Download PDF | Historical Dictionary Of The Mongol World Empire,Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations and Historical Eras, No. 8, By Paul D. Buell, The Scarecrow Press 2003.
381 Pages
Editor's Foreword
By all criteria the Mongol World Empire was one of the most extraordinary empires that ever existed. It was certainly one of the most extensive, stretching far into China, across Central Asia and deep into the Middle East, covering much of Russia and skirting Eastern Europe.
It was put together in record time, indeed, so fast that contemporary observers could barely keep up with it. It also declined and fell apart in an unusually short period. Probably what was most exceptional was that this empire was put together, and then ruled, by a Mongolian people who were surprisingly few, albeit led by remarkable chiefs some of whose names still resonate. Yet, for all this, little is known about the Mongol Empire and there is not even a healthy curiosity to know more outside of the countries it once embraced.
That, certainly regrettable, gap is filled somewhat by this Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire. This volume is similar to others in the series on ancient civilizations and historical eras in most ways. It has a chronology which shows the compressed time scale. It has several useful maps. It has a dictionary which provides brief entries on important persons, places and events (many of them battles) as well as the components of the empire and even something about the form of warfare and economic, social and demographic conditions. The bibliography presents the, once again regrettably small literature on the subject not only in English but other languages. But the real innovation is an introduction far larger than usual, nearly a hundred pages, which is necessary to follow the endless and extremely complicated cycle of warfare, expansion, consolidation, disruption and decline. This volume was written not by a specialist but a generalist.
In fact, it almost had to be, or it would not have been able to cover the myriad facets of the Mongol Empire. Paul D. Buell, however, is not just any author, he has a comprehensive knowledge of the region, past and present. He is familiar with most of the essential languages needed for research. And he is keenly aware of much of the research that has been done. More than that, he is very good at extracting conclusions from limited evidence, interpreting the facts as they are currently know, and then drawing a picture that is amazingly realistic and arouses one's interest and curiosity. While this is only one of many books written by Dr. Buell, it is certainly a welcome contribution for general readers who want to know something about this most extraordinary empire and even specialists who want to see further. Jon Woronoff Series Editor
Preface
Mongolia today is a small, poverty-stricken country, but Mongols once created the greatest empire that has ever been seen, before or since, and inaugurated an era of intense international interchange. It, in many ways, persists to the present, since the explorers whose voyages gave rise to our modern era originally went looking for the realm of the "Great Khan" (q.v.) of the Mongols. Doing full justice to such a vast empire in a few hundred pages is, of course, impossible. This is true even if the existing scholarship would allow such a full treatment, which it certainly does not. I have thus not attempted to provide anything even moderately comprehensive, but have instead tried to offer a maximum amount of useful information for the nonspecialist, one needing to know about the Mongols.
To this end, and because even the most knowledgeable reader cannot reasonably be expected to have a basic understanding of the history of the Mongol conquests and their aftermath, due to a highly technical secondary literature in too many languages, I have departed somewhat from the usual exclusively dictionary format of this series. The dictionary entries are there, but I have also provided major narratives as well to integrate the dictionary as a whole. I have done so not only because of problems of access to the specialist literature, but also because no such narratives exist in an accurate and up-to-date form in one place elsewhere. A number of scholars have written general books about the Mongols. Some are quite good, but none covers the history of the Mongolian Empire as a whole and of its various successor states in sufficient detail and balance to provide a true overview.
There is also the problem that most of the general accounts are now out of date. Many also contain numerous inaccuracies, since nearly all of their authors come from specialties outside Mongolian studies. Another problem is created by overly popular presentations that provide at best a distorted image of the Mongols and their states. A new overview with the latest scholarship in mind is thus urgently required. I have attempted to provide it.
The overview below is divided into an introduction and six essays. Essay One narrates the rise of Cinggis-qan (q.v.) down to his formal establishment as universal steppe ruler in 1206. Since there is much dispute about the events of his early life and career, and much is pure hagiography, or political propaganda, I have kept this section short. It is focused upon what we do know, with reasonable certainty. The next essay covers the real history of the Mongol Empire, from 1206 down to the death of Mongke (q.v.), the grandson, and the last ruler of a unified state, in 1259. The focus is on institutions rather than events, since I feel that such a focus tells us more about the Mongols than a simple chronicle, but major events are narrated too. There follow four essays devoted to each of the four successor qanates.
The first is on China (q.v.), mostly because Qubilai (q.v.), its founder, maintained, until his death, the fiction that he was qan Mongke's true successor. This claim was recognized by Mongol Iran, more briefly by the Central Asian Ca'adai ulus (q.v.), the "Patrimony of Ca'adai." The pretense was even maintained by Qubilai's successors, with less and less effect as the Mongol world changed and as once close relatives became more distant from one another. Next is the history of the Golden Horde (q.v.), Mongol Russia (q.v.) and nearby areas.
The Golden Horde was not only the longest lasting of the four successor qanates, but it was the first to establish its independence, effectively even before the breakdown of unified empire. This was because of its relative remoteness geographically, and the poor integration of what was a recently conquered area with the rest of the Mongolian world before 1259. There follows the history of the Ca'adai ulus, with that of Qaidu (q.v.), who tried to advance the cause of the House of 0godei after its loss of the throne to the House of Tolui (q.v.) in 1251, as a connected essay. Qaidu controlled the Ca'adai ulus for much of his period of influence and rule (1263-1301), and many of Qaidu's supporters came under the control of the Ca'adai ulus after his death. Last is a history of Mongol Iran (q.v.), the Ilqanate, whose history is of particular interest because of its numerous contacts with the West.
The time span focused on in these essays, and by the entries of the dictionary as a whole, is roughly 1100-1500. I have not treated in detail the histories of any Central Asian or other empires preceding the Mongols except in so far as to provide background for understanding their rise. I have not dealt with Tamerlane (q.v.), who was not a Mongol. He was only indirectly connected with the Mongol ruling house (through a princess); his career is clearly a part of Turkic rather than Mongolian history. The same is true, except in passing, for the Mongol successor states in the Russian steppe after 1502 (the end date for the Golden Horde as a single, unified structure).
Their history is complex and following it adds little to our understanding of the Mongols of the age of empire. Like Tamerlane's, this was largely Turkish history. More Mongolian is the era of Northern Yuan (q.v.), the Mongol state in East Asia after 1368, but its history is more properly that of the post-empire history of Mongolia than of the Mongol Empire and it successor states, despite the continuity of a ruling house. If I have given preference to things Chinese in what follows this is perhaps understandable in view of my own background. Another reason is that the sources for Mongol China (q.v.), even allowing for a far stronger bias than is found in Iranian sources, are far fuller than for other parts of the Mongolian world.
The Ca'adai ulus is, by contrast, particularly poorly documented, as is the Golden Horde for much of its history. North China was also the first sedentary area to be brought effectively under Mongol control and was the longest held (circa 1234-1368). Even former Song (q.v.) domains were held nearly as long (from 1279 to the late 1350s) as the Mongols held Iran. The rulers of the Mongol qanate of China also claimed hegemony over the rest of the Mongolian world, and at times even enforced it, at least morally. Nonetheless, in making Mongol China the centerpiece of what follows I have endeavored to avoid the usual clichCs regarding the almost "instant" Sinicization (q.v.) and Confucianization (q.v.) of the conquerors.
To the contrary, more than a third of a century of research on Mongol China has convinced me that there was as much cultural assimilation going the one way as the other, and that the Mongols were in no way absorbed by their subjects. They used Confucian and other Chinese symbols to perpetrate their rule, but at no point did they fall captive to them. In China, as throughout the rest of the Mongolian world, the real assimilation that was going on was Turkicization (q.v.), not Sinicization, although this was probably less obvious in Mongol China where native Mongolian tradition remained strong.
In the dictionary entries, I have tried to expand on details and facts already presented in the narrative essays. The reader will also find topics of a more general interest. In all cases, I have tried to make these entries stand alone, even when this has led to the repetition of material in the narrative sections. This is because some readers may not want to read all the pages below and may come to this book solely looking for specific information.
I have tried to meet their needs as completely and as authoritatively as possible. Cross-references, including to the narrative sections, should make it clear what single pieces of information need be taken in context. Following the dictionary entries are three appendices. Appendix A provides examples of documents in the scripts in use during the era of Mongolian Empire and after to write Mongolian. Reproduced are an imperial seal in the Uighur Script, a sample of the Mongolian of the era in Chinese transcription, and a coin from the 14th century inscribed using the aPhags-pa Script, in this case to write Chinese. All the texts are translated. Appendix B lists all of the Mongolian words and terms mentioned anywhere in the text, with brief definitions. It is intended for independent reference. Finally, Appendix C provides representative court recipes from Mongol China as a cultural sampling of an age. In preparing the bibliographical section that follows the appendices, I wrestled with the problem of how to provide a comprehensive selection of the vast literature on the Mongol empire and its successor states without including too much written in languages that few users are likely to read. Unfortunately, the problem is virtually insoluble. Most of the important literature is not in English. Thus, while focusing on Englishlanguage materials, I have also included a large selection in German and French and a few sample publications in Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and even Turkish, to alert the reader as to how much there is available in most of the latter languages. Mongolian scholarship is, for obvious reasons, of particular importance and cogency, and the flow of relevant new publications from both the Mongolian People's Republic and Inner Mongolia continues to gain ground. I would be remiss not to refer to it and thereby note to the reader the importance of Modern Mongolian for the study of Mongolian history. The simple truth is that no matter how wise outsiders become in a particular field of Mongolian history, their knowledge will never entirely equal that of the natives. Their insight comes from growing up in a culture, not just studying it in an abstract sense. In the bibliography, those works, books and articles, used in writing the narrative sections and the dictionary entries are marked with an asterisk. While a full scholarly apparatus is not possible in a popular book such as this Dictionary, I want to give the many colleagues whose works I have used in writing it at least some acknowledgment. Several sources were particularly important. For the entire book, probably the most important source has been my unpublished doctoral dissertation: "Tribe, Qan and Ulus in Early Mongol China: Some Prolegomena to Yiian History" (University of Washington, 1977). In writing the sections on the Ca'adai ulus and Qaidu, I have drawn extensively on what is now the definitive work for much of the topic, Michal Biran's Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1997), and for Mongol Iran I have relied heavily on J. A. Boyle, editor, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). This remains the best general discussion of the topic and its historical context. For Mongol China, a most useful work has been Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, editors, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Those wanting a fuller examination of most of the topics discussed in this Historical Dictionary, with full apparatus, should wait until my forthcoming general history, with the late Angelo Anastasio, and Eugene N. Anderson, Mongols and the Outside World. This will include recent Mongolian history, as well as that of the period of empire, all looked at from a unified, Mongolian perspective. Let me say in concluding that some will be critical of my approach to Mongolian history, with its free combination of history, philology, and anthropology, all from a highly comparative perspective, rather than the traditional approach emphasizing a careful exegesis of detail. In fact, I find the latter approach to be one in which the forest is often not seen for the trees. I seek not only to see the Mongolian forest, but also how it is structured, not only in its own terms, but also from the perspective of other cultures, and other societies. The time, in my view, has come for such an approach.
Acknowledgments
Many provided encouragement as I planned and wrote this book. Special thanks go to the two specialized readers of an earlier draft, Eugene N. Anderson and Timothy May, to my wife, Sally, who volunteered to proof the final manuscript, to Henry Schwarz for his continued willingness to discuss the bibliography, and point me in the right direction, and to Igor de Rachewiltz for his willingness to share his research on the Secret History of the Mongols. Providing useful suggestions and warm encouragement, as always, was Philippa Ferraria (MKA Philippa Alderton), a 6'" century Goth, who helped proof the manuscript and also indirectly suggested to me the idea of including recipes in Appendix C. I would also like to thank Buu Huynh and Vy Pham for listening to me go on about the dictionary and serving as guinea pigs for choice nuggets. Buu Huynh also made useful editorial suggestions.
Reader's Notes There is no universally accepted system for spelling the Mongolian words and terms of the age of empire and after and, in some cases, there is even a lack of agreement upon the proper forms themselves. A large part of the problem is due to the fact that we have so few documents in Mongolian from the period in question and must rely on reconstructions made from spellings of the words in Islamic or other foreign sources. They often have long manuscript traditions resulting in many erroneous forms transmitted to the present day. These reconstructions are particularly problematic when Chinese transcriptions are our only source since, although, thanks to early Chinese use of printing, the evidence is more reliable, Chinese (9.v.) is too simple phonologically to represent the sounds of many Mongolian, Turkic, and other foreign words found in the sources of the time. Most Mongolian and, particularly, Turkic finals simply do not exist in Chinese and representing the complex diphthongs characteristic of most Central Asian Turkic languages of the past and of the present is quite beyond Chinese. There is the added problem of having to take into consideration the specific Chinese pronunciation of the era (so-called Old Mandarin) and possible dialectical variants (the speech of Peking, barely in the Old Mandarin zone in the 13th century, for example) that we may not understand today. Thus, recovering Mongolian words and terms from Chinese sources is an uncertain enterprise at best, and only possible at all due to our ability to make comparison between various versions of what is apparently the same word, the drafting of modern forms to understand the past, and the existence of a few texts in Chinese intended for the serious study of the Mongolian by Ming Dynasty (q.v.) translators, for example, and utilizing a more scientific transcription system with a better representation of finals and diphthongs. The longest and most complete of these reproduces the entire text of the Secret History of the Mongols (q.v.), which has been largely reconstructed from this Ming version. Yet even this text has many problems due in large part to the fact that it is possible to misread forms in Uighur-script Mongolian (see Mongolian Script) because of the ambiguity of the script itself, and the Chinese transcribers of the Secret History, who had a now-lost Uighur-script version of the text before them, have done just this. In any case, the existence of such fairly reliable texts is the exception rather than the rule. They are also exceptional in that they seem to represent a reasonably standard usage of the form of Mongolian considered the most important standard language of the time, Middle Mongolian (q.v.). This is the language in which Ming Dynasty informants recited the Uighur-script original text, which reflects other linguistic values entirely. More typical are forms that do not appear to reflect any rules or even standard usage. Some are outright strange. While much of this may reflect transmission problems or a simple mishearing of native Mongolian words by nonnatives, there is also the issue of other dialects than standard Middle Mongolian. There is also the possibility that the Mongolian spoken environment of the time may have been heavily Turkicized and the forms that have come down to us are mixed, linguistically, as a consequence. All of this is to say that while some reconstructed forms are more reliable than others, and many are even likely to be entirely accurate, the potential for error and misunderstanding is great, all the more so because the detailed linguistic studies of the various court and other environments of the Mongol era are largely lacking, particularly for China. Users of this dictionary are thus warned about overly exact reconstructions where the available evidence simply does not allow it. Many are highly artificial and arbitrary, even if widely quoted in the literature out of lack of anything better in most cases. My own approach is probably artificial and arbitrary too, but I have at least striven to be consistent in using a single authority in most cases. This is Igor de Rachewiltz's Index to the Secret History of the Mongols, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University (Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series, 121), 1972. The Secret History of the Mongols is not only our single largest treasury of Mongolian words and phrases from the era of Mongolian empire and its successor states, but the de Rachewiltz text is highly reliable in part because it has been computer-checked for consistency. In his Index he employs a modification of the transcription system originally employed by Paul Pelliot in his reconstruction of the text of the Secret History of the Mongols, but with fewer dia- critics, making his spellings easily reproducible with even a minimal character set. Mongolian words occurring in the Index and used in this Historical Dictionary, with a few exceptions, mostly where another form has become established in the literature, are spelled as they occur there except that I have made a choice between alternative forms in some cases (using the form more common in the text). Other Mongolian words and terms of the period, those found in the texts but not existing in the Secret History of the Mongols, I have endeavored to spell in the same way, but not to the extent of making possibly arbitrary reconstructions. Note too that some Mongolian forms given below are Classical Mongolian forms, as they are spelled in the Uighur script, e.g., qayan, not qa'an, or are the current standard Khalkha forms, e.g., khaan. For the convenience of the more specialized reader, Appendix B provides an index of all Middle Mongolian words and expressions used in the text as well as a few other forms. All Chinese terms used below are transliterated in accordance with the Pinyin system, except that I have not changed bibliographical entries using the old Wade-Giles system. Chinese characters are universally provided for the first occurrence of a Chinese word, term, or name in a given entry or section, except for the names of dynasties for which see the table below on page xxvii. No attempt has been made to provide Old Mandarin forms, which are not that different from modern in any case. This is generally the convention in the field as well. The Hepburn system is used for Japanese with macrons. Russian words are transliterated in accordance with the system employed in reports published by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (except for a few names whose forms are well established in the literature), and the same practice is followed for any modern Turkic forms now written in the Cyrillic script. For older forms I follow G. Doerfer, Tuvkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupevsischen, four volumes, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963-1975, or some other indicated authority, if there is good reason to do so. In each case these forms have full diacritics. Persian and Arabic forms are spelled as in the Cambridge History of Iran with full diacritics. Exceptions to the above rules include many forms that are firmly a part of popular usage, or whose spelling is firmly a part of some source tradition. Thus I write Mongol, and not Mongqol, except in phrases @eke mongqol ulus, "the Great Mongol Patrimony," i.e., the Mongol Empire), Bukhara instead of Buk&irB, Baghdad instead of Ba&dBd (but Ba&dBd-qatun), Ghazan, instead of an unfamiliar Qasan, or mazan, although I have resisted Genghis Khan and Ulan Bator, writing, respectively, Cinggis-qan and Ulaanbaatar. When well-established forms exist in the text of Marco Polo I have at least crossreferenced those that are the most well known. In all of this I have firmly followed the maxim of using forms that will be usable by the nonspecialist but that will still be reasonably solid.
Introduction One of the most important events in the history of the European Middle Ages was the sudden emergence of an unprecedented threat from the interior of Asia, the Mongols. In less than two decades, the armies of Temiijin, the later Cinggis-qan (q.v.), had gone from raiding the areas immediately around Mongolia (9.v.) to mounting major expeditions, one of which got as far as southern Russia (1223), and achieving major conquests. While steppe peoples had threatened Europe before, and some had even maintained a semipermanent presence there, usually on the fringes of Europe proper, no steppe threat had emerged as quickly and decisively as that of the Mongols. Scarcely a decade and a half after their first sudden appearance, Mongol armies began destroying Russia systematically, and in 124 1 mounted a frightening invasion of Eastern Europe that took them as far as the present borders of Germany and the outskirts of Vienna, before retreating the next year, never to return. Less than two decades later the Mongol Empire, the first truly world empire in history, uniting much of the territory of Eurasia and a substantial part of the Old World's population under its control, was gone, replaced by four successor qanates based respectively in China (q.v.), western Turkistan (see Turkistan), Russia (q.v.), and Iran (q.v.): the Yuan Dynasty (q.v.) or Qanate China, the Patrimony of Ca'adai or Ca'adai ulus (q.v.), The Golden Horde (q.v.), and the Ilqanate (q.v.). To which may be added the empire of Qaidu (q.v.), who waged a long war against Mongol China and other enemies. Within less than a century these too were gone, although various Golden Horde successor states persisted into the 16th century, and, in one case, into the 18th. Despite the comparative rapid disappearance of the political order associated with Mongol expansion, the rise of the Mongols had a profound impact upon world history. By the 1240s, at latest, it was possible to travel virtually unimpeded anywhere in Mongol domains, from the borders of Poland to the interior of north China, from Novgorod to southern Iran or even Tibet (q.v.), just then coming under Mongol control. Not only did merchants take advantage of the opportunities that these expanded vistas offered, but explorers of every complexion soon followed, from the West in particular. Between 1220 and 1250 the narrow European worldview, with its rudimentary maps and a cultural boundary that ended with Jerusalem, and knew little enough about that, gave way before a flood of new information. William of Rubruck (q.v.) never got to China, but he heard a lot about it, and came back with his reports. Not long after, European merchants were actually going there, and towards the end of the Mongol era the account of his travels of Marco Polo (q,v.) appeared. It was a sensation, and no book, with the possible exception of the Bible or other major religious texts, has ever been so influential. Columbus took it with him, and we still live in its shadow, or at least in the shadow of the world it gave rise to. Others went the opposite way. They included Rabban SaumFi (q.v.), born in what is now Inner Mongolia, but later a traveler as far as France, where he met the kings of France and England. From the Muslim side, we have the account of the greatest explorer of them all, Ibn BaffC'fa (q.~.). His writings dwarf those of Marco Polo in size and include unprecedented information about the farthest reaches of the world. Much of his travels took place in Mongol-controlled areas and he was richly patronized by Mongol princes. Other, more subtle influences were at work as well. A nowlost Italian church painting shows Saint Jerome reading a book in aPhags-Pa Script (q.v.) from the China of Qubilai-qan (q.v.). Italian merchants gave their children "Tartar" names and brought back exotic pottery, textiles, and even art in East Asian styles. The backgrounds of Persian miniature painting became Chinese, an acupuncture manual was translated into Persian by a translation agency headed by Rashid al-Din (q.v.). He also wrote the first truly world history using European and East Asian sources.
Throughout Eurasia new foodways emerged, based on imitation of Mongolian court foods. One food of the time, baklava (q.v.), the word is derived from Mongolian, is still with us. In Europe, even ladies' hats followed Mongol fashion, while in many societies, including Mongol China and in Portugal, the Mongol word for a bribe became important loan words. Just by its size, the Mongol Empire deserves a special place in world history. When we also consider its cultural impact, as one of the most multicultural structures in human history, its importance becomes even more manifest. Truly, Heaven and Earth, in the words of the Secret History (q.v.), must have taken counsel together in creating it since its achievement seems beyond mere human abilities.
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