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One of the persistent legends of Western Syria and Asia Minor, and only a largely acci­
historiography is that Europeans were the first dental repulse by superior forces at “Ain
to conceive of a history of the world as distinct Jalut” (‘Goliath’s Spring’) in Palestine in 1260
from histories of particular states and nations. prevented a Mongol conquest of Egypt. From
Herodotus wrote about Persians and Egyptians China, which was totally subjugated by Kubilai
and Scythians as well as about Greeks; Polybius Khan in 1279, their columns spread into Burma,
surveyed the past of the Mediterranean world Thailand and Vietnam, and in the harbours of
when it had been unified politically by the arms China and Korea they constructed fleets which
of Rome; and then, afftcr long centuries, a they launched (unsuccessfully, as it turned out:
global view embracing distant China was they were not in their element on sea) against
attained in the age of the Enlightenment by Island kingdoms as for apart as Java and Japan
men like Voltaire and Gibbon. Yet however No wonder the Great Khan saw himself as the
close these writers might come to the idea of representative of God on earth, with a divine
world history, what the wrote was Europe - or commission to conquer the whole world.
Mediterranean - centred history, a limitation The Mongols started out as illiterate
not surprising in view of the fact that Europe barbarians. Genghis Khan could neither read
was so long the focus of world power. When nor write- but he knew the value of these
towards the end of the age of European accomplishments, and he recruited clerks,
dominance. H. G. Wells wrote his famous Out­ administrators and political advisers from more
line of History (1920), the greater part of his educated peoples and employed them to run his
book was filled with the doings of European empire. He also had the Mongol language for
peoples, and his vision of a world State was of the first time reduced to writing in an alphabet
one in which European institutions and Western borrowed from the Uighurs, a Turkish people
liberal ideas had been universalized. who were part-Christian. In Persia, as in other
But there had been a time when Asia, not civilized lands, the Mongols inflicted dreadful
Europe, was the centre of world power, and wounds; whole cities were left heaps of rubble
though this period was brief, it left its mark there were ferocious massacres of townsmen
on historiography and, indeed, produced the and peasants alike, irrigation systems were
first historian whose treatment of the past can destroyed, and vast areas of farmland went out
be called genuinely global in scope. His name of cultivation. But the storm passed and a new
generation of Mongol leaders arose who saw
was Rashid al-Din Fadl-Allah. and he was a
Persian civil servant who lived from 1247 tc there was no profit in governing a ruined and
1318; but the Western world has scarcely heard starving country. Moreover, by 1260 the
Mongol Empire was no longer a political unity;
of him.
several autonomous kingdoms had emerged
Rashid al-Din’s career fell in the midst of
which ran their own affairs, while admitting a
the great convulsion brought about by the
conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors. vague suzerainty on the part of the Great
Khan, who was by then the Conqueror’s grand-
The Mongol horsemen not only swept across
the vast Eurasian steppes from Manuchuria to son Kubilai Khan, reigning in Peking. The
the Ukraine, they broke^ into populated, Mongol ruler in Persia bore the title of 11-Khan,
urbanized lands such as China, Persia, “subordinate Khan”, the Turkish word il mean­
and Russia and here they set up org­ ing dependent or submissive. These local Khans
had more limited responsibilities and were
anized governments which lasted for
anxious to make their kingdoms productive and
many years. The range of their activites
was indee d world-wide. From Russia they profitable. To reconstruct the shattered fabric
pushed into Poland and Hungary, and only the of the state, they were obliged to call in trained
native administrators and give them very
Great Khan’s death impelled them to withdraw
undefeated, when they were posed for an assault largely a free hand. • In Persia these reforms
on Germany and Italy. From Persia they began on the accession of the Khan Ghazan in
1294.
threatened India, thrust westwards into Iraq.
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