Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe destruction of the Baghdadi libraries has been a powerful image connected to the Mongol conquest of 1258, often claimed to have precipitated the decline of Muslim civilization. This study, however, challenges this claim by reconstructing the state of libraries in Ilkhanid Baghdad, revealing a thriving intellectual community. Based on a close reading in Arabic biographical dictionaries and analysis of samāʿ and book lists, it elucidates the functions of libraries in Ilkhanid Baghdad, identifies channels of knowledge transmission, and offers a glimpse of the libraries' holdings. Finally, it analyzes the Mongols' role in invigorating local scholarship and the impact their rule had on Baghdad's intellectual life.

AbstractThe Mongol Empire is as an early example of the transformative role of mobility, celebrated in the contemporary social sciences. The only way in which the Mongols who by the time of Chinggis Khan numbered less than a million nomads, were able to create and rule their huge empire was by fully mobilizing the resources—both human and material—from the regions under their control. This high measure of mobility fostered robust cross-cultural exchanges in various fields, resulting in a huge expansion of knowledge and connectivity, cultural relativism, and a common imperial culture—political, material, institutional—with regional variants. These developments set the stage for major transformations in world history. The introduction presents the articles included in this special issue, which tackle various case-studies of mobility and transformation while looking at the Mongol Empire in Eurasian perspective, and highlighting the impact of the Mongols' indigenous culture on the proto-global world of the 13th and 14th centuries.

Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions. This volume brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore how nomads played the role of 'agents of cultural change.'

All major continental empires proclaimed their desire to rule 'the entire world', investing considerable human and material resources in expanding their territory. Each, however, eventually had to stop expansion and come to terms with a shift to defensive strategy. This volume explores the factors that facilitated Eurasian empires' expansion and contraction: from ideology to ecology, economic and military considerations to changing composition of the imperial elites. Built around a common set of questions, a team of leading specialists systematically compare a broad set of Eurasian empires - from Achaemenid Iran, the Romans, Qin and Han China, via the Caliphate, the Byzantines and the Mongols to the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Russians, and Ming and Qing China. The result is a state-of-the art analysis of the major imperial enterprises in Eurasian history from antiquity to the early modern that discerns both commonalities and differences in the empires' spatial trajectories