowdlerized European derivatives (such as ‘Jenghiz’ or ‘Genghis’), and hence I call the dynasty he founded the Chinggisids. By contrast, although Tamerlane appears here under his Turco-Mongolian name (Temiir), I have adhered to the spelling “Timurids’ generally used for his dynasty. In addition, whereas the name of Chinggis Khan’s second son is here given under the Mongolian form Chaghadai, the Turkic language named after him is spelled in the Turkish fashion as Chaghatay. I have frequently used q to transcribe the guttural consonant in Mongolian sometimes rendered by kh or gh (thus Qubilai, gaghan, quriltai, rather than Khubilai, khaghan, khuriltai). Here the reader will detect further inconsistencies: thus I have employed Ghazan for the celebrated Ilkhan, but Qazan for the Chaghadayid khan of a slightly later period, on the grounds that these usages are well established in historiography - and despite the fact that the two khans’ names are one and the same in the Uighur script (and mean ‘cauldron’). For place names in modern Turkey, modern Turkish spelling is used. Naturally, Mongol and Turkish names and terms that appear within a quotation from a Muslim source are spelled as Arabic and Persian.
For Arabic and Persian, I have used the conventions observed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (1954-2009), except that I employ ch (in place of ¢),j (replacing dj) and q (not k). Persian is transliterated as if it were Arabic: thus th rather than s, d rather than z, and w rather than v; the exception is the Arabic conjunction wa- (‘and’), which generally appears as -u in Persian phrases. Persian-Arabic spelling is also used even where an author's nisba is derived from a Turkish locality (thus Aqsarai rather than Akserayi), but the Arabic definite article al- is omitted in the nisbas of persons of nonArab stock (as with Juwayni). For place names where an anglicized form is in common use (e.g. Merv, Herat, Aleppo, Damascus) and for titles/ranks that have long been Europeanized (e.g. caliph, amir; but wazir in preference to ‘vizier’), these forms are used. Terms that recur frequently in the text (e.g. quriltai, noyan, tiimen, ortaq, amir, malik, dhimmi, dinar, Shari‘a) are given in roman type rather than italics, and without diacritics, after their first appearance. The names of dynasties appear without diacritics (thus Salghurids rather than Salghirids). I have employed the form ‘Mamluk for the power that so tenaciously resisted the Mongols, while using ‘mamluk’ (with no macron) for the elite military slaves from whom the regime takes its name. The Arabic-Persian patronymic (bin, ibn) is regularly abbreviated to ‘b; except when it is commonly used to designate a particular individual, usually an author, as in the case of Ibn al-Athir.
Given the fact that various letters in the Arabic-Persian script differ only in the placing of diacritical points, the reading of proper names in the primary sources (either printed or in manuscript) can be problematic. The reconstruction of a hypothetical form is preceded by an asterisk. I have used capitals, particularly in the notes, to indicate the spelling of an uncertain name ina text: here C represents the double consonant ch, G stands for gh, § for sh, T for th and X for kh, and the long vowels 4, a and i are represented by A, W and Y respectively. When diacritical points seem to be lacking in the manuscript original, I have shown the Arabic-Persian consonant in the form in which it appears there, but in italics. Thus H [z,>] might in fact have stood for J [¢, 4], C [¢, 4] or X [¢,4]. A mere ‘tooth’ without diacritical points, which could accordingly represent B, P, T, T, N, Y or ’ (if simply the bearer of the hamza, 5), is indicated in transcription by a dot.
Qur’anic quotations
Quotations from the Qur'an are taken from the translation by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, The Quran (Oxford, 2005; repr. with corrections, 2010). In citing verse numbers I have followed the text established by Gustav Fliigel, Corani textus arabicus, 3rd edn (Leipzig, 1893).
Dates
Where dates are cited from Muslim sources, the date according to the Hijri calendar appears first and is followed by that according to the Common Era: thus 659/1260-1.
Referencing
In many cases I have cited more than one edition/translation of a work (for instance, Rashid al-Din’s Ta’rikh-i mubdrak-i Ghdazani, the anonymous Hawéadith al-jami‘a and the final volume of Ibn Wasil’s Mufarrij al-kuriib). This is because I have frequently found an author's habit of using a single version of a text or translation (particularly one I do not myself possess) extremely frustrating, and hope that the convenience of access to alternatives will more than offset the disadvantage of what may strike some readers as excessively cluttered notes.
INTRODUCTION
Ve BOOK SETS OUT to explore two questions. First, it investigates the impact on the Islamic world (Dar al-Islam) of the campaigns of conquest by the armies of Temiijin, better known as Chinggis Khan (d. 1227), and his first three successors, under whom the empire of the Mongols (or Tatars, as they were often termed) came to embrace all the Muslim territories east of Syria and the Byzantine Greek oecumene. And second, it examines the character of Mongol rule over Muslims down to, and just beyond, the conversion of the various khans to Islam, and the longer-term legacy of subjection to the infidel. These themes have naturally surfaced in the standard work on the conquerors, David Morgan's The Mongols (1986; 2nd edn, 2007), as well as in Bertold Spuler’s Die Mongolen in Iran (1939; 4th edn, 1985), and various collaborative enterprises, most recently The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (2009) and The New Cambridge History of Islam, III (2010). But they have not, to the best of my knowledge, been the discrete focus of any single-authored book.
The research is based largely on the works of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury authors writing in Persian and Arabic, and to a lesser extent on material in Latin and Old French, produced by Western European observers and visitors to the Mongol empire. My linguistic capacity, regrettably, does not extend to the sources in Armenian, Georgian, Syriac and Chinese, which I have had to consult in translation, or in Tibetan, where I depend on secondary literature. Nor does it include Mongolian: relatively little material from these two centuries survives in Mongolian, however, and I have used the only surviving contemporary narrative in that language, the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, in the splendid translation (with voluminous commentary) by Dr Igor de Rachewiltz.
Historiography has not usually been generous to nomads. They have tended to leave few or no literary remains and nothing by way of archival material. We are accordingly dependent on the writings of their sedentary neighbours, who viewed them at best as unsophisticated and more often as bestial. Nomads were depicted as lawless and rapacious, constantly in need of restraint; their very strengths - the mobility and speed afforded by travelling light - reinforced these negative reactions.’ The imbalance within the corpus of primary sources long exerted a pronounced effect on the secondary literature, often further primed by nationalistic sentiment, so that conquest by the nomads could be held to have retarded political or cultural development. It is only in the last three decades or so that historians have begun to challenge the stereotype, pointing out that the nomads were no more ‘natural warriors’ than their sedentary neighbours, that they were not driven by the inherent poverty of their lifestyle to plunder those neighbours or extort their wealth by means of threats, and that the representatives of sedentary culture were themselves given to predatory attacks on the pastoralists.» Nomadic groups were by no means monolithic in their attitudes towards settled societies, moreover. The interests of tribal armies and the mass of the herding population might differ; the relationship between the pastoralists and their agrarian neighbours was often symbiotic.’ And lastly, the nomads’ interest in acquiring technical knowledge has been greatly underestimated.*
As pastoral nomads who operated on a far grander scale than their precursors, the Mongols have enjoyed the worst press of all, and it is by no means confined to academic scholarship. For the average Westerner today the first assault on the Islamic world, by Chinggis Khan’s Mongols in 121924, is just a part of a bigger process that seems to exercise a growing fascination: the rise of a hitherto obscure people, under a charismatic leader, to create the largest continuous land empire in the history of the planet. The details of the conquest and its aftermath can remain relatively blurred behind a skein of admiring or, equally, disparaging epithets to describe ‘Genghis Khan, perceived as an extraordinarily talented general but an uncultured and bloodthirsty monarch’ (and one whose career, mystifyingly, represents a challenging paradigm to those aspiring to a niche on the far right of the political spectrum). At times the conqueror’s notoriety has presented an irresistible temptation to borrow his name for the titles of books that betray only the most tenuous connection, if any, with his career.®
By comparison with Chinggis Khan, his grandson Hiilegii (d. 1265), whose campaigns subjugated a much larger proportion of the Muslim population of south-west Asia, is virtually unknown in Europe, as is the state he founded, the Ilkhanate - and this despite the fact that his sack of Baghdad in 1258 brought to an abrupt and violent end the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, of which Baghdad had been the centre (with relatively brief interruptions) for nearly half a millennium.A lecture to the British Academy by a historian of modern Iraq in the wake of the Second Gulf War, tracing regime changes in that country back as far as Hiilegii’s invasion and presented as ‘an essay in haute vulgarisation,’ may nevertheless have both signalled and promoted a growing awareness.
It is a very different matter in the present-day Dar al-Islam, where by all appearances Hiilegii’s operations have eclipsed those of his grandfather. A Syrian government official is quoted as claiming in the 1950s that the Mongol sack of Baghdad had put back by centuries the development of Islamic science and, by implication, its capacity to outstrip that of Western Europe.* As Emmanuel Sivan pointed out over thirty years ago, the denunciations of the recently converted Mongols of Ilkhanid Iran by the great Syrian Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) have served since the midtwentieth century as an inspiration for Muslims implacably opposed to growing secularization or Western influence and encroachment.’ And when Osama bin Laden contended, in a statement broadcast by Al-Jazeera on 12 November 2002, that ‘Cheney and Powell killed and destroyed in Baghdad’ (during the First Gulf War) ‘more than Hulegu [sic] of the Mongols, he did not, apparently, deem it necessary to provide his audience with greater detail about this remote episode.'® Nor was it only Muslims of a radical bent who noticed such parallels. In January 2003 Saddam Hussein likened the imminent second attack on Iraq by the forces of Britain and the United States to the Mongol invasion of the country in 1258'' - something of an irony, since an analogy had earlier been drawn between the Mongol conquest of Baghdad and Saddam's own invasion of Kuwait in 1990.” Clearly Hilegii’s campaign against the Caliphate was an event that still resonated in Muslim minds after an interval of more than seven centuries.
Academics, too, from a Near Eastern or Iranian background tend to enter verdicts on the overall legacy of the Mongols to the development of the region that fall far short of favourable.’? The author of a recent history of Iran is fairly representative of many:
It is difficult to credit the Mongol regime in Persia with much positive achievement ... A few notable constructions such as Soltaniyeh and Holagu’s [sic] observatory in Maragheh are hardly compensation for the losses they inflicted on the country. Hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) were killed; towns were devastated; sedentary agriculture suffered tremendously from pillage, plunder and heavy taxes. Any brave attempt to find a balance for these disasters under Mongol rule would be reminiscent of Voltaire’s poetical caricature of the pious belief that the earthquake of Lisbon had some beneficial effects such as dogs being able to help themselves to the corpses of the dead."4
This is in my view unduly dismissive of the beneficial consequences of Mongol rule, to which certain Iranian scholars are ready to give some weight.’ But the underlying point still stands: to draw up a balance sheet is a futile and elusive task.’
The assessment quoted above would have been endorsed not long ago by historians in the Western world. J. J. Saunders, for example, wrote of the Mongols as ‘hated alien conquerors, an army of occupation, putting down no roots, and winning no loyalty, charged them with ‘cold and deliberate genocide’ and imputed to them ‘a blind unreasoning fear and hatred of urban civilisation:'!? Many Western scholars, however, now dissent sharply from such verdicts. True, there is still a readiness to concede that the Mongol conquests were accompanied by large-scale slaughter (although this coexists with a clearer understanding of the strategic impulses behind it).'* Moreover, a number of authors have recently begun to analyse the nature of the very real blow that Sunni Muslims sustained with the destruction of the Imamate, namely the “Abbasid Caliphate, and the spiritual malaise to which that event gave rise.'? They have admittedly tended to look more to the Islamic heartlands in Mamluk Egypt and Syria than to Mongol-ruled Iran and Central Asia. Inevitably too, perhaps, they have focused on the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, himself a fugitive from Mongol-occupied Harran; although his fulminations were by no means confined to the Mongols and he regarded the inner spiritual crisis that confronted Muslims as a bigger problem than military defeat and subjection.”
Generally speaking, however, if for present-day Muslims Mongol violence in the Near East is still a byword, Western historiography on the Mongol empire over the past half-century has undergone a marked shift of emphasis. In a piece first published in 1968, Professor Bernard Lewis queried whether the mass killing in which the Mongols engaged had the profound economic consequences often attributed to it; he further suggested that Iraq, already in decline, was the only region which suffered long-term effects and that the significance of the demise of the Caliphate has been exaggerated. In pointing to the positive results of the Mongol hegemony, especially in the political sphere, the article was a milestone in anglophone scholarship; though it was impaired by a holistic treatment of nomadic incursions from the east, so that the Mongols were lumped in with other steppe peoples, such as the eleventh-century Saljuq Turks and the Ottomans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as if they were homogeneous phenomena.”
Since the appearance of Lewis article there has been a growing tendency among Western historians to accentuate the more positive repercussions of the Mongols’ rule in the extensive regions of Asia that they conquered.” In 2006 Bert Fragner invited us to adopt a nomadic Mongol vantage point, over against a more traditional discourse which begins from the status of the sedentary societies of China and Iran as the repository of venerable cultures and which privileges their twin role both in suffering from and adapting to alien conquest and in (eventually) ‘taming’ and absorbing/ expelling the conquerors.*? One symptom of the change is that the image of Mongol governance has mellowed somewhat. Evidence has been advanced for a closer assimilation (in Ilkhanid Iran, at least) between the Mongol ruling cadre and the indigenous aristocracy and official classes.”* The khans themselves have undergone a certain measure of rehabilitation. Dr George Lane locates them within a tradition - of seeking knowledge in many different fields - that linked them both with earlier steppe potentates and with Chinese emperors of the Tang dynasty.” David Morgan suggests that the time-honoured assumption that Mongol sovereigns, intent only on warfare, hunting, feasting, drinking and coition, evinced little interest in the tedious responsibilities of administration, which they happily left to Persian or (in China) Inner Asian bureaucrats, can no longer stand.”
On a different front, the Mongol expansion has been seen as ‘the first global event.” Here the seminal work of Professor Thomas T. Allsen has been especially influential. One of the few scholars engaged in the rapidly expanding field of Mongol history who is able to draw on both Chinese and Islamic sources, he highlights the active role the Mongols played in the promotion of economic and cultural activity: their stimulation of commercial networks covering the entire breadth of Asia (and not just that linking Asia and Catholic Europe, of which we have long known),” and their deliberate fostering of intellectual exchanges, notably between Iran and China, across fields as diverse as medicine, astronomy, geography, agronomy and cuisine.” As demonstrated by an important exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum in 2002-3 (the Los Angeles phase coinciding, unintentionally, with the US-led invasion of Iraq), the cultural cross-fertilization over which the Mongols presided extended even to the visual arts.** Their empire functioned as what S. A. M. Adshead termed ‘the basic information circuit’*! Professor Timothy May has labelled this phenomenon ‘the Chinggis Exchange’ by analogy with the term ‘Columbus Exchange’ that denotes, in the vocabulary of some historians, the intrusion of Western Europeans into the Americas and its profound consequences.” The subtitle chosen by Lane for his Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran is ‘A Persian Renaissance. Indeed, the attention now given to such intercultural contacts represents, in Morgan’s words, a ‘major historiographical shift’ in the study of the Mongols and their empire.*’ In a recent biography of Chinggis Khan (which appeared, tellingly, in a series entitled “Makers of the Muslim World’), Professor Michal Biran incorporates a comprehensive, and by no means totally negative, outline of the overall legacy of the Mongols to the world of Islam.*
While broadly sympathetic towards these new emphases, to which I hope I have done full justice, 1 am concerned equally to avoid minimizing the shock of the Mongol conquest, not least the destruction, whether temporary or longer term, that accompanied the campaigns in the west. The primary sources may well exaggerate - in a great many instances they undoubtedly do exaggerate — the conquerors’ numbers, the casualty figures for the populations that resisted, and the damage inflicted, in particular, on the great urban centres of eastern Iran. This does not, however, mean that the grim impact of successive incursions by infidel nomads, possessed of what was in some respects a superior siege technology, should be played down. Nor can we leave out of the balance either the economically and socially harmful consequences of rapacious and irregular taxation during the early decades of Mongol rule, and perhaps beyond, or the effects of subjugation by an infidel power, for the first time in centuries (in Iran and Iraq), on what might be loosely termed the collective Muslim psyche. In other words, the vantage point of this book is largely that of the subject Muslim rather than the infidel master.
On the other hand, I have also given prominence to the role of Muslim ‘allies’ - client rulers and their forces - in boosting the military capacity of the Mongol war-machine and in facilitating the subjugation or the peaceful submission of their co-religionists. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that at the first appearance of Chinggis Khan and his forces in the Khwarazmshah’s empire in 1219-20 the Mongol army was by no means made up exclusively of infidels but included large numbers of Muslim troops; and that this characteristic was yet more conspicuous forty years later, when the coalition with which Hilegii attacked the Caliphate comprised an even greater number of Muslim princes drawn from Iran, Iraq and Anatolia. How far, if at all, this often neglected fact mitigated the traumatic experience for the conquered Muslim populations must remain a moot point. I have devoted a later chapter to the condition of such Muslim client states under Mongol overlordship.
This book goes beyond the era of the unitary empire to cover also, in varying degrees, the separate and practically autonomous khanates into which the Mongol world split in the early 1260s, within just a few years of Hiilegii’s destruction of the Caliphate. In two of these successor-states — the Ikhanate in Iran and Iraq and the khanate of Chaghadai in Central Asia Muslims from the outset constituted a majority; in the third, the Jochid dominions (known to historians as the Qipchaq khanate or the Golden Horde) in the Pontic-Caspian steppes and western Siberia, they did not, and Islamization took longer. But in each case the Chinggisid rulers and their Mongol following came in time to embrace Islam. China, present-day Mongolia and eastern Central Asia - the territories of the Yuan empire, ruled by the Great Khans (qaghans), where Buddhism triumphed - will enter into consideration only insofar as their much smaller Muslim population and a more limited process of Islamization require notice. In fact, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence relates to the Ilkhanate, since there is a relative dearth of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century source material for the other two westerly Mongol polities; but it is possible, even so, to offer (I trust) sensible conclusions about them also. It may be that at times I overcompensate for the fact that the Jochid lands and (still more) the IIkhanate have received more comprehensive coverage in the secondary literature than have the Mongol territories in Central Asia. If this be the case, I remain unrepentant.
I have not set out to provide a narrative of events in any of the Mongol khanates, whether the undivided empire or the three successor-states just mentioned. Nor do I deal with the relations between the Mongol world and those parts of the Dar al-Islam that remained resolutely outside it. Diplomatic exchanges and military and ideological confrontation with the Mamluk empire (inter alia) have been dealt with admirably by Professors Reuven Amitai and Anne Broadbridge;* I myself have examined contacts with Muslim India.*° My aim here, rather, is to investigate the encounter between the Mongol conquerors and the Muslims (of all social levels) under their rule. With that in view, I am seeking to answer a number of questions. How were the Mongols able to subdue such a vast swathe of Muslim territory within just a few decades? How destructive for the Islamic lands were the campaigns of conquest, and how far was the damage compounded by the subsequent wars between hostile Mongol khanates? In what ways did Mongol domination make itself felt for subordinate Muslim princes, for their Muslim servitors and for their Muslim subjects at the grass-roots level? In what light did these subjects view their infidel monarchs? How did members of the Chinggisid dynasty, their military commanders and the Mongol rank and file come to adopt Islam? What, if anything, changed as a result? What impact did the Mongol presence have, both in the short term and more enduringly, on the conquered Islamic lands? What were the consequences for the Dar al-Islam of incorporation within a world-empire and, in particular, of more intimate contact with the ancient, highly sophisticated and decidedly non-Muslim culture of China? The answers to these questions, of course, must all too frequently remain merely partial, tentative or speculative.
The first two chapters are introductory in nature. Chapter 1 reviews our principal written sources. They are for the most part the work of Sunni Muslim authors, but also include two Shi‘is and a number of eastern Christians who wrote under Mongol domination, as well as a handful of observers from Latin Europe. Here, as at intervals later in the book, I have tried to ask why authors told the story in the manner they did, to locate them in their respective contexts, to ascertain their preoccupations and guiding purposes, and to identify the intended readers (or, in certain cases, reader). It has to be acknowledged that groundwork of this kind is frequently as elusive as it is desirable. While we know a great deal about historians like Juwayni (who served as Ilkhanid governor of Baghdad) and Rashid al-Din (who was chief minister to the IIkhans for over two decades), we know of Juwaynts continuator Wassaf, for instance, only what little he chooses to tell us regarding his life; while the majority of historians writing within the Mongol empire in this period say even less about themselves and remain far more opaque figures. Chapter 2 is designed to provide a vital background survey of the relations, down to the eve of the Mongol attacks, between the Dar al-Islam and the nomads of the Eurasian steppe, mostly peoples who had emerged among the debris of the former empire of the sixth- and seventh-century Turks. A particularly important phase in these relations was the advent, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, of the infidel Qara-Khitai, most probably of Mongolian stock, which would be envisaged by at least one thirteenth-century Muslim observer, and by a modern author, almost as a rehearsal for the more spectacular Mongol intrusion.*”
Thereafter, the book falls very loosely into two parts. Chapters 3-6 are concerned with the conquest period, down to c. 1260, whereas the remainder focus essentially on the era of the divided empire beyond that date. Chapter 3 covers the history of Mongol expansion down to 1252, a theme taken up again in chapter 5, which concentrates on the invasion of south-west Asia by Hiilegii in the 1250s. Chapter 4 studies the complex layers of imperial administration under the qaghans from Ogédei (r. 1229-41) to Méngke (r. 1251-9) and the distribution of appanage lands among the members of Chinggis Khan's dynasty. Only to a very limited degree did the appanages foreshadow the quasi-independent khanates that would develop after 1260. But this period has all too often been handled as if it were merely a prelude to the more impressive era of Hiilegii and the IIkhanid dynasty he founded. I have tried instead, by highlighting the tensions within the imperial system and among the Chinggisids themselves, to set the scene for the latter sections of chapter 5. These investigate the disruptive nature of Hiilegii’s creation of the Ilkhanate, and treat it as an integral stage in the fragmentation of the Mongol empire in the period 1260-2. I have long felt that there is something highly suspect about the official’ version of Hiilegii’s emergence as Ikhan in Iran and Iraq, and in an article published back in 1978 I contended that it represented an act of usurpation.** Here a slightly modified form of that argument is advanced on the strength of important new evidence from a recently unearthed and virtually untapped Persian source, the Akhbar-i mughulan attributed to Qutb al-Din Shirazi. Chapter 6 investigates the extent of the devastation inflicted on the Dar al-Islam by the invasions and such recovery as occurred prior to the 1260s, whether as a result of local initiative or at the instigation of Mongol rulers.
The main thrust of chapter 7 is to explore the impact of the conflicts among the successor-states that developed after 1260, and of the turbulent activities of different nomadic groups within such states, upon the agrarian and urban economy of the Islamic world; some attention is also given to the measures of reconstruction that the various Mongol regimes put in place. These upheavals make it difficult to retain the now venerable concept of a Pax Mongolica without qualification; the destruction that Mongol khans visited upon each other's territories has to be tacked on to any assessment of the conquest period. Yet if the idea of a Pax hardly emerges unscathed from a study of the inter-Mongol struggles of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, we can still legitimately speak of a growing ‘interconnectedness’ between far-distant regions during this period. The Mongol conquests involved the displacement - usually involuntary - of significant numbers of both Muslims and non-Muslims. There is little doubt that as a result of this diaspora, especially that of scholars, much of the Islamic world was brought into a markedly closer relationship with other parts of Eurasia, most obviously China but also Latin Europe. Chapter 8 attempts to outline the symptoms of this process, perceptible (in varying degrees) in the fields of trade, the visual arts and technical knowledge, while at the same time identifying the limitations of cross-cultural contact in its various spheres.
Chinggis Khan's great westward expedition was separated by seven or eight decades, and that of Hiilegii by four decades or so, from what may be deemed the conversion of any branch of the imperial dynasty, beginning with the Ilkhans. The three chapters that follow each approach the impact of pagan Mongol hegemony from a different vantage point. Chapter 9 deals with the local Muslim potentates who kept their thrones in return for loyal service: it is necessary to stress the uneven spread of imperial authority and the existence of a tranche of ancillary regimes under Mongol overlordship. Particular attention is given to the obligations imposed by the conquerors and the advantages of vassalage. Study of these relations affords an opportunity also to ask whether, and to what degree, elite Muslim women benefited from the more prominent role and higher status of women in traditional Mongol society. Chapter 10 examines the sometimes precarious relationship of the Mongols’ Muslim servitors with infidel khans and military commanders and with their non-Muslim colleagues. In the process, it traces the shifting balance of power between Mongol grandees and ‘Tajik civilian officials, and investigates how far, if at all, these very disparate ruling cadres were in the process of integration. The nature of the evidence dictates that the focus of these latter two chapters is largely on the Ilkhanate. The experience of Muslims of all social ranks under infidel Mongol rule - a topic that has been unaccountably neglected — is investigated in chapter 11. Here I have looked particularly at the contexts of taxation, law and religious freedom, and have drawn attention to a variety of repressive measures enacted by the conquerors, notably those enshrined in Mongol law (yasa) and custom (yosun), while taking care to exaggerate neither their scope nor any consistency in their implementation. This chapter also highlights what Muslims viewed as a starkly unwelcome departure from the practice of their pre-Mongol rulers: the establishment of parity between themselves and other confessional groups.
Chapters 12 and 13 explore the Islamization of the Mongols. Muslim writers gave prominence to royal conversions. They naturally saw an event like the acceptance of Islam by the IIkhan Ghazan (1295) as a watershed, and the acolyte as initiating a definitive shift in the religious orientation of the state, when in reality it appears that convert monarchs trod in the wake of large numbers within their military establishment and that Islamization was a long drawn-out and sometimes fitful process. Chapter 12 focuses on patterns of conversion and conceptual problems, not least elusive questions such as the appeal of Islam to the nomadic Mongols of Western Asia and the means by which the new faith was conveyed to them. At one level, this chapter relates to the conversion of the ordinary Mongol and (in some degree) of the Mongol aristocracy, where a dearth of evidence inevitably confines us to the realm of surmise. In chapter 13, which opens with an overview of the process within each of the three western khanates, the spotlight is chiefly on the conversions of particular khans for which we possess more specific accounts (even though we know nothing like as much as we should wish). A further aim is to ascertain what changed (and what did not) in the wake of such royal conversions - how far, in particular, the subsequent policies of these rulers were shaped by their new faith - and to reach some conclusions regarding the pace of Islamization.
The Epilogue considers the impact of infidel Mongol rule on the Islamic world in the longer term, down to the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, even in those regions where Chinggisid sovereignty was by then a dead letter. In the sphere of statecraft and ruling institutions, one especially important phase was the era of the Turco-Mongol warlord Temiir (-i lang, ‘the lame’; hence “Tamerlane’ in European literature), both a selfconsciously orthodox Muslim and a champion of Mongol tradition, who attempted to recreate Chinggis Khan’s empire from his power-base in Central Asia between c. 1370 and his death in 1405, but who took care to rule in the name of a Chinggisid shadow-khan. Another phase was the restoration of de facto Chinggisid rule in Transoxiana by the Uzbeks, who ousted Temiir’s descendants in the period 1500-7, and also, at approximately the same time, by the Kazakhs in the more northerly steppelands to which they have given their name. It was this resurgence and prolongation of Chinggisid rule that led the editors of the recently published Cambridge History of Inner Asia (covering a period that stretches to as late as the 1880s in certain regions) to subtitle it “The Chinggisid Age.” The Mongol legacy, however, was by no means confined to institutions, but included the spread of the Islamic faith to hitherto untouched regions of Asia and the creation, in time, of new ethnicities. The final topic investigated is the relationship between the Mongol conquests and the genesis of the Black Death, through the formation of a single disease zone that embraced the whole of the Eurasian continent, a development for which the Mongols have often, on less solid grounds, been held responsible.
The chronological parameters of this book vary greatly, depending to some extent on the date at which the relevant Chinggisid rulers and their Mongol following officially embraced Islam and hence ceased to be infidels. Whereas I devote little space to Mongol Iran once we pass the reign of the convert IIkhan Ghazan (in chapters 9-11, for instance), the history of the Jochids in the western steppes receives longer notice, until well into the fourteenth century, and the attention given to the Chaghadayids in Central Asia continues to an even later date. But in any case, to limit the scope of the book to the pre-conversion era would have produced a treatment that was inexcusably artificial: pagan practice continued well after conversion, and it is impossible to do justice to the consequences of conquest by pagans with reference only to the era of paganism.
For the same reason, the boundaries of the geographical area covered also necessarily fluctuate, incorporating territories that at different times contained only a minority Muslim population or were ruled by khans who, in whatever degree, had accepted Islam: Qaraqorum in Mongolia, for instance, not merely because it was the administrative centre of the unitary empire but also on the grounds that it contained a resident Muslim community; or the lower Danube basin during the era of the Jochid khan Noghai around the turn of the thirteenth century - decades before the Ottoman conquest — because both Noghai and his son appear to have identified with Islam.
It is also necessary to say a word about geographical and ethnic terminology, where the pitfalls attendant on loose phrasing are legion and I risk offending against canonical usage. I use ‘Iran’ in preference to the term ‘Persia often favoured by British and other European historians, but in a wider sense than the area covered by the present-day Islamic Republic. For the purposes of this book, Iran does not merely subsume Azerbaijan but extends as far east as the Amt-darya (Oxus river) and the Suleiman range, and thus includes modern Turkmenistan and cities like Herat and Ghazna/ Ghazni (both today in Afghanistan); “Khurasan’ accordingly denotes an area far larger than the modern Iranian province of that name. ‘Central Asia here comprises the territory of four (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirgizstan) of the five modern republics that gained their independence following the break-up of the USSR in 1991, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang (Uighur Autonomous Region).*° Inner Asia’ (sometimes called ‘Central Eurasia’) has a broader meaning and includes not only these regions but also Mongolia and southern Siberia.*' I have adopted ‘the Eurasian steppe; lastly, for the grasslands extending from the edge of the Manchurian forest zone to the great rivers that water the Ukraine and beyond as far as the lower Danube.
As to ethnic labels, I have preferred to call the peoples of the eastern Eurasian steppe whom Temiijin united under his rule ‘Mongol, even though they were more commonly called “Tatars’ by their Muslim subjects and by enemies who remained outside the empire. In this book, for the most part, "Tatar has a narrower application. First, and primarily, it denotes the tribe who neighboured the Mongols in their homeland and who were Chinggis Khan’s bitter enemies; and in the second place it is used for the “Turkicized’ Mongols of the western steppe and forest regions, such as those of the Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian and Crimean khanates that split off from the moribund Golden Horde in the fifteenth century. Otherwise, the word ‘Tatar’ is used only in direct quotation from contemporary sources. The noun “Turk’ is employed in its usual sense, for instance in chapter 2, to embrace all those who belonged, or claimed to belong, to the same branch of the Altaic group of nations; the corresponding adjective in this context, however, is “Turkic. I have used “Turkish generically for the related languages the peoples of this branch spoke or, less frequently, for the Ottomans and the inhabitants of modern Turkey, whereas “Tiirk refers specifically to the sixth-eighth-century empire, its rulers, its peoples and the traditions that it bequeathed to its steppe successors, the Mongols included. Lastly, the term “Tajik is used, as in the primary sources, for people of Persian stock, and does not denote the inhabitants of modern Tajikistan. It is my hope that the reader will not find these distinctions unduly pedantic or - worse - baffling.
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