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- Convenors:
-
Judith Kolbas
(Miami University)
Beatrice Manz (Tufts University)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Posvar 3800
- Start time:
- 27 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
New research on the Mongol Empires seemingly emerges everyday. Climate science and expanded understanding of how the sources were written and expanded has altered our appreciation of the empire's history. This panel will explore some of the latest findings and how they apply to the empire and how it has revised our own understanding of the events within the Mongol Empire. Climatic studies has raised questions about the rise of the Mongol Empire as well as its impact on military operations. Now more localized applications of climate studies are being applied to the study of the Mongol Empire such as its impact on the Jochid Ulus. The study of key sources reveals not only additional materials, but also a better understanding of how documents and authors are connected, while also demonstrating that a source must always be understood within the context of its period and its author's intent--a lesson that historians must never forget.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Stefan Kamola (Eastern Connecticut State University)
Paper long abstract:
Hafez-e Abru, boon companion to Tamerlane and court historian to Shahrokh, famously wrote a continuation to Rashid al-Din's dynastic history of the Mongols and reconstructed a fragmentary copy of Rashid al-Din's world history. He also produced his own version of a universal history that embedded Rashid al-Din's dynastic history into a larger historical chronology. Beyond these works, however, his engagement with the works of Rashid al-Din was even more extensive than has previously been recognized. In this paper, I examine the numerous ways that Hafez-e Abru collected, corrected, and updated manuscripts of Rashid al-Din's historical writing. As a result of these activities, fully one third of the extant manuscripts of Rashid al-Din's work can be connected to Hafez-e Abru. As Rashid al-Din's first editor, Hafez-e Abru shaped the modern reception of his predecessor's work in ways that have both facilitated and complicated our study of Mongol history.
Timothy May (University of North Georgia)
Paper long abstract:
The Mongols never met a weapon that they didn't use. Gunpowder is one of them. In the past I have argued that there is no evidence that the Mongols used gunpowder outside of East Asia. While some scholars have agreed with this, other scholars indicate they did. Regardless, gunpowder was certainly transmitted to Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East during the period of the Mongol Empire. The question remains as to how Roger Bacon received his recipes in the thirteenth century as well as why early European cannons bear a remarkable resemblance to those used by the Yuan and Ming. This paper will explore arguments on both sides and attempt to make a conclusion based on the documentary and archaeological evidence as to the Mongols use as well as the transmission of gunpowder and firearm technology.
Uli Schamiloglu (Nazarbayev University)
Paper long abstract:
This paper builds upon the author's proposal that the Golden Horde state began to experience climate change around the 1280s. The medieval period of warm and wet climate began to end at that time, followed by the transition to a period of dryer (and cooler) climate in the western territories of the Golden Horde. Although it would be centuries before the height of the "Little Ice Age" and the "Maunder minimum" of reduced sunspot activity (1645-1715), the impact nonetheless began to be felt very quickly by the Golden Horde.
The author now argues that climate change may also be a primary or secondary factor in a series of changes in the western territories of the Golden Horde. The author has already noted elsewhere that the expansion of grain production around Ükek (present day Uvek, near Saratov) could be a result of shifting patterns of precipitation. (The increased demand for grain in the Black Sea trade is also a response to climate change in SW Europe.) In the Golden Horde, in addition to the growing role of Ükek, we also see the transfer of the capital from Saray Batu to Saray Berke located further north along the Volga River. This could be a result of changing trade patterns, but arguably it can also be linked to changing environmental conditions along the lower Volga region. From this perspective, it is also possible that the political struggles among the Golden Horde élite in the last two decades of the 13th century can be connected not only to changing patterns in trade, but to changing environmental conditions affecting nomadic populations as well.
Finally, the most famous result of climate change would be the creation of environmental conditions favorable to the spread of various diseases, especially the infamous pandemic known as the Black Death (caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis) from the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau to the territory of the Golden Horde in the late 1330s (or earlier?). Of course, the Black Death would arrive in Kaffa in 1346, after which it spread to the Middle East and Europe. As the author has argued elsewhere, the Black Death resulted in a wide range of catastrophic transformations in the territory of the Golden Horde state, just like elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe. More recently it has been proposed that smallpox was yet another disease which affected the Golden Horde in the mid-14th century.