Download PDF | (Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization) Thomas T. Allsen - Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia-Cambridge University Press (2001).
262 Pages
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia In the thirteenth century the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural “clearing house” for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies, and technologies were disseminated and displayed across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations “shared” the cultural resources of their realms with one another.
The result was lively tra c in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, and from agriculture to astronomy. Unexpectedly, the principal conduit of this transmission was an obscure Mongol tribesman, Bolad Aqa, who rst served Chinggisid rulers of China and was then posted to Iran where he entered into a close and productive collaboration with the famed Persian statesman and historian, Rashıd al-Dın.
The conclusion of the work examines why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. The book is informative and erudite. It crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol Empire and promises to become a classic in the eld.
thomas t. allsen is Professor in the Department of History, The College of New Jersey, Ewing. His publications include Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (1997).
Preface The present study originated some twenty- ve years ago with a chance discovery that the Mongolian courts in China and Iran both sponsored the compilation of agricultural manuals in the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. A few years later I discovered, again quite by accident, that this was not mere coincidence, and that there were indeed “agronomical relations” between these two courts.
This in turn led to an interest in other types of cultural exchange between the Il-qans and the Yuan, an exchange that became the focal point of my research over the last decade. My initial intention was to cover all facets of the interchange in one large monograph but this was clearly impractical. Consequently, I have concentrated here on cultural exchanges in the elds of historiography, geography, cartography, agronomy, cuisine, medicine, astronomy, and printing technology. My investigations into other areas of their contact – language study, popular entertainments, and economic thought, as well as the transfer of military technology and the transcontinental resettlement of artisans of varied specialties – will appear as separate studies.
I have had the opportunity to present my preliminary ndings in the form of lectures at a number of academic institutions and the response has always been welcoming and the questions and comments from these audiences most helpful in shaping the direction of my subsequent research. To these various students and scholars I o er my thanks for their guidance and encouragement. I must also record my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities which awarded me a Fellowship for the academic year 1998–99 that permitted me to complete research and prepare a rst draft of the manuscript. Peter Golden and Stephen Dale read and commented on this manuscript and helped to improve it in many substantial ways. So too did the many suggestions and corrections of the anonymous reviewers of the Press.
I am deeply indebted to all of these scholars. I must also o er special thanks to my current department chair, Daniel Crofts, who has supported and facilitated my research over the last several years. Finally, I again express my profound gratitude to my wife, Lucille Helen Allsen, whose enthusiasm, patience, and editorial and word-processing skills are essential ingredients in all my scholarly endeavors.
Introduction
The goals and themes of this work have undergone substantial change in the course of the basic research. As originally conceived, this monograph was to explore the political and diplomatic relationship between the Mongolian courts of China, the Yuan, and Iran, the Il-qans/Il-khans. I was particularly interested in their joint e orts to stave o the military challenge of their rivals and cousins in central Asia, the lines of Chaghadai and Ögödei, and the western steppe, the line of Jochi, in the last half of the thirteenth century and the early decades of the fourteenth century. To sustain one another against their mutual enemies, the regimes in China and Iran shared economic resources, troops, and war matériel.
As time passed, I became increasingly aware that this exchange was far more wide-ranging and diverse, embracing as it did an extensive tra c in specialist personnel, scholarly works, material culture, and technology. My interest in these issues grew and I soon came to the conclusion that these cultural exchanges were perhaps the most consequential facet of their relationship. This, however, was only the rst phase of the work’s transformation. Having settled on the issue of cultural exchange as the central theme, I naively assumed that I would proceed by identifying speci c exchanges and then assess their “in uence”: for example, the impact of Chinese physicians in Iran on Islamic medicine. This, I quickly discovered, posed formidable problems of method, interpretation, and evidence.
The most obvious di culty is that any attempt to establish such in uence requires a detailed knowledge of Chinese and Islamic medicine before, during, and after the Mongolian conquests. The same stricture, of course, applies to all other areas of contact, such as agronomy, astronomy, etc. And, beyond the intimidating range of topics, I came to realize that I simply lacked the formal training and experience to make meaningful evaluations of these complex issues, most of which are highly technical. This realization led to one further modi cation of the goals and themes of the work: in this monograph I will speak primarily to the question of the nature and conditions of the transmission of cultural wares between China and Iran, not the vexed issues of receptivity or rejection of new elements on the part of subject peoples.
In other words, I am mainly concerned with how these two courts utilized the cultural resources of their respective domains, Iran and China, in their e orts to succor and support one another. This reorientation means that early sections on the diplomatic, ideological, and economic relations between the Chinese and Iranian courts, while interesting in themselves, are presented here to provide the political and institutional context in which the Mongolian-inspired cultural exchange took place. A full-scale diplomatic history of Yuan China and Il-qan Iran, sensitive to the changing power relations between the Mongolian, Christian, and Muslim polities of medieval Eurasia, is certainly desirable but not the objective of this study. In fact, it is the overall range, frequency, and intensity of the contacts that are of primary interest here, not the diplomatic goals of speci c embassies – a kind of information that in any event is rarely supplied in the sources.
The core of the work, then, is devoted to the movement of speci c cultural wares between China and Iran. In each case, I will seek to provide full information on given exchanges, some of which, like astronomy, have been previously studied, while others, such as agronomy, have yet to be investigated. These sections will be for the most part descriptive, with an occasional suggestion, opinion, or hypothesis on the more problematical issue of longand short-term in uences. This, it is hoped, will pro tably serve as a guide to specialists interested in tracing contacts and in uences between East and West. The nal sections will be devoted to questions of agency and motivation, and here the Mongols, their cultural priorities, political interests, and social norms take center stage. Indeed, the overarching thesis of this work is the centrality of the nomads to East–West exchange. The nomads of Inner Asia made some notable contributions to world culture, horse riding and felting to name just two, and this, to be sure, has been duly acknowledged.1
More commonly, however, studies of the cultural tra c across Eurasia have focused on the extremities: the desire and receptivity of the great sedentary societies for one another’s products and ideas.2 When the nomads are brought into the picture their in uence on the course of events is usually addressed under the twin rubrics of “communication” and “destruction.”3 In the former, the nomads create a pax which secures and facilitates long-distance travel and commerce, encouraging representatives of sedentary civilizations, the Polos for example, to move across the various cultural zones of Eurasia and thereby take on the role of the primary agents of di usion. In the latter, the nomads, conversely, and perversely, impede contact and destroy culture by their ferocity and military might. For some nationalist historians, nomadic conquest, especially that of the Mongols, was a regressive force in human history accounting for their country’s “backwardness” in modern times.4
These two visions of nomadic history, as Bernard Lewis points out, are not mutually exclusive alternatives; the nomads destroyed some cultural resources and at the same time created conditions in which long-distance cultural exchange ourished.5 There was, in fact, both a Pax Mongolica and a Tartar Yoke, inhering and coexisting in the very same polity. But such a formulation, while true so far as it goes, leaves out too much and has limited explanatory power. For a fuller understanding of the place of the nomads in transcontinental exchanges we must look more deeply at the nomads’ political culture and social norms which functioned as initial lters in the complex process of sorting and selecting the goods and ideas that passed between East and West. Indeed, such possibilities of cultural transmission were embedded in the very structure of Mongolian rule and in the basic ecological requirements of nomadism. Because of the need to distribute large numbers of herd animals and small numbers of people over sizable expanses of territory, the Mongols’ demographic base was quite limited compared to their sedentary neighbors. In Chinggis Qan’s day the population of the eastern steppe, modern Mongolia, was somewhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000.6 Moreover, as pastoralists, they could hardly provide specialists from their own ranks to administer and exploit the sedentary population that fell under their military control.
This critical issue was soon recognized and squarely faced: immediately after the conquest of West Turkestan, ca. 1221, Chinggis Qan sought the advice of Muslim subjects with commercial and/or administrative backgrounds who, in the words of the Secret History, were “skillful in the laws and customs of cities [balaqasun-u törö yasun].”7 As a decided minority in their own state, the Mongols made extensive use of foreigners, without local political ties, to help them rule their vast domains. This technique received its most elaborate development in China, where the Mongols, for purposes of o cial recruitment and promotion, divided the Yuan population into four categories: Mongols, Central and Western Asians (se-mu-jen), North Chinese, and South Chinese.8 Moreover, quotas were established so that the Mongols and West Asians were assured “equal” representation with those selected from the two Chinese personnel pools. Those so appointed were in turn served by a large number of assistants and secretaries of equally diverse social and cultural origins.9 Further, there was a decided tendency in the Yuan to promote these low-level o cials – clerks, gatekeepers, scribes, and, most particularly, translators and interpreters – to high positions in the government and court.10
Thus, the Mongolian rulers of China systematically placed peoples of di erent ethnic, communal, and linguistic backgrounds side by side in the Yuan bureaucracy. There were, in other words, quite literally thousands of agents of cultural transmission and change dispersed throughout the Yuan realm. Some idea of the extent to which these specialists were transported from one cultural zone of the empire to another can be conveyed graphically. In table 1 “Easterners” are de ned for our purposes as subject peoples of the Yuan serving or traveling in the Islamic and Christian lands, the “West,” while “Westerners” are Christians and Muslims who took up residence anywhere within the Yuan regime, the “East.” Even a cursory examination of the raw data reveals the extraordinary geographical mobility and ethnic-occupational diversity of the servitors of the Empire of the Great Mongols. How the Mongols, in the furtherance of their imperial enterprise, went about the business of selecting and appropriating the vast cultural resources of their sedentary subjects and why they initiated the transference of cultural wares and cultural specialists across Eurasia forms the subject of this work.
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