Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Mar 25, 2004 - History - 245 pages
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 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 a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking 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. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.
 

Contents

Before the Mongols
8
Formation of the Ilqans 12511265
17
Grand Qans and Ilqans 12651295
24
Continuity and change under Ghazan 12951304
31
Sultāns and Grand Qans 13041335
35
Economic ties
41
Overview of the relationship
51
Marco Polo and Polo
59
Agriculture
115
Cuisine
127
Medicine
141
Astronomy
161
Printing
176
Models and methods
189
Agency
193
Filtering
203

Qubilai and Bolad Aqa
63
Rashīd alDīn and Pūlād chīnksānk
72
Historiography
83
Geography and cartography
103
Summation
210
Bibliography
212
Index
238
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About the author (2004)

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).