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- Convenors:
-
Anne Broadbridge
(University of Massachusetts)
Stefan Kamola (Eastern Connecticut State University)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Conference Room 505
- Sessions:
- Friday 11 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
In recent decades, the history of the Mongol world has become an increasingly familiar story: the dramatic conquests of Chinggis Khan and his sons and grandsons, the brief period of a unified empire, its dissolution into rival khanates, and the rich new contacts they engendered between East and West Asia. The Mongols themselves serve as the connective tissue of this narrative: Mongols as nomads, warriors, emperors, and patrons. This panel brings a series of previously unstudied or under-appreciated external sources and perspectives to the story of the Mongols to cast the familiar story in sharper relief. Armenian, Georgian, and Alan sources from the Caucasus region show how the experience of Mongol conquest there invited resistance on various levels of society and sparked literary responses that compliment the official chronicles produced under Mongol patronage. Individual Mongols travelled beyond the edges of the official Mongol conquest; we will hear about the experience of one Mongol who went to work at the mint in Mamluk Cairo. On the steppes of Central and West Asia, the familiar narrative holds that the Mongols acculturated into the pre-existing population of Turkic tribes. New research, however, shows that the presence of the Mongols radically reshaped those tribes, so that the Turks of the post-Mongol period can be said to be Mongolized, just as the Mongols were Turkicized. Taken together, these papers approach the story of the Mongols in West and Central Asia from new perspectives, allowing us to better appreciate the complex interactions between the Mongols and their neighbors.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 11 October, 2019, -Paper long abstract:
The Mongol conquest of the Armenia and the Middle East in the late 13th century was marked by large-scale sociopolitical upheaval and the union of formerly petty principalities into a single political entity. The effects of these transformations were keenly felt by the local populations and their perspectives are captured in a variety of letters, poems, chronicles, and other forms of correspondence. Diversity in primary source documents is a potentially invaluable tool to a historical inquiry of this period because of its ability to enhance our understanding of the different methods of knowledge production and dissemination. In light of this potentiality, the poetry of the author known as "Frik" has emerged as a particularly enlightening source because of its stylistically detailed discussions of intrigues in the Ilkhanid court, the civil war between Arghun Khan and his vizier Bugha, and Frik's own tragic experiences at the hands of the Mongols.
In spite of the wealth of information that this source offers, it is only in recent years that Frik has undergone a critical review in Anglophone scholarship. Although Frik's poetry discusses the events immediately following the Mongol conquests of the 13th century, and does so in the first person, the oldest extant book with his poetry is a printed book of miscellaneous Armenian verse from the early 16th century. In light of this, definitively placing the author as a contemporary of Arghun, and his poetry as an eyewitness account, seems to be a dubious prospect at best. Instead, my project will critically examine Frik's poetry and pay special attention to the images and memories he evokes of the Ilkhans in general and of Arghun Khan in particular in order to shed light on his possible motives for crafting such a vivid and lasting image of the Mongols in the Armenian literary imagination.
Paper long abstract:
By the late 14th century, the Mongol descendants in Central Asia and the Qipchaq Steppe had become speakers of Turkic languages. Historians accordingly refer to them as "Turks" or "Turkicized Mongols." However, we hear of no Turkic amīrs or tribal leaders of the Mongol successor states seeking to revive the pre-Mongol Turkic states or looking to the latter for political legitimation during the post-Mongol period. The Turkic nomad elites of the Mongol successor states, most notably, Temür, instead continued to honour the charisma and traditions of the Mongol Empire, not the ancient Kök Türk Khagahanate or the pre-Mongol Muslim Turkic dynasties such as the Seljuqs or the Qarakhanids.
We may then wonder why the Turkic nomads of the Mongol successor states in Central Asia and the Qipchaq Steppe looked to the Mongol Empire for political legitimation and even retained a Mongol identity instead of reverting to the pre-Mongol Turkic identities. In this paper, I attempt to answer this question by challenging the widely held view that the Mongols were assimilated by "the majority Turks." More specifically, I will demonstrate that the Turkic nomads of the Mongol successor states in Central Asia and the Qipchaq Steppe arose from the merging of various Turkic groups (consisting of heterogeneous elements that did not coalesce into a single entity sharing a common identity and historical consciousness) and the more cohesive Mongols. The former did not constitute a uniform majority in relation to the latter. In terms of tribal and genetic compositions, the Turkic nomads of the Mongol successor states were closer to the Mongols than to the pre-Mongol Turkic groups. Naturally, they held on to a predominantly Mongol orientation rather than reverting to pre-Mongol identities.
Paper long abstract:
A Mongol in the Cairo Mint
In 650 and 651 AH/1252 and 1253 AD, Ilqāy was a high official at the Mamlūk mint of Cairo. One source only sheds light on Ilqāy's unexpected existence, a series of rare monetary weights: only ten are known, located in six museums from Cairo to California. The weights are made of translucent glass with clear legends written in Arabic script as well as Coptic numerals. As a Mongol, how could Ilqāy have achieved this status when the Mamluks and Mongols were adversaries? This presentation offers an answer with a hypothetical construction of his career indicating amongst other points that he may have been a Jalayrid and also converted to Islam. It also suggests that originally he was a treasury official of the Ögödeids, working first in Qarā Qorum under Ögödei and then for Güyük. He took the imperial style of coinage across the steppe, striking silver, and then organized vassal coinages in Georgia and Anatolia. With the harsh civil war among the Chingizids after Güyük's death, he offered his services to the Mamlūks. As a result, some small objects have led to an investigation of a strange name, Mongol clan and tribal loyalties, and an individual's conversion from shamanism to Islam. This biography also follows a numismatic trail from Qarfā Qorum to Cairo, considering monetary movements, messages of legitimacy, and mint structure. No matter what his detailed biography really is, Ilqāy spent his life surviving regime changes throughout Central Asia and the Middle East. Therefore, this small glimpse of a refugee emerging from a piece of glass the size of a coin is more poignant for its human tale than for Ilqāy's important financial roles.