Paper short abstract:

My paper presents a micro-history of the reception of an innovative verse-image synergy from the Yuan dynasty in China by the Ilkhanid court in Tabriz in illuminating the Shah Nama and Iskandernama and in a new multi-media retelling of the Alexander Romance for an Armenian aristocratic audience.

Paper long abstract:

Since its inception in the 2nd century BCE the Silk Road functioned as an important means of exchange across the northern hemisphere not only of mercantile commodities but also cultural products and intellectual concepts, attaining its apogee during the Mongol Empire (13th-14th cc.).

Within this context, my comparative, interdisciplinary approach, theoretically informed by insights from World History, seeks to present a micro-history positing the novel Chinese synergy under the Yuan dynasty of painting, poetry, and calligraphy, inscribing images with accompanying verse surrounded by a broad frame, as a model for inaugurating the illumination of the Shah Nama and Iskandernama romances at the Ilkhanid Mongol court in Tabriz, and the creation of a radically new retelling of the Alexander Romance for a contemporary Armenian aristocratic audience. These romances embellish the narrative with an unprecedented iconographic program which later becomes standard.

My further contention is that the Armenian tradition involved the further dimension of melody, as indicated in manuscript marginalia, permitting us to imaginatively recreate a performance environment in which a select group of nobility would be beguiled by the miniatures, many full-page, somewhat reminiscent of the modern graphic novel, that afforded an epitome of the much more prolix prose original, while being regaled by a bardic rendition of the verse commentary on the images, revivifying the ancient tale of the cosmocrator of Macedon, while inspiring them with lessons on statecraft, strategy, and social philosophy, carefully calibrated to the ethos of their age.