The Mongol Empire and its Legacy

The Mongol Empire was founded by Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century. Within the span of two generations it embraced most of Asia, thus becoming the largest land-based state in history. The united empire lasted only until around 1260, but the major successor states continued for many generations, in the Middle East, present-day Russia, Central Asia and China. It left a lasting impact on these areas and their peoples, which was often far from negative! The papers in this volume offer fresh perspectives on the Mongol Empire, its rule in the eastern Islamic world, Central Asia and China, and the legacy of this rule. Various authors approach the matter from a variety of views, including political, military, social, cultural and intellectual. In doing so, they shed a new light on the Mongol Empire.

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The Mongol Empire was founded by Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century. Within the span of two generations it embraced most of Asia, thus becoming the largest land-based state in history. The united empire lasted only until around 1260, but the major successor states continued for many generations, in the Middle East, present-day Russia, Central Asia and China. It left a lasting impact on these areas and their peoples, which was often far from negative! The papers in this volume offer fresh perspectives on the Mongol Empire, its rule in the eastern Islamic world, Central Asia and China, and the legacy of this rule. Various authors approach the matter from a variety of views, including political, military, social, cultural and intellectual. In doing so, they shed a new light on the Mongol Empire.

This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

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Presents a variety of political, military, social, cultural, and intellectual perspectives on the largest land-based state in human history and on the successor states that carried the legacy of the 13th-century empire into the later history of China, the Middle East, Russia, and Central Asia. The 18 essays discuss such topics as a neglected Arabic source on Chinggis Khan and the early history of the Mongols, Mongol nomadism and Middle Eastern geography, whether the letters of Rashid al-Din are Ilkhanid fact or Timurid fiction, the evidence food and foodways provides on the empire and Turkicization, Qubilai Qa'an and the historians of pre-modern China, China as a successor state, how Mongol the early Ottomans were, the legitimacy of khanship among the Oyirad tribes in relation to the Chinggisid principle, and the vicissitudes of Mongolian historiography in the 20th century. They are from a March 1991 conference in London. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Ph.D. (1990) in Middle Eastern History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is Senior Lecturer in medieval Islamic history at the Hebrew University, and author of Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War (Cambridge, 1995).
David Orrin Morgan, Ph.D. (1977) in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, is Reader in the History of the Middle East at the University of London. He has written The Mongols (London, 1986) and Medieval Persia (London, 1988), and is editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.