Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals.

• Author: Hansen, Valerie

Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals. Edited by MICHAL BIRAN, JONATHAN BRACK, and FRANCESCA FIASCHETTI. Oakland, CA: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2020. Pp. xv + 335. $85, [pounds strling]70 (cloth); $29.95, [pounds strling]25 (paper, ebook).

This volume previews a new historiographical consensus about the Mongols that is slowly displacing the prevailing narrative, which features the multiple European envoys who visited the Mongol khans and the omnipresent Marco Polo. Highlighting the activities of historical actors from the Middle East, East Asia, and Central Asia, this emerging understanding offers a fresh interpretation of the united Mongol empire (1206-1260) as well as the different sectors it broke into after 1260. Many of its insights rest on a body of sources in multiple languages: Chinese, Latin, Mongolian, Persian, Arabic, Russian, Armenian, and Georgian, among others.

The editors' introductory essay provides a succinct, up-to-date overview of the Mongol empire and its aftermath. Every graduate student taking oral exams should read it closely, and more established scholars will learn much from it as well. Like the fifteen rigorously copy-edited biographical essays in the volume, it is followed by endnotes and a detailed bibliography. Written to the highest scholarly standard, each essay runs some ten to twelve pages long, with extensive endnotes and detailed bibliographies often of four to five pages or more.

Because the essays will be most useful to scholars researching these fifteen individuals, let us begin with an abbreviated table of contents (following the volume's transliteration of names). Part one is devoted to six generals: the Chinese Guo Kan (by Florence Hodous), the Mongol Baiju (by Sara Nur Yildiz), the Mongol female warrior Qutulun (Michal Biran), the Chinese Yang Tingbi (by Masaki Mukai and Francesca Fiaschetti), the Mongol Sayf al-DTn Qipchaq al-Mansur! (by Amir Mazor), and the Qipchaq Tuqtuqa (by Vered Shurany). Then come the four merchants of part two: Ja'far Khwaja (by Yihao Qiu), Baldwin of Hainaut (by John Giebfried), Jamal al-Din al-Tibi (by Matanya Gill), and Taydula (by Szilvia Kovacs). Finally, the five intellectuals of part three: Rashid al-DTn (by Jonathan Brack), Fu Mengzhi (by Yoichi Isahaya), 'Isa Kelemechi (by Hodong Kim), Padshah Khatun (by Bruno de Nicola), and Jalal al-DTn al-AkhawT (by Or Amir).

Almost all of these names will be unfamiliar to readers...