Download PDF | Michal Biran and Hodong Kim, editors - The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire. 2 vols.-Cambridge University Press (2023).
1513 Pages
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Chinggis Khan and his progeny ruled over two-thirds of Eurasia. Connecting east, west, north, and south, the Mongols integrated most of the Old World, promoting unprecedented cross-cultural contacts and triggering the reshuffle of religious, ethnic, and geopolitical identities. The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire studies the empire holistically in its full Eurasian context, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center. Written by an international team of more than forty leading scholars, this two-volume set provides an authoritative and multifaceted history of “the Mongol moment” (1206–1368) in world history and includes an unprecedented survey of the various sources for its study, textual (written in sixteen languages), archaeological, and visual. This groundbreaking Cambridge History sets a new standard for future study of the empire. It will serve as the fundamental reference work for those interested in Mongol, Eurasian, and world history.
M ICHAL B IRAN is the Max and Sophie Mydans Foundation Professor of the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently the director of its Institute of Asian and African Studies, she is a historian of Inner Asia, the medieval Islamic world and imperial China, and has published twelve books and volumes as well as numerous articles. She is a member of the Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences. HODONG KI M is a Professor Emeritus of the Seoul National University. He received his PhD degree from Harvard University and his thesis was published as Holy War in China (2004). A member of the Academy of Science, Korea, he is the author of books and articles on the history of Xinjiang as well as the Mongol Empire, published in both English and Korean.
Introduction
michal biran and hodong kim
The Mongol Empire changed the world. In the thirteenth century, Chinggis Khan and his heirs created the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen, an empire that at its height stretched from Korea to Hungary and from Anatolia, Iraq, and Vietnam to Siberia, ruling over two-thirds of the Old World. The Chinggisids connected east, west, north and south, integrating the Old World, promoting cross-cultural contacts of an unprecedented scope and triggering the reshuffle of religious and ethnic identities. It contributed to the discovery of the New World, ushered in the shift from the medieval to the early modern, and left an enduring legacy for later Eurasian empires. What is more, it was the indigenous nomadic culture of the Mongols, notably the mobility and redistribution inherent to it, that played a major and active role in these transformations. The impact of the Mongol Empire on world history has been debated for centuries, running the gamut from the “Tatar yoke” to the Pax Mongolica, and this discourse has often been loaded with strong nationalist undertones. The merciless destruction that the Mongols left in their wake is still what most people associate with the empire, and there is no reason to pretend it did not happen. Nevertheless, other, no less important, aspects of their complex legacy were hidden or ignored, not least due to the fractured way in which the empire was usually studied up to about two decades ago. In contrast, The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire studies the Mongol Empire from a holistic point of view in its full Eurasian context, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center. It scrutinizes the Mongol Empire as a multifaceted phenomenon, one that combined elements from various Asian imperial traditions (particularly steppe, Islamic, Iranian, and Sinitic empires) and created a common imperial culture – political, material, institutional – that has had a broad and enduring impact on world history.
Scope
The two volumes of the Cambridge History cover mainly the “Mongol moment” in world history (1206–1368), namely the period from the rise of Chinggis Khan to the retreat of the Great Khans from China in 1368. This rather long moment is commonly divided into two: first, the era of the United Mongol Empire (1206–1260) – when an ever-expanding polity ruled the newly conquered lands from its center in Mongolia; second, the period of “the Mongol commonwealth,” during which the empire to some extent dissolved, resulting in the creation of four regional empires seated in China, Iran, Central Asia and the Volga region, each headed by a different branch of the Chinggisid family. The state headed by the Great Khan or qa’an/qaghan, in Mongolian Qa’an Ulus,1 was centered in China, to where the imperial capital shifted after 1260, eventually settling in Dadu (Mo. Daidu) – Beijing. It became known as the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and enjoyed a nominal, though not uncontested, primacy over its counterparts. Hülegü Ulus, known by modern historians as the Ilkhanate (1260–1335), had its center in modern Iran and Iraq; Jochi Ulus or the Golden Horde (1260–1502) was centered in the Volga region; and Chaghadai Ulus or the Chaghadaid Khanate (1260–1678) held power in Central Asia.2 After the empire’s dissolution, there was only one major Mongol expansion campaign, which culminated in the final conquest of Song China (1276–1279). Yet this campaign, which added this richest and most populous country to the Mongol domains, was of tremendous importance, as it enabled the Mongols to connect the Eurasian continental and maritime trade routes, creating a proto-global economic exchange. While the four Mongol polities were often at odds, they retained a strong sense of Chinggisid unity, seeing their – often bloody – conflicts as family feuds between brotherly states. These states shared genealogy, ideology, and institutions (and some personnel), and were closely connected by economic, religious, artistic, scientific, and diplomatic networks that reached far beyond the Chinggisid space.3 In the midfourteenth century, all four Mongol empires were embroiled in political and ecological crises that led to the collapse of the Mongol states in Iran (1336) and China (1368), and considerably weakened the two remaining steppe khanates. The fall of the Great Khan’s state in China is considered the end of the “Mongol moment,” since it brought the Chinggisids back to the steppe and disrupted the economic and cultural exchange typical of Mongol rule. Yet descendants of Chinggis Khan continued to rule in the western steppe, in Muslim Central Asia, and later in India, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and remained an important factor in Mongolia. Moreover, the memory of the empire, its political culture, and its various institutions, continued to impact imperial formation and rule across Eurasia well into the early modern period.
The Study of the Mongol Empire: Toward a Holistic Paradigm
The study of the Mongol Empire has made enormous strides in the past two decades, and its most notable impact is the shift of seeing the empire not only in national or regional terms but from a holistic perspective, in its full Eurasian context. Due to the gigantic dimensions of the empire, and the resulting bewildering variety of languages in which the history of Chinggisid expansion and rule were recorded, previously scholars tended to choose one corner of the empire, to base their work on sources in one of its two major languages – Persian and Chinese (and sometimes Russian) – and to frame their inquiry in a dynastic or national context, often concentrating on the impact the Mongols had on it. While such works have their merit, this state of affairs can easily lead to portraying the Mongols as barbarian outsiders who threaten, invade, and demolish sedentary civilizations, outside and inside the empire. Moreover, such frameworks can easily underscore the local components of the empire at the expense of its Mongol character. The main reason for this is that the information about the Mongols was mostly penned by their sedentary subjects (or enemies), each bounded in the models of his own civilization and local tradition. Mongolian institutions and policies therefore often tend to be obscured in the sources, whose authors either did not approve of them or were not too interested: Chinese and Muslim historians endeavored to portray the Mongols as a “normal” Chinese or Iranian dynasty while the Russian chronicles adopted the “ideology of silence,” basically ignoring Mongol dominion over their lands. Reading sources from different parts of the empire together, with full awareness of the various historiographical traditions involved, is thus essential for reconstructing a fuller picture of Mongol institutions and policies, and for writing the history of the empire as a whole, together with its constituent parts. Indeed, the major breakthrough in the study of the Mongol Empire in the last decades came from the works of our late contributor Thomas T. Allsen (1940– 2019). Equally familiar with the Persian, Chinese, and Russian sources, and adept in the historical anthropology of steppe nomadism, Allsen looked at the empire from a holistic perspective, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center of his inquiry. This not only enabled him to write a multifaceted political history of Möngke Qa’an, presenting the United Empire both at its height and on the eve of its dissolution,4 but, in his further books, notably Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A History of Islamic Textiles (1997) and Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (2001), to highlight the cultural and economic exchange that took place under their rule.5 Allsen’s work initiated “the cultural turn” in the study of the Mongol Empire,6 greatly enlarging the range of research topics, and highlighting the cultural – religious, scientific, artistic, institutional – and economic exchanges that prevailed in Mongol Eurasia, as well as aspects of social and cultural histories, in all of which the Mongols played a central and active role. His holistic paradigm is the point of departure for The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire. In the two decades that have passed since the publishing of Culture and Conquest, and the near decade in which The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire was conceived, this new paradigm has been considerably invigorated. Thus, even those focusing on one corner of the empire are more aware of its Mongol character and of what was going on in other parts of Eurasia. Likewise, more people in both east and west systematically integrate sources from across Eurasia, notably Chinese and Persian but also Arabic, Russian, and others. In East Asia, this trend owes much to scholars such as Sugiyama Masaaki, Liu Yingsheng, and Kim Hodong,7 and in the West mainly to Michal Biran and her students.8 Younger and emerging scholars trained in Israel, East Asia, Europe, and the United States will hopefully make this approach dominant among the new generation of Mongol Empire research. The thriving of the field is attested to and strengthened by the growing number of reference works9 and textbooks,10 and the translation, editing, and publication of primary sources, as well as more specific monographs, collected volumes, and articles. In particular, Igor de Rachewiltz’s translation of the Secret History of the Mongols, the only extant Mongolian source for the rise of Chinggis Khan, has been of prime importance. The excellent translation is accompanied by an encyclopedic commentary that deals with nearly every aspect of Chinggis Khan’s Mongolia.11 Even beforehand, Wheeler Thackston’s translation of the history of the Mongols as recorded in the Persian Compendium of Chronicles (Ja¯miʿ al-Tawa¯r¯kh ı ) of Rash¯d al-D ı ¯n (d. ı 1317), a polymath of Jewish origin who served as the Ilkhanate’s vizier and wrote the first ever world history (including the histories of the Mongols, Chinese, Indians, Franks (i.e., Europeans), Muslims, Turks, and Jews), has also been of major importance.12 Rash¯d al-D ı ¯n, one of the major cultural brokers of the empire, included data ı not only on the United Empire and the Mongols in Iran, but also on the other Mongol branches. His methods, political tendencies, debts to other historians, and other works, both theological and scientific, have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years,13 yet his central position as the most important historian of the Mongols remains intact. While other important Persian sources are available in translation – the most recent addition is George Lane’s translation of Akhba¯r al-Moghu¯l (Mongol News), a short work copied by the polymath Qut˙ b al-D¯n Sh ı ¯ra ı ¯z¯ ( ı 1236–1311) and first published in 200914 – Chinese sources on the Mongols have been less accessible to non-sinologists. Yet this situation is about to be changed, mainly due to the efforts of Christopher Atwood, who has begun to translate the annals of the official history of the Yuan (Yuan shi) in articles that have appeared in the journal Mongolian Studies. Additionally, in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources, he has translated five short travelogues relating to the time of the United Empire, while his long-awaited annotated translation of the Shengwu qinzheng lu (History of the Campaigns of Chinggis Khan) reveals a Chinese chronicle that retained an alternative Mongolian version of the empire’s early years, different from the Secret History and used also by Rash¯d al-D ı ¯n. ı 15 A first English translation of a chapter from the Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan), a 1331 compilation written in the challenging Yuan colloquial language, one considerably influenced by Mongolian grammar, was included in Bettine Birge’s recent book,16 while Buell and Anderson have translated the Huihui Yaofang, an encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine compiled under the Yuan dynasty that partially survived in a Ming dynasty copy.17 All these activities have benefited from and been augmented by an upsurge of works on primary sources in East Asia, notably China. Thus well-known legal sources from the Yuan dynasty, such as the Yuan dianzhang and the Tongzhi tiaoge (Statutes from the Comprehensive Regulations), were newly studied and rendered easy to understand with punctuated editions.18
A partial copy of the Zhizheng tiaoge (Statutes of the Zhizheng Period (1341–1368)), the last legal code promulgated by the Yuan government in 1346, was found in Kyungju, Korea, and was published in a punctuated text with a facsimile,19 while a team in Nanjing is working on a new annotated edition of the Yuan shi, the official history of the Yuan dynasty. Another trend, from the other edge of Asia, is the growing scholarly use of Arabic sources, from within the empire and beyond its borders. Notably, the voluminous sources of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517) are a huge reservoir of information about the Mongols – not only the Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde but also the other Mongol polities. Moreover, works compiled in the Ilkhanate, notably in Iraq, in Mongol Central Asia, and even in Yemen and North Africa, add unique details which are of great value, especially for aspects of the social and cultural history of the Mongol states.20 Simultaneously, the study of documents, including edicts, orders, and inscriptions in various scripts, has advanced considerably, and many have been newly translated and reviewed. Studies of the multilingual written materials found in Heicheng (Qara-Qoto) were also published with facsimile editions.21 Scholars have paid close attention to epigraphical materials, written in various scripts, e.g., Uighur, ’Phags-pa, Syriac, and Arabic, found in Mongolia, China, and Iran.22 Among the monographs of the last decade, Jackson’s The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (2017) is a voluminous and erudite work that combines political, military, and religious history, while Marie Favereau’s recent The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (2021) is an ambitious and accessible history of the Jochid Ulus in its broader Eurasian context. The last decade has also witnessed an upsurge in works dedicated to aspects of social, cultural, and religious histories of the various polities or across the empire,23 and the same is true of books dealing with art history, notably textiles, both within the empire and through its impact on European art.24
Mongol women and the Mongol marriage system (including the imperial sonsin-law) have merited quite a few monographs.25 The Mongol legacies to their successors in China, Iran, and the early modern empires in general have also been widely discussed.26 New topics that will probably be developed in the coming years include economic history and environmental history, inter alia the epidemics. While quite a lot of work has recently been devoted to trade and economic exchange,27 we still know too little about other facets of the Mongol economy, notably agriculture and pastoralism. The current global-warming and climate crisis, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, have accelerated the study of environmental and plague history everywhere, and the Mongol Empire is no exception.
Climate assisted the expansion of Chinggis Khan’s troops and affected the empire’s major expansion campaigns while both the Little Ice Age and the Black Death played a role in the mid-fourteenth-century crisis that led to the collapse of the Mongol moment.28 The inclusion of methods from the natural sciences, from the fields of climatology and genetics, have considerably broadened the tool kit available for scholars and entailed a new reading of the historical and archaeological sources. The archaeology of the empire, notably in Mongolia, has also made strides in recent years.29 Yet we anticipate that future use of micro-archaeological methods can also revolutionize our understanding of daily life and population movements in Mongol Eurasia.
The Structure of the Book The immense dimensions of the empire and the huge variety of its sources imply that the best way of comprehensively studying the Mongols is by an international team of leading scholars from both east and west. More than forty scholars from more than a dozen countries in Asia, Europe, and America took part in this enterprise, and in quite a few cases we paired two scholars for one chapter, in order to fully cover the discussed subject. The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire comprises two volumes: a thematic volume and another dedicated to sources for the study of the empire. Volume 1 begins with “Political History,” which focuses on the political–military history of the United Empire and its four successor states, centered in China, in Iran, in Central Asia, and on the Volga river, and highlighting the common attributes of the different Mongol polities. This is followed by “Thematic Histories,” which refers to the United Empire and the four uluses throughout the Mongol moment and studies the imperial institutions; the military machine; ideology; economic, religious, artistic, and scientific exchange; environmental history; and women and gender. While most of these chapters provide an insightful review of the subject – enriched with new and original research – the chapters on the economy and the environment of the Mongol Empire, two fields the study of which is still in its infancy, do not pretend to cover the whole field, but offer many data that will hopefully encourage further exploration. The third part, “Views from Edges: Regional Histories,” focuses on particular subjected regions, most of which the Mongols administered indirectly. Besides showcasing the assortment of Chinggisid governing methods, the entries falling under this heading shed light on the “centers” as well as the institutions and policies described in Parts 1 and 2 respectively, by examining their connections to the margins.
The first chapter is devoted to Mongolia itself. While the empire’s capital was originally in Mongolia (Qaraqorum), the seat of government was transferred to China in 1260. From that point on, the Chinggisid “homeland’” is almost ignored by the research literature. Among the other case studies of outlying territories are Siberia, Georgia and the Caucasus, Korea, and the Rus0 principalities. The final part of this volume, “External Histories,” explores the Chinggisids’ impact on regions outside their empire’s borders. It includes chapters on Western Europe and the Mediterranean, South Asia, and the Arab Middle East. While these lands never succumbed to the Mongols, they could not but be affected by the era’s lone superpower. The arrangement of the volume means that some events and players are described in several chapters, sometimes from different points of view, thereby reflecting the complexity of the historical narratives of the Mongols. While we could not cover every aspect and region, we believe that this wide-ranging and integrated framework results in a rounder and fuller portrait of the empire and its various manifestations. The second, complementary, volume reviews the literary, archaeological, and visual sources on the Mongol Empire, along with comprehensive bibliographies. This is quite an exception in the history of the Cambridge Histories, which usually settle on more modest “bibliographical essays” at the end of the volume or simply a bibliographical list. Such an “anomaly” is, however, required by the unique character of the Mongol Empire: while the research of most empires demands proficiency in one or two languages, the Mongols’ voluminous holdings encompassed a baffling array of languages and terrains, and the sources are thus scattered across different historiographical traditions and various materialities.
The discussion of the literary sources, which comprises the lion’s share of Volume I I, is arranged according to the most pertinent languages and includes chapters introducing sources in sixteen languages. The archaeological sources are arranged geographically, and the visual chapter highlights cross-Eurasian connections. This volume not only enables the reader to follow the Mongols’ image in and impact on various texts and artifacts, from Hebrew Kabbala texts from Provence to Japanese animal carpets, but, more importantly, is an effective antidote against the previously fractured character of the study of the empire. Volume II is indispensable for taking first steps in studying the Mongols. Yet it is also of immense value even to old hands specializing in one (or several) corners of the empire, who can now be aware of what is out there in the various other corners, and where and how to find it. We hope that these two volumes will serve as a sound scholarly basis for future studies of the Mongol Empire that will highlight the holistic view of it. Lastly, while working on this enterprise, we lost three of our eminent contributors, Thomas T. Allsen (1940–2019), David O. Morgan (1946–2019), and György Kara (1935–2022). As noted above, Tom Allsen revolutionized the study of the Mongol Empire and the paradigm shift he initiated has been the starting point for this Cambridge History. His understanding of the nomadic cultural complex and its evolution across both time and space, as well as his original thinking, helped liberate the study of the Mongol Empire from its confines in philology and the sedentary–nomad binary opposition, and set it on an innovative new path. His books have already become classics, and his creative choice of research topics – the last being pearls and alcohol in Eurasian history30 – opened new vistas for innovative studies. Pursuing a rather unusual academic career and teaching mostly at the College of New Jersey, Allsen did not train graduate students. Yet he was extremely generous with his time and erudition, from which many of the contributors to these volumes benefited greatly. David O. Morgan laid much of the foundation for the modern study of the Mongol Empire: his textbook The Mongols, first published in 1986 and reprinted ever since,31 has often been the first work through which students, scholars, and general readers were introduced to the Mongols.
His witty and accessible writing attracted people to the field and shaped future careers. Furthermore, Morgan was not only an influential scholar of Ilkhanid, Iranian, and Muslim history, but also an outstanding teacher and editor. He trained students at both SOAS and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (including our contributor Timothy May), and supported many emerging scholars. His term as the chief editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1987–1999) made this illustrious journal a venue for many Mongol-related and crossAsian studies, and his long tenure as the chief editor of the prestigious “Cambridge Studies of Islamic Civilization” series (1991–2013) secured the publication of many Mongol- and steppe-related books, including Allsen’s most-cited books. When the book was at the copy-editing stage we had to part with another contributor,György Kara (1935–2022), a pre-eminent expert on Mongolic and Altaic philology and a wonderful and devoted teacher. A member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Kara divided his time between ELTE University in Budapest and Indiana University, training generations of Altaists. A real polyglot who spoke nearly fifty languages, Prof. Kara was first and foremost a Mongolist. His magnum opus, Books of the Mongolian Nomads: More Than Eight Centuries of Writing Mongolian (Bloomington, 2005) thoroughly treated all aspects of Mongolian writing and literacy since the thirteenth century, and he was always willing to discuss complicated paragraphs with overawed historians. We deeply miss these three great mentors and friends, and are proud that their last works are included in The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire. We dedicate this work to their memory.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق