Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 62 (2019) 257-268
brill.com/jesh
Introduction: Mobility Transformations and
Cultural Exchange in Mongol Eurasia
Michal Biran
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
biranm@mail.huji.ac.il
Abstract
The Mongol Empire is as an early example of the transformative role of mobility, celebrated in the contemporary social sciences. The only way in which the Mongols who
by the time of Chinggis Khan numbered less than a million nomads, were able to create and rule their huge empire was by fully mobilizing the resources—both human
and material—from the regions under their control. This high measure of mobility fostered robust cross-cultural exchanges in various fields, resulting in a huge expansion
of knowledge and connectivity, cultural relativism, and a common imperial culture—
political, material, institutional—with regional variants. These developments set the
stage for major transformations in world history. The introduction presents the articles
included in this special issue, which tackle various case-studies of mobility and transformation while looking at the Mongol Empire in Eurasian perspective, and highlighting the impact of the Mongols’ indigenous culture on the proto-global world of the
13th and 14th centuries.
Keywords
the Mongol Empire – mobility – migrations – cross-cultural exchange – cultural
relativism – historiography of the Mongol Empire
Introduction
In the 21st century the world is on the move more than ever before and
mobility—the ability of people, ideas and artifacts to move or be moved across
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15685209-12341479
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Biran
both space and society—has become a keyword of the social sciences. Yet the
impact of mobility on pre-modern societies is often underestimated, mainly
because many of the technologies and sites which stand at the heart of “the
mobilities turn” (Urry 2000, 2007; Adey 2009; Creswell 2011)—internet, mobile
phones, cars, airports, etc—simply did not exist before the last decades or centuries. Nonetheless, the Mongol Empire is a striking example of how mobility was a forceful catalyst for major transformations already in earlier periods.
This is not least due to the enormous scale of the Mongol Empire, the largest
contiguous empire ever that at its height stretched from Korea to Hungary,
from Burma and Iraq to Siberia, ruling over two thirds of the Old World. It is
also because Chinggis Khan and his heirs who established this huge empire in
the 13th century were nomads, for whom mobility was a fundamental part of
their culture and way of life.
The only way in which the Mongols, who by the time of Chinggis Khan
numbered less than a million people, were able to create and rule such a huge
empire was by fully mobilizing the resources—both human and material—
that they extracted from the regions under their control. The formation of the
empire, its continued expansion, and the establishment of its administration
therefore entailed a vast mobilization of people—followed by goods, techniques, institutions, texts and ideas—throughout the empire’s territory and
farther afield. And these movements have changed the world: The high measure of mobility constituted the first step towards robust cross-cultural exchanges in fields as varied as art, science, trade, religion, and political culture,
to name just a few. These exchanges triggered massive ethnic, religious and
geo-political transformations; led to a closer integration of the Old World; contributed to the discovery of the New World; left a considerable imperial legacy
to later polities; and helped shape the transition from the medieval to the early
modern world (Biran 2015a).
Unprecedented human mobility was apparent chiefly in the period in which
the empire existed as a constantly-expanding entity ruled from Mongolia (12061260), but continued on a smaller—but still highly significant—scale when the
center moved to north China, eventually leading to the emergence of four regional empires headed by Chinggisid lineages: The Qa’an Ulus,1 known as the
Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), centered in China and enjoyed a nominal—though
not uncontested—primacy over the other uluses. The Hülegü Ulus, known as
the Ilkhanate (1260-1335), literally ‘the empire of the submissive khans’ (that
is, to the Qa’an in China), was centered in modern Iran and Azerbaijan. The
1 For ulus, originally the people subject to a certain chief and later nation and state see Kim’s
article in this volume and below.
Jesho 62 (2019) 257-268
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259
Jochi Ulus, often called the Golden Horde (1260-1480), centered in the Volga
region, and the Chaghadai Ulus—or Chaghadaid Khanate—held power in
Central Asia, from eastern Xinjiang (China) to Uzbekistan, up to Tamerlane’s
rise to power in 1370, and continued to rule eastern Central Asia up to the
late 1600s. As shown in Kim’s article in this volume, despite the many—and
often bloody—disputes among the four polities, they retained a strong sense
of Chinggisid unity, and saw themselves as brotherly states within a common
Chinggisid political space. In the mid-14th century all four polities were embroiled in political crises that led to the collapse of the Hülegü Ulus (1335) and
of Yuan China (1368) and considerably weakened the two steppe khanates.
The fall of the Yuan is generally deemed to be the end of “the Mongol moment,” but the Mongol impact on world history has been much more enduring
than this relatively short span (in imperial terms) suggests. This was not least
due to the Mongols’ active promotion of inter-civilizational contacts and the
transformations—not always intended—that their population movements
generated.
Mobility saturated all levels of Mongolian life and history: from their
pastoral-nomadic economic adaptation, through their unprecedented military
success and up to the shaping of their imperial administration. The ecology of
Mongolia—a continental, northern and arid region of the Eurasian Steppe—
supports only marginal agriculture. Yet it produces rich grassland, which
provides good pastures, making pastoral nomadism the main source of subsistence. This unforgiving environment, which requires quick adaptation to
changing circumstances, supports very low population densities.2 People (and
livestock), not territory, were therefore the main measure of wealth among the
Mongols. The Chinggisids hence regarded humans and human talent as a form
of booty, to be shared out across the empire and amongst the family like material goods, and myriads of people were sent across Eurasia to provide for the
empire’s needs—military, civil and cultural.
The first and most potent instrument of Mongol mobilization was the army,
as the Mongols spread across Eurasia, appropriating the defeated and submitted populations, both nomad and sedentary, and organizing them in decimal
units that were assigned to Mongol commanders and sent to fight across the
continent. Soldiers with special skills (e.g. catapult builders) were singled out
and allocated to later campaigns, while myriads of others were taken captive
during the battles.
2 The territory currently known as the Republic of Mongolia, Chinggis Khan’s homeland, is
larger than France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy combined; its population however is less than three million people.
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The advance of this formidable army in turn instigated a massive flight of
people, as refugees of all classes and professions tried to escape the approaching Mongol threat, before or during each of their major campaigns (and later
escaped their censuses). Furthermore, the empire transferred myriads of farmers and artisans to repopulate and revive the areas formerly devastated by
Mongol troops.
Indeed mobility was not limited to the military sphere: as soon as the
Mongols found themselves rulers of an empire with a significant sedentary
sector, they realized they lack not only numbers but also specialists. Nomadic
culture creates generalists, and every nomad is versed in variety of skills that
allow him to survive in the steppe, but are not enough for ruling a world empire. The Mongols therefore looked for experts—in fields as varied as administration, military technology, trade, religion, craftsmanship, science and
entertainment—collected and redistributed them across Eurasia. The recruitment of professionals was systematized as early as the late 1230s by means of
a census in which people were classified according to vocational skills. Later
on, the different uluses competed for these specialists and exchanged them
in order to exploit better the economic and cultural wealth of their sedentary
lands, enhance their kingly reputations, and accumulate and share the Good
Fortune or charisma that was imbedded in skilled persons (Allsen 2009; Allsen
2015; Biran 2015a). Spatial mobility was often accompanied by social mobility,
and even captives and slaves who were or made themselves proficient in fields
appreciated by the Mongols—be it linguistics, alchemy, music, astronomy
or warfare—can easily find lucrative jobs and join the imperial elite. In turn,
Mongol policies of search for talent, trade promotion and religious pluralism,
encouraged many social climbers, skilled scholarly elites, merchants, adventurers and missionaries to relocate to or within the empire’s realms. (Biran 2015a;
Biran 2015b) The growing mobility within the Empire and inside each ulus,
encouraged by the economic, political, diplomatic and cultural connections
between the various Mongol polities. The continuous seasonal movements of
the mobile Mongol courts (ordo), also facilitated both temporary and permanent migrations. Continuous political upheavals and succession struggles resulted in military defections and several-step migrations of people escaping
one turmoil only to find themselves facing new ones, or trying to improve their
standard of living. While in the first decades of the Empire the main pattern
of population movements was forced collective migrations, initiated by the
Empire’s political or strategic needs, in the post-conquest era voluntary, individual migrations, motivated mainly by economic factors, were more common.
This torrential human flow connected people within and beyond the empire and generated countless opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. Most
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261
of what was conveyed throughout the empire was not the Mongols’ own
culture, but rather elements from that of their sedentary subjects. However,
it was the Chinggisids who initiated the bulk of these exchanges. The prime
movers of this culture were imperial agents, including diplomats, merchants,
administrators, artisans, soldiers, and hostages. The particular cultural goods
that diffused across Eurasia were those compatible with Mongol norms and
beliefs. Thus, for example, medicine, astronomy, geography and cartography
were enthusiastically encouraged by Mongol rulers due to their compatibility
with Mongol shamanism. The flow of people, ideas and artifacts Eurasia was
determined to a large extent by the Mongols’ affinities and needs (Allsen 1997a,
1997b, 2001: Biran 2004, 2015a).
Until the publication of Allsen’s seminal works (esp. 1997a, 2001), the connection between the Mongols and culture was far from obvious. First, in the
popular mind and many national histories they have been remembered mostly as demolishers of cultures, connected primarily to massacres and devastation. Second, what the Mongols left behind was something different than
their own indigenous culture—unlike other empires they did not enforce
their language or religion on their various subjects and were willing to adopt
useful elements from other civilizations. This had to do with the demographic
balance between Mongols’ and non-Mongols, as well as with nomadic practicality and the Mongols’ multi-cultural outlook, deriving from the Steppe
dwellers’ long familiarity with various languages and religions, none of which
was considered exclusive. Thus, the culture created by the Chinggisids was
not indigenously Mongolian but rather a complex imperial culture, comprising not only Mongol and local components, but also elements from other regions that came under Mongol rule. In imperial terms this means combining
elements of Steppe Empires, Chinese, Muslim and Iranian empires, molded
by Chinggisid preferences and reflecting the Chinggisids’ enormous success
in uniting multiple various territories and civilizations under their command.
This Mongol imperial culture—as shown also in Robinson’s article in this
volume—represented a critical source of political capital for ambitious dynasties across Eurasia, a repository of imperial glory, and a host of functioning institutions that were hard to ignore, both for those who cherished their
debt to the Mongols (Timurid and Uzbek Central Asia, Qing China, Moghul
India) and for those who rejected it altogether (Ming China, Muscovy, the
Ottomans).
The third and more practical reason for overlooking the Mongols’ role as
cultural brokers is the character of the historical sources dealing with the
Empire. The information about the Mongols was mostly penned by their sedentary subjects, each bounded in the models of his own civilization and local
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tradition. Mongolian institutions and policies therefore often tend to be obscured in the sources, whose authors either did not approve of them or were
not too interested in recording them. Chinese and Muslim historians endeavored to portray the Mongols as a “normal” Chinese or Iranian dynasty while the
Russian chronicles adopted the “ideology of silence,” basically ignoring Mongol
dominion over their lands, degrading it to a list of devastating raids. Moreover,
due to the gigantic dimensions of the empire, the history of Chinggisid expansion and rule was recorded in a bewildering variety of languages. Previously
scholars tend to choose one corner of the empire, to base their work on sources
in one of its major languages—Persian and Chinese (and to a lesser extent
Russian)—and to frame their inquiry in a dynastic or national context, often
concentrating on the impact the Mongols had on this specific part of the
Empire. Such works are not without merit, yet they can easily result in a fractured picture of the Empire, which underscores its local components on the
expense of its Mongol character. It took a historian of Allsen’s stature, equally
familiar with the Persian, Chinese and Russian sources, and adept in the historical anthropology of steppe nomadism, to look at the empire from a holistic
perspective, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center of
his inquiry and highlighting the cultural exchange that took place under their
rule (Biran 2013).
Allsen’s work initiated “the cultural turn” in the study of the Mongol Empire
(Morgan 2015), of which this volume is an integral part. Joining the burgeoning recent scholarly literature on the Mongol Empire (Pfeiffer 2013; Aigle 2014;
McCausland 2014; Pederson et al. 2014; Amitai and Biran 2015; Golden et al. 2015;
May and Jackson 2016; De Nicola and Melville 2016; Jackson 2017; Broadbridge
2018; May 2018 and see Biran 2013), the articles collected here add new questions, perspectives and sources to the scholarly pool of Mongolian studies,
while simultaneously contributing to the related fields of world, Islamic,
Central Asian and Chinese history and to discourses of transmission of knowledge, conversion, artistic legacies, political culture and early globalization.
The volume consists of seven studies, most of which were first presented at
the Joint Research Conference of the Institute for Advanced Studies and the
Israel Science Foundation, titled Mobility and Transformations: New Directions
in the Study of the Mongol Empire, that took place at the Israel Institute for
Advanced Studies in Jerusalem on June 29-July 4, 2014.3 The common feature
of these studies is that they look at the Mongol Empire in its full Eurasian
3 The workshop was supported by an ISF grant no. 2139/14 and received funding from the
European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 312397, as well as the Hebrew University of
Jesho 62 (2019) 257-268
Introduction
263
context and highlight the impact of the Mongols’ indigenous norms on the
proto-global world of the 13th and 14th centuries. Whether they pursue a crosscontinent comparative perspective (Kim, Blair, Jackson, Yang), or focusing on a
certain corner in western (Yokkaichi, Biran) or eastern (Robinson) Asia, these
studies are well aware of the developments in other parts of the continent and
the routes connecting these various realms.
Kim Hodong focuses on the transformations of the Mongol themselves, by
exploring the meaning of ulus (people; nation; state), a basic institution of
the Mongol Empire, looking at the structure of the Empire from the Mongols’
point of view and charting the transformations of the Empire’s internal divisions throughout the 13th century. Masterfully commanding sources from the
whole continent, Kim shows how the Yeke Mongol Ulus—the Great Mongol
Nation established by Chinggis Khan in 1206—replaced all the other tribal
uluses in Mongolia. Soon afterwards, however, Chinggis Khan began to divide
the imperial territory among his kin, creating a structure of nine uluses—four
uluses of the right (west) were given to his sons, four uluses of the left (east) to
his brothers, while Chinggis Khan himself held the central ulus. The Empire’s
further expansion—mainly westwards—and the various succession struggles
amongst the Chinggisids led to several changes in this original structure, the
division of the ulus into secondary and tertiary units, and the creation of new
uluses, with various amounts of power and legitimation. Hence the so-called
United Empire was actually a conglomerate of multiple uluses, while what we
used to call the four khanates were four large uluses, often comprising also
smaller ones, which saw themselves as part and parcel of a single Empire,
nominally headed by the Qa’an. The Qa’an ulus therefore viewed its realm of
the Great Yuan (Da Yuan) as equivalent to the Yeke Mongol Ulus (the united
Mongol Empire), namely encompassing not only Greater China but the entirety of the Chinggisid uluses. Kim’s article revises our understanding of processes of state formation and dissolution in 13th- and 14th-century Eurasia,
hitherto seen mainly through the prism of the Mongols’ subjects.
Sheila Blair’s article compares burial forms from Iran, Transoxania and North
China, shedding light on the change in Mongol mortuary practices—from
the burial in hidden tombs of the first Khans to the adoption of Muslim-type
aboveground domes among Mongol Muslim Khans, Muslims elites, and perhaps even non-Muslims, a feature closely connected to the extensive movements of Muslims across the continent. Highlighting the mobility of craftsmen,
architectural forms, artifacts and ideas across Eurasia, she forcefully argues
Jerusalem and the Confucius Institute therein. For details and abstracts see http://mongol
.huji.ac.il/projects/international-conference.
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that the Empire created a “shared culture of things” (e.g., gold-and silk textile,
polychrome decorated tiles, various artistic motifs and styles) from which people could borrow multiple elements, and to which they could assign various
different meanings. This resulted, inter alia, in the amalgamation of Muslim
and Chinese burial customs in an anonymous tomb in north China, probably
meant to assure the tomb’s occupier’s maximal blessing in his afterlife.
One of the major unintended results of Mongol population movements was
the huge expansion of Islam—the most mobile, mercantile and cosmopolitan
civilization under Mongol rule—within the empire and beyond its realm, due
not least to the Islamization of three out of the four big Mongol uluses (Biran
2007: 93-8). A fresh look at the royal conversion of the three western Mongol
khanates is the topic of Peter Jackson’s article. Taking the lesser-studied
Chaghadaid ulus as his frame of reference, Jackson comparatively examines
the hallmarks of conversion; its agents; and especially its impact on royal policies. He argues that a central part of the dilemma of Muslim khans was that
Islamization entailed the breaking of Chinggis Khan’s yasa, which ordered that
all religions should be treated as equal. The Mongol Muslim Khans who managed to retain their throne did so by promoting the new faith in gradual stages,
keeping a certain amount of religious pluralism intact on the one hand, and
eliminating resistant relatives, on the other.
Yang Qiao discusses the networks of astronomers in Mongol Eurasia, highlighting the physical and social mobility of the astronomers as well as the
transmission of astronomical knowledge. One of the strong points of her
article—a fine example of experts’ migration—is the comparison of the astronomers’ networks in the Ilkhanate and in Yuan China, stressing the individual character of scientific training and work in the Ilkhanate in contrast
to the more formal and centrally controlled institutions that supervised the
astronomers’ education and activities in Yuan China. Based on a close study
of the astronomers’ biographies, she underscores the central nodes of these
networks as well as the diverse ethnic and religious background of the astronomers in both realms—all working together in West Asia, but strictly separated
between Chinese (or Sinicized) and Western astronomers in the East. She also
stresses that the transmission of knowledge did not stop at the Empire’s borders but reached also the Byzantine Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate, which
made use of Ilkhanid achievements that were also known though less effective
in Mongol China.
The diffusion of knowledge and material goods beyond the Empire’s frontiers is also apparent in Yokkaichi’s and Biran’s contributions. Yokkaichi, dealing with mobility of merchants and commodities, proves that the Indian
Ocean trade routes, which connected the Middle East to India and China, were
Jesho 62 (2019) 257-268
Introduction
265
also closely linked to the inland routes in Iraq and Iran. Based on literary and
archaeological sources, including Arabic tariff lists from Rasulid Yemen and
his own recent surveys in Iran, he demonstrates that Kīsh merchants, enjoying Ilkhanid patronage, played a major role not only in connecting the Persian
Gulf to the Indian Ocean shores, but also in the trade leading from Aden to
the Red Sea, Hijaz, and the Mamluk Sultanate. The article highlights the connectivity of the maritime and continental trade routes in Mongol Eurasia, and
the continuous use of pre-Mongol routes, now part of a global trade network
that crisscrossed the entire Old World. More specifically, it also shows that in
contrast to what scholars once assumed, Iraq in fact played a major part in this
commercial network, and was far from economic decline.
Iraq’s status in the Ilkhanid and Muslim realms is also discussed in Biran’s
exploration of the libraries of Ilkhanid Baghdad, in which the city is an arena
for various kinds of mobility—of diverse people, books, and knowledge systems. Contrary to the cliché of the destruction of Abbasid culture by Mongol
troops, her close reading of Arabic biographical dictionaries shows that both
libraries and intellectuals flourished in Mongol-ruled Baghdad, despite the annihilation of the Caliphate and the city’s violent conquest. Her analysis of the
libraries’ personnel, book holdings, audience, and the channels of knowledge
transmission, vividly portrays the effervescent scholarly activity in Ilkhanid
Baghdad, highlighting the Mongols’ contribution—as patrons, sponsors and
consumers—to this intellectual affluence, and their impact on the Baghdadi
intellectual scene. Furthermore, it underscores both the continuity of Abbasid
and Islamic culture under Mongol rule long before the Mongols’ Islamization,
and the persistence of scholarly (and other) relations between Iraq and the
rest of the Muslim world even during the height of the Mamluk-Ilkhanid conflict (1260-1323). Thus, this article puts to rest the idea that the Mongol capture
of Baghdad enduringly impaired the city’s intellectual and cultural life, and
further challenges the notion of the alleged post-1258 decline of both Iraq and
Muslim civilization.
Finally, David Robinson reminds us that the empire’s collapse also produced
waves of migrations and transformations, as the Mongols, their former and current subjects and their successors, had to relocate themselves in relation to the
Chinggisid past and legacy. Discussing early Ming relations with the Mongols,
Robinson shows how the Ming tried to put the Yuan period squarely in the
past, stressing the Mongols’ loss of their once-held heavenly mandate in order
to prevent Chinggisid revival. Dissecting the edicts, proclamations and diplomatic correspondence of Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, Robinson argues that
they all addressed an audience well-versed in Chinggisid rhetoric and political culture. He shows how Zhu Yuanzhang’s foreign and domestic policy was
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aimed to both assert his legitimacy and to attract many former Yuan subjects—
Mongols and others—into the Ming’s more limited territorial realm. Robinson
calls for a comprehensive study of the post-imperial Chinggisid world that examines both the Mongol diaspora and the Chinggisid legacy among their successor states across Eurasia.
Taken together, these studies highlight various aspects of movements across
space and time, which resulted in greater Eurasian connectivity, caused first by
the empire’s expansion but continued and intensified by the extensive commercial, religious and scholarly networks that the Mongols promoted or facilitated. This connectivity, and the huge population movements that set the
stage for it, resulted in two complementary phenomena. First, the creation of a
common culture—material, political, administrative—across Eurasia, though
with obvious regional variants, from which future empires could later adopt
various elements; and second, relativism of knowledge and religion, promoted
by the Mongols’ multi-cultural outlook, which favored amalgamation of legitimation concepts, celestial insurance and second opinions. Such connectivity
and relativism can result in various forms of exchange, including diffusion,
syncretism, conversion, crosspollination, acculturation, competition, conflict,
or none of the above. Yet they certainly broadened the intellectual horizons of
the Mongols, their subjects and neighbors, and modified the existing modes of
thinking across Eurasia. Thus, for example Chinese and Muslim astronomers
could adopt elements of, ignore or even look down upon Muslim or Chinese
calendars respectively, but they were aware of their existence and operation
much more than in the pre-Mongol era, and this knowledge reached also beyond the Empire’s realm. Similarly, by the time the Mongols adopted Islam
or Tibetan Buddhism as their state religion, they were fully aware of the existence of other religions, and at least partly familiar with their practices and
tenets. Moreover, such relativism, combined with the quantum leap forward
in knowledge—geographical, linguistic, commercial, scientific, artistic and
otherwise—that these cross cultural contacts generated; the long-distance
commercial and financial exchanges including the growing role of maritime
trade; the formation of new collectivities due to ethnic and religious changes; as well as the notion of universal empire headed by sacred kingship, were
all instrumental in ushering in the transition from the medieval to the early
modern world. (Allsen 1997b; Subrahmanyam 1997; Kuroda 2009; Brack 2016;
Atwood forthcoming).
Whether we deem the Mongol empire to be the final curtain of the Middle
Ages or the opening act of the early modern period, it is hoped that the articles included in this volume will suggest a wealth of new directions for future
inquiry, and will lead to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the
Jesho 62 (2019) 257-268
Introduction
267
fascinating, mobile and transformative Mongol era and its multi-faceted impact on world history.
Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European
Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 312397”.
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