Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape

The rise of Chinggis Khan (d. 1227) and the expansion of the Mongol empire to western Eurasia in the 13th century dramatically changed the history of the Islamic World. The Mongols - and in their wake Timur are generally seen as a horde of unstoppable nomadic warriors that put an end to the golden age of Islamic civilisation. At the same time it has often been noted that Mongol and Timurid rule coincided with a period of unprecedented cultural activity in many fields. These two phenomena illustrate a contradiction in which barbarian conquerors simultaneously destroyed a learned civilisation and triggered a booming cultural environment in the lands they conquered. To make sense of this paradox, it has often been assumed that nomads and their sedentary subjects lived in a mutually beneficial but culturally separated social arrangement. In this conventional view, nomadic conquerors ruled from horses, enjoying the rewards of military success and leaving the day-to-day administration of their territories to native bureaucrats. This project starts from a different vantage point. Its basic hypothesis is that nomadic rulers closely interacted with sedentary elites to a point in which a process of intense mutual cultural borrowing occurred. Nomads and their sedentary subjects were equally involved in creating a cohesive culture. In order to validate this hypothesis, our project makes use of the extensive amount of Islamic manuscripts that have come down to us from that period. This project subscribes to a novel methodology that aims at a comprehensive documentation, analysis and interpretation of a large and representative amount of codices across genres and languages. Not just the main texts contained in the manuscripts are of interest to the project. Rather it fully considers all the written notes and material traces left by authors, patrons, owners, readers and others in many codices. Those traces allow us to reconstruct the production, circulation and consumption of written knowledge to sometimes considerable detail. They allow us to study in a differentiated way the interaction between various actors among the nomad and sedentary elites, from the imperial court to urban and also rural groups and individuals who partook in the production and consumption of written knowledge. Mapping this manuscript landscape, a landscape populated by individuals as diverse as members of the Mongol imperial family or rather modest Sufis in small town lodges, provides the basis for a new interpretation of cultural interaction in the Mongol and early Timurid periods. To facilitate access to the extensive amount of new information from these little studied codices, the project will develop two freely accessible digital databases.