Moments of unexpected and catastrophic change can cause societies to reconsider even the most deeply held ideas about how the world works. The Mongol conquest of Iran, Iraq, and Anatolia in the thirteenth century was one such moment. As the dust of the conquest settled, the new socio-political climate that the Mongols inaugurated led to profound revisions in Iranian intellectual and cultural life, from the visual arts to theology. This talk will examine one area of change, as historians writing under Mongol rule created new ways to think about world history after the fall of the caliphate and the opening of Eurasia to unprecedented trans-cultural exchange. In the half century after 1260, existing ideas about the course of history were revised, dormant ideas were revived, and new ideas were floated to integrate the new foreign rulers into a coherent narrative of human experience. We will see which of these ideas took hold and reshaped historical writing in later centuries, and which became forgotten visions of how the world works. In the end, the histories written during the period tell us much more than just the narrative of events: they open windows into the world of ideas in which their authors lived and wrote.
Stefan Kamola is a research fellow at the Institute for Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is pursuing a research project titled, “Rethinking history: authorial process in Mongol Iran,” examining how Persian-language historical texts were written, revised, and edited during thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 2013 and has previously taught and researched at Princeton University and Eastern Connecticut State University. His book, Making Mongol History (Edinburgh, 2019) reconstructs the early life of the most important single source for Mongol history, the Collected Histories of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318).
Image credit: University of Edinburgh, Or.Ms.20