Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia.

• Author: Biran, Michal
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. By THOMAS T. ALLSEN. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. xiii + 235. $60.

The Pax Mongolica and the extensive cross-cultural exchanges it promoted have long fascinated historians. Thomas T. Allsen's new book, however, sets a new--and extremely high--standard for any future discussion of these issues. It concentrates on the Mongolian-inspired cultural exchanges between China and Iran in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and stresses the role of the Mongols in these borrowings--namely, how the Mongols selected and appropriated the cultural resources of their sedentary subjects and why they initiated the transference of cultural wares across Asia.

The book is divided into five parts. After a short background, part 2 deals with the political and economic relations between the Ilkhanate, the Mongol dynasty in Iran (1260-1335), and the Mongol-Yuan dynasty in China (1271-1368). Part 3 reviews the intermediaries, stressing the role of Bolad Aqa, a Mongol who, after a long and diverse career in China, arrived in Iran in the 1280s as the representative of Qubilai Khan to the Ilkhanate. A fruitful collaboration between Bolad Aqa and Rashid al-Din, the chief minister of the Ilkhanate and the most important historian of the Mongols, contributed significantly to the cultural exchange in all fields reviewed in part 4, which is the core of the book and its most innovative section. This part examines the cultural exchange in the fields of historiography, geography and cartography, agriculture, cuisine, medicine, astronomy, and printing. Allsen's unique command of both Persian and Chinese sources for Mongol history, his wide reading in secondary literature, and his ability to integrate this impressive amount of different materials, enable him to expand significantly our knowledge of each of these fields and to draw important comparative observations. Together with his other recent contributions, notably "The Rasulid Hexaglot in its Eurasian Cultural Context," in The King's Dictionary, ed. P. B. Golden (Leiden, 2000), which deals with language exchange, and "The Circulation of Military Technology in the Mongolian Empire," in Warfare in Inner Asia 500-1800, ed N. Di Cosmo (Leiden, 2002), Allsen displays a complex, fully rounded, and fascinating picture of the distribution and flow of commodities, techniques, and ideas under Mongol rule.

The fifth and...