The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion

"Because it is quite simply one of the most remarkable books on the Mongol Empire ever published. It covers Chinggis Khan, but then it goes far beyond him. And if I’m going to pick one book to discuss the whole of the Mongol Empire, it would be this one. Peter Jackson’s now retired from the University of Keele, but it’s basically his life’s work. His use of the sources and just the sheer number and volume of sources is remarkable. His depth of understanding of the Mongol Empire is unparalleled. I wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s also very reasonably priced, in spite of being over 600 pages. It is an outstanding book, not only covering everything you could possibly want to know about the Mongols, but new analysis. This is a book I think every scholar of the Mongol Empire will be looking at for a very long time. That’s a difficult question. The Empire never really falls, it just goes through a dissolution. “The dissolution of the Mongol Empire” is a phrase that Peter Jackson coined around 1978/ 1979 in a seminal article by that title, looking at why it split apart. In 1260, there was a civil war that began between Khubilai and Ariq Boke, two brothers of Mongke Khan, the fourth khan of the Mongol Empire, who died in 1259 in the province of Sichuan. While these two are duking it out over the throne—Khubilai Khan eventually wins, although he was the usurper—the other parts of the Empire go their own way. They would still look to Khubilai as the emperor, but it’s less a question of Khubilai ruling the entire Empire directly, but rather these other parts doing their own thing, often fighting amongst each other. Eventually we get a partition into four parts. There’s the Middle East; there’s Russia, Ukraine and a large chunk of Kazakhstan and Siberia; there’s East Asia and then Central Asia. All these end at different times, just fading away. You can safely say that a little bit after 1500, by about 1525/1526 the Mongol Empire is done. By 1368 the Mongols are out of China. But there was still a Mongol state in Mongolia, fully intent on re-establishing the Empire. “The Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous empire in history” The Ilkhanate, the Mongol power in the Middle East, ends in 1335. After that, we have various Mongol polities who trace their origins back to various Mongol commanders. In Central Asia, we eventually get Tamerlane, who rules but has Mongol khans on the throne. And then there is another breakup of that territory among the descendants of Tamerlane. Other parts of Central Asia were still ruled by the descendants of Chinggis Khan. The last Chinggis who sat on a throne was removed in the 1920s by the Soviet Union. He was and he wasn’t. He would technically have been classified as a guregen , a son-in-law of Chinggis Khan. It didn’t matter how far back you had to go, or how far removed you were, as long as you married a princess descended from Chinggis Khan, then you can make that claim to be a son-in-law. So, he viewed himself as a restorer. But, again, he had ‘puppet Khans’ until the last one of them died, when he stopped using them. By the time he died, he had done so much that his own charisma was enough to legitimate his own successors. Yes, he goes through a lot of it. He focuses primarily on the Mongols and the Islamic world. But he has previously written a book called The Mongols in the West where he focused on the Mongols and their relationship with Europe. It’s a pity that he probably won’t do one on ‘the Mongols in the East.’ I don’t think he knows Chinese but, you never know, now that he’s retired, he might pick it up and do it. I think he would do an excellent job. Mongolian has no relation to Chinese. Today there are some long Chinese words in Mongolian, but there are also a lot of other loan-words. Mongolian, if you believe in language families (which don’t really exist as we like to imagine them), would be Altaic. It’s more similar to Turkic, to Tungusic languages like Manchu. There are some similarities with Korean and Japanese in structure, but it’s its own language. Originally it was written with what is now known as Mongol bichig , Mongolian script, which was derived from the Uyghur’s script and written horizontally. In the time of Chinggis Khan, Mongolian was written vertically. Bichig itself is derived from a Syriac script, brought to them by Nestorian Christian missionaries in Central Asia. The Mongols adopt that after they conquer the Naiman, who also had a Nestorian population and were using that Uyghur script. They were known as the Church of the East and viewed as heretics by the Byzantines . Eventually most of them left what was the Byzantine Empire and moved eastward into Iran and Central Asia. They actually had a bishopric in Merv, in what is now Turkmenistan. In the 11th century they sent missionaries into Mongolia and converted some people among the Naiman and the Kereit and also the Onggud in what is now Inner Mongolia. Today in Mongolia they use the Cyrillic alphabet, which was introduced in the 1940s because of Mongolia’s association with the Soviet Union after it became the world’s second communist state. It was at the time that Stalin was imposing new scripts on various people in Central Asia and elsewhere, getting rid of Latin and Arabic scripts. There’s a movement to bring back Mongol bichig and, allegedly, it will happen at some point. But I’ve been hearing this since the 1990s, so I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s used for ceremonial purposes. And in Inner Mongolia they do still use it. There is an issue with the Chinese government suddenly imposing Chinese as a more dominant language in education. Many Mongolians are afraid that Mongolian will become more of a ‘kitchen table language’, only spoken in the home, and that they’ll eventually begin to lose their educated literacy in Mongolian."