Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art 0824876571, 9780824876579

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Illustrating the Eurasian World in the Long Thirteenth Century (1206–1368)
Prelude to the Mongol Intervention in Eurasian History
1 Tabriz in Azerbaijan (Ilkhanate)
2 Constantinople in Rum (Byzantium)
3 Siena in Tuscany (Land of the Franks)
4 Cairo in Egypt (Mamluk Sultanate)
5 Alchi in Ladakh (Greater Himalayan Region)
6 Turfan in Uighuristan (Tarim Basin)
7 Dadu in Khitai (Great Yuan)
8 Quanzhou in Manzi (Great Yuan)
Conclusion: Theme and Variation in the Post-Mongol World
A Brief Chronology of the Long Thirteenth Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SUDDEN APPEARANCES

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Perspectives on the Global Past Anand A. Yang and Kieko Matteson SERIES EDITORS

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Sudden Appearances

The Mongol Turn in Commerce,

Belief, and Art

Roxann Prazniak

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu

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© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Prazniak, Roxann, author.

Title: Sudden appearances : the Mongol turn in commerce, belief, and art /

Roxann Prazniak. Other titles: Perspectives on the global past. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Series: Perspectives on the global past | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018036103 | ISBN 9780824876579 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mongols—History—To 1500. | Art—Eurasia—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC DS19 . P63 2019 | DDC 950/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036103 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: (Top) Detail from Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Lamentation of Christ, 1340. Scala /Art Resource, NY ART190524. (Bottom) Detail from Lamentation of Alexander the Great from The Great Mongol Shahnama. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment. F1938.3.

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For Arif

And thou beside me singing in the wilderness—

And wilderness is paradise enow.

—Omar Khayyám

Love, Pu

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Illustrating the Eurasian World in the Long Thirteenth Century (1206–1368)

1

Prelude to the Mongol Intervention in Eurasian History

17

1

Tabriz in Azerbaijan (Ilkhanate)

25

2

Constantinople in Rum (Byzantium)

55

3

Siena in Tuscany (Land of the Franks)

79

4

Cairo in Egypt (Mamluk Sultanate)

103

5

Alchi in Ladakh (Greater Himalayan Region)

130

6

Turfan in Uighuristan (Tarim Basin)

154

7

Dadu in Khitai (Great Yuan)

176

8

Quanzhou in Manzi (Great Yuan)

199

Conclusion: Theme and Variation in the Post-Mongol World

222

A Brief Chronology of the Long Thirteenth Century

229

Notes

231

Bibliography

253

Index

281

Color plates follow page 102

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Acknowledgments

I

t is a true pleasure to write the acknowledgments for this book that has been guided in often inexplicable ways by the presence of so many knowledgeable and spirited individuals. I am deeply grateful to each and all for making this journey possible and most enjoyable. My place in the ter­ rain of art and history along this thirteenth-century itinerary has included Alchi, Turfan, Constantinople (Istanbul), Dadu (Beijing), and Siena. I have had the opportunity to spend hours with the Edinburgh University Library folios of Rashid al-Din’s Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, the mosaic art of the Chora Church (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s murals in Siena, the mural art of the Alchi Temple Complex and the Dunhuang Caves, and days during summer pasture in the eastern Anatolian mountains. Among colleagues, my first thanks go to Thomas T. Allsen, without whom my fledgling project might have sputtered and stalled, or at least not have had the vigorous life it acquired when Tom welcomed me into what he affectionately referred to as the “swamps of Eurasian history.” Our con­ versations over years shaped my thinking and enriched my familiarity with sources. At conferences and by e-mail, numerous colleagues have provoked my thinking and on occasion saved me from some grievous errors, but not all I am sure. I thank Robert Hillenbrand, historian of Islamic art; Jane Casey, Tibetologist; Sheila S. Blair, historian of Islamic art; Osman Gazi Özgüdenli, scholar of Seljuk and Mongolian histories; Piergiacomo Petrioli, historian of Italian art; Syriac specialist Pier Giorgio Borbone; historian of the Mongols Morris Rossabi, as well as my anonymous readers at the University of Hawai‘i Press. I was fortunate to participate in a major confer­ ence on “Mobility and Transformations: Economic and Cultural Exchange in Mongol Eurasia” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the summer ix

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of 2014, where I benefited from conversation with David Jacoby, historian of Mediterranean trade and material culture; Liu Yingsheng, historian of the Yuan period; Kim Hodong, historian of Central Asia and nomadic societies; Reuven Amitai, historian of the Mamluks and Mongols; and Michal Biran, historian of the Chagadaid and Mongol periods. I am also grateful for invi­ tations to “From Influence to Translation: Art of the Global Middle Ages,” a conference held at Edinburgh University in May 2012, and to the Asian Association of World History Congress held at Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, South Korea, April 2012, as well as opportunities to lecture at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, in September 2011 and at the Institute of Ethnology and Sociology at the Northwest University for Nationalities and the Institute of Dunhuang Studies at Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, PRC, in March 2010. The expertise and assistance required to make this publication possible have been extraordinary. Masako Ikeda, acquisitions editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, offered active interest and abundant support. Alethea Steingisser and her team at the UO InfoGraphics Lab devoted hours over many months to produce the beautiful maps for this volume, without which readers would surely be lost. Yuka Kadoi lent her expertise as an art histo­ rian to gather permissions for illustrations that made the difference between meeting deadlines and delaying progress. Among the scholars and image coordinators who generously made illustrations available for publication, I would like to thank Christian Luczanits, senior lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at SOAS, University of London; Jaroslav Poncar of Cologne University of Applied Science; Juliette Lichman of Edinburgh University Library; Sophia Chang of the National Palace Museum in Taipei; Carolyn Cruthirds of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Madame Zerkane of the Bibliothèque national de France; Sandra Powlette of the British Library; Jennifer E. Berry of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Father Justin of the Sinai Icon Collection; and Maria Mangiavacchi at the Siena Pinacoteca. The Robert D. Clark Honors College and the Oregon Humanities Center provided financial assistance for maps and illustrations. Among family and friends, my son Nicholas grew up with this project from elementary school to college. I am grateful for his patience and love and his growing to be a fine young man, actor, stagehand, and writer alongside a flood of books always cascading across the dining-room table. To Erin Carey I am thankful for friendship that never tired of hearing news from the thir­ teenth century and for studio days that improved both violin and manuscript practices. Art historian Robin O’Bryan crosses over between colleague and friend. From our first encounter in Florence, Italy, but also in Virginia, she has been encouraging and appropriately skeptical. x Acknowledgments

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During the final months of preparation for production, my dear col­ league, soulmate, and once husband, Arif Dirlik, although he had not pre­ viously read any of the manuscript, undertook to read it, offer suggestions, and even shorten some of the endnotes for me, as we traveled the route of his final illness. Arif knew he would not live to see the book published but was very enthusiastic about what he called its theoretical history qualities. For that and our thirty-five years of history conversations and more, I will always be appreciative. This book is dedicated to his memory and the spirit of full consciousness and humane decision making to which his own writing so richly and eloquently calls.

Acknowledgments xi

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INTRODUCTION

Illustrating the Eurasian World in the

Long Thirteenth Century (1206–1368)

H

istorically, art and the politics of conquest have been closely inter­ twined. Beyond capturing land, labor, and wealth, victory has meant seizing the art of a defeated people, their columns and stat­ ues, their paintings and crafted objects, having the power to redefine culture, identity, and history. Because aesthetic beauty opens emotional pathways, art performs a transcendent moment in the spectacle of power in which forms are both captured and reimposed under new authority. Utilizing this political accessory, the Mongols set out to conquer the world and rewrite its history in images. Sifted from populations destined for destruction, skilled artists and craftspeople were among the human resources captured and deployed to the purposes of the new regime. Mongol rulers shared the central/east Asian imperial understanding that art was a signifier of status, part of the transfer of authority that granted legitimacy and conferred nobility even on those responsible for great inhumanities. When the Mongols made their bid for global empire, they knew exactly what the intellectual and artistic requirements were, the ciphers of power that could be mixed and matched to broadcast their new status. In the fields of Mongolian studies and Eurasian history, scholars com­ monly agree today that what we might call “the long thirteenth century” was a game changer in human history. This period began with the initial expan­ sion of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan in 1206 and closed with the fall of the Great Yuan in 1368. Material and cultural exchange had long been a part of Eurasian transregional networks. However, the Mongols encouraged a new model of “empire as exchange” that put political and economic con­ siderations above matters of religion and ethnicity; as a consequence, “both disruptive and constitutive, the Mongol impact was colossal.”1 Though the motives for exchange were traditional, their scope and magnitude produced sudden, qualitative shifts in cultural and political life. As Thomas Allsen has written, “In their systematic search for talent and their transcontinen­ tal reach, the Mongols had no real predecessors, no established models to 1

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follow.”2 The Mongol reach included a conscious effort to integrate diverse traditions into a universal history and to stress effective governance over reli­ gious orthodoxy. The material and symbolic aspects of artistic exchange had a transformative effect on shifting worldviews and social relations. These in turn were integral to the fundamentally new economic forms that emerged from this historical rupture. As recently argued by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, “the expansion of the Mongolian empire was a cru­ cial ‘vector’ of uneven and combined development which contributed to the making of capitalist modernity over the longue durée.”3 However, to avoid teleological linkage between the distinct but interrelated geopolitical pat­ terns of the Mongol era and industrial capitalism, the present work uses century markers to displace periodization conventions that would label the Mongol era “medieval” and the nineteenth century “modern.” The diverse locations in this study all shared the same historical period, but not the same periodization typically based on regional events. “Modern,” taken from its etymological origins to mean “in the fashion of the present,” suggests mul­ tiple thirteenth-century moderns from which multiple nineteenth-century moderns might emerge.4 Because the history of the rise of the Mongol Empire has been admira­ bly detailed by others it will not be repeated here.5 Suffice it to say that mili­ tary organization and strategies resulting in intensified commercial exchange and widened diplomatic contacts figure prominently in these analyses.6 Scholarship on material culture details both marketing patterns and technol­ ogy transfers.7 The history of art for this period has not generally reached for a similar Eurasian scope.8 While art-historical studies have begun to reveal new layers of interconnected imagery that spread across thirteenth-century Eurasia, these invite further investigation and require a strong historical con­ textualization to hold delicate pieces together. Art historians frequently note a “sudden appearance” of motifs, designs, and materials in their thirteenthto fourteenth-century areas of specialization.9 The Eurasian historical frame­ work within which these changes occurred typically remains underdeveloped and is therefore the primary concern of this study. The following, then, is a history of how sudden changes in material and intellectual conditions repurposed the making of images, bringing artistic and religious themes into a contemporary moment of continent-wide dia­ logue that engaged emotional and belief structures. While diplomats and political elites were key players in the social processes that fashioned the arti­ san’s creations, itinerant craftsmen, market-savvy merchants, aspiring fami­ lies of middle rank, those held in bondage, and worldly clergy, among others, were all essential to the wide-ranging, transformative effect of activities that both reflected and shaped changing perceptions. Despite our incomplete 2 Introduction

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historical and artistic records, individual works function as diverse parts of a period whole, what we might call a Eurasian “canvas in the round” of themes and variations. Offering a counterpart to intertextuality, art historian Robert Nelson, in his work on Byzantine and Crusader art, has proposed the concept of intervisuality that is extended here to the complex social realities of thirteenth-century Eurasia. “Intervisuality” as Nelson defined it places individual works of art in relationship both to their horizontal contemporary audiences and to their vertical past and future contexts of received artistic practices and projected political intents.10 In this case, the horizontal exten­ sion includes communities across the continent during the Mongol era as well as the vertical historical cores of each region and their imagined futures. More recently, Monica Juneja emphasizes the Eurasian context and suggests that art historians move toward a “shift of focus from a history of style and fixed meanings to a narrative of circulation [my italics], from the search for origins to an analysis of re-contextualization.”11 She goes on to argue that vision itself is conditioned by historical experience, as a result of which “new relationalities are negotiated in the wake of cultural encounters.”12 An era rich in circulation with regard to artistic creation, thirteenth-century Eurasia produced a distinctive intervisuality that shifted beliefs about the social and natural frames of human activity. “Sudden appearances” in the title of this work refers, first, to the rapid ascent of Chinggisid political rule and its far-flung economic consequences, and second, to the precipitous rise of artistic innovation across the conti­ nent during the same period.13 Usage of the term “Mongol” was itself a product of the thirteenth century, a consequence of nomadic consolidation that caught the attention of sedentary peoples. Inhabited by Mongolian and Turkic speakers, the eastern steppe and forest zones were home to diverse nomadic communities organized by households and clans into tribes with up to tens of thousands of individuals, including forest dwellers, hunters, and herders.14 Imperial aspirations had long existed as a potential in the political culture among the elite stratum across clan and tribal groupings, as evidenced by earlier nomadic empire-building activity among the Xiongnu, the Xixia, and the Kushan. Ideologically speaking, nomadic groups deemed military success a proof of divine sanction. At least fifty major tribal units, including the Kiyat subgroup of the Borjigit lineage, the Onggirat, Tartars, Kereyit, Naimans, and Mergits, each with its own subgroupings and territo­ rial domains, inhabited the region from which Temüjin, the future Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, would first succeed in reorganizing allegiances into a com­ plex politico-martial system.15 These groups were multiethnic and multilin­ gual, organized around the principle of loyalty to an effective leader. Because legitimacy constellated around martial skills, a culture of constant conflict Eurasian World 3

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and rule by ability more than by blood right defined nomadic activities. Temüjin effectively reorganized this system of loyalty to play for higher and greater stakes with ethnically and linguistically diverse groups under his command who collectively became known as “Mongols.” Mongol identity, forged from a loosely connected field of independent tribal nomads, was itself a sudden creation of what would became equally sudden empire-building activity. The swiftness with which nomadic move­ ment almost unintentionally morphed into empire contributed greatly to its transformative impact. Between Chinggis Khan’s reorganization of nomadic social structures and the first moves westward in 1206 until his death in 1227, the Mongols would steadily lay claim to territory from the Sea of Japan to the Caspian Sea. In 1237, Batu Khan, grandson of Chinggis Khan, pushed Mongol claims to Kiev and beyond into areas of eastern Europe, overrunning towns and small villages as far west as Važec in present-day eastern Slovakia.16 The sudden appearance of these world conquerors regis­ tered alarm and curiosity. Perhaps these new conquerors would be a pass­ ing phenomenon. Perhaps there were benefits to be negotiated with the new rulers. By 1250 they appeared to be holding fast and settling. Even though 1260 saw the emergence of four dominant khanates or ulus with continuing intra-regional rivalries, the empire stabilized enough to establish continen­ tal commercial and political controls.17 Financial brokers and statesmen of every stripe began to wonder what their relationship to this sudden global shift might be. Scholars and clerics of various orders and schools formulated strategies and explanations. Was the Mongol scourge God’s punishment for laxness in their faith, or was it a challenge to strengthen themselves with new knowledge and opportunities to better serve their faith? In the end, events would prompt a large-scale rethinking about human agency and his­ tory itself. During this period, every group, including the Mongols, needed a new story that would relocate themselves in a web of relations that consti­ tuted a new cultural and political whole. This was the defining project of the thirteenth century set in motion by the Mongol conquests. Dramatic expansion of commerce paralleled dramatic innovation in the arts. In terms of what was painted, how it was painted, and why it was painted, commerce made the art world go round. The variety and volume of goods in circulation increased during this era in every part of the conti­ nent. The very notion of “specie” as monetary unit derived from the period as Mediterranean merchants recorded huge volumes of spezie, a category including everything from soap and raisins to spices, itself a classification comprised of items used in food preparation, as medicine, and on the artist’s palette.18 Lévi-Strauss reminds us that, at the point of creation, artists and artisans “dialogue with materials and means of execution.”19 They create and 4 Introduction

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innovate with materials and techniques at hand as well as with symbols that have a basis in material realities, signs that, as Anthony Cutler notes, “could also become commodities, particularly if we understand the term broadly enough to include religious objects used instrumentally in pursuit of politi­ cal and economic ends.”20 Looking at materials, we find that red and blue pigments dominate the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena as well as The Great Mongol Shāhnāma produced in Tabriz, because these were the materials available through trade and determined by market value to carry the greatest esteem. Similarly, expo­ sure to new textiles prompted Simone Martini to “dialogue with materials” and develop new painting techniques. To execute the detail and luminosity of Mongol najis gold brocade, arriving in Siena from eastern markets, for his depiction of Saint Gabriel’s cloak in his 1333 Annunciation, Martini strug­ gled to adapt his materials in what Lévi-Strauss calls the bricolage process of creativity, a complex field of interacting symbolic signifiers and material, skill-based options. To cite a further example, The Birth of Mohammad, an illustration for the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, the Compendium of Chronicles produced in Tabriz between 1304 and 1314, also highlights the creative process as dialogue between material and symbolic worlds. The figural, ink-on-paper representation of Muhammad’s birth was unprecedented; it converses with Latin and Greek iconography of the birth of Christ made possible by social conditions of the long thirteenth century that called forth a dialogue among comparable traditions under the umbrella of Mongol authority. Instead of a star, a lamp serves as heavenly signifier, and above it the Persian script announces “the birth of the king of the universe, peace to him.”21 Investigating art to understand the significance of Mongol-era develop­ ments is effective for three reasons. First, art makes visible the contemporary social moment in a way that is contextually holistic even as it is locally selec­ tive. Miniatures and frescoes convey intimate details of daily life shaped by contemporary aesthetic preferences and availability of material resources, a visual record of objects and nuances of social relations that often escape writ­ ten documentation. Visual dialogue connected the viewer to a larger sensual world while simultaneously retaining a local “structure of feeling,” a con­ cept Raymond Williams has used to describe the consciousness of historical awareness in the moment. The present study further complicates Williams’ notion by examining the Mongol period, when multiple cultural sites inter­ mingled and produced to a noticeable degree a shared structure of feeling visible in an “integrative impulse” that moved through major currents of art during the long thirteenth century. Moshe Barasch, for example, looks at new motifs in the language of gestures that appear in the thirteenth century. He writes, “The rather rapid modification of prayer gestures in the period to Eurasian World 5

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which Giotto also belongs demands explanation.”22 The raised-hands motif, initially symbolizing prayer and blessing, evolved in the thirteenth-century representation of passions to become an expression of anguish and grief in Byzantine-Frankish crusader art and in Ilkhanid illustrations. The shared structure of feeling this representation of grief embodies is, according to Williams, “as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible part of our activities.”23 Second, Mongol rulers intentionally employed art as a medium for ideological consolidation of their empire. The rulers of the Yuan ulus and the Ilkhanate were ideological warriors, more so than their counterparts in the Chaghadaid and Kipchak regions of the empire. Image making became an arrow in their ideological quiver. An efficient military with ruthless policies of slaughter and destruction for those who refused terms of submission, the Mongols quickly divined that such tactics were insufficient for long-term political and economic goals. The first Mongol capital at Karakorum epito­ mized the Mongol synthesis of art and empire building. As historian at the Mongol court, Ata-Malik Juvaini noted the speed with which the new city rose: “There had previously been no town or village in that place except for the remains of a wall called Ordu-Baligh. . . . Hither artisans of every kind were brought from Khitai, and likewise craftsmen from the lands of Islam. . . . Khitayan artisans reared up a castle with doors like the gates of the gar­ den . . . on the right and left houses for his brothers and sons and the turqaq, [the walls of these houses being] painted with pictures.”24 A kind of soft power found in the visual arts became essential to the project of world con­ quest, creating spaces of cultural encounter in which groups with unequal resources met to negotiate new relationships in a process Mary Louise Pratt had termed “transculturation,” exchange in which both the dominant and subordinate groups appropriate motifs and styles from each other for political use.25 As Pratt’s concept envisages, the Mongols were as much transformed by their activities as were the peoples they sought to blend into a new world vision. The Mongol Eurasian contact zone altered everyone’s ways of seeing to some extent.26 While the Mongols have not typically been associated with artistic interests, they were in fact heavily invested in sponsorship of the arts and related crafts. It is estimated that one-third to one-half of state revenue in the Yuan and Iklhanid regions of the empire were devoted to the construction and maintenance of Buddhist and other temples, with their richly endowed architecture, art, and manuscript collections.27 The potential power of rep­ resentational art to transform beliefs and behavior was well perceived by Mongol rulers and their agents. This does not mean that every work was a piece of propaganda, although to some degree this was often the case.28 6 Introduction

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Governance of a multitude of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, plus the necessity of sustaining Mongol identity while accommodating diver­ sity for state building, raised this issue and kept it center stage. Third, the essential materiality of artistic creation fashioned an organic web through which commerce and beliefs moved. Perhaps no single item was of greater importance in this regard than paper, whose commercial pro­ duction increased during the long thirteenth century and directly impacted manuscript and miniature art.29 Circulating to the reaches of northwest India and across the continent, paper revolutionized the commercial, social, and creative aspects of artistic exchange.30 The demand for pigments, materi­ als, and technical skills stimulated a search for supplies and knowledge that invariably altered ways of thinking about art, geography, social mores, and cosmology. The material conditions of the artist’s world included terms of patronage that provided access to luxury items such as rugs, silks, and met­ alwork that might be selected for representation in a work commissioned by a statesman, religious figure, or merchant. This patronage was also essential for the artist’s access to luxury pigments that provide clues to the commer­ cial and political underpinnings of the Eurasian canvas in the round. Barbara Berrie makes the case for laboratory analysis of artworks to explore some of these pathways. She suggests that the results of such work “may also help the investigation of geographical sources, and hence trade, of pigments used by trecento artists.”31 Her work on pigments used by Giotto has had limited results, however, largely because laboratory studies are invasive and require an exhaustive database to be meaningful. Inevitably, our ability to under­ stand the movement of pigments or motifs relies on our knowledge of social and political contexts. Art historian Anne Dunlop offers another approach, writing, “as mate­ rials travelled from one culture to another, they brought real and imagined histories in their wake: these associations, and the materials themselves, had their own place and logic in devotional paintings.”32 Pigment names were often more part of the geographic imaginary than descriptive of particular hues and frequently carried stories with them.33 On the Hereford mappa mundi (c. 1300), Afghanistan was the closest place to paradise in the imag­ ined geography and the source of lapis lazuli stone from which ultramarine could be made. High-quality ultramarine was the thirteenth/fourteenth-cen­ tury European artist’s color of choice for the Virgin Mary’s cloak. Cennino Cennini recorded the heritage of this pigment when he wrote, “Ultramarine blue is a color illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other col­ ors.”34 Marco Polo linked the precious stone to stories of a Christian king, Prester John, who he said lived in a province of the Mongol Empire that pro­ duced “lapis lazuli in plenty and of good quality, besides excellent camlets Eurasian World 7

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of camel hair.”35 He stressed that the rulers were Christian, but that there were many Buddhists and Muslims as well. Meanwhile, mural artists work­ ing at Alchi in Ladakh or the Buddhist caves at Kizil and Bezeklik had long favored shades of red, but also used lapis lazuli for sky and other elements, without the faraway exotic overtones. Technical aspects of art making typically had mathematical and stan­ dardized features tied to their production that facilitated their precise trans­ mission. The production of pigments from minerals was often a laborious task that required specific repetitive motions under specific conditions. Muscle memory and rhythmic chants were integral to techniques passed from mas­ ter to apprentice without written notes. In textile production, intricate pat­ terns woven with repetitive accuracy depended on a meditative recall of line and color sequencing. Although secrecy was a feature of workshop produc­ tion, secrets also had a way of getting around. Mariachiara Gasparini, writ­ ing on workshop conditions at Turfan, notes, “the medium of textile as a mathematical expression of art, due to the engineering process necessary for its creation, became a visual language of signs that were universally com­ prehended and adaptable to different territorial areas.”36 Jane Casey, in her study of Sino-Himalayan art, refers to the paint-by-number, or in this case by-letter, approach to Buddhist mural art that allowed artists to pre-mix batches of color and ensure uniform coloration of specific pigments through­ out a mural.37 The template for the mural itself was predetermined, set by doctrinal and iconographic standards, as Robert Bruce-Gardner has noted. This measure of rigidity in form and detail facilitated standardized move­ ment of images while also allowing for creative spaces in the underdrawing, brushstroke, and paint fluidity, where an artist might break with convention and still produce a recognizable field of images.38 Techniques and the designs they carried all traveled as signifiers in a kind of semiotic ecological zone, what Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman has tagged a “semiosphere.”39 Defined by what was materially, tech­ nically, and ideologically available, the concept of the semiosphere helps us hypothesize the world of ceramicists, glassmakers, apothecaries, and spice dealers who all shared an interest in the stones, minerals, insects, and plants collected for pigment manufacture but also for use by physicians who believed that ultramarine cooled fevers and cleansed the eyes.40 Recent art-historical thinking postulates that images in this social context might be regarded as “a condensation of temporal moments, which then act as a space to make differ­ ence . . . encountered through circulation visible; the image acts as a site upon which to negotiate and theorize about its self-constitution through trans­ culturation.”41 Indigo, as already noted, came from the Indus River Valley, 8 Introduction

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but could appear in many shades of blue depending on processing methods. Vermilion red was favored over cinnabar red because of the former’s mysteri­ ous qualities.42 Lotman argues that these symbols—signifiers—understood as words or images, must be considered in relationship to a whole cultural biosphere rather than to any one subset of conditions or groups. Eurasia under Mongol rule was such a cultural biosphere. The material item and its artistic representation conveyed symbolic meaning that registered socially across cultural zones and held local significance as well. In Tabriz, Dadu, or Siena items that signified power became a manifestation of authority as well as a continuing means of access to more materials. All features of the creative project, in Lotman’s view, link politics and mimesis (art’s imitation of life), facilitating the means by which signifiers—words and pictorial elements— enter the imagination through the lens of political relations. For example, the fleur-de-lis motif, a symbol of royal authority also associated with the Buddhist lotus flower, gained widespread circulation during the Mongol era, appearing in many Ilkhanid throne scenes, paint­ ings of French and Italian royalty, and mural art in the Turfan and Ladakh regions. Often assumed to be a symbol primarily of European and specifi­ cally French kingship, the motif traces its west Asian origins to twelfthcentury Syria and Egypt, where it may have settled from earlier encounters with Buddhist imagery; Ilkhanid Tabriz weavers stepped up the circulation of this design when they produced silks with the fleur-de-lis for Mamluk markets from which fabrics were imported for the elite luxury market by French and Italian buyers.43 The fleur-de-lis on French royal fabrics had quite a complex pedigree. In an era with strong Buddhist activism across the continent, the Hindu-Buddhist symbol of the windstar (swastika), signifying abundance, also appeared once again in the thirteenth century with sudden, widespread regularity. The clothing choices of clerics and other wealthy elites as far west as Europe were fine-tuned to current fashions. When Louis of Toulouse had his portrait painted wearing robes with very large swastikas decorating his lapels, we can wonder about his choice.44 Clothing for formal portraits was certainly chosen with purpose. He may have simply thought it was a sharp look. Given Louis’ political association with persecuted dissident Cathar groups and radical Franciscans, we might legitimately wonder if he associ­ ated the design with vague, or not so vague, reference to Mongol religious pluralism, a concept familiar to his peers. Franciscan Andrew of Perugia, during his service to the Great Khan, observed: “In this vast empire there are verily men of every nation under heaven and of every sect; and each and all are allowed to live according to their own sect. For it is their opinion, or I Eurasian World 9

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should say error, that every man is saved in his own sect.”45 Beyond any pos­ sible faith cross-referencing, Louis certainly chose to dress himself in sym­ bols for which weavers familiar with eastern patterns had technical expertise. AN OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS: INTERCONNECTED HISTORIES The primary source for this study is visual evidence from thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Eurasia. This includes images from illustrated manu­ scripts, scroll paintings, murals, woodblock images, and textiles. The prin­ ciple guiding selection highlights innovative, representative works in each of eight regions that speak to the themes of historical narrative and biography. Written materials include primary sources from Persian, Chinese, French, and Italian histories, travel accounts, geographies, and literary works, in addition to an abundance of secondary literature. By examining regional and local studies in juxtaposition to each other and in relationship to a broader Eurasian frame of reference, this project offers an artistic mapping of thirteenth-century developments that complements and extends existing scholarship, examining stones previously unturned and questions previously underdeveloped, not pursued, or unasked. The goal here is to consider addi­ tional, historically grounded readings of art in the long thirteenth century, not to counter or displace existing art-historical analyses. The major thematic arc of this work is that, during the Mongol era, belief, both religious and secular, became more embedded in the material world of daily life. A sharp cultural divide marked this passage akin to what J. H. Elliott sees in his comparative analysis of pre- and post-1492 Europe.46 A similar old world–new world contrast applies to the pre- and post-Mongol eras. Previous periods of interregional exchange in the arts, technology, and commerce were significant in themselves.47 They were, of course, also essen­ tial to the potential the Mongols actualized. However, as a consequence of the Mongol turn, with its unique geographic range and cultural depth of social interactions, Eurasia before and after the Mongol Empire was two fundamentally different places. Throughout Mongol Eurasia in myriad social microclimates, material exchange altered ways of thinking about historical happenings. Clearly a time when religious views were a powerful backdrop to politics as well as to intellectual and social life, these centuries produced an ascendant materialism and intervisuality that emphasized human agency in historical developments, religious inclusiveness with unintended secular overtones, and attention to natural phenomena with representational realism. The political culture of Tabriz is the organizing principle of this project, with seven locations across Eurasia in specific cultural and political relation­ ship to that city. Each of these eight centers had strong cosmopolitan features 10 Introduction

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expressed in the outlook and activities of local elites; they were exemplars of the global dynamics of their times. Constantinople of the Byzantine Empire since the fourth century CE and Dadu, the new capital of the Da Yuan ulus and political center of the Mongol Empire, were both imperial centers. Mamluk Cairo and Ilkhanid Tabriz were political newcomers and rivals for regional authority after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. Turfan and Alchi were strong reference points for artistic work, and both had rela­ tions with Tabriz and Dadu and a deep history of social pluralism that inte­ grated central, east, and south Asian cultural themes going back at least to the time of Alexander the Great, stories of whom became a common cultural reference point across thirteenth-century Eurasia.48 Siena and Quanzhou were more peripheral commercial centers on the rise, with Quanzhou being a major port on the maritime silk roads. Turfan, Alchi, Tabriz, and Dadu were all located on the land routes of the silk-road networks, while Cairo, Siena, and Constantinople connected more immediately to major sea routes in addition to overland passages. The geopolitical reality was that Tabriz held a critical place in the commercial and intellectual traffic that moved through and beyond the Mongol domains. The map constructed for this project conveys the interconnectedness of these regions rather than the imperial political boundaries that were vital but secondary to the story of cultural exchange. An Arabic text by Sharaf al-Zaman Tahir Marvazi written around 1120 provides a baseline for this regional approach to destinations. Marvazi stressed the commonly held notion that the “soil” defined inhabitants who varied “according to their countries and places of residence,” regions such as Rum, Sha’am, Hind, Sind, Sin, Khitai, and Uyghur.49 What we refer to as “China” was a region of many kingdoms. Travel emphasized destinations over routes that inevitably var­ ied according to seasonal and political vicissitudes of landslides, floods, and warfare. Because metropolitan, pastoral, and agricultural conditions were interdependent, this study therefore emphasizes regions instead of cities. The nomadic rulers of Tabriz in Azerbaijan followed mobile political strate­ gies that challenge conventional concepts of urban cores and agricultural/ pastoral peripheries. Tabriz was permanent yet not fixed in either size or level of activity. When the royal court was in town, the population grew by tens of thousands. Tabriz was also moveable, in the sense that, when the court left town to follow seasonal pasturing of the Ilkhan’s herds, anyone who had official business with the head of state needed to locate “Tabriz, the political center” far to the north or south of “Tabriz, the geographic center.” Political geography was also in flux throughout this period. Turfan, for example, belonged variously inside or outside the Chaghadaid or Yuan domains. In addition, places like “India” or “Shambhala” were wanderers, Eurasian World 11

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Map 1. Mapping Artistic Exchange, c. 1300

having multiple locations in the geographic imaginaries of the period.50 On the Hereford mappa mundi (c. 1300), Afghanistan was the closest to paradise in the imagined geography of the world and the source of ultramarine, as mentioned the thirteenth/fourteenth-century artist’s color of choice for the Virgin Mary’s cloak. The contemporary geography of place was also located within narratives of painted space, as already noted above by Anne Dunlop: when “materials travelled from one culture to another, they brought real and imagined histories in their wake; these associations, and the materials them­ selves, had their own place and logic in devotional paintings.”51 My approach is to enter each geographical location through a spe­ cific set of images that illustrate a degree of “sudden appearance” in thir­ teenth-century artistic exchange. Taken together, these images define a focus on naturalism and humanism. Each work offers evidence of an extended 12 Introduction

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intellectual reach beyond its own place-based elements and in relationship to the Mongol Empire as exchange. Each chapter includes an artistic prologue to introduce a specific set of images with discussion of relevant themes and personages, a region-based analysis of political and economic context, and a comparative segue to discuss linkages among clusters of stylistic elements demonstrating the interdependence of chapters. Chapter 1 makes the case that Tabriz under the Ilkhans was a major nexus of cultural, diplomatic, and commercial transactions for Eurasia dur­ ing the Mongol Empire. At the core of innovative cultural developments in Tabriz was the Rab’i Rashidi, a dynamic intellectual center built by vizier Rashid al-Din. The crown jewel of scholarship produced in the Rab’i Rashidi was the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, an illustrated text incorporating histo­ ries of Arabs, Greeks, Franks, Chinese, Turks, and others into an integrated Eurasian World 13

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Mongol-Islamic historical framework. The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh challenged past historiography by embodying two distinctive features: a global relational per­ spective and a projection of historical time into the present moment. One illustration for a later edition of this text, Abaqa on Horseback, introduces the themes of biography, history, and naturalism. Chapter 2 explores contemporary political and visual culture in Byzantium. Like Rashid al-Din, Theodore Metochites, prime minister of the Byzantine Empire, was a major intellect of great wealth who oversaw substantial construction projects in the early 1300s. The Chora Church (Kariye Camii), one of Metochites’ splendid achievements, contains two mosaic murals of special interest: the Enrollment for Taxation and the east wall Deesis with a portrait of Mary of the Mongols, the nun Melania, who had also been a wife of the Ilkhan Abaqa of Tabriz. The Chora taxation mural raises points of comparison with the contemporaneous Good and Bad Government murals by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena, along with elements of portraiture and historical narrative. Chapter 3 considers Siena in the context of the eastern Mediterranean world and takes as its artistic starting point the 1342 Martyrdom of the Franciscans by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. In response to a contemporary event set at Almaliq in the Chaghadaid ulus, Lorenzetti imaged a Mongol court scene with detailed features of Mongol, Persian, and European ethnic groups. Situated on the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage route to Rome, Siena was an active participant in cultural and commercial exchange that extended into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Tommaso Uzi, citizen of Siena, served as sword bearer and confidant in business matters at the Ilkhan’s court in Tabriz. Benuccio di Giovanni of the Sienese Salimbeni merchant family imported an abundance of Mongol manufactured silks from Tabriz as well as Cairo.52 Chapter 4 moves to Cairo and the Mamluk Sultanate that maintained strained diplomatic and military relations with Tabriz throughout most of the Ilkhanid period. The Mamluks were a challenge for the Latin world as well. Attempted alliances between the European and Mongol heads of state against the Mamluks never came to fruition, but in 1260 a Christian/ Mongol coalition led by Armenian King Hetoum I, Prince Bohemond VI of Antioch, and Mongol General Kitbuqa produced a momentary victory over the Mamluks at Damascus. This event found pictorial expression on an ico­ nostasis beam showing the successful triumvirate depicted as the three magi presenting gifts to the Christ child in a scene of the Nativity. The visual focus for Chapter 5 is the late twelfth- to early thirteenthcentury frescoes found at Alchi in the kingdom of Ladakh, also known as western Tibet, the heart of a greater Himalayan region that included Kashmir and Nepal. Ilkhan Hülegü developed relations with Buddhist leaders in 14 Introduction

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Ladakh and Kashmir. When Rashid al-Din came to compile sections on Buddhism in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, he invited the scholar Kamalashri from Kashmir to work on the illustrated manuscript project. The fresco The Royal Drinking Scene highlights a focus on textiles and figural art that parallels the popularity of Kashmiri and Nepalese skills in the visual arts of Mongolian court life at both Tabriz and Dadu. These were central to the thirteenthcentury Eurasian Buddhist revival. Chapter 6 discusses the frontispiece of a Buddhist text with an impres­ sive group portrait of the Mungsuz family dated around 1300 and printed from a woodblock carving for reproduction and widespread distribution. Each of forty-seven portraits is individually depicted with names reflecting Chinese, Mongol, Uighur, and Buddhist elements. This work links con­ temporary Turfan to artistic circles at the Yuan court in Dadu and the oasis silk-road town of Qocho, a historic site with extensive Buddhist mural art. Artisans from this region met those from Nepal and Kashmir on projects commissioned by the Ilkhans, especially at the early Buddhist complex con­ structed at Labnasagut near Lake Van to the west of Tabriz. The individu­ ality of the Mungsuz figures, both male and female in Buddhist prayer, manifests in the naturalism of facial features and a focus on the importance of lineage as family historical narrative. Chapter 7 explores developments at Dadu (Khanbuliq, modern Beijing), capital of the Da Yuan ulus and its relationship to Tabriz. At Dadu the Khans’ portrait galleries constituted an innovative statement in visual politics. Mongol claims to universal leadership at the court in Tabriz took on a more figurative, narrative style. Both, however, put forth a new human­ ism grounded in social pluralism and historical perspective. Nepalese artist Anige (1245–1306), premier artist of the Yuan court, was a painter, archi­ tect, and sculptor of the highest order. Working in a style that integrated Nepalese, Chinese, and Indian Pala elements, he enjoyed extensive royal patronage. In portraiture, Anige’s greatest work consisted of the posthu­ mous portraits of Kublai Khan and his wife Chabi Khatun, an innovative fusion of Sino-Himalayan secular and religious art forms from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And finally, Chapter 8 comes full circle to explore relations between Quanzhou and Tabriz and the importance of maritime trade. Two paint­ ings by Wang Zhenpeng (1275–1330), The Dragon Boat Regatta (1323) and The Mahaprajapati Holding the Infant Buddha (c. 1308), constitute the artistic focus for this chapter. These works draw our attention to the Eurasian posi­ tionality of Wang and other Yuan artists as well as to the maritime policies of the Yuan and Tabriz courts. An important node in the web of Eurasian communications during the Mongol era, Quanzhou was the destination of Eurasian World 15

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large numbers of emigrants from Iran, including Muslim and Franciscan travelers among others. Despite the expansive cultural geography of this work, its main goal is modest—to consider art as a lens for exploring the cultural interface between political and economic change across Mongol Eurasia, allowing us to under­ stand further the social and intellectual dynamics at play during this criti­ cal era in world history. Digging deeper, the intent is to rethink some of the larger historical questions that presaged the modern era. At both levels this study continues discussions set in motion by Janet L. Abu-Lughod (1989), Jerry H. Bentley (1993), Andre Gunder Frank (1998), Thomas T. Allsen (2001), and many others to whom the present volume is heavily indebted. Many pieces of the puzzle under assemblage have yet to be found or are for­ ever lost; only a very small percentage of the art the era produced survives today, and much of it resides in embattled, inaccessible parts of the world. We still have, however, a remarkable record of images from this period. These postcards from the past portray transformative cultural interplay from what was arguably the first rigorously global era on the Eurasian continent. A social reading of images with historical and biographical themes suggests that artistic departures across diverse settings were an interconnected conse­ quence of a loosely configured and multicentered political phenomenon that sought to mobilize the integrative and totalizing potential of images during a period of exceptional upheaval for the repurposing of received perceptions and adjustment to new realities.

16 Introduction

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Prelude to the Mongol Intervention in Eurasian History A Brief Pre-Mongol History of Eurasia

B

efore considering the significance of artistic exchange during the Mongol Empire we need to gain some idea of the conditions, cul­ tural and political, that preceded the Mongol era. Siena in the central Italian-speaking region, Alchi in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh, and Hangzhou in Southern Song, Manzi, at first appear as an unexpected pool for historical reflection. Yet these regions shared a story line in the thirteenth century that is unmistakable and more than a forced spinoff of Mongol mili­ tarism, for each region shaped the encounter to its own desires. A shared story in separate installations became more whole and visible during the Mongol era but was not entirely a product of Mongol activities. Regional conditions generated their own agenda and active responses. As Jerry H. Bentley pointed out in his seminal work Old World Encounters, preconditions across Eurasia prepared the groundwork that made Mongol strategies pos­ sible and their impact globally transformative.1 Vibrant renaissance movements stirred within each of our eight regions in the pre-Mongol era. In the central Italian and northern French zones, agricultural and commercial revival raised productivity and political com­ petition, including heightened struggles over questions of orthodoxy and heresy that became intertwined with commercial ventures. The Northern and Albigensian Crusades as well as the eastern crusades to Jerusalem gave the Latin Christian world new presence in the eastern Mediterranean and access to that region’s material and intellectual abundance. At Alchi in Ladakh and the greater Himalayan region, increased trade stimulated a cultural renaissance in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that would pres­ age a thirteenth-century revival of Kashmiri and Tibetan Buddhism under Mongol auspices, carrying elements of the Buddhist tradition into Central Asia as far as Armenia and Anatolia, after centuries of submergence beneath Islamic tutelage. Perhaps most significantly, the Song dynasty produced a 17

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tenth/eleventh-century commercial and political renascence with distinctive developments in landscape arts, neoclassical philosophy, and economic devel­ opment some have called a commercial revolution. There can be little doubt that, no matter what the regional variations, Mongol rule across Eurasia inherited a dynamic cultural and economic environment in full swing, pro­ ductive, and primed for new opportunities. At the same time, centers of wealth and political stature such as Baghdad, Byzantium, and Cairo under the Ayyubids aspired to revival and rejuvenation. The Mongols capitalized on preexisting cultural and economic accumulation. Their historical contri­ bution was to weave a new whole-cloth canvas integrating and modifying pieces others had already begun to spin. Known as the largest contiguous land-based empire in world history, the Mongol Empire was far from the first major empire to rise on the Eurasian continent. To grasp what was particular about the Mongol venture it is help­ ful to sketch briefly the previous comings and goings of peoples across this land. Although the Eurasian landmass encompasses some of the most chal­ lenging physical environments on the planet, this was never an impediment to the circulation of people and their material cultures. Nomadic commu­ nities moved herds and populations east and west across the Taklimakan Desert and the high Pamir passes as well as north and south between the Siberian forest zones and the grassy Mongolian steppe lands. Migratory pat­ terns and trade sustained networks of knowledge and material infrastructure. From these emerged agricultural practices and the first settled communities in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Yellow and Indus River valleys during the early Neolithic period. From the interplay of these sedentary and nomadic communities emerged the activity of empire building. The Achaemenid Empire (560–330 BCE), or first Persian Empire, set a general template for empire building. With territories from the Indus River valley to Macedon as well as most of Central Asia and eventually Egypt, rulers from Cyrus the Great (559–529 BCE) to Darius III (336–330 BCE) established and maintained a cultural and political model that would be the standard for rulership through successive empires, including that of the Mongols. Alexander the Great, whose armies conquered the first Persian Empire, made known his great admiration for its leaders and their accom­ plishments; he even expressed regret at the empire’s demise. Effective cen­ tralization, achieved through bureaucratic administration and a competent civil service, generated strong transport and communications infrastructure that linked major urban areas and religious centers. While promoting Ahura Mazda/Zoroastrian principles of a good life, the Persian kings sought to uphold tolerance for local customs and languages. Extensive architectural 18 Prelude

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and artistic achievements resulted from official support for the arts. Empire building required basic but not always identical techniques for maintaining bureaucratic order. The Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) established a similar imperial model of administrative units that would be revived and altered through the dynastic history of East Asia. The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) introduced significant innovations when it initiated a secular, civilian meritocracy. Whereas the satraps of the Persian Empire were military kings, the Han and subsequent dynasties gradually consolidated the principle of literary achievement for appointment to civilian office at the provincial and central imperial levels. Peasant rebel leaders and nomadic military figures alike were potential claimants to this imperial heritage. When the Mongols established rule in the eastern steppe, they were only the most recent group to cross over from nomadism and make a bid for empire. The Kushan Empire (30–375 CE) claimed territory from Turfan in the Tarmin Basin west to Bactria across the Hindu Kush and south to the Indus and Ganges River valleys. Related to the Yuezhi nomadic groups from the eastern steppes, the Kushan maintained diplomatic relations with the Roman, Han, and Sasanid Empires. Their king, Kanishka (127–151 CE), cultivated Buddhism and sponsored extensive temple building in the Gandharan region north of Alchi in Ladakh. Central legal codes and monetary systems accompanied any bid for empire even when laws were extended to only a small portion of the pop­ ulation and barter prevailed at the local market place. The Mongol Empire was one of a long line of nomadic empires that won their place through mili­ tary skill and then turned to the patterns of bureaucratic and cultural gover­ nance that had long been a measure of imperial leadership. The Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE) occupies somewhat different terrain in the history of empire building. The geography of the empire at its height in 117 CE extended from the Iberian Peninsula and Britannia across the north and south shores of the Mediterranean, including Egypt and Anatolia, into Mesopotamia, with corridors to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf. This overlapped to some extent with past and future empires of Central Asia. At the time, the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE) was settled into Iranian lands with the Kushan to their east. Two distinctive features of the Roman Empire were that, first, it was the only world-his­ torical imperial system to claim the northern European lands, and second, once the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 CE, no subsequent empire rose in its place to revitalize the imperial bureaucratic order, as successfully hap­ pened repeatedly in both Central and East Asia. Roman order moved east to Byzantium with the Christian Roman emperor Constantine in 330 CE. Byzantine emperor Justinian’s sixth-century attempts to restore the territorial Prelude 19

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integrity of the Roman Empire succeeded only briefly, leaving Byzantium settled into the Balkans and Anatolia with significant influence in the east­ ern Mediterranean. During the period of this study, the Latin Church struggled unsuccess­ fully to reclaim the mantle of the Roman Empire, and Emperor Frederick II rallied secular leadership in an unsuccessful bid to revive the vision of empire. These struggles were the basis of conflict between the Guelph and Ghibelline factions in Italian city-states and the motivation for the Roman Church’s suppression campaigns against all groups, foreign and domestic, deemed heretical. While a few Roman legions appear to have wandered across Eurasia into Han frontier territories, and there is some evidence of silk from the Han domains in the Roman and Egyptian markets at this earlier time, the Roman Empire had always been an essentially European, North African, and eastern Mediterranean affair. Europeans, until the time of the Mongol Empire, had limited and fragmented contact with the empires that rose and fell in Central, South, and East Asia. During the Mongol era, Europe remained divided among small feudal kingdoms and city-states, with the Roman Church as the only symbol of unity, and an increasingly weak one given the rise of secular authority. Empires, including the Parthian, the Han and Tang, the Kushan, the Abbasid, and others had a long, ongoing history of political dialogue and contact ranging from artistic exchange to warfare. The Ilkhanate of the Mongol period occupied Iranian lands that had historically hosted a number of empires. Many of these claimed common cultural and political heritage from the Persian Empire and the philoso­ phy of Ahura Mazda (Zoroastrianism). The Seleucid (312–63 BCE) and Sasanian (224–651 CE) empires dominated these lands prior to the Islamic Umayyad (661–750) and Abbasid (750–1258) caliphates that also encom­ passed lands in north Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Asia. The Ghaznavid Empire (962–1186), ruled by a highly Persianized Islamic, Turkic elite controlled Central Asia, northern Hind, Afghanistan, and Iranian lands, while the Turkic Seljuk Empire (1037–1194) extended from the Hindu Kush to eastern Anatolia and from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. The Khwarazmian Empire (1077–1231/1256) ruled greater Iran, from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. All of these empires emerged from nomadic origins and, unlike the empires of the east Asian heartland, they retained large nomadic populations and nomadic customs. Four dynasties of Turkic and one of Afghan origins ruled the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), extending in 1294 from the Indus River to the Ganges across the northern stretch of the subcontinent and to the south of Kashmir, Ladakh, and Nepal. When the Mongols moved into Iranian territories in 1243, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (1077–1307) became a vassal state and soon went into administrative decline. 20 Prelude

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The Khwarazmian Empire, the Ismaili order of Assassins at Alamut, and the Abbasid caliphate succumbed to military defeat at the hands of the Mongols in the next decade, leaving the lands of greater Iran under the command of Hülegü, founder of the Mongol Ilkhanate. A BRIEF PRE-MONGOL EURASIAN HISTORY OF ART The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a dramatic turn toward “the image” as a focus of political discourse, yet the approach to image making had no single conceptual framework. On his travels Marco Polo encoun­ tered clear evidence of the association of contemporary image making with power. Of Kublai Khan’s palace at Khanbuliq he recalled: “The walls of the halls and chambers are all covered with gold and silver and decorated with pictures of dragons and birds and horsemen and various breeds of beasts and scenes of battle. The ceiling is similarly adorned, so that there is nothing to be seen anywhere but gold and pictures.”2 This saturation of images as known in Buddhist cave and temple art had few secular precedents prior to contact with imperial Mongol structures. A story from the eleventh century reveals some of the philosophical complexities surrounding the transmission of thir­ teenth-century visual culture.3 Hisham, a merchant and scholar from Mecca, hoping to convert the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (r. 610–640) traveled to Constantinople for an audience. During their conversation, the emperor brought forth a beautiful cube-shaped box with many compartments, each containing a silk cloth on which was an individual portrait. Heraclius slowly opened each drawer, revealing in sequence portraits of Adam, Noah, and Abraham. Upon viewing the portrait in the last compartment, Hisham and his companions began to weep, for they recognized the face of the Prophet Muhammad. Astounded, Hisham asked how this could be? From where had this box come? Who created the portrait, which in the story, unlike the other portraits, was not described in detail? They learned that these images were of divine creation, not painted by the hand of man.4 Through a material image, God had transmitted verification of his last chosen prophet and delivered this evidence into the hands of a Byzantine emperor. The mutual act of seeing and being seen offered a measure of legitimacy. Here was an example of the uncreated image and the structure of feeling that allowed conversation and necessary translation across artistic traditions and belief systems. Even the Byzantine emperor as a non-Muslim was a recipient of God’s visual message. Thirteenth-century Armenian historian Vardan tells another story of the Armenian Christian ascetic Yovhannes, who traveled to the holy city of Bethlehem and there saw mural paintings of the apostles. Though the monk was dismayed to see that Muslims had dug out the eyes of the images to show Prelude 21

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their disapproval of this kind of display, he also wondered as a Christian if this sort of depiction of holy figures was entirely appropriate. Did not the process of figural representation itself dishonor them? The monk prayed and begged the apostles to reveal to him if they were pleased to be painted every­ where. In a vision, Peter and John appeared to him and said: “You begged us to disclose to you [our views] about the Christians’ drawing us. It is not at all pleasing to us, and we are vexed. We indicate [this] everywhere, but they do not heed us.”5 Although Vardan does not explicitly condemn image making and does call the Muslim defacement of images a show of disrespect, his story also gives strong voice to those Armenian Christians who shared the Muslim perspective that discouraged figural images. The pronouncements of Peter and Paul in a vision make it clear that they are as vexed as the Muslims. The first eastern polity to convert to Roman Catholic Christianity in 301, the Armenian Church held that the holy books condemned “worship of the cre­ ated” as idolatry. However, the Church also held that the apostles and their successors had the power to lay their hands on a cross, offer a prayer, and “as the Spirit moved them, that the sensible matter might receive the intelligible power of God.”6 This was the “image created by man and anointed by God.” The establishment of Christian Constantinople shortly after the conver­ sion of the Armenians placed a new focus on images in the form of painted icons. The Byzantines anointed figural images in the way the Armenians anointed the cross and transformed them with Spirit. These images were deemed miraculous, for they contained the power of God. Icon worship soon became a disputed practice in Armenia, where it was commonly known as the Greek heresy. Periodic outbursts of iconoclasm also happened within the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, where holders of different views on the matter contended. Despite Armenian references to the Greek heresy, one well-known icon, a wooden relief of the Descent from the Cross, continued to be venerated in Armenia. According to legend, “John, wit­ nessing the Virgin’s grief, had taken a piece of the cypress wood left from the cross, and begged Christ to imprint His image on it. His prayers were answered, the miracle took place, and the Virgin filled with great joy took the image, embraced it, pressed it against her face, and wetting it with her tears exclaimed: ‘This is truly portrayed, my crucified Son, called the Saviour.’”7 The miraculous imprinting was similar to the image of Muhammad found on the silk cloth in the story of Emperor Heraclius and Hisham. Staking its claims to an alternative identity, the Latin Church held that the “image created by man” was only that—created by man with no possible pretense of anointment. There was nothing holy, in the sense of God-invested Spirit, about the murals or statues that graced the monasteries and cathedrals 22 Prelude

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of Latin Christendom. Figural art was symbolic, a powerful memory prod for the faithful, a guide to inner spiritual life. The wine and bread of the Eucharist ceremony under the authority of the priest could be transformed by the power of God according to Catholic belief, but not the image. Latin Church policy generally held that images could be adorned and venerated for the personages they represented, but not worshipped—a devotion reserved for God alone. Occupying another perspective, Buddhist art traditions that grew out of classical Hindu and Greek visual culture celebrated figural imagery in sculpture and mural work and carried little if any tension regarding the rela­ tionship between the image’s spiritual and material components. Alexander the Great’s conquests of Persia (334 BCE) resulted in a mass migration of artists into the areas of Balkh, Merv, and Kabul, where later craftsmen trained in the Greco-Roman and Hindu arts would create the first extensive renderings of the image of the Buddha for the rulers of the Kushan Empire (30–375 CE). This work, initiated by the Buddhist emperor Kanishka (127– 151 CE) at Gandhara and neighboring sites, flourished and was eventually carried north by missionaries to Central and East Asia and along the western and eastern seas to communities in southeast Asia. The Buddhist communi­ ties that absorbed these artistic traditions in subsequent centuries become the “idol worshippers” so distained by keepers of the Christian and Muslim faiths. In fact, however, Buddhist artistry, while not as fundamentally trou­ bled by questions of a divide between spirit and material, did acknowledge the same power of investiture of an image with spiritual presence. A piece of wood and paint on a surface were simultaneously material images and embodied Buddha spirit. Because Buddhism invested all of creation with a Buddha nature, there was relatively little inherent tension on this point. The “eye-opening” ceremony that constituted the final touch on a statue or portrait brought it to life through correct consciousness, a feature of the Buddhist Eight-Fold Path. Claims could be disputed and popular beliefs might follow a more literal attachment to the miraculous, but Buddhist prac­ tice provided no central authority to mandate the legitimacy of one view or another: pluralism was the norm. In the Central Asian world, Buddhism entered into Manichaeism, the teachings of Iranian philosopher and art­ ist Mani (216–277 CE).8 An integrative faith that included Christians and Buddhists, this tradition provided both the theological interconnectedness for the transmission of images and artistic standards and the enthusiasm and appeal of faith-based painted images. Buddhist temple sites along the Taklamakan silk-road routes produced a core collection of art work that excelled in both naturalism and human spirit drawn from Manichaean and Gandharan inspiration. Prelude 23

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THE MONGOL INTERVENTION IN EURASIAN HISTORY With its politically and geographically far-reaching implications, the Mongol intervention in history signaled a clear shift beyond the more regionalized imperial politics of antiquity. At the foundation of the Mongol era’s impres­ sive cultural exchange was continental commercial exchange. Historian Stephen Kotkin, writing on Mongol Eurasia, reminds us that “Eurasia” con­ notes an open terrain, not a coherent system. He suggests the term ab impe­ rio (from empire) to characterize the cross-regional exchange that ultimately privileged a system of governance rather than ethnic identity.9 While mate­ rial and cultural exchange had long been a part of Eurasian transregional networks, the Mongols and their vassals, Kotkin continues, “fostered not an ethnic culture but an imperial culture, really an imperial system. Exchange for them was not a byproduct of interaction, not an occasional phenomenon, but the raison dêtre of their empire: empire as exchange—essentially with­ out barriers of religion, tribe, or language, thanks in large measure to the Realpolitik (the inverse scale of the conquerors to their conquests).”10 Combining nomadic exchange relations with a transcontinental infra­ structure of commercial networks, the empire flipped the normative relation­ ship between political and economic power. The impact of this commercial overdrive created further opportunities for many societies poised for eco­ nomic takeoff and at the same time challenged the received ideologies that had held belief systems and social orders in place. It is no surprise that Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the grand synthesizer of Latin Church teachings on the proper limits of merchant activity and Christian faith, taught and wrote in the Eurasian thirteenth century. In the Mongol scheme of things, wealth followed political authority, but this was not enough. At its foundations, only unlimited growth and motion, circulation of peoples and commodi­ ties, could sustain Mongol political authority. Vastly successful but inher­ ently unstable, this economic nomadism was a new template for centralizing political systems. The Mongol vision was not only of empire but of world conquest, a voracious posture with a capacity for utter devastation and rapid high-end reconstruction. Other conquerors had claimed the world, willfully or by default relegating most of its actual geography to the barbarian realms beyond their civilized center. For the Mongols there were no “barbarians,” no groups to be left beyond their reach. They mapped an imperial vision not dependent on the politics of a civilized/barbarian divide. Their claim to a new universalism brought with it the necessity as well as the material means for innovative artistic conditions.

24 Prelude

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CHAPTER 1

Tabriz in Azerbaijan (Ilkhanate)

T

he illustrated Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) is a unique creation of the long thirteenth century. Compiled in Tabriz between 1304 and 1314 by Grand Vizier Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh included histories of all the peoples of the known world while also clearly subordinating these multiple histories to the frame of late Ilkhanid political authority. Produced in Persian and Arabic for widespread domestic distribution, this text continued to be copied long after the decline of the Ilkhanate, a measure of its impact as a reference point in political ide­ ology. An illustrated manuscript, the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh offered a new vision of world culture. Produced in Herat in 1415 during the Timurid period (1370–1505) to illustrate an edition of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, Abaqa on Horseback is a family portrait of three generations of rulers of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335), Mongol rulers over Iranian lands. Although Ilkhan Abaqa (1234–1282) dominates the composition, and his son Arghun (1258–1291) shares the central space of the illustration, the intended focus of the group portrait is the child who at the time of the initial compilation of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh was already grown up and ruled as Ilkhan Ghazan (1271–1304). The immediate setting is pastoral and in the vicinity of Tabriz. Grasslands and horses affirm the nomadic life from which Ghazan is somewhat lifted away but still connected. The scene is both regal, with crown and royal umbrella marking the trio, and informal, depicting an outing with grandchild hoisted on his father’s back and with his grandfather leading the way. All eyes, including those of the horses, are on the child. Ilkhan Ghazan himself sponsored the illustrated history of the Mongols that became the first installment of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh. Rashid al-Din as Ghazan’s vizier oversaw this project, introduced his own perspective, and continued the work, which produced the 1314 manuscript under Ilkhan Oljeitü (d. 1316), baptized Nikolya after Pope Nicholas IV and Ghazan’s suc­ cessor. While acknowledging previous rulers and their beliefs, the program envisioned by Rashid al-Din’s text linked the family history of Ghazan with 25

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world-historical movements, offering a contemporary spin on both. Here the chronological framework spanned the period from the consolidation of Mongol rule over Iranian lands under Abaqa’s father Hülegü (1218–1265), grandson of Chinggis Khan (1162–1227), to the reign of Abaqa’s grand­ son Ghazan, who converted to Islam from his upbringing and early edu­ cation in Buddhist practices. As compiler/author of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, and himself a convert from Judaism to Islam, Rashid al-Din advocated for the unique features of Iranian Islam and his vision of a consolidated Iranian state. He hoped to inspire his fellow Muslims in Persian-speaking territories to embrace Ghazan as the true leader of a new Islamic Iranian polity. Both Rashid al-Din’s 1314 text and the Timurid illustration Abaqa on Horseback drew attention to the childhood of Ghazan, the star of the text, emphasizing his humanity and drawing attention toward human agency in world-historical events. Historical thinking, in this context, increasingly became not just a record of the past but a totalizing vision attempting to integrate the present into a larger human story in a way that legitimized the claims of the authorizing source. Inconsistencies, contradictions, and mul­ tiple voices were part of the acknowledged complexity of historical represen­ tation. While theories of God’s punishment or Heaven’s mandate possibly explained how the Mongols had come to dominate the Eurasian world, their accomplishments through sheer force of human will impressed contempo­ raries as well. The Mongol conquests brought a sharp rupture between past and future. Rashid al-Din was not alone in his contemplation of the meaning of it all. Spiritual Franciscans, Chinese literati artists, and Nepalese Buddhist devotees, as we shall see, were on a similar mission to visualize history anew with reference to the phenomena of Mongol conquests. These conquests made possible each group’s engagement with an extended and complex cul­ tural geography. Tabriz was the meeting place where many would share and compare in this common project of uncommon precedent. TABRIZ IN EURASIAN HISTORICAL CONTEXT Human desires trekked the geographic imaginaries of thirteenth-century Azerbaijan. Across mountains, lakes, and grasslands, profit, faith, and curi­ osity motivated the circulation of goods and ideas in the Iranian heartland. Located on silk-road routes west of the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, Tabriz had long existed as a commercial crossroads, but remained relatively underdeveloped prior to the Mongol’s arrival and the city’s sudden rise to prominence after 1258. Situated in the eastern corner of an alluvial plain, with the Caspian Sea to the east and the Sahand massif with peaks of 11,000 feet to the south, Tabriz functioned as the only suitable pass in the area for 26 Chapter 1

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east-west and south-north traffic. Prone to earthquakes, the city suffered numerous tremors, including one in 1042 in which an estimated 40,000 people died. The years 1273 and 1304 brought major quakes that destroyed whole sections of the city.1 While Tabriz had many streams and rivers that could be used for irrigation, these ran dry during the summer months. Water too salty for drinking was also a problem. For its main water supply, Tabriz depended on a unique system of underground water canals (qanâts) that tapped into subterranean water channels and carried drinking water directly to neighborhoods. Local elites with surplus resources constructed and main­ tained the cobbled conduits as part of their charitable activities. Periodic user fees contributed to repairs; families paid according to the number of pipes entering a household. Without major investments, Tabriz remained a sizeable but not politically remarkable hub of trade. This investment opportu­ nity arrived with the Mongol invasions; the city’s historical landscape was about to shift. Tabriz functioned as a model of a nomadic-urban society with many unique imperial features. Because the Atabeg rulers of Tabriz submit­ ted peacefully to the Mongols in 1231, the city, with its many shrines to sufis, poets, and mystics in addition to its commercial assets, suffered little destruction. Under the Ilkhans who were subordinate to the Mongol Khans of Khitai, Tabriz grew to a magnificent city with a large population and a collection of newly constructed imperial buildings. At the same time, the Ilkhans maintained their nomadic lifestyle, with its seasonal migrations to accommodate their herds and the movement of magnificent tent cities com­ prised of government, workshop, and commercial facilities organized around the ordos (nomadic palaces). The pick of a sedentary capital city favored Tabriz because the region just south, known as the Margha Steppe, provided ideal nearby pastureland for the Mongols’ vast herds. Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258 and the selection of Tabriz as the new political center secured Tabriz’s place in the string of commercial, urban centers dotting central Eurasia. With expanded and improved infrastructure Tabriz’s sta­ tus would remain a marker of political authority in the region long after the Mongols had passed from the scene. With the advent of Mongol rule, the city expanded well beyond its existing walls with the addition of many new neighborhoods, gardens, and orchards. Ilkhanid ministers and local governors contributed to the con­ struction of palace complexes, administrative offices, and religious foun­ dations in Tabriz.2 Because royal households periodically vacated Tabriz to move their herds to summer or winter pastures, the city was often left with only minimal official staff and a reduced population that consequently fluctuated. Tabriz, however, was a city associated with the court even when Tabriz in Azerbaijan 27

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Map 2. Mapping Artistic Exchange: Eastern Mediterranean Zones

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the Ilkhan and his court were set up in elaborate tent cities elsewhere. This gave Tabriz a dynamic vitality. Rashid al-Din, historian of the period, wrote that “Tabriz was so populous that it became an Egypt with Arghunia as the capital like Cairo.”3 (Tabriz, in this case, refers to both the city and its sur­ rounding region.) The whole of Azerbaijan province was comprised of nine tumans (administrative districts) with twenty-seven cities; Tabriz itself con­ stituted seven districts, each with numerous villages.4 Contemporary sources concur that it was the finest and largest city in all of Iran. In conjunction with Tabriz, Ilkhan Arghun developed Sultaniyya with many new Buddhist structures. Geopolitical thought placed the new city of Sultaniyya at the piv­ otal point between the Western Imperial Highway (shah-rah-i gharbi) con­ necting Sultaniyya to Konya in Anatolia via Tabriz and the Eastern Imperial Highway (shah-rah-i sharqi) linking Sultaniyya with Balkh through Rayy and Sabzavar, cities with Naw Bahar place-names, suggesting old ties to Buddhist communities in the seventh and eighth centuries. A Southern Imperial Highway connected Tabriz through Sultaniyya to Isfahan and Kirman, with an alternate route to the south through Shiraz to the seaport town of Hormuz. Of Sultaniyya the geographer Mustawfi wrote in 1340: “There are at the present time so many great buildings in Sultaniyyah, that, except for Tabriz, the like thereof is seen in no other city. People also have migrated hither from many other provinces, to settle in the (new) capital, being of all nations and sects, whereby the language spoken at present here is not uniform, though it is mainly a mixed dialect of Persian.”5 A paradigm of social and ideological integration, Tabriz, with its nomadic style of empire building, required an ever-expanding resource base, without which political authority was not possible. Lacking claims to legiti­ macy through estate holding, bloodlines, or examination prowess that elites in other polities might invoke, transcontinental empire building required a sustained inversion of politics and economics not typical of dominant seden­ tary states. Tribute, taxes, booty, fees, and trade maintained political author­ ity. The nomadic model of political economy produced an empire of exchange that created unique conditions of heightened social contact and in the pro­ cess transformed the material and cultural conditions of Eurasian societies. Though Marco Polo’s account of world geography traversed most of Eurasia and commented on specific locales along the way, his focus on Christianity and the court of the Great Khan introduced an eastwest frame to his narra­ tive. Similarly, Wang Dayuan, in his 1349 description of foreign countries in the Daoyi zhilu (Record of Island Peoples), conceptualized the world divided between east and west at the Straits of Singapore.6 The east-west focus on a Eurasian-wide scale emerged as an ideological construct in this era, but did not dominate social thought. The social geography of Rashid al-Din’s Jami‘ Tabriz in Azerbaijan 29

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al-Tarvarikh, on the other hand, radiated out from the Ilkhanate to incor­ porate histories from the east and west as well as north and south. This per­ spective found visual expression in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh’s range of depicted peoples, including Song emperors and past rulers of Iranian territories, and scenes from the stories of Islam and Christendom. As represented in the Timurid illustration and the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh text, Abaqa was an important figure in the early history of Mongol rule in Iran. Son of Hülegü, founder of the Ilkhanate, Abaqa was the first to desig­ nate Tabriz his official capital, and so it remained for the duration of Mongol rule in Iran. Educated in Buddhist beliefs and practices, Abaqa as ruler of the Ilkhanate after 1265 continued to extend the Mongol legal code (yasa) with its commitment to religious inclusion. At the same time, he carried on the cultivation of a thirteenth-century Eurasian Buddhist renaissance that extended as far west as Anatolia. Hülegü had been patron to fifteen sites in western Tibet, including the kingdom of Ladakh, home to the Phag-mo gru­ pa sect.7 These territories included pasturelands, market towns, and transit routes in a vital area between Tibet and Iran.8 At the prosperous town of Malot in the Kashmiri domain, a traveler in the 1250s noted a temple he described as having been built by King Hülegü (Ilkhan Hülegü).9 Elaborate Buddhist complexes built in 1260 at Labnasagut near Lake Van to the west of Tabriz housed high-quality paintings and statues for which no expense was spared.10 Under Abaqa’s rule, the maintenance and expansion of these facilities continued. Uighur Buddhists inhabited the town of Khoi just north of Tabriz and coexisted with dominant Muslim populations in other parts of the Ilkhanate. Abaqa passed on this legacy to his son Arghun, included in the family portrait Abaqa on Horseback, who also held strong Buddhist views and sponsored extensive construction of Buddhist temples.11 An expression of Mongol political vision, sponsorship of Buddhism over the first three decades of Ilkhanid rule directed an estimated half of their treasury toward production of elaborate gold and silver Buddhist images.12 The same pattern held for the Yuan court’s sponsorship of Tibetan Buddhism. Tons of gold and silver, plus tens of thousands of bolts of silk, made possible an era of extraordinary artistic creativity and technical exper­ tise devoted to Buddhist practices.13 One consequence was that a new and more attentive awareness of Buddhism filtered into contemporary attitudes. Individuals, including Roger Bacon and Marco Polo, were seriously inter­ ested in the precepts of Buddhism for its philosophical and political conno­ tations. The interest of some stemmed more from their interest in converting the Mongols to Christianity, but the exchange was two-way no matter what the initial intent. An extant copy of the Lotus Sutra dated 1346 with a gold frontispiece illustrating the life of the Buddha found its way to a shelf in 30 Chapter 1

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the Vatican Library, underscoring the intelligence gathering and curiosity that equally motivated cultural exchange through and around Azerbaijan.14 Although composed after a ban on Buddhist practices in the Ilkhanate fol­ lowing the conversion of Ilkhan Ghazan to Islam, the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh included both history and illustrations from the life of the Buddha. Detailed attention to Buddhism in this case was made possible by Rashid al-Din’s recruitment of Kashmiri Buddhist scholars to the court of Tabriz, where they worked with scholars of Islam to translate Buddhist terms and concepts into language and narratives familiar to Muslim readers. Beyond his Buddhist upbringing, Abaqa experienced religious plural­ ism through his mother, Doquz Khatun (d. 1265), a devotee of the Church of the East, and one of his secondary wives, Maria Palaiologina (1253–1325), an orthodox Christian princess from the Byzantine imperial family who became known as the Despina Khatun (1265–1285).15 Both women enjoyed high sta­ tus and were celebrated for their spiritual leadership, often playing advisory roles and acting as advocates for Christian populations of various schools within the Ilkhanate. Travelers among Christian communities through­ out Tabriz, Armenia, and Rome transmitted images of Ilkhan Hülegü and Doquz Khatun reimaged as the new Constantine and Helen, the parents of Constantine the Great, founder of the Byzantine Empire.16 With their Patriarch of the East in Baghdad, Church of the East organizations by the thirteenth century spanned the continent from the eastern Mediterranean to the Mongolian steppe and the seas of al-Hind. Islam accepted the Church of the East as a protected community under Muslim law. Roman Catholicism, in contrast, condemned the Church of the East as a heretical organization. Eastern Orthodox Christianity was more accommodating. While obliging Christian parties of all persuasions and actively supporting Buddhist groups, Abaqa successfully ruled a majority Islamic population. Not surprisingly, linguistic pluralism followed from the above condi­ tions and marked both life and work at the Tabriz court. Layers of ethnic, linguistic, and faith-based diversity defined the contact zone that surrounded the city. Evidence of this diversity appeared clearly in policy discussions and the recruitment of experts. I. P. Petrushevsky suggests that at the Ilkhanid court Buddhists and Church of the East members frequently shared the same opinions on policy questions regarding the economy, while a Muslim elite, supported by factions of the Turkish military aristocracy and Iranian bureaucrats, constituted an opposition; at times Jews sided with Buddhists.17 Buddhists, Church of the East members, and Jews with imperial support faced off with high-level Muslims, Turks, and Iranians with local exper­ tise. Thanks to an infrastructure of translators and cultural experts made possible by an increase in social mobility, language options at the Ilkhanid Tabriz in Azerbaijan 31

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court included dialects of Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Italian, and Arabic, among others. Some, like Tomasso Uzi from Siena, found employment as sword bearers to the Ilkhans and served in the inner court.18 In his capac­ ity as translator to the Ilkhan in business matters, Uzi interpreted conflicts and requests to the Tabriz court that involved citizens of Venice and Genoa. John de Cora, as archbishop of Sultaniyya, prepared reports for Rome on conditions and events around Tabriz; he translated Roman Christianity to the Ilkhanid elite as well as Buddhism to the Latin Church authorities. Rabban Sauma (1220–1294), traveling from the court at Dadu as a Church of the East monk on pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, arrived in Tabriz only to be dispatched by Ilkhan Arghun on a diplomatic mission with letters in Mongolian and Latin bound for the papacy and King Philip IV of France. Versed in multiple languages exemplifying the cosmopolitanism of their nomadic court life, the Ilkhans consciously signaled linguistic and political recognition of mutual interests through carefully selected messengers and their choices of family names. Ilkhan Arghun, a devotee of Buddhism, had his son Oljeitü baptized in the Christian faith and named Nikolya after Pope Nicholas IV. At the same time, out of regard for the Mongol rulers of Tabriz, Italian-speaking families in noticeable numbers began naming their sons after Ilkhans Hülegü, Arghun, and Ghazan, calling them Alaone, Argone, and Cassano respectively; “Can Grande” became the Italian appella­ tion for the Great Khan.19 In relationship to contemporary rivalries between Guelf and Ghibeliline factions in Italian politics, this naming fest seems to align with the secular tones of Mongol society. Ghibelline ideology cham­ pioned the supremacy of imperial authority over papal authority, contrary to the Guelf position. The Ghibelline signore of Verona, known as Cangrande (Grand Khan) della Scala (r. 1311–1329), was a contemporary of Marco Polo and patron of the great poet Dante Alighieri.20 The Cangrande’s court was famous for its display of textiles, dress, and art objects from Mongol territo­ ries, a statement of both fashion and power. Cross-naming and translation activity spurred on hopes for closer commercial and diplomatic connections. Archbishop Bartolomeo of Poggio, appointed archbishop of Marāgha from 1328 to 1333, contributed translations of the Gospels into Persian for the Codex Cumanicus, a thirteenth-century language guide for merchants and missionaries in the Black Sea ports.21 At the upper political levels, Rome hoped for the conversion of the Ilkhans to Latin Christianity. The Ilkhans in their turn hoped for the submission of the Franks, whoever might repre­ sent them, and alliance against the Mamluks. Interestingly, the names most familiar to Italian contemporaries, aside from Kublai Khan publicized by Marco Polo, were those of the rulers in Tabriz. 32 Chapter 1

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The Ilkhans were particularly comprehensive in their approach to state-to-state diplomacy. Conflict with both the Chaghadaid ulus and the Mamluks in Egypt gave Abaqa a two-front military challenge, motivat­ ing him to seek alliances with European heads of state. A series of largely unsuccessful efforts nevertheless produced unprecedented events such as the 1274 Council of Lyon, where attempts were made to reconcile the Latin and Greek branches of Christianity. Abaqa sought a coalition of Mongol Buddhist, Armenian Christian, Church of the East, and Muslim groups in Iran against the Muslim Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. No potential ally was too small, and the plethora of European political centers did not discourage them. Nor did lack of success deter the Ilkhanid efforts. Some of the earliest exchanges were between Catalonia and Tabriz during the reign of Hülegü. Before his campaigns of 1299–1300 against the Mamluks, Ilkhan Ghazan contacted Henri II de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, in the hope of obtaining military assistance. The Ilkhan later exchanged letters and embassies with Pope Boniface VIII with the objective of forming a united front against the Mamluks. Oljeitü, in 1305, long before his invasion of Syria in 1312, sent letters to the kings of France and England with the purpose of an alliance in mind. After the Mamluk defeat of Ilkhan Öljeitü’s forces in Syria in 1313, the Ilkhans ceased military actions, and for all practical purposes warfare between these two foes came to an end. As centers of Christian authority, Rome and Constantinople were both relatively weak states; Constantinople, however, enjoyed a higher sta­ tus in Eurasian diplomatic circles. The Ilkhans shared this assessment. Their efforts to create an alliance with Rome amounted to an attempt to draw a more peripheral player to their side. Unlike Rome, the rulers of Byzantium maintained informal diplomatic connections with the Mamluks through Orthodox Church networks in Cairo.22 The Ilkhans followed the Mamluks in their recognition of the Byzantine emperors as heirs to Greek learning, which Ilkhanid court intellectual circles held in high regard. Byzantium rep­ resented a political center in the Mediterranean world that remained a refer­ ence point for interstate diplomacy even when the Byzantine Empire was in sharp decline.23 For rulers of both Egypt and the Ilkhanate, Constantinople held its status as the highest seat of Christian authority and as such retained the privilege of distributing thrones and crowns within Christian lands. Both the Ilkhans and the Mamluks claimed diplomatic friendship with the Byzantine rulers and sought to cultivate this relationship. For the Mamluks, the Byzantines were friendly Christians, not active allies. The Ilkhans were aware of the need to maintain their own good relations with Constantinople in spite of the latter’s ties to the Mamluk Sultanate. Diplomatic marriages Tabriz in Azerbaijan 33

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between the Ilkhans and the daughters of the Byzantine rulers provided a measure of additional defense on the Ilkhanate’s northern border, where conflict with the Golden Horde created ongoing tension. One bride who became known as Maria of the Mongols played an especially intriguing role as a woman among a strong contingent of Mongol women at court and an Eastern Orthodox Christian among Buddhists, Church of the East mem­ bers, and Muslims.24 GROWING THE IMPERIAL VISION: NOMADIC COMMERCIAL INVERSION An extended use of the Islamic waqf (charitable endowments) system along with monetary reform laid a foundation for the infrastructure enhance­ ment Tabriz required to make its bid as Baghdad’s commercial and political replacement. Ilkhan Ghazan oversaw the construction of a covered bazaar that both boosted trade and incorporated new mosque and madrasa educa­ tional structures. The waqf system legally endowed public buildings tradi­ tionally devoted primarily to religious activity with a secure source of income for maintenance and personnel expenses. Because waqf structures typically included mosques, schools, and markets, Ghazan’s expansion of the com­ mercial component was significant but not a radical departure from existing practice and easily brought together a coalition of supportive elites. Spanning an area of twenty-nine acres, the covered bazaar at Tabriz became the largest for hundreds of miles around.25 Silk weavers maintained workshops in the bazaar, while camel sellers, jewelers, dyers, carpet makers, and sugar mer­ chants found their place alongside money changers, book and paper sellers, and leather makers. The market scene was often lively and sometimes com­ bative, as Ibn Battuta described on his day in town: The next morning I entered the town [Tabriz] and we came to a great bazaar, called the Ghazan bazaar, one of the finest I have seen the world over. Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the jewel­ lers’ bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the varieties of precious stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich garments with a waist-sash of silk, who stood in front of the merchants, exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another. As a result of all this I witnessed a riot—may God preserve us from such! We went on into [the] ambergris and musk market, and witnessed another riot like it or worse.26

An extensive system of caravansaries provided merchants and travelers like Ibn Battuta with accommodations, information, and resources. Through a 34 Chapter 1

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system of charitable endowments, secular and religious leaders contributed significantly to an extensive commercial infrastructure at Tabriz. Monetary reform begun in the early 1270s was integral to the rise of Tabriz as a financial center. Ilkhan Abaqa (r. 1265–1282) in 1273 summoned a new mint master, possibly of Georgian origins. Master Arabesque, as he came to be known from the design of his insignia, set in motion far-reach­ ing fiscal reforms that would provide the city and its rulers with additional layers of economic prosperity and political unity. Due to numerous difficul­ ties encountered along the way, almost a decade would pass before the plans reached completion. The goal was to create a coinage system for Tabriz that by extension would transform exchange across the empire. Beyond stan­ dardizing silver coins by weight, design, and quality, all of which facili­ tated exchange both within the Ilkhanate and with neighboring economies, Master Arabesque introduced an ideological approach to financial reform. Coins would be minted in copper and gold to cover all media of market exchange from the Mediterranean to the Western and Eastern seas. As Judith Kolbas has written, in developing a design for the new coins, “the mint master planned to adopt both Mongol and Islamic concepts to give Tabriz the status of a capital in both cultures.”27 [B]oth the reverse and obverse of the 671h Tabriz type announced a new unified financial structure of the whole regime. The two words of al-adil and al-azam re-asserted the Chingizid tradition from the east as well as combined the two different administrative regions of the west. On the obverse, the amalgamation of the short shahada from Adharbayjan with the longer ones from the il-khan’s province also joined two regions. As a result, both sides of the coin gave a political statement of unity. 28

New standardized coinage made possible increased ease of monetary exchange, with consequences for the politics of taxation. Revenue from diverse populations of the Ilkhanate, in the form of poll taxes and customs duty, were essential, just as tribute had been for pre-imperial steppe gover­ nance. With a standardized monetary system, sundry ethnic and religious groups could potentially be incorporated into one tax system, resulting in increased revenue for a stronger state and the projects it sponsored. This was especially critical because the Mongols had destroyed much of their poten­ tial tax base in the wanton destruction of agricultural and village life during the initial period of their Iranian conquests. Ironically, it was in the effort to undo this destruction that Ghazan imported Chinese agricultural knowledge into Iran. Land taxes both agricultural and pastoral were paid primarily in kind; religious orders and the political/military elite held tax exemptions. Tabriz in Azerbaijan 35

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Ilkhanid political patronage and fiscal reform did more than raise the levels of integration among local and regional markets; they opened doors to potential market integration among places as diverse as Burgundy, Tuscany, Khitai, and Hind/Sind. Wealthy merchants and religious figures drawn from the periphery of the empire all sought luxury textiles from the Tabriz domes­ tic and import markets. The papal inventory of 1295 included silks manufac­ tured in Tabriz; silk woven in Tabriz between 1319 and 1335 also provided Emperor Rudolf IV of Habsburg with his burial garb in 1365.29 Economic historian A. P. Martinez noted that “The transit trade between India [Hind/ Sind] and the West was always the most important single category of trade in the Il-Khanate”; he goes so far as to say that “The India [Hind/Sind] trade of the Latin West was responsible for the prosperity of the Il-Khanate.”30 With Ilkhan Hülegü’s capture of Baghdad and the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, prosperous trade routes between Baghdad and Sind shifted to Tabriz and the Black Sea under Mongol rule. Trade through the Persian Gulf port of Basra previously destined for Baghdad now continued on to Tabriz. Vesconte’s 1321 map of Persia, created for the papacy in Rome, dem­ onstrates clear interest in the markets of Iran. Representing a geography that extended from the eastern Mediterranean region to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, this map offered a vision of routes through central Asia that might provide alternative access to goods from south and east Asia. Hostile rela­ tions with Mamluk Egypt found expression in the papacy’s repeated restric­ tions on trade between Christian merchant centers and the prosperous Egyptian markets connected to Asian markets through the seas of al-Hind. In 1323 the papacy finally banned all trade with Alexandria, to the dismay of Venetian merchants. As a substitute option, the papacy sought to pro­ mote both trade and missionary work in the Ilkhanate. With the ascent of Pope Nicholas IV (1288–1292), the first Franciscan pope, many friars of the Franciscan order increased their activity in Ilkhanid Iran, including Tabriz.31 As early as 1264 Pietro Veglione (or Vilione), a Venetian trader, had lived in Tabriz and acted as contact person for merchants working commercial routes between Tabriz and the Italian city-states. The papacy also estab­ lished bishoprics at Marāgha and Sultaniyya in the greater Tabriz region. Under these circumstances, increased daily contact among religious groups previously little known to each other became a novel feature of life. John de Cora, appointed archbishop of Sultaniyya by Pope John XXII in 1330, wrote an account titled Livre de l’Estat du Grand Caan between 1328 and 1334, in which he commented on the ecclesiastical organization of the Buddhists in Sultaniyya under their Grand Lama: “This pontiff of idolaters was dressed like a cardinal; ‘porte sur son chief un chapeau rouge, et touslours est vestu de rouge’ [wearing on his head a red hat, and dressed in red].”32 A greatly expanded 36 Chapter 1

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comparative consciousness moved through social life during the long thir­ teenth century. Less visible in the Mongol integration of the Eurasian economy, Buddhist commercial networks activated their own real and potential sys­ tems of exchange. Although this phenomenon had a stronger base in the Yuan territories, the Buddhist revival across Eurasia impacted the Ilkhanate as well. As already noted, Buddhist groups played prominent roles in policy debates at the Tabriz court, where the ability to marshal economic resources could be decisive. Heavily involved in commercial matters as a matter of course, a Buddhist community (sangha) functioned within mobile, flexible, and loosely federated networks generating an infrastructure for commer­ cial activity that maximized its regional and long-distance investments in pastoral goods, hemp oil, timber products, bamboo materials, and lacquer items, as well as banking institutions.33 In the Ilkhanate, Buddhist asso­ ciations revived links to Khurasan in eastern Iran and the court at Tabriz. Imperial support for Buddhist monasteries in the Yuan domain often ren­ dered Muslim financiers a vulnerable minority at odds with Confucian fac­ tions, who under the circumstances were more likely to find common ground with Buddhist associates. When El Temür established his new reign at Dadu in 1328, he revoked the commercial privileges of Muslim merchants in favor of their competitors, the Buddhist monasteries.34 In Azerbaijan, Buddhist connections played out a little differently. In Iran, Muslim traders and financiers commanded the dominant networks on the ground. Malik al-Islam Jamal al-Din, for example, a prominent Muslim merchant of central Asia, held privileges to negotiate on behalf of Iranian Persian Gulf merchants with clients in Hind and Sind, creating a commer­ cial pathway between Ilkhanid and South Asian markets linked largely by Muslim communities.35 At the same time, Abaqa and other Ilkhanid rulers attempted to negotiate equitable relations while promoting the prosperity of Buddhist establishments. In places such as Khurasan, with sizeable Buddhist and Shi’a populations and where Ilkhan Arghun built many Buddhist tem­ ples, merchants were so numerous and wealthy that Khurasani became the word for foreign merchants in Hind and Sind. The move against Buddhism in 1295 altered these dynamics in favor of the Muslim commercial networks. THE RAB‘-I RASHIDI AMONG THE YELLOW PLUMS OF TABRIZ By 1300, when Rashid al-Din (1247/50–1318) became vizier to Ilkhan Ghazan (r. 1295–1304), Tabriz had already profited from the Master Arabesque’s reforms and their subsequent innovations. Tabriz markets were lively, vast, and copious. High-end products that sustained avenues of Tabriz in Azerbaijan 37

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exchange were potent as value multipliers through the mechanism of longdistance transport. Specific condiments, aromatics, medicines, and dyes from Asian markets leveraged high profits simply through movement of commodi­ ties from one region to another. When Marco Polo returned through Tabriz to Venice, he carried Tibetan musk as one of the commercial assets acquired on his travels. The musk trade, comparable in value to the highest-grade silks, moved along routes through Nepal and Kashmir, continuing either to Sind and by sea to Basra on the Persian Gulf or across land through Herat and Sultaniyya to Tabriz. Hindu communities along the route facilitated this trade. Hamd-Allah Mustawfi of Qazwin, a geographer and tax collector for the Ilkhanate, noted in 1340 that merchants exported fruit from Isfahan both to India and to Greece. Another commodity noted by Mustawfi was rock crystal, highly prized for light fixtures and precious carvings. “This is found in India [Hind/Sind],” he wrote, “in the mountains of the province of Kashmir. It is also found in the hills of the Frank countries, but though in the Frank country it is found in greater abundance, the best is the Indian Rock­ crystal.”36 Rashid al-Din himself, during his time as vizier to the Ilkhans, invested the vast majority of his own wealth in trade, primarily textiles, as did most of his associates among the nobility.37 He was reputed to have held farmland in Kabul, Ghazna, Lahore, and the province of Sind as well as trade investments in Hind and Transoxiana.38 As a market in a richly cos­ mopolitan network spanning the Eurasian continent, the political economy of Tabriz was an essential base of resources for the creativity of Rashid al­ Din’s Tabriz workshops and Ilkhanate authority. Given the commercial and diplomatic integration of Tabriz into the Eurasian networks of exchange, it is not surprising that it was also an intel­ lectual center of high repute supporting extensive intercultural dialogue. An individual referred to as “the great Frank physician” declared in 1311 that “since I have been received in the service of that great man [Rashid al-Din], I have, through his munificence, learned scientific truths which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no man ever dreamt or imagined of them.”39 Historical vision came into focus in this environment as well. The composi­ tion of The Great Mongol Shahnama (Book of Kings), a manuscript produced in Tabriz around 1330 based on the tenth-century classical epic by Persian poet Ferdowsi, illustrates this intent to let the past serve the present. Originally in two volumes of 280 large-page folios, the Shahnama is estimated to have had 190 illustrations, 57 of which are extant. Many of these illustrations link past and present through a historical revisualization that pairs scenes from contemporary history with legendary events to leverage political meaning in the present. Illustrations from the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh served as models for some of the images included in the Great Mongol Shahnama. Science as well 38 Chapter 1

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as literature was central to Ilkhanid intellectual discourse. In a treatise on Reason and Science Rashid al-Din recorded questions discussed in seminar settings. His notes included reflections and answers offered by himself as well as scholars from Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds. This inclu­ siveness was heavily dependent on the court’s relative tolerance in matters theological and its location in a richly diverse social environment. In one section of the treatise, dialogue turned to the question of whether reason or science was of higher worth. While most participants held that “human reason” was more all-encompassing than “abstract reason,” or science, and hence of superior value, some Christian groups argued that humans might aspire to the realm of the divine through both.40 The infu­ sion of human reason with qualities of the divine rather than the separation of reason from the divine were the points of debate. Although it is difficult to ascertain the philosophical fine points of this discussion, the general fact of its occurrence is remarkable, reaffirming the unique position of the Tabriz court in diplomatic and hence intellectual discourse. To support such schol­ arly communities, the Ilkhans designated tribute gifts from Constantinople and Venice for use by villages in greater Tabriz that housed international students and teachers. Consequently, many of the scientific and medical books produced in Tabriz circulated widely and were commonly translated into Greek and other languages. Ilkhan Ghazan and his vizier Rashid al-Din each personally sponsored major construction projects in greater Tabriz that became new intellectual and commercial centers adjacent to old Tabriz. Ghazniyya, the suburb built for Ilkhan Ghazan, and the Rab‘-i Rashidi, Rashid’s quarter, exemplified a pattern of urban-pastoral development of Tabriz under the Ilkhanate. Both “cities” were organized around waqf pious foundations and functioned as major cultural and commercial centers with extensive agricultural acreage. In addition, each center was organized around a memorial to its founder. Revenue to maintain both “cities” and their community functions derived from the waqf pious foundations legally designated to support the commeri­ cal and cultural development of each neighborhood. Through the manage­ ment of extensive trade and agricultural lands, the waqf foundations enabled urban growth. At the center of each hub stood a monument dedicated to the district’s founder. Both cities were sizeable units. Ghazaniyya was larger than old Tabriz before the 1302 construction of the new wall. Of Shanb Ghazaniyya, Rashid al-Din wrote: He [Ghazan] ordered a large caravansary, a cross-roads market, and a Bath, with workshops and places for animals, to be built just inside the city next to every gate of New Tabriz [Ghazaniyya]. Merchants who come from all Tabriz in Azerbaijan 39

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directions enter by the gate in the direction from which they come and stop at that caravansary. The customs official stamps their goods, they enter the baths, and then go into the city. When they have found their particu­ lar places they can move if they want. Likewise, when merchants go from Tabriz to all parts they stop there for the customs official to inspect their goods, and then they can set forth.41

Ibn Battuta, for one, was thankful for the accommodations he found upon his arrival in Tabriz. He wrote: “We reached the town after ten days’ travelling, and encamped outside it in a place called ash-Sham. Here there is a fine hospice, where travelers are supplied with food, consisting of bread, meat, rice cooked in butter, and sweetmeats.”42 Ilkhan Ghazan’s motivation for his investment in this project, which went far beyond the scope of a memorial to himself and departed from the traditional Mongol practice of unmarked burial sites, was explained by Rashid al-Din as having been inspired by Ghazan’s visit to Muslim shrines in Baghdad. Ghazan reportedly said: How can one consider a person who has died in this manner and has a shrine or visitation site like this to be among the dead? Dying like this is better than other people’s living. Even though we do not possess the rank of pious people, nonetheless in imitation of them we can build a charitable institution to spend eternity in, and in that manner there will be charity and alms, the blessings of which will attract God’s mercy, and there will be an eternal reward stored up. It will be very good.43

Details of the royal foundation and its devotional responsibili­ ties included a “lofty dome” as memorial to Ghazan, several mosques and madrases, plus a hostel for Sufis (khanaqah), an observatory, hospital, library, bathhouse, and house of tax rolls. An endowment managed supplies and repairs for all facilities plus two thousand sheepskin coats to be bought and given to the deserving every year. If a person died in Tabriz and could not afford burial, it would be covered. Birds were to be fed by scattering grain and millet on the rooftops with the curse of God or other appropriate pun­ ishment for anyone who took advantage of the situation and tried to catch the birds for their own profit.44 Tribal values of leadership and distribution of wealth combined here with the Muslim legal institution of the waqf and Buddhist notions of inter-species relationship. Inspired by the design of Ghazaniyya, Rashid al-Din extended the pastoral/urban model to further expand his own resource base and define a space for innovative research and scholarship. In so doing, he pushed the concept of waqf toward new secular uses. Rashid al-Din’s detailed guidelines 40 Chapter 1

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for the administration and financing of these projects can be found in his written endowment deed, the Waqf-nāmah, which provides a contemporary record of the daily functioning of this vital institution. Unlike Ghazaniyya, which was built to the west and outside of the new wall, the Rab‘-i Rashidi was built inside of the 1302 Ghazani wall and to the east of the old city. Some scholars have called Rashid al-Din’s conception of the Rab’-i Rashidi a utopian vision. Along these lines, it is interesting to note that facilities included an almshouse and a policy of hierarchical access to food and medi­ cine. Every day one hundred poor people were served warm soup and bread. The deed read: “The people who want to eat in the poor people’s kitchen are supposed to eat the meal in an earthen bowl. The door to the kitchen is to remain closed, so that they can return the dishes and not take them with them.”45 Under the rubric of treating “travelers and neighbors,” trav­ elers received first place in line to see a doctor, followed by children of the compound headmaster and his freed slaves, with compound workers, and the gardeners and farmers from Tabriz and vicinity next on the appoint­ ment schedule.46 Utopia needed to accommodate poverty as well as to pri­ oritize access even as equal opportunity crossed gender, ethnic, and religious lines. This reminds one of the figure of Poverty who sits in the shadows of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ideal Good Government fresco in Siena, a more paro­ chial but also increasingly cosmopolitan setting seeking a place in relation­ ship to the challenges of a thirteenth-century world. The walled compound of the Rab‘-i Rashidi was itself, of course, embedded in larger commercial, intellectual, and political networks within Tabriz, Azerbaijan, and the Ilkhanate reaching into Hind and Khitai ter­ ritories. Built around a waqf pious foundation, the Rab‘-i Rashidi, like Ghazaniyya, functioned as a memorial to its primary benefactor as well as a commercial and religious center. Structures in each of these compounds included caravansaries, baths, an orphans’ home, and khanaqah for Sufi com­ munities, in addition to hospitals, gardens, and mosques, all of which stimu­ lated the economies of Tabriz and satellite towns. Han Khafipour notes that physicians assigned to the Rab‘-i Rashidi who had families lived in an out­ side neighborhood known as the mahallah-yi sālahīyah.47 Although Shanb Ghazaniiyya sported an observatory, which the Rab‘-i Rashidi did not, the latter sponsored an extensive library, a research hospital, students’ quarters, and a scriptorium, plus the industries and communities of experts necessary to support these projects. In the satellite neighborhoods that housed scholars, physicians, and travelers there was also a commercial complex with numer­ ous shops including textile and pape-making factories.48 The exact number of residents and students is unknown. Contemporaries cite hundreds and thousands; scholars who have examined the endowment deed estimate scores Tabriz in Azerbaijan 41

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and note the “exclusive club” qualities of the operational details.49 It was in the workshops of the Rab‘-i Rashidi that Rashid al-Din assembled teams to produce and illustrate the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh. Given the unique historical and social circumstances surrounding the Jami ‘al-Tavarikh, it is not surprising that the manuscript itself was equally unique in the annals of intellectual creativity. The Mongol history of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh derived from the Tarikh-i Ghazani (Ghazan’s history), which scholars believe was the spoken word of Ilkhan Ghazan as dictated to Rashid al-Din.50 The scholarship of Rashid al-Din’s workshops drew on previous Chinese, Arabic, and Persian language literary traditions, but also departed significantly from each to produce a new vision of human historical development. Dynastic histories in the Chinese literary genre had conven­ tionally been written by successor ruling houses to establish the legitimacy of the new dynasty and provide a record of the causes of dynastic decline. Unlike Chinese dynastic histories that were written by successive dynas­ ties, the histories produced in the Rab‘-i Rashidi included accounts of cur­ rent events written by the current rulers. Abolala Soudavar notes that the Han-Lin Academy in Dadu inspired the history projects of the Tabriz court and introduced unconventional standards, including the logging of “minor­ ity” histories such as the Liao and Chin into the official records.51 Through the assistance of Bolad, emissary to Tabriz from the court of Kublai Khan, Rashid al-Din had access to the Dadu Imperial Library’s “Archives of the Court,” known as the Dafartir-i divan. Initially proposed by Kublai Khan’s staff, the Mongol history that became the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh took on distinc­ tive features in its Iranian setting and surpassed the limits of its original con­ ception, morphing into a universal narrative that stretched received standards for historical thinking. The questions of why to include the Liao or the Franks or how to render the history of Buddhism challenged the political status quo and the artistic imagination. An illustration of the Virgin Mary showed her and the Christ child as a vision with a Buddhist-Zoroastrian fire orb.52 The Buddha appeared in Arabic dress, and a depiction of his entrance to nirvana configured a contemporary Islamic setting with a Sufi mosque. Rashid al­ Din’s histories of Hind, Sind, and Christendom (both Byzantine and Latin) were completed with the assistance of scholars from Buddhist and Christian communities in Tabriz.53 Chinese artisans and translators inhabited a quarter in Tabriz in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.54 We know that Buddhist scholars worked specifically on the “Chinese” dynastic histo­ ries in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh.55 Kashmiri Buddhist monk Bakshi Kamalashri worked among scholars and monks from Byzantium and regions of the east­ ern Mediterranean. In all of this, Rashid al-Din possessed no regional or 42 Chapter 1

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imperial histories on which to model his effort to represent and illustrate a contemporary thirteenth-century world history. There were some prec­ edents in Persian histories for using the recorded exploits of reigning fami­ lies to serve as propaganda in the present. Aware of the Islamic traditions in historiography that recorded the chronologies of individual rulers and selected geographies, including the Tarikh al-Tabari (History of the Prophets and Kings) by al-Tabari (838–923), and al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh (The Complete History) by Ibn al-Athir (1160–1233), Rashid al-Din and his team of schol­ ars also drew selected materials from the Ta’rikh al-Hind (History of Hind) by al-Biruni (973–1048) and the Tarikh-i Jahangushay-i Juvaini (History of the World Conqueror) by Ilkhanid court historian Juvanyi (1226–1283). Known in his time as Rashid al-Tabib (Rashid the Physician), Rashid al-Din was a man of remarkable intellect, statesmanship, and general good character who fell victim to court intrigue and eventually died a painful and humiliating death at the hands of his rivals.56 The Rab‘-i Rashidi, literally “neighborhood of Rashid” or “Rashid’s Quarter,” flourished for a decade and a half before factions that accused Rashid al-Tabib of poisoning Ilkhan Oljaitü would also attack the Rab‘-i Rashidi and destroy or disperse its agricultural stations, workshops, and libraries. Its agricultural and medical experiments as well as artistic and literary production were exceptional and a unique fusion of contemporary knowledge. The Khalili fragment of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh provides valuable infor­ mation on the material details of a 1314 copy of the manuscript produced at the Rab‘-i Rashidi. This fragment is part of an original manuscript now incomplete and dispersed; the Edinburgh University Library holds the remaining extent folios. Sheila Blair has written extensively about the pro­ duction and subsequent life of the Khalili fragment. She notes that this manuscript in Arabic belonged to part two of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh’s second volume on the history of non-Mongol peoples, only half of which survives between the Khalili and Edinburgh collections.57 Because the endowment arrangements of the Rab‘-i Rashidi stipulated that two complete versions of the four-hundred-page Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh would be produced every year— one in Arabic, the second in Persian—the production schedule was tight. This condition effected the process and results of manuscript illustration. With approximately 110-plus illustrations per edition, Sheila Blair estimates that teams of artists needed to complete one or two paintings per day to stay on schedule. She deduces that Muhammad ibn al-‘Afif al-Kashani, known for his superior painting and calligraphy skills, likely oversaw a team of painters diverse in both their ethnicities and artistic training. Consequently, the Khalili illustrations display a variety of styles and techniques. In Tabriz in Azerbaijan 43

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assembly-line fashion, artists may have been assigned particular elements to add to each painting or, alternatively, small teams of painters may have worked on clusters of illustrations. Given that Tabriz was a vibrant center of the transcontinental tex­ tile trade, the Khalili illustrations display few of these luxurious materials. This stands in clear contrast to the work of artists like Simone Martini in Siena who devoted great effort to capturing the brilliant detail of Mongol fabrics. To some extent, speedup accounts for the minimalist style found in the Khalili fragment. Detailed depiction of textiles was not the priority; their luxury could be assumed and simply suggested by tiraz bands, Mongol cross-fastened robes, and checkered fabrics. Fine pen-drawn lines and col­ ored washes were most suitable for this purpose and drew on the expertise of contributing artists trained in regions of Khitai and Kashmir. Designed as narrative images to highlight a text, the Khalili paintings also have the compositional capacity to stand as independent works of art, an innovative move within Islamic book arts. The folios of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh were paper of the highest quality produced in Baghdad that used black-ink pens and brushes for light color washes to create images. East Asian art favored silk, brushes, and ink with color washes. The Franks and Italians during this period produced manuscripts only on parchment (the processed skins of sheep, goats, and calves); this required a different resource, marketing, and technological base from that of the silk-and-ink-brush materials that domi­ nated East Asian art.58 Favored pigments in the Khalili manuscript were red and blue, with occasional uses of brown, green, and yellow. Gold highlighted turbans and robes; silver highlighted eyes and cheeks.59 Horse saddlecloths might catch the eye with simple color combinations, but beyond the occa­ sional checkered robe, clothing drew little detailed attention. The intense blue made from lapis lazuli was more likely to be used for the sky behind an image of Muhammad or for his horse’s saddlecloth than for his robes. Contemporary Byzantine and Latin depictions of the Virgin Mary, on the other hand, almost exclusively draped her in solid layers of the precious lapis lazuli pigment, a post-1200 innovation. The illustrations of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh carried no titles, leaving the viewer to recognize subject matter through familiarity with historical nar­ ratives or, in some cases, placement within the text that might, but did not necessarily, provide clues. Ruth Bernard Yeazell has recently argued that within the western European domain, picture titles, primarily for easel art, came into vogue with the rise of eighteenth-century market forces that cre­ ated conditions for a “new mobility of the image” facilitated by art deal­ ers, academies, and museums.60 Rapid market growth and circulation of art required titles to identify works created at a place and in a context unfamiliar 44 Chapter 1

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to the interested viewer. The resulting tension between image and word in which the image becomes dependent on a shorthand title to give it meaning was not an automatic consequence of word-image interaction. By the time of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, east Asia had a centuries-old rich artistic practice of complementing image and word. Beyond poetry and personal inscriptions that enhanced paintings, and government records and personal inventories that listed holdings, the commercial revolution of the Song and Yuan peri­ ods had produced an active art market wherein dealers kept extensive writ­ ten accounts of works sold, bought, and commissioned. Inventory titles were often generic—bamboo, mist in the mountains, scholars gathering. This commercialization and cataloguing did not override the aesthetic enjoyment of integrating word and image. The Edinburgh fragment of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, The Birth of Mohammad, presents an interesting variation. Originally painted at the Rab‘-i Rashidi, the innovative image probably did not contain the inscription that one finds today in the center of the painting above the birth scene. The inscription reads “Valadat-i padishah-i humayun-i kainat—‘alayhi al-salam” (Birth of grand king of the universe—salam upon him). While the main text is in Arabic, the inscription is Persian (padishah, humayun). Despite Chinese painting traditions imported into Tabriz during the period and the affinity of image and word within that tradition, Sheila Blair notes that the inscription was added once the volume had passed into the hands of the Mughal court, where in the sixteenth and later centuries, glosses were often added to identify scenes for non-Arabic readers. In this case the inscription title is a product of the mobility of images across cul­ tural zones.61 A primary feature of the Rab‘-i Rashidi was its vast agricultural tracts within an urban setting. Hülegü’s conquest of Iranian territories had devas­ tated the agricultural land-tax base of the economy. Despite their overall sub­ sequent commercial success, Ilkhanid fiscal policies were weak to disastrous in the agricultural sector, giving rise to significant political debate. Even once Ilkhanid lands were partially reconstructed through imperial programs, the amount of arable land was estimated at only 10 percent of its pre-Mongol total.62 In addition, the Ilkhans never successfully developed an effective tax collection system that would maximize revenue from agricultural commu­ nities. Fiscal, and hence political and religious, tensions in Iran tended to reflect an inadequate revenue base, which was less of an issue for the Yuan rulers, who inherited a bureaucratic tax collection system, a strong agrarian base, and an accepted paper-money economy.63 The Ilkhans consequently sought specialists from the Yuan court to address some of these problems, as well as agricultural expertise from Georgia and Egypt. The Mongolian official Bolad came to serve the Ilkhans after holding high positions at the Tabriz in Azerbaijan 45

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Yuan court. He contributed to the large experimental garden near Tabriz designed to stimulate Iranian agriculture by introducing new techniques and seeds from the Yuan territories and Hind.64 When the Ilkhanate began to experience a major fiscal crisis, Bolad, adopting economic practices of the Yuan ulus and Song dynasty, introduced the use of paper money into Iranian locales, but without success.65 Famous for its signature yellow plums, Tabriz supported a variety of agricultural produce, which Rashid al-Din sought to extend by introducing experimental gardens at the Rab‘-i Rashidi. In this way, he hoped to grow the agricultural base of the Ilkhanate and secure a better livelihood for the rural population. New varieties of plants, trees, and herbs meant increased food supplies and state revenue. In his work the Äthär wa ahyä’, Rashid al-Din set out twenty-four chapters in which he provided information on climate, water, and soil conditions, as well as the details for grafting trees, preventing pest infestations, and raising bees; he also noted the processing and uses of precious stones and rocks.66 Like the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, the Äthär wa ahyä’ was intended for production in two copies a year, one in Arabic and one in Persian, for general distribution. Financial support for this project was stipulated in the waqf endowment of the Rab’-i Rashidi. Although grains, herbs, and garden vegetables received attention in Rashid al-Din’s treatise on agriculture, trees were of special interest to the vizier. In addition to the delectable yellow plums of Tabriz, Rashid al-Din experimented with pomegranate, apple, pear, almond, mulberry (black, white, and red), and new varieties of plum trees.67 He took a hands-on approach to selecting and tending trees that had not previously grown in Azerbaijan, noting their growth patterns, productivity, and the quality of their fruit when dried. Many of the trees cultivated came from Khitai and Manzi, but also from Hindustan and Uighurstan, such as the cinnamon tree and the palm date tree. Rashid al-Din reported the particular success of fig trees established for the first time in the Tabriz region and of how to protect them with dome-like baskets and cow dung during the winter; experimenta­ tion led to the knowledge of how to develop a variety of figs from one stock root.68 The exact impact of these experiments on Ilkhanid agriculture is not known, but many of the plants and trees introduced through the gardens of the Rab’-i Rashidi continued to be cultivated in Iran. As a physician Rashid al-Din would have been intimate with the apothecary trade at the heart of contemporary science and art. Like the phy­ sicians’ guilds of central Italian towns and Chinese medicine shops, Tabriz apothecaries traded in a wealth of minerals and spices needed to prepare ointments, herbal remedies, paint and dye pigments, and tinctures. Lapis lazuli, “prized in both Byzantium and Islam for the color that it lent to 46 Chapter 1

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inscriptions, was available for purchase in both Tyre and Qayrawan in the 11th century,” and was so rare that there was little of it on the market.69 By the thirteenth century extensive trade routes had increased distribution and availability, though at steep prices. Spices such as turmeric from Hind and saffron from Kashmir and Iran had multiple uses as dyes, medicines, and cooking ingredients. Verdigris, a green-gray dye from Persia, used saffron in its recipe.70 Scribes at the Ilkhanid court used vermilion to outline gold lettering on royal documents, but there was little experimentation with the apothecary’s stock of minerals and plants applied to manuscript illustra­ tion.71 Bolad and Rashid al-Din were more likely to see the herbs in their experimental gardens as material in the quest for medical knowledge. They established a large hospital at the Rab‘-i Rashidi to treat patients and provide conditions for medical research. The search for drugs that would extend life was a major preoccupation of the Mongol rulers, who scoured every scholarly tradition with particular attention to the alchemical traditions of Daoism and Buddhism. With the assistance of Bolad, Rashid al-Din translated such works as the fourth-century manual on The Secrets of the Pulse and wrote the Tibb-i ahli Ikhatāy (The Medicine of the People of Khitai) included in the Tānksūqnāma-yi Īl-khān dar funūn-i ‘ulum-i Khatāyī (The Treasure Book of the Ilkhan on Khitai Science and Techniques).72 As with his other projects, Rashid al-Tabib’s approach was universal and integrative, “doing for medi­ cine what he had conceived of in his vision of a culturally inclusive world history.” 73 In the end the Tānksūqnāma proved to be a text that did not easily translate across contact zones and required more time to evolve and integrate than the Ilkhanate would have. MARĀGHA: A STAR IN EURASIAN ASTRONOMY While Ghazaniyya and Rab ‘-i Rashidi gave commercial, political, and artis­ tic centrality to the Ilkhanate, and the temple complex at Labnasagut marked the apogee of Buddhist presence, the observatory at Marāgha crowned the scientific work sponsored by the Tabriz court. Astronomical work was of great interest to the Ilkhans. Rashid al-Din described the informed involve­ ment that accompanied such interest: “In order to measure the circular path of the sun, he [Ghazan] had a dome built according to his own taste and dis­ cussed it with the astronomers. They [the scientists] all said, ‘Even though we have never seen such an instrument, it is reasonable.’ At the observatory next to the Abwabu’l-birr in Tabriz, a dome was constructed that contains those things, as can readily be seen.”74 Related to activities at both Ghazaniyya and the Rabi ‘-i Rashidi, the Marāgha Observatory constituted the premier center of thirteenth-century astronomy. Tabriz in Azerbaijan 47

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Constructed south of Tabriz in the city of Adharbayjan, the obser­ vatory was a noteworthy achievement not only for the critical advances made in astronomy but for the geographic and ethnic diversity of schol­ ars it attracted. Dialogue between the Yuan and Tabriz courts initiated the idea of the observatory. As Hülegü’s armed forces approached the Isma’ilis stronghold at Alamut in 1256, Möngke Khan (r. 1251–1259) began plans to construct imperial observatories at Beijing and Qarakorum. His search for a lead astronomer led him to Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, widely known for his intellectual accomplishments and highly recommended. At the time, al-Tusi was at Alamut. When Alamut fell to Hülegü, al-Tusi sought new patron­ age for his work and persuaded Hülegü to build an observatory near Tabriz that al-Tusi might direct. Möngke’s death in 1259, Hülegü’s need for accu­ rate astrological data, and al-Tusi’s search for financial support for his stud­ ies led in that year to the construction of Marāgha Observatory, arguably the premier institution of its kind in all contemporary Eurasia. By 1262 the well-endowed observatory, with its large library and conference center, was operational. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi had successfully convinced Hülegü to invest considerable resources in this enterprise. A poem by Nizam al-Din al-Isfa­ hani describes the observatory at Marāgha as a “marvel” and a “treat to the eye.”75 The main building was constructed with a high tower and reportedly contained a library of over forty thousand volumes, which even if exagger­ ated leaves a sizeable collection of thousands. Contemporaries tell of a large building with a dome open at the top to receive the sun’s rays for taking mea­ surements throughout the seasons, beginning with the solar spotlight on the threshold that marked the first day of spring. Mural paintings of the phases of the moon, signs of the zodiac, and representations of the celestial spheres with their epicycles and deferents covered the inside walls. Hülegü’s compelling interest in the Marāgha Observatory and al-Tusi’s expertise was astrology. The latter, like his peers, valued accurate reading of the stars and planets to predict auspicious times for military campaigns and other court decisions. Within Islam the relationship between astronomy and astrology was strained in ways not characteristic of the Yuan intellectual environment. Islamic astronomy generally enjoyed the support of religious leaders, but astrology did not. Muslims held to the idea that God’s plan was not for man to know or try to alter. Hülegü’s move was uniquely syn­ cretic, born of Mongol sensibilities in an Islamic intellectual environment. His motive was to obtain accurate astrological information, but he funded a major center for the study of astronomy supported by the religious system of waqf endowments. Without the lure of astrology, it is not clear that this project, which attracted some of the most prominent astronomers of the day and produced some of the most advanced astronomical work of the period, 48 Chapter 1

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would have secured the necessary funding to establish and maintain this major scientific institution. The results of Hülegü’s investment were catalytic. As George Saliba has written, “the real revolution in the work of the ‘Marāgha School’ astrono­ mers lies in the philosophical dimension that was equal in importance to the mathematical and astronomical dimensions if not more so, and which was in the realization that astronomy ought to describe the behavior of physical bodies in mathematical language, and should not remain a mathematical hypothesis.”76 While Urdi and others had taken some steps in this direction, it was the massive imperial support of the Ilkhans, as well as the ideologi­ cal environment they fostered, that brought this simmer to boil and clarity. Ilkhanid use of the Islamic waqf system to sponsor a largely secular under­ taking made the observatory at Marāgha the first one to make use of revenue from this source.77 With state-secured endowment revenue, the observa­ tory sustained uninterrupted intellectual activity from 1262 to 1316, ensur­ ing prospects for stability and continuity essential to scholarly development through periods of political turmoil. The tremendous imperial reach of the Mongols and the steady access this provided to almost unlimited resources and expertise was something contemporary observer Roger Bacon (1214–1292) recognized as a revolution­ izing aspect of Mongol rule. Bacon, as theologian, scientist, and philosopher, commented on the costly nature of astronomical instruments and the invest­ ment he was aware the Mongols of the Ilkhanate had made in this area. His detailed awareness raises the question of what he knew and how he knew it, but clearly he had some combination of firsthand reports and personal obser­ vations. He wrote that such instruments are not to be found among the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds. . . . Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered. . . . Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the rotations of the heavens are certified from the begin­ ning to the end of the world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king’s ransom, and could not be made without a vast expense. . . . Thus have the Tartars and Saracens been able to accomplish what they have done. For it is agreed that the Tartars give more time to astronomy than others, since although there are learned astronomers in many nations, the rulers of their state are directed only by such advisers. Astronomers hold the same position among the Tartars as prelates do among us.78

Al-Tusi led an international team of scholars at Marāgha. One of the distinctive features of the Marāgha environment was its integrated discourse, Tabriz in Azerbaijan 49

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which included philosophy and optics as well as physics and mathemat­ ics.79 Al-Tusi’s own work on the azimuth quadrant and the Tusi couple for understanding planetary motion developed in this atmosphere. Among his colleagues were Gregory Choniades, mentioned above, Mu’ayyid al-Din al­ ’Urdi and Muhyi al-Din al-Magribi from Damascus, and Fao Munji, whose work transferred East Asian astronomical knowledge into the Ptolemaic conventions of Islamic schools of astronomy. The international networks also brought someone like Muhyi al-Din al-Magribi from the Iberian peninsula, whence he was borne to Damascus and finally Marāgha. Al-Magribi’s refer­ ence to Hülegü’s era as a way of dating the Tāj al-azyāj, which he compiled in Damascus in the same year Hülegü conquered Bagdad (1258) and two years before the fall of Damascus, suggests his awareness of the changing political situation and his desire to find work under the new ruler of Iran whose new observatory at Marāgha was already under construction.80 The astronomical bureau of the Yuan dynasty in Beijing began construction on the Shitiantai Observatory in 1279 under the supervision of Royal Astronomer Guo Shoujing (served 1276–1290).81 The innovative work done at the Marāgha Observatory changed the questions, methods, and instruments of future observatories such as those at Samarkand, Istanbul, and Copenhagen.82 The international assemblage of scholars at Marāgha opened chan­ nels for the transference of knowledge that Ilkhanid diplomatic maneuvers complemented.83 According to the Alphosine Chronicles, in 1261 Alfonso X received an embassy from Hülegü in Seville, and in 1265 sent an embassy with gifts ostensibly to al-Tusi. Furthermore, the Catalan Chronicle of King Jaume I of Aragon and Catalonia notes that a Mongol embassy arrived in Toledo and was received at court. Examination of court documents suggests that “Andalusi materials were known in Marāgha and Persian ones in the Iberian Peninsula.”84 Ilkhan Ghazan continued the diplomatic efforts of his father Arghun and his grandfather Abaqa as well as pursuing a keen inter­ est in astronomy. Contact between the Ilkhanate and the Iberian peninsula occurred at many levels. Ibn Battuta, traveling through Granada in 1325, noted: “There is also at Gharnata [Granada] a company of Persian darwishes [dervishes], who have made their homes there because of its resemblance to their native lands. One is from Samarqand [Samarkand], another from Tabriz, a third from Quniya [Konia], one from Khurasan, two from Hind, and so on.”85 The world vision emanating from Ilkhanid Tabriz found its reflection in many aspiring societies. While Tomasso Uzi served the court of the Ilkhans, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a fellow Sienese, created his mural The Martyrdom 50 Chapter 1

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of the Franciscans in 1342. Lorenzetti’s commission came from the busi­ ness elite and Franciscan community in Siena who were seeking to define their place in the contemporary world of the Mongol empire. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s martyrdom scene set in a Mongol court reflected back an image of the thirteenth-century world like that projected by the workshops of Tabriz in their illustrated texts. Both conveyed a historically based, contem­ porary perspective seeking to claim for its own a universal humanism that crossed geographic and hence political as well as cultural divides. The results were complex, neither internally consistent nor singular in their viewpoints. Perception depended on social position within changeable local and interna­ tional realities. Simone Martini, at the same time in Siena, developed new painting techniques to capture the light-reflecting qualities of the highly prized nasij gold brocade, signature creation of Mongol textile production. These were co-creations in a shared and expanding field of cultural and geo­ graphic awareness. New experiences and encounters with new knowledge greatly expanded contemporary travelers’ and artists’ understandings of time and space and hence historical thinking. Roger Bacon, for example, noted in his Opus Majus, written around 1266, that whereas Pliny relied on past accounts to set his geography, Bacon had learned from the travel experience of William of Rubruck and others that the Caspian Sea did not rise from the ocean as Pliny had claimed.86 Ilkhanid court tax collector Hamd-Allah Mustawfi of Qazwin would never have misplaced the Caspian Sea, but in his geog­ raphy did not hesitate to include supernatural details about the miraculous endlessly gushing spring at Saturiq in Iran.87 For Marco Polo and his con­ temporaries, speculation over the lands of Gog and Magog and the stories of the legendary Christian Prester John inspired their exploration of littleknown lands and peoples in central and east Asia. Emotional inclinations easily carried all travelers across borders between real and imagined worlds. Geography and imagination set the stage for cultural transmission, whether we are looking at a pictorial representation of the territory between Tibet and India in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh or the imperial pond that suggests the Southeast Asian seas in Wang Zhenpeng’s Dragon Boat Regatta. Stories structured geographic awareness, and those stories wandered and met other stories, often with little regard for consistency or checks on physical reality. Geography was a mental construct that embodied social rela­ tions as much if not more than a compass sense of direction. Knowing the lay of the land meant having information about what to expect emotionally, what one might desire in a locale or be prepared to avoid. Stories carried valu­ able emotional clues every bit as essential as knowledge of climate and local products, and every bit as fickle. Buddhist pilgrimage maps, for example, Tabriz in Azerbaijan 51

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such as the tenth-century mural of sacred Mount Wutai at Dunhuang (Cave 61), near Turfan on the west end of the Taklamakan desert, included enough recognizable geography and site details to be read as a trustworthy source, but were primarily intended to convey valuable emotional information about the possible human and spiritual interactions one might encounter when physically or meditatively entering this transformative landscape, whether that be knowledge of the local patrons or a shape-shifting bodhisattva who might test one’s spiritual core.88 Buddhist art from the Taklamakan area remained an artistic reference point during the Mongol era. Neither random nor entirely subjective, these geographies manifested themselves as a func­ tion of shifting desires expressed through socially and culturally perceived possibilities. While nomadic peoples conceived of a landscape in motion, sedentary groups dwelled in a more fixed sense of place. Each struggled to grasp an expanding geographic universe. In the end, all stories and images were more memorable for their motivational qualities than for their direc­ tional assistance or information on market inventories. For the latter, caravan leaders and merchant logs must be consulted, and these too carried attentiongrabbing stories. Often studied primarily within their regional scholarly contexts, his­ torical writings in the thirteenth century shared common concerns and their own innovative attempts to engage aspects of Mongol material and social culture. Microcultural adjustments prompted by expansive geographical encounters shifted historical thinking. In Mamluk Egypt, the same year Rashid al-Din produced the pages of what became the Khalili fragment of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, al-Nuwayri (d. 1333), who himself had participated in the 1303 battle of the Mamluks against the Ilkhans at Shaqhab (Marj alSuffar, south of Damascus), began the Nihāya, an encyclopedia that included a history of the world plus a 120-page section on the Mongols.89 At some level, al-Nuwayri’s work, which would occupy him for almost twenty years and run to thirty-one volumes with nine thousand pages, could not help but register the expansive Mongol impact even while rejecting Mongol legiti­ macy. Reuven Amitai stresses the extent to which al-Nuwayri’s history was both preoccupied with and dismissive of Mongol accomplishment, leading al-Nuwayri to develop new methods and categories by collecting passages from previous histories to create a single, extended section on the Mongols.90 The breadth of Mongol historical claims required innovative reorganiza­ tion of received histories. Against the challenges of a consolidated Mongol Empire emerged a countervision of a newly integrated geographic block under of the rubric of Dar al-Islam that spanned across from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indian Ocean. The rise of Tabriz more than the fall of Baghdad necessitated this defensive position and its consequent attempts at 52 Chapter 1

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ideological consolidation. Elias Ibrahim Muhanna notes that thirteenthcentury Mamluk society experienced an upsurge in the production of books, a proliferation of madrasas, and a growing scholarly class of administrators whose knowledge of the thirteenth-century world expanded even if their intellectual intent was to contain that expansion; scholars both registered and condemned new fashions in religious thought and practice.91 We might note that the intensity of this dynamic between old and new was a feature of thirteenth-century culture at each of our stops. As a consequence, the postMongol era marked significant shifts in historical writing as well as in other aspects of intellectual life and material culture. In Islamic scholarship, uses of traditional intellectual forms differed significantly from their classical predecessors; “a hierarchical arrangement set it [the Nihāya of al-Nuwayri] apart from the adab [erudition] tradi­ tion.”92 Al-Nuwayri’s historical method of organizing sources and informa­ tion around topics within a narrative format moved his project toward what we call modern historical methods. Ibn Khaldün (1332–1406), often iden­ tified as the first modern historian among Islamic scholars, continued this humanist approach by seeking to understand history as a story of human needs and desires within which religious beliefs and practices operated—a slide toward the secular end of the spectrum while retaining a faith-based cosmology. Among the various experiences that influenced Ibn Khaldün’s thinking was time spent in the intellectual circles of post-Mongol-era Cairo, where he would have had access to an Arabic copy of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh.93 Meanwhile, in the Frankish lands of the court of Louis XIII, Vincent of Beauvais (1190–1264) constructed his Speculum Maius during the first years of Ilkhan Hülegü’s reign. This encyclopedic work also organized knowledge within an innovative narrative frame that struggled with the sense that infor­ mation, historical and otherwise, and the need to collect and organize it had suddenly become seemingly limitless.94 While the Ilkhans’ political ties to the Yuan rulers were crucial, Tabriz owed its centrality to its geopolitical position. Ideologically a mix of Buddhist and nomadic customs embedded in the Iranian heartland of Islam, Tabriz evolved an expansive intellectual environment and extensive political econ­ omy. The scope and vision of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, while dependent on Rashid al-Din’s abilities, could not have been created without these specific historical conditions. Chaotic as circumstances could be, a consistent ideo­ logical and institutional base supported the intellectual cultivation of criti­ cal perspectives and universal concepts. The power of these truths, whether humanism and naturalism in the illustrations of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh or the mathematics of planetary motion developed at Marāgha Observatory, resonated with contemporary societies in search of their own admixture Tabriz in Azerbaijan 53

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of wealth, power, and truth. One person who moved in this environment was the Byzantine princess Maria Palaiologina (c. 1253–1325), a wife of Ilkhan Abaqa. Her life crossed political, cultural, and religious boundar­ ies and invites reflection on issues of gender that permeated every aspect of Mongol imperial life in its Eurasian context.

54 Chapter 1

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CHAPTER 2

Constantinople in Rum (Byzantium)

T

he Deesis mosaic at Chora Church, today Kariye Cami in Istanbul, preserves a portrait of the Byzantine princess Maria Palaiologina (c. 1253–1325), wife to Ilkhan Abaqa (1234–1282), who appeared in the artistic prologue to our previous chapter. Daughter of Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1258–1282), Maria is here portrayed as a nun in retirement after her eventful life among the Mongols at the Ilkhanid court. Returning to Constantinople, Maria retained her personal and popu­ lar association with the Mongols as she became involved in restoration proj­ ects including those at Chora Church. Her inclusion in the Deesis mosaic connoted more than a faithful donor; it conjured up diplomatic designs over a span of five difficult decades in Eurasian affairs. Another church in Constantinople to which Maria eventually retired and assumed manage­ ment of was popularly known as the Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols.1 The inclusion of a donor (ktetor) portrait in a supplication scene com­ position was unusual in Byzantine art but was quite common in Buddhist art familiar to the Ilkhanid court. Maria’s Deesis portrait features her in a nun’s habit, common dress for Byzantine women when they took up resi­ dence in nunneries. The mosaic depicting Maria is not a generic donor fig­ ure but expresses her individual personality and life story. Other members of the Byzantine social elite in the early fourteenth century shared this fashion of portraiture as family narrative. Theodora, niece of Michael VIII, drew up a typikon (charter) at the founding of her convent the Theotokos Vevaias Elpidos sometime between 1310 and 1345. In this document she included an appendix with a number of individual and group portraits.2 This unusual addition to a standard document depicted parents, founders, sons, grand­ daughters, and a group portrait of senior and junior nuns. Each full-page miniature, executed with exceptional skill, displayed a striking contrast between realistic facial features and a lack of naturalism in costume drap­ ery, no folds or body contours.3 Woven designs on some robes clearly dis­ played the lotus symbol associated with royalty and, east of Anatolia, with Buddhism. Given the contemporary attention to portraiture and Maria’s 55

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disrupted family narrative, her portrait in the Chora Deesis marked her own legacy and unique history. Like the mosaic fragment at Chora, Maria’s life appears to us only in small fragments when the historical record refers to her at all. From what we do know, she possessed an engaging personality and a Greek Orthodox Christian faith. Historian Steven Runciman has described her as “the great lady whose goodness impressed three generations of the East,” including not only the Ilkhans but members of the Syrian and Armenian communi­ ties, who were often difficult to impress when it came to members of the Greek faith.4 Given her positive reputation, we can surmise that Maria felt socially valued and empowered. A girl of twelve years when she started across Anatolia bound for Tabriz, she appears to have flourished in the intellec­ tual and social milieu in which she grew to adulthood. Maria had no chil­ dren but adopted a daughter later in life upon her return to Constantinople. At the Ilkhan’s court in dialogue with strong adherents of Buddhist and Islamic views, she advocated for Christians of every denomination, includ­ ing the Byzantine Rite Melkite communities. Interestingly for us, she arrived in Tabriz with two highly skilled Greek artists in tow. The story of this Byzantine princess, known at the court in Tabriz as the Despina Khatun 5 (the Greek Queen Lady), offers a unique vantage point on thirteenth-cen­ tury Eurasia. The princess, the khatun, and the Virgin Mary she worshipped moved within a social discourse that crisscrossed Eurasia through the geo­ politics of artistic exchange. CONSTANTINOPLE’S ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CRISIS IN EURASIAN HISTORICAL CONTEXT Founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 330 CE and originally called Nova Roma, Constantinople by the twelfth century had become a world-class city and center of Christianity. Natural defenses, a deep harbor, and wall construction enhanced security. The city’s strategic commercial location and famed relics placed it on the map for merchants, pilgrims, and military adventurers. The “Tartar Road” from Kiev to the Dniester River and along the Black Sea brought monks and merchants to Constantinople from the rich wheat fields of southern Rus.6 From Genoa, Cyprus, and Venice ships sailed to Constantinople and continued on to the Crimea, or along the coast to Trebizond, toward the markets of Tabriz. Routes across Anatolia through Kayseri linked Constantinople by land with Tabriz and points east. By 1200 the population of Constantinople reached half a mil­ lion people. Economically at the nexus of powerful transcontinental trade routes, Byzantine rulers proved unable to mobilize these resources without 56 Chapter 2

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significant dependence on foreign investors, whom they hoped to control to their own imperial advantage. It was risky business fraught with danger. There were few alternatives. Multiple foreign threats exacerbated weaknesses of the Byzantine domestic economy, including infrastructure and commercial development. A precipitous decline began with the loss of eastern Anatolian lands to the Sunni Muslim Seljuk Turks after their victory over Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Despite the long-standing schism between Latin and Greek Orthodox schools of Christianity, the Latin Church, seek­ ing to secure Anatolia for Christianity against Islam, registered Byzantine losses to the Seljuks with dismay. The Latin Church crusades, initially against these encroachments, began in 1095. When Byzantine rulers accepted sup­ port from Rome in maneuvers to secure Christian territories from Mamluk and Seljuk conquest, the strategy concurrently opened the door to a flood of Latin merchants and mercenaries, primarily from the premier shipbuilding centers of Genoa and Venice. Italian merchants from Venice, Genoa, and Pisa had long battled among themselves for privileges from the Byzantine rulers. At the same time, local Greek merchants and residents at large grew increasingly hostile to Italian commercial hegemony. In one instance, antiItalian riots in 1182 resulted in the massacre, exile, or enslavement of sixty thousand Latins resident in Constantinople. The Fourth Crusade launched by Rome in 1202, ostensibly intended to recover Byzantine territories lost to the Seljuks, quickly became entangled with local political and commercial rivalries. Latin retaliation took an unexpected turn. Crusading armies laid waste to most of Constantinople and sent the Byzantine rulers into exile in Nicaea. Seljuk surrender to the Ilkhans at the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 did not preclude further political struggles with Byzantium. As a vassal state to the Ikhans in Tabriz, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum remained a player in regional politics that the Byzantine rulers could not ignore. Former Seljuk Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kaykawuz set out to collude in 1262 with anti-Ilkhanid factions at the Byzantine court. Both Cairo under Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Baybars and Sarai under the Golden Horde of Berke Khan moved to sup­ port ‘Izz al-Din in the formation of a short-lived Sarai-Constantinople-Cairo axis against their Ilkhanid competitors.7 At this time, Byzantine emperor Michael VIII officially received the Cairo envoys enroute to Sarai, but also retained them under pressure from Ilkhan Hülegü, who did not want the envoys to proceed to rival territories in the Golden Horde. The impasse con­ tinued for one year, until Sultan al-Malik received confirmation of the deten­ tion and arranged for the patriarch of Alexandria to excommunicate Michael for his broken oath. This had little real effect on Michael. Meanwhile, with Constantinople in Rum 57

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‘Izz al-Din under house arrest, Hülegü was able to consolidate his new ter­ ritories in eastern Anatolia. Hülegü did not return Byzantine lands previ­ ously lost to the Seljuks, but flexible Ilkhanid religious policies allowed many towns of Anatolia and Armenia to negotiate their own favorable terms of surrender to the Ilkhanate. Michael secured holdings in Anatolia as a buffer against Golden Horde encroachments, an interest he shared with Hülegü. With the Muslim Seljuks cutting deep into Byzantine territories to the east, the Latin Christian Church did Constantinople no favors, dealing a near fatal blow during the period of the Latin Empire (1204–1261). After the Fourth Crusade assault on the city, which witnessed the devastating destruction of richly endowed Greek Orthodox properties, Roman Catholic Baldwin I was installed as emperor to replace Greek Orthodox authority. The city’s most prized relic of the True Cross was looted and eventually transported to Paris, where Louis IX installed it in Saint Chapelle. It took almost six decades for the Byzantines to recover. Recovery was partial at best and ironically depended on Genoese assistance. The leader of the Byzantine government in exile, Maria’s father, Michael Palaeologos, signed the 1261 Treaty of Nymphaeum with Genoa, in which Genoese investors offered ships to Michael VIII for his planned siege of Constantinople. In return, the Genoese community at Galata would receive most-favored status, which they eventually parlayed into favored positions at Tabriz and along the seas of al-Hind to Quanzhou. Having successfully recaptured Constantinople in 1261, Michael brought the Byzantine rulers out of exile, but despite his best efforts he could return them only to a diminished city. In this environment the arrival of the Mongols into eastern Anatolia was almost a relief. They constituted an outside player with no long-standing vested interests, com­ mitted to neither Christianity nor Islam, and even perhaps an ally, an enemy of his enemies in the Mamluks and Golden Horde, all of whom coveted the trade of the Bosphoran channels. Profit from trade that passed through the Bosphorus and Dardenelles made the commercial world go round. Nicola Di Cosmo, in keeping with the work of Gheorghe Bratianu, suggests that the Black Sea trade be viewed as “a moving piece of equipment that connected two separate trade systems, or circuits, namely the maritime system of Mediterranean trade and the land system of Eurasian trade,” the latter created by the Mongols.8 The littoral system further enriched Eurasian trade. Italian merchants, primarily the Venetians and Genoese, sought control of the Black Sea trade and worked it as a turntable for commodities circulating from south and east Asia into the Mediterranean economies. Evidence of economic expansion by Latin mer­ chants prior to the First Crusade (1095) highlights the commercial vector of Crusader incentives and the early Venetian and Genoese interest in regional 58 Chapter 2

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rather than long-distance economic concerns. David Jacoby’s detailed inves­ tigations of merchant account books and customs taxes in Mediterranean and Black Sea regions show that Latin merchants were engaged in shipping foodstuffs and wine into Constantinople both from other provinces of the Byzantine Empire and from nearby countries in the early eleventh century.9 Di Cosmo points out that these activities were in high gear around 1260, prior to European awareness of trade potentials with the eastern Mongol ter­ ritories of Khitai and Manzi. Although Marco Polo went the distance and had tales to tell that would fuel commercial imaginings, Di Cosmo finds that for the most part Italian private merchant activity focused on the Black Sea region to secure grain supplies and had little interest in long-distance international trade until at least the early fourteenth century, when direct east-west trade began to appear as a feasible source of commercial gain.10 Both Italian merchants working the Black Sea routes and central Asian trad­ ers looked to the markets at Tabriz to parlay the value of their commodities. A Genoese colony established in Trebizond connected Black Sea trade to the markets of Tabriz, where by 1280 the Genoese community prospered as well.11 Rife with complex ethnic, religious, and commercial players, the Black Sea emporia never fell under any one group’s control for long. The Mongol rulers of the Golden Horde, a division of the Mongol empire after 1260, actively attempted to regulate Black Sea trade, but never achieved more than a loose system of accountability. ARRIVAL IN TABRIZ FROM CONSTANTINOPLE: A JOURNEY TO THE EAST Maria Palaiologina’s journey to Tabriz cannot be separated from the Byzantine mosaic of political and cultural conditions or, consequently, from the artistic and intellectual exchange of which it was a vital part. When Maria’s father, Michael VIII, restored Byzantine control of Constantinople in 1261, he gained a weakened empire in a world of political giants. The Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt (1250–1517), the Ilkhans of Persia (1256–1335), and the Golden Horde Khanate (1240s–1502) of the northwest steppe lands from the Carpathian Mountains to Lake Balkhash dominated global politics in the second half of the thirteenth century. To forestall the further weak­ ening of his empire, Michael VIII sought an Ilkhanid-Byzantine alliance to strengthen Constantinople’s hand between Cairo and Sarai. Having selected Maria’s sister Euphrosyne (aka Irene) for marriage to Nogai, Mongol general and ruler of the Golden Horde from 1260 to 1300, Michael VIII chose his daughter Maria, born to a lady of royalty but not his empress, for Hülegü. At a standard age for contracting marriage in accordance with contempo­ rary practices, Maria left Constantinople as a twelve-year-old girl to fulfill Constantinople in Rum 59

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agreements made by her father the emperor of Byzantium and the Ilkhan of the Persian world. Maria Palaiologina’s journey to Tabriz followed the route of many fel­ low travelers seeking alliances with the Ilkhans. The encounter was always mutually transformative. Italian city-states sought to catapult themselves into commercial prominence through connection to the changing economic landscape, captured by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in his early fourteenth-cen­ tury wall-sized rotating mappamondo of the known world with Siena, Italy, at its center. The Genoese were quick to offer their diplomatic services as envoys on missions to promote alliances between the Latins and Ilkhans against the Mamluks. Tommaso de’Anfossi and Buscarello de’Ghisolfi both Genoese carried letters from Ilkhan Arghun to Latin rulers.12 The Ilkhans, for their part, seeking to promote sea routes to Quanzhou and strategies to block Mamluk access to the markets of the Western and Eastern Seas, utilized Italian scribes and translators to lay their plans. Arghun in 1289 employed Genoese shipbuilders to construct a fleet at Basra.13 Although not a successful venture because of Genoese factionalism, the attempt demon­ strated Genoese-Ilkhanid collaboration. Along the route with Maria was Theodosius, abbot of the Monastery of the Pantocrator, the second largest Byzantine religious structure after the Hagia Sophia. He traveled to insure Maria’s safe arrival and also to nurture Greek Orthodox communities in the Ilkhanate. Maria’s marriage was of great diplomatic consequence, and hence her entourage carried many valuable gifts across Anatolia destined for the court at Tabriz. According to historian Georges Pachymeres (1242–1310), Maria’s father exhausted the treasury to provide the richest possible gifts for this matrimonial alliance.14 The objects she brought entered the material base of Ilkhanid artistic circles and concurrently drew Maria’s attention into the artistic aspects of her own faith and practice. Her handlers packed numer­ ous richly decorated ecclesiastical items including an elaborate, exquisitely crafted church tent.15 By some accounts this church tent, part of her dowry, was made of “sturdy silken cloth, embroidered in gold with the figures of the saints.”16 We do not know of specific icons, relics, or illustrated manuscripts that Maria may have brought with her, but it would have been unusual if some of these did not accompany her. The embroidered figures of saints on her church tent certainly included images of the Madonna and Child. Books were common property among women of Byzantine royalty and may also have been included in the official gifts. Contemporary sources confirm that women of the Byzantine elite typically possessed books of great value. The nun Ypomone donated land, animals, sacred vessels, and books to the small 60 Chapter 2

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Monastery of St. John Prodromos; Kale Pakoriane disposed of her lands, books, clothing, and jewels, and freed her slaves; and Irene Choumnaina, young widow of a grandson of Michael VIII, received in her convent books sent to her by friends.17 Aristocratic Byzantine women had many opportu­ nities for education. Wills and documents of donations to monasteries often mention books among their valuable property. By the thirteenth century a large book market encompassed Anatolia and Azerbaijan north to the Caucasus. The Armenian historian Vardan, who had visited the court of Ilkhan Hülegü, recounts how his book on historical events was stolen by bandits and discovered a year and half later at a mar­ ket in Tiflis, where it was recognized by a relative, purchased, and returned to its owner.18 Books also moved between Constantinople and Tabriz, as Greeks translated many scientific books compiled in Tabriz and Marāgha during the Ilkhanid period. George Chioniades, a physician from Trabizond, bought medical books in Tabriz, and a priest, Isaac Argyros, translated works on astronomy. Tribute from Constantinople was purportedly used to sup­ port several thousand Greek students at the educational centers in Tabriz who studied with learned men from Khitai, Hind, and the lands of the Franks, among other groups.19 Most significantly for our study, contempo­ raries reported that Maria “brought two marvelously skilled painters from Constantinople, from the king her father, to paint pictures for the church of the Greeks in the city of Tabriz.”20 When Maria’s party reached Kayseri in central Anatolia, Theodosius received news that Ilkhan Hülegü had died. Maria would continue on to Tabriz and marry Abaqa, Hülegü’s son and the next Ilkhan. Patriarch Euthymius of Antioch joined the party on its final approach to the Ilkhanid court, where Maria arrived in late spring and shortly thereafter began her life as the Despina Khatun. Upon her arrival in Tabriz, Maria might have immediately been struck by the differences in her new royal surroundings. From a world divided between Greek and Latin Christianity she had entered a realm where Christians of many beliefs not only lived side by side but also in proxim­ ity to Muslim and Buddhist communities. Even royal marriages took place between partners of different religions. This was especially the case during the years of Maria’s sojourn in Tabriz. At court, Franciscans, Armenians, and Church of the East members, among others, came and went. The geographer Qazwin noted a community of Christians established at Ujan in a prosperous agricultural region, where they lived side by side with a Shafi’ite commu­ nity.21 According to Armenian sources, before her marriage to Abaqa, Maria required him to be baptized, to which he consented without objection.22 For Maria the baptism would have signified his acceptance of Christianity; for Constantinople in Rum 61

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Abaqa it expressed his religious pluralism and did not contradict his Mongol and Buddhist beliefs. To the Armenian author, this account projected both a commanding image of Maria and an Ilkhan with Christian commitments. When it came to wifely status, in Constantinople the emperor had only one wife but many mistresses and affairs, as Maria’s own birth testified. In Tabriz, Maria, now the Despina Khatun, was one among the Ilkhan’s pri­ mary and secondary wives. Rashid al-Din reported that when Abaqa mar­ ried the senior Bulughan Khatun, “Since he loved her very much, he seated her above Martai and Täspinä (Despina Khatun).”23 This did not diminish Maria’s authority, however. As a Byzantine princess, Ilkhan’s wife, and a person of recognized sincerity, the Despina Khatun commanded respect. Beyond her gendered position, she carried a hybrid social consciousness, giv­ ing her ongoing ties to both Tabriz and Constantinople. With no children or primary duties, she might have deteriorated and grown ill as some women did under similar circumstances. Instead, she appears to have flourished, exploring her social and intellectual environments as a devoted Orthodox Christian and woman of intelligence and purpose. Leaving one court life for another would have brought adjustments under any circumstances— new people, places, customs, food, and climate. In the transition from Constantinople to Tabriz, Maria also crossed a profound divide between sedentary and nomadic lifestyles. Relocating tent structures to accommodate the changing seasons, the nomadic life would have seen Maria, as the Despina Khatun, move with the court and its herds to pastureland near Marāgha in the winter and north to Lake Van in the summer. The basics of home and daily life were themselves quite different from what she had known. A stationary apartment of rooms in the imperial palace defined life for the Byzantine princess in Constantinople, whereas the wife of the Ilkhan would typically have her own ordo, tent liv­ ing quarters integrated into the Ilkhan’s camp. The Mongols had borrowed ordo organizational principles from the Liao, nomadic state builders whom the Mongols had conquered, just as they borrowed the Liao institution of female regency.24 The Despina Khatun’s ordo, like that of many other Mongol wives, was her domain, which she personally managed for profit and into which she received visitors at her invitation. An ordo was a social space, with its own property and labor force under the khatun’s personal management. Because nomadic wealth was measured more in terms of people and herds than in land, khatuns often received a portion of the distribution of goods and people under Mongol control at any one time. Villages and land were allotted to provide pasture and moveable wealth. The elaborate and hand­ somely furnished royal ordo was a political and economic unit composed of many tents appointed as living quarters, centers of worship, shops, and 62 Chapter 2

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offices. Each ordo came with its own horses, cattle, and military units. Ordos were in effect small towns to large cities, with all the necessary facilities for daily life. They were wealth-accumulating units and policy-making entities. The ordo and its furnishings were the Despina Khatun’s property to manage, as were lands she held in both the Ilkhanate and Byzantium.25 The ordos, especially those managed by women, functioned also as salons, gathering places for informal discussion and socializing. We know that Baidu (d. 1295), a contender for the position of Ilkhan with his forces in eastern Iran, often visited Maria to discuss Christianity, in which he was much interested. A contemporary reported that, because Baidu “had been acquainted for long years with the Despina, the daughter of the kings of the Greeks, who was the wife of Abaqa, he was favourably disposed towards the Christians, and for a certain number of years he made a church and a beater of the board [creating a bell-like sound] to march with his camp, moreover he boldly gave himself the name of ‘Christian.’. . . To the Christians he used to say, ‘I am a Christian, and he hung a cross on his neck. To the Muslims he showed that he was a Muslim, but he was never able to learn the ablu­ tions and the fasts. . . . it was not hidden from the Arabs that he inclined towards the side of the Christians and that he leaned [on them].”26 If Baidu had won out in his rivalry with Ghazan, the Despina Khatun’s efforts at reli­ gious dialogue might have had a bigger impact. Jacobite Christians as well held services from time to time in her ordo tent church.27 Given the doctri­ nal animosity between Greek and Latin Christianity, the Despina Khatun’s activities promoted the Greek side of this divide. 28 Sufi leaders also com­ monly participated in ordo gatherings to discuss religious matters. By the early fourteenth century, despite the presence of Greek and Latin priests in these conversations, Sufism had won more converts.29 A young girl herself when she arrived in Tabriz, Maria grew to become the Despina Khatun in a social environment that encouraged female empow­ erment. Contemporaries familiar with Mongol court life frequently com­ mented on the status of Mongol women. One historian has suggested that “Mongol queens traditionally enjoyed a position of authority within their society unrivalled in the western Byzantine, Chinese, or Arab worlds, as writers from each of these cultures have testified.”30 Mongol women were generally perceived to be stronger, more capable, and more highly regarded by their male peers than were women in their own societies. This intrigued some observers and disappointed others. Latin churchman Giovanni da Pian del Carpini wrote between 1245 and 1247 that, among the Mongols: Girls and women ride and gallop as skillfully as men. We even saw them carrying quivers and bows, and the women can ride horses for as long as Constantinople in Rum 63

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the men; they have shorter stirrups, handle horses very well, and mind all the property. The women make everything: skin clothes, shoes, leggings, and everything made of leather. They drive carts and repair them, they load camels, and are quick and vigorous in all their tasks. They all wear trousers, and some of them shoot just like men.31

Marco Polo, almost a half-century later, wrote: “The womenfolk buy and sell and do all that is necessary for their husbands and households. . . . The wives are true and loyal to their husbands and very good at their house­ hold tasks.”32 Polo also noted that “the [Chinese] maidens always walk so daintily that they never advance one foot more than a finger’s breadth beyond the other. . . . This rule must be understood as applying to the natives of Cathay. The Tartars [Mongols] do not trouble about such refinements, since their daughters and wives often go riding with them.”33 Polo attributed the graceful gait of the women of Khitai to a desire to protect their virginity. He might actually have been observing the bodily motions of women walking on crippled bound feet. He perhaps preferred the demure, secluded, quiet Han Chinese women to the active, public personas of Mongol women. Polo did, however, comment on the loyalty of the Mongol husband to his ten-to­ twenty wives and on the relative harmony of the group of wives themselves, who enjoyed their authority, productive tasks, and independence. One can­ not help but wonder if these encounters had any impact on gender awareness or critiques of the status quo back home in Venice, Cairo, Constantinople, or Paris. The empire-building process itself opened new social spaces for female authority as women partook in the new opportunities for wealth and power that came with a transcontinental empire. The Mongol era produced an exceptionally large number of women who held imperial political author­ ity.34 Rashid al-Din described Sorghaghtani (r. 1204–1252), wife of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan’s youngest son Toliu, as “the most intelligent woman in the world,” noting that the foundation she laid for the future Mongol Empire “would have been beyond the capability of any crowned head.”35 Sorghaghtani successfully maneuvered her three sons, Möngke, Kublai, and Hülegü, into prominent positions under difficult circumstances. Without her political strategizing and serious attention to her son’s education, the empire might well have disintegrated in 1260. Closer to Maria’s world in the Ilkhanate, women’s authority was equally visible. Some have even argued that women ran the Ilkhanate. Baghdad Khatun and Dilshadh Khatun were married to Ilkhan Abu Sa‘id and were recognized as rulers in their own right, appointed with Ilkhanid approval to govern local dynasties. Al-‘Umari wrote that “these Khatuns participate with them [the sultan and waizir] in the 64 Chapter 2

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government and they issue decrees just as they [the sultan and waizir] do; the most of this [decreeing and interfering in the government] is Baghdad daughter of Chupan and wife of Abu Sa‘id and we have not seen in our times nor have we heard from any one close to our days about a woman that rules as she does.”36 Baghdad Khatun rode in processions with a sword fastened to her waist. The image of women armed was visually compelling and perhaps alarming to an audience that typically held women in seclusion and certainly did not provide them with weapons for defense or otherwise. A letter received by the bishop of Perugia in 1237 notes that “It is also said that their [the Mongols’] women, like themselves, are warlike, and shoot arrows and ride horses and mares like men, but that they are much more spirited than men in battle. For while men sometimes turn tail, they [the women] in no circumstances take to flight, but expose themselves to every risk.”37 Qutlugh Khatun, niece of Kublai Khan and granddaughter of Chinggis Khan, was one of Abaqa Khan’s daughters born late in Maria’s time in Tabriz. Qutlugh became a convert to Islam and went on a hajj in 1323 immediately after the peace between the Ilkhans and Mamluks. She was very involved in Ilkhanid court politics, rousing suspicion that she was a spy for the Mamluks, with whom she exchanged high-level correspondence.38 Mamluk author Al-Safadi (d. 1363) included her biography in a biographical dictionary. Al-Safadi wrote: She was a devout, esteemed, God-fearing, pious woman. She loved good deeds and the benevolent. . . . Among the Mongols, she was greatly respected, often referred to, highly revered and her words were valued and appreciated. She was sharp-minded and courageous/skilled in horseman­ ship. She was married to ‘Urab Ti [Ghurbati] and her dwellings were not far from the borders of the land of Islam [the Mamluk Sultanate]. When her above-mentioned husband died, she rode on her own and killed his killer, beheaded him and hanged [sic] his head on the collar of his horse.39

Qutlulun Khatun (c. 1260–1306), a contemporary of the Despina Khatun and daughter of central Asian ruler Khaidu, was known near and far for her wrestling expertise. No man was able to defeat her. She rode into battle with her father and never met her match. She refused to marry, and after much contest lived happily ever after. WINTER PASTURE NEAR MARĀGHA, SOUTH OF TABRIZ Maria arrived in Tabriz just before the death of Doquz Khatun, Hülegü’s primary wife and a prominent leader among the Ilkhanid Christian Constantinople in Rum 65

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communities. A woman of the Kerait tribe who favored the Church of the East Christianity, Doquz had a strong reputation that preceded her arrival in Tabriz. Upon dispatching Hülegü to Iran, Möngke Khan was reputed to have advised: “In all cases make your clear-sighted intelligence and golden mind your guide. . . . Let the subjects be free of excessive taxation and impo­ sitions. Return devastated lands to a flourishing state. Conquer the realm of the rebellious through the night of the great god so that our summer and winter pastures may be many. Consult Doquz Khatun on all matters.”40 When her husband captured Baghdad in 1258, Doquz counseled pro­ tection for the Baghdadi Christian communities and it was done. Baghdad, we recall, was and continued to be the ecclesiastical hub for the Church of the East. Doquz’s wealth and status grew to be substantial. In the spring of 1265 her husband and supporter Ilkhan Hülegü had recently died, her own health was failing, and a young Byzantine princess with the authority of the Greek Orthodox Christian Church had just joined the Tabriz court. It was a last chance to make some plans for the future. During the three months of their acquaintance, Doquz cultivated a close relationship with the Despina Khatun that transcended their Church of the East and Greek Orthodox preferences. Maria’s tent church, with its beautiful, artistic renderings of the saints, was an initial meeting place. Together they traveled to Marāgha to visit its sizeable Christian communities and church sponsored by Doquz. Maria learned much from Doquz, who transferred her own aura of respect and authority to this young princess. The Dokuz Khatun had no children. While this was not a major concern for many women, including Maria, it evidently bothered Doquz to the point where she had offered to adopt an Ayyubid prince who arrived at Hülegü’s court one day on business.41 (Why this Ayyubid prince is not clear.) Maria became Doquz’s heir as guardian of Christian interests, and she was recognized as such within the Ilkhanid circles. When Doquz died she left behind great wealth, which was distrib­ uted among other khatuns, including the Despina Khatun. Mongol law (yasa) made it clear that groups would be permitted to practice their faith without state interference, and in practice this allowed leaders great flexibility to manipulate matters of faith for political advantage. Within a political structure that promoted independence of worship and a tax structure that granted exemptions to religious institutions and figures, Mongol women effectively leveraged their religious affiliations into strong patronage networks. These networks grew through investment in community services and in return augmented the accumulation of wealth. Such network­ ing was critical as connective tissue in the circulation of artistic materials related to religious beliefs. Unlike their male peers, who often cycled through numerous religious identities over a lifetime, women who rose to prominence 66 Chapter 2

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tended to remain committed to one religion while including support for other religions. Although Sorghaghtani, mother of Möngke, Kublai, and Hülegü, identified as a Church of the East Christian, she sponsored construction of a madrasa at Bukhara, purchased villages to endow support for teachers and students, and sent funds to assist poor and needy Muslims.42 Her strat­ egy effectively wove disparate beliefs and practices into a coherent imperial whole. This pattern had a long history. When Chinggis Khan defeated the Church of the East Kereit tribe in 1203, its daughters were married into the Chinggisid line. The descendants of these daughters readily sought to con­ nect their networks to the Greek and Latin Churches.43 Kereit princesses and khatuns presented themselves to Latin Christians as the mothers of the lost Christians of the East. Örüg Khatun, wife of Abaqa’s son Ilkhan Arghun, had her own son baptized and named Nicholas after Pope Nicholas IV, with whom she carried on a correspondence during the entirety of her husband’s reign.44 Pope Nicholas IV, for his part, fully recognized the influence of the Chrisian khatuns and sent letters addressed to them urging them to encour­ age the Ilkhan’s baptism.45 Like the Mamluks who sent gifts specifically for the women at the Tabriz court, papal emissaries may have delivered articles of Christian art to the khatuns. A women-centered social grouping that favored faith-based beautiful material possessions both collected and circu­ lated these items through their far-reaching associations. SUMMER PASTURE NEAR LAKE VAN, NORTH OF TABRIZ Composed after her service to the Ilkhanid court but during her lifetime of continued relations, Rashid al-Din’s Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh briefly noted Maria’s presence. Many of the images painted at the Tabriz workshop sug­ gest Byzantine stylistic and compositional elements derived from Byzantine books of saints and other illustrated material available to workshop art­ ists.46 Created for various editions of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, the illustrations also offer visual impressions of the Despina Khatun’s daily environment. Surely she stood many a time to see her husband Abaqa ride off with his son, as later artists depicted when choosing scenes to illustrate the text. Court scenes and banquets, represented in the Diez illustrations, were quite familiar occasions. Her ordo and the encampments of which it was a part no doubt bore resemblance to those depicted in numerous illustrations. The Despina Khatun’s nomadic travel would have taken her in summer to the cooler terrain near Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, a region of many Buddhist communities and temples, including the elaborate temple com­ plex at Labnasagut with its stunning art and architecture. Constructed in 1260–1261, the complex was in place when Maria passed Lake Van on Constantinople in Rum 67

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her first journey to Tabriz and was functioning in all its glory during her many seasons in the area. We do not know if the Despina Khatun visited Labnasagut or other Buddhist sites in the Ilkhanate, but it would have been almost impossible for her not to be aware of Buddhist practices, art, and beliefs so central to her new companions’ lives. Presentation of her Christian faith required awareness of the faith of others for effective trans­ lation and comparative dialogue. Christian Armenian communities inhabited the lands around Lake Van as well. As already noted, Syriac and Armenian communities in the area received Maria graciously. Armenian artistry incorporated and popularized many Persian and Buddhist motifs that were easily diffused through com­ mercial networks into diverse cultural zones. When Maria later requested the reliquary cross of Gregory the Illuminator, patron saint of the Armenian Church founded in 301 CE, she expressed her familiarity with the com­ munities and artistry of these lands as well as her ongoing personal ties to the region. With opportunity, connections, and interest, Maria most likely visited the Armenian church at Echmiadzin, where Saint Gregory built his church. In this setting Greek and Armenian Christians among a Buddhist elite and a predominantly Muslim population recognized their common internal dialogue regarding religious relics and images. Armenian/Greek discourse on the meaning of images had a long his­ tory by this period. As mentioned in the prelude notes above, Armenian his­ torian Vardan, conveyed an early account of a famous ascetic lord, Yovhannes, who, upon seeing images of the apostles painted on the walls of a Bethlehem church, prayed to them to ask if they were pleased by these paintings. The eyes of the painted figures in this story had been scratched out by disap­ proving local Muslims attempting to enforce their own position on visual material. It is worth recalling a second time here that, according to this account, Peter and John came to Vardan in a vision and said, “You begged us to disclose to you [our views] about the Christians drawing us. It is not at all pleasing to us, and we are vexed. We indicate [this] everywhere, but they do not heed us.”47 Clearly, the subject of images remained complex and contested during the century when Mongol political leaders invested heavily in the produc­ tion and circulation of illustrated materials to create a shared vision of past, present, and future. Armenian churchman Nerses the Gracious (1098–1173) wrote: “God is invisible by His nature; in bowing down before the visible cross, we do so before the invisible God. . . . While with our bodily eyes we see its material and true shape, with the eyes of the spirit, and our faith, we perceive the invisible power of God united with it”; when you see the cross, “know and believe that you are seeing Christ enthroned on it; when you pray 68 Chapter 2

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before the cross, believe that you are conversing with Christ, and not with inanimate matter.”48 Not all Armenian Christians accepted this view. Some preached that all images should be destroyed. From this perspective the worship of icons belonged to the misguided Byzantine Church and should not be taken as a model. Among the errors about which Pope Benedict XII informed the Armenians in 1342 was their failure to include images of saints in their churches, to which Armenian churchmen replied that this was no longer the case except in areas controlled by Muslims, who persecuted those who owned images.49 The power of images to move people’s beliefs on an emotional and nonverbal plane affected all theological and political positions in the world Maria engaged intellectually and socially. ARRIVAL IN CONSTANTINOPLE FROM TABRIZ: A JOURNEY TO THE WEST After the death of her husband Ilkhan Abaqa in 1282, the Despina Khatun returned as Maria Palaiologina to Constantinople in 1285. The Constantinople to which she returned was still recovering from the devas­ tation of the Fourth Crusade. Maria’s father was dead and his memory in disgrace for his promotion of union between the Greek and Latin Churches at the Second Council of Lyon 1272–1274. Her father and husband had both favored an alliance among the Greeks, Latins, and Mongols and sent delegations to the council to argue as much. Failure to end the Greek/Latin schism fed a rise of factionalism within the Byzantine Empire. Eventually denounced for his efforts, Michael VIII was denied Christian burial by the Orthodox Church. Even his wife Theodora became convinced that she had fallen into error under the sway of her husband. A widow, returning with her experiences from nomadic court life to the Byzantine society from which she had long been absent, Maria found her half-brother Andonikos II Palaiologos (r. 1282–1328) enthroned as emperor and undertaking the resto­ ration of numerous sites still in ruins after the Latin occupation. Despite its overall decline, Constantinople retained an allure for contemporary travelers and a place at the heart of intellectual and artistic life. Cecily J. Hilsdale has skillfully clarified this apparent contradiction between political decline and a flourishing world of visual arts by demonstrating that “later Byzantine diplo­ matic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage . . . power must, out of economic necessity, be constructed in non-monetary terms within the realm of culture.”50 This held true for the policies of Michael VIII as well as his son Andronikos II. With a long history in Greek Orthodox thought, icons and the conver­ gence of political and religious themes became forces shaping contemporary Constantinople in Rum 69

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Byzantine uses of art. Byzantine icon painters of various schools drew both technique and style from the second-century Coptic Christian portraits created at Fayam to the south of Cairo. These images invested with indi­ vidual spiritual essence became the standard when, in 357, Saint Basil the Great, archbishop of Caesaria (Kayseri) of Cappadocia in Anatolia visited Alexandria and returned to the new Byzantine Empire to found the monas­ tic movement there. Of the many doctrinal disputes facing early Christian communities after Christ’s lifetime, the conflict over icons (from the Greek eikon for “image,” often meaning portrait) was most fierce. Despite a ruling by the Second Council, icon worship remained widespread in the Byzantine Church and in popular practice. With the opportunity to take a stand, two women, Byzantine empress regents Irene (r. 797–802 CE) and Theodora (r. 842–855 CE), moved the case forward when they boldly reinstated the ven­ eration of icons during their rule. While icons were a point of dispute between Latin and Greek Christians, relics were not. During the Fourth Crusade, icons were confis­ cated and plucked for precious metals in their frames and cases, their images destroyed in the name of purging heretical practices; relics, on the other hand, were perceived as holy and hence assigned a separate category in the booty of warfare. Relics had to be “translated” carefully and with great cer­ emony in order to preserve their beneficial powers when they were carried into another domain. Latins in Constantinople came to see “translation of relics as partial fulfillment of crusader vows.”51 Relics linked to the central figures of Christian belief had tremendous value, both monetarily and in terms of social authority. When put on display, they raised huge amounts of revenue for their owners. A woman’s right to own relics and collect view­ ing fees went back to the early eleventh century and was protected by law. Euphrosyne from Peloponnesos in the fourteenth century and Vatatzina Gavraina in the early fifteenth century both brought cases to court to pro­ tect their right to collect and utilize revenue from miraculous relics in their possession.52 Against this backdrop of shared and divergent relationships to religious artifacts, Byzantine diplomatic gifts for the first time in the late thirteenth century employed imperial portraits purported to be endowed with iconic powers. Emperor Michael VIII’s portrait with Saint Lawrence became a venerated treasure among the Genoese when it arrived in their city.53 The notion that the spiritual authority of Michael himself was invested in his image greatly impressed the Genoese, who as Latins should have eschewed the notion of icons. Upon her return to Constantinople, Maria remained attentive to Byzantine-Ilkhanid political involvements. When Church of the East monk Rabban Sauma (1220–1294) arrived in Constantinople on a diplomatic 70 Chapter 2

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mission sent by Ilkhan Arghun, son of Maria’s husband by another wife, to secure an alliance with the Franks against the Mamluks, Maria was two years into her new life. Rabban Sauma traveled from Tabriz to Trebizond to Constantinople on his way to Rome. In Constantinople, he had an audi­ ence with Andronicus II, visited the Hagia Sophia, and viewed awesome Christian relics. Maria likely knew of his visit, but as her deceased father had fallen out of favor for his efforts to join with the Mongols and Latins, and Andronicus II was party to suppressing his memory, a meeting might have been difficult. Against the backdrop of contentious schismatic and unionist debates that dominated Byzantine royalty including many of the learned women, Maria may have recalled the less contentious environment of Christian groups in Tabriz. When the tide began to turn toward Islam in the Ilkhanate after Ghazan’s conversion in 1295, and Buddhist temples and Christian churches were looted, Maria was aware of these developments too. She requested that one of the most sacred relics of Eastern Christendom, the cross of Saint Gregory the Illuminator from an Armenian church north of Tabriz, be sent to her for safekeeping.54 Her wish was fulfilled. In 1303, when Turkish Ottoman forces threatened Byzantine territo­ ries, Maria accepted an assignment to go to Nicaea on a low-profile diplo­ matic maneuver to secure Ilkhanid assistance for a Byzantine attempt to out maneuver Ottoman forces.55 Oljeitü reportedly sent thirty thousand men to invade Anatolia. Iranian historian and contemporary Kashani mentioned Maria as the twelfth wife of Oljeitü, but this is probably best understood as a marriage connection in recognition of the long association between Maria and the Mongol court at Tabriz more than an actual marriage.56 The joint effort against the Ottomans did not meet with success. Beyond politics, Maria devoted herself primarily to her spiritual and cultural endeavors. Through her acquaintance with Theodore Metochites (d. 1332), she became involved in the restoration of the Chora Church on the outskirts of Constantinople. From 1315 to 1321, Metochites provided the intellectual inspiration and political support for the Church’s illustra­ tive program. Like Rashid al-Din in Tabriz, Metochites was a knowledge­ able scholar with strong artistic and literary interests who served as primary adviser to the ruler and commanded considerable financial resources. Most interesting for us, Metochites created an artistic program for the Chora restoration that featured Maria prominently though subtly. As statesman and scholar, Metochites oversaw every detail of the Chora mosaics, artfully conveying his strong conservative political views through innovative ele­ ments that retained a conventional aura. Why did Metochites work so closely with Maria on this project, and why did he conceptualize a role for her that recalled her connections to the East and the Ilkhans? Constantinople in Rum 71

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THE CHORA CHURCH IN EURASIAN CONTEXT Byzantium’s fiscal and political crises were on the mind of Theodore Metochites as he planned the program for the Chora mosaics. Himself a senior official who entered the service of Andronicus II after returning from exile for his support of Michael VIII, Metochites set out to create an inno­ vative expression of Greek Orthodox faith and Byzantine authority in the contemporary world. Robert S. Nelson has written that the mosaics at Chora “celebrated a certain kind of triumph and offered a lesson in good and bad government, not in the manner of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s secular allegory, painted a decade or so later, but according to a long-standing Byzantine tradition of religious narratives that were political at the same time.”57 The mosaic known as the Enrollment for Taxation was both innovative and politi­ cal. Like the image The Birth of Mohammad in Rashid al-Din’s history, the Enrollment for Taxation, with no pictorial precedents, offered new artistic and messaging possibilities. The image spotlighted the Virgin Mary in a way that both legitimized and made sacred the collection of taxes for social order at a time when the Byzantine government was experiencing great fiscal diffi­ culties. The need for land taxes was especially critical, because commercial taxation, particularly in the lucrative Black Sea trade, increasingly fell into the hands of Italian merchants, the Genoese most notably. Metochites’ debate with Theodore Palaeologus provides some instruc­ tive context for understanding the Chora mosaic program. Conducted through a series of 120 essays known as his Autobiographical Poem written in 1326–1328, Metochites considered this work, penned just five years after the restoration of Chora, to be his masterpeice, of which he said, “I have left this book in the world as a picture of my mind.”58 His words articulated the visualization we find in the Chora mosaics. In his essays, Metochites argued against more democratic forms of government in favor of an impe­ rial vision of political authority, which he modeled on Rome, noting that early Christianity bridged the Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire. Theodore Paleaologus, for his part, contended that recent developments in the Italian city-states, particularly Genoa though Siena was also included, offered constructive methods that might remedy Byzantium’s precipitous political decline. Instead of one ruler and his chosen minister, in this case Metochites, making all critical decisions, a council of delegates from many walks of life should be consulted on all matters before taking action. To this proposal Metochites replied: abounding proof and evidence of this is provided by Genoa, which has suf­ fered the introduction through rebellion of an absolute democracy and is 72 Chapter 2

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now torn apart by worthless citizens, and headed towards the greatest per­ ils, and threatened by disaster without hope of redemption or the restora­ tion of government—a city whose most exalted name rang throughout the world, for, set apart by her wealth and prosperity and by her inhabitants’ spirit of daring and battle-readiness, she performed deeds upon the sea not only without compare in our own age but scarcely with their equal among the great miracles of olden days. Now, however, she has fallen prey to twisted democracy, and to egotism and libertarianism of an unreasonable, unfathomable and untimely nature, so that she leaves unchecked the desires and ambitions of her people.59

Metochites’ preference for imperial government looked more to Tabriz than to Genoa. When Ilkhan Arghun employed Genoese to build a fleet at Basra, he encountered the same disruptive behavior that Metochites attributed to Genoa’s democratic governance. Genoese merchants proved fractious and unable to complete the project. Embedded in the politics of Constantinople and Tabriz and eventually as far as Quanzhou, Genoese merchants were both volatile and expansive elements in the world of Mongol Eurasia. Metochites, for his part, framed his picture of the world as an imperial project to which he was committed and from which he profited handsomely. Throughout the Chora mosaics, medallion designs echo Buddhistinspired motifs that gained renewed, widespread popularity during the thir­ teenth and fourteenth centuries.60 Art historian Sergio Bettini, in his study of Byzantine art and architecture, cautiously comments on the strong reso­ nance between Armenian-Georgian art of the period and both the mosaics of the Chora and the design of the Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols.61 Bettini saw in the Chora mosaics a style that was related to Byzantine mosaic art but surpassed that art to create an innovative iconography more expressive and refined, more naturalistic and harmonious.62 The Chora mosaics, too, suggest the thirteenth-century trend toward lifelike representations inspired to a large extent by artistic innovation and eclectic adaptations of Persian and Buddhist designs. Metochites, who sponsored the unusual Deesis panel in which the portrait of Maria appears, was well aware of her role in Byzantine/ Ilkhanid cultural politics. Having grown up in Anatolia, Metochites longed for the land lost to the Seljuk Turks and looked to the Ilkhans for support. Maria of the Mongols at the center of a newly restored Orthodox church was entirely consistent with his support of imperial governance over democratic city-state start-ups. The Deesis panel of the Chora Church is unique in its unconventional arrangement of religious personages. Careful study of Maria’s portrait in relationship to the overall visual program of the mosaic reveals her centrality Constantinople in Rum 73

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to the imagery as well as additional layers of personal and political reflec­ tion on her life. Given the visually off-centered and lower-right-corner loca­ tion of Maria’s portrait, it at first seems unexpected that she is the center of attention. Natalia Teteriatnikov points out that the figure of Christ in this traditional composition of Mary’s supplication on behalf of humanity is unprecedented in Byzantine art, in that Christ is shown without a Gospel book and in addition gestures a blessing with his right hand toward Maria in the lower right.63 A clue to the absence of the Gospel may be found in a poem Manuel Philes wrote for Maria in which he describes her gift of a “richly decorated Gospel book and a precious red veil with golden embroidery” to the Virgin as thanksgiving for safe passage on her journeys.64 If the missing Gospel book does connote the one Maria donated, this is again an unex­ pected intervention in conventional Christian iconography. Extraordinary attention to Maria is also displayed through the off-kilter figure of Christ in the dome above the Deeis that directs attention through Adam to Maria. The Virgin Mary and Isaac Comnenos, the second donor in the Deesis, both gaze toward Maria. All eyes are on the diminutive figure of Maria as nun. Natalia Teteriatnikov explores a possible association of the Chora pro­ gram with Maria’s Ilkhanid experience in the scene of Christ healing three blind men. She suggests that, consistent with the logic of the overall pro­ gram, this may be interpreted as a reference to the three intended Mongol husbands of Maria (Hülegü, Abaqa, Oljeitü) and the hope for their conver­ sion to Christianity. Maria believed that her purpose at the Ilkhanid court was to heal and save souls from excesses. She certainly witnessed many a feast there for which the Mongols were famous despite a general frugality in daily eating habits. Carpini had spread the image early on of Mongols who “are more given to drunkenness than any other nation on earth. . . . They eat immoderately all forms of unclean food, wolves, foxes, dogs, carrion, after­ births of animals, mice.”65 The extent to which Carpini’s account was induced by xenophobic reflexes is unclear, but we do know from more sympathetic sources that high feasts often went on for days or weeks and were immoder­ ate by design as displays of royal power and diplomatic compensation for past loyalties and continuing support. Maria may well have read these activities as sheer gluttony and passions run wild, a sickness of the soul that required healing from her sympathetic, Orthodox Christian perspective. As Despina Khatun, Maria held an ambiguous position akin to sections on Christianity in the Jami‘ al-Tavarikh. She was embedded in a narrative of Ikhanid design, but not fully of that design. If she had ever gazed upon the illustration of the birth of Muhammad, she would have viewed a scene both familiar and unfamiliar. The Hagia Sophia was the centerpiece of the Greek Orthodox world. Along with many other churches and monasteries of Constantinople it 74 Chapter 2

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housed an impressive number of relics, despite earlier plundering. Arms, bones, beards, blood, tears, heads, bread from the Last Supper, and items associated with the miracles of Christ, saints, and other holy personages proliferated. Wrapped in luxury textiles and placed in elaborate gold and jeweled boxes, relics merged with art. When Ignatius of Smolensk arrived in Constantinople in 1390 after a long journey from Moscow down the Don River and across the Black Sea, he enthusiastically toured the relics that remained in the aftermath of extensive Latin looting. Upon entering the city he went to the Church of Hagia Sophia: “When we came to the great doors, we venerated the miraculous icon of the All-Pure Mother of God. . . . We also venerated the image of the Lord inside the holy church and the [other] venerable holy icons. We kissed the table on which the holy relics of the Passion of Christ were placed. . . . We spent the entire morning in the church worshipping and wondering at the miracles of the saints and at the size and beauty of the church.”66 In addition, Ignatius kissed the relics of Saint Anastasia, saw the white stone vessel in which Jesus made water turn into wine at the Pantocrator Monastery, “kissed the blood which flowed from the side of the Lord on the cross,” and attended a service at the Blachernae Church in which the robe of the Virgin Mary, enshrined in the church since the fifth century and credited with saving Constantinople from several attempted invasions, was presented for viewing by the faithful.67 Given its centrality to Byzantine imperial life, the Hagia Sophia pro­ vided a powerful reference point in political discourse. As with other images we are considering, the Chora Deesis mosaic embodies layers of meaning intended to communicate multiple, not necessarily internally consistent, mes­ sages to contemporary audiences in ways that referenced present conditions, historical practices, and hopes for the future. Considering the context of political relations in Constantinople in the early fourteenth century, Robert Nelson identifies unique visual resonances between the Chora Deesis imag­ ery and the Deesis panel of the Hagia Sophia, both of which date from around 1315. Size and placement of the Deesis figures in each mosaic com­ municate an intended association between the two. Nelson writes: “By refer­ ring to Hagia Sophia, the Chora and its patron [Metochites] writes itself and himself into the centre of contemporary imperial/religious symbolism or ideology. Moreover, Metochites accomplishes this not with mere words on a wall, but by his inclusion in this interplay of icons, more potent signi­ fiers in his world.”68 We can contextualize the relationship between these two Deesis panels even further. Metochites’ world included eastern Anatolia and the Ikhanate. As an able statesman, Metochites drew the widest possible circle of power to his cause. From his debate with Palaeologus, the merits of imperial forms Constantinople in Rum 75

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of government were on his mind, and Maria of the Mongols was a power­ ful political signifier in this discourse. Court poet Philes Manuel referred to her as the “Empress of the East.”69 She had been protector of the Greek Orthodox communities in the East. Byzantine authorities seeking help to safeguard the Hagia Sophia and their waning empire from the Ottoman Turks had turned to Maria and her connections to the ilkhans for assistance. Maria’s inclusion in the Chora Deesis with its visual ties to the Deesis of the Hagia Sophia expands Nelson’s argument that the intent of Metochites’ construction projects was restoration of Byzantine imperial authority against other claims. By some accounts, a tunnel, dug through roughly three and a half miles under Constantinople, once connected the interior of the Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols to the Hagia Sophia, the Mother Church of Byzantium. Imperial portraits with iconic import were a Byzantine specialty. As with advertising and branding today, image making in many formats was an effec­ tive way to reap political and ideological benefits from limited resources. Art required financial investment, but also paid off in economic terms. As Anthony Cutler has argued, official records reveal a commercial attitude toward gift giving in general, with ledgers carefully maintained to keep exact records of items received and their estimated value.70 Economic historian David Jacoby further documents the value-created aspect of interregional exchange by noting that manufacturers “created and stimulated new demand and new fashion trends by borrowing visual and technical elements from for­ eign products that freely circulated within and across political and cultural boundaries.”71 All of this stimulated local economic takeoffs not otherwise in the making. While the Mongol rulers were awash in booty to be redistributed to allies and could command the relocation of skilled artisans and materials to produce abundant items for gift giving, the Byzantines occupied a precarious position that drew more on past glories than present military or economic prowess. They compensated by cultivating intellectual talent and creating diplomatic gifts that featured the iconic spiritual aura of their emperor. The decision to send painted or woven images of the emperor on imperial doc­ uments and gifts was intended to impress secular and spiritual authority. Many of these gifts cultivated a Genoa–Constantinople tie, such as the por­ trait of the Despina Khatun’s father, Emperor Michael VIII, that depicted him with Saint Lawrence on a silk pallium, donated to Genoa. In the later fourteenth century, Byzantine emperor John V would donate to Leonardo 76 Chapter 2

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Montaldo, doge of Genoa, a relic cloth with an image of Christ that became known as the Mandylion of Genoa.72 The Italian city-states, with little of great material value but equally convinced of their own superiority, sought to strengthen their position by manipulating market exchange—buy low, sell high. In this spirit, the Latin Church put forth its best assertions of universal authority, but within the Eurasian scope they had far less historical claim to political grandeur and economic achievement than did the Byzantines. Nothing in the artistic leg­ acy, theology, or political memory made a portrait of the pope or French king a compelling object of international awe. Nonetheless, the Franciscan movement was second only to the Armenian communities in sponsoring innovative art and circulating it throughout the Eurasian emporia. When Armenian monks fled Ottoman militarism in the early fourteenth century, they carried church-related furnishings and art objects to the Armenian Church of Saint Bartholomew (1308) in the Castelletto quarter of Genoa and hence into the Italian Franciscan pathways.73 The Franciscans themselves moved imagery back and forth as far as the graveyards of Yangzhou and as near as their refractory in Siena. In gift-giving practices, the Mamluk court held a different hand of cards. Without a strong figural artistic heritage, portraits and narrative images were not a winning option. Although the Mamluks were political newcomers, they drew on the strategic and material resources that had made Egypt a regional power for millennia. Textiles from imperial workshops were prized across the Mongol empire, and the Mamluks excelled in this area. Robes and gowns from Dar al-Tiraz workshops produced exquisite silk gar­ ments embroidered with gold epigraphic bands, carrying elegance and the name of the sultan under Allah’s name into every receiving court. Mamluk gift packages of luxury garments to the Ilkhanid court included specific items for the court women, an unusual gesture and a recognition of the per­ ceived authority of women there.74 Whether Maria ever received a Mamluk robe with tiraz trim or not, she lived with the political realities that such gifts acknowledged. In an impressive study of diplomatic gift records related to Mamluk practices, Doris Behrens-Abouseif has concluded that “Alongside the epigraphic textiles of the Dar al-Tiraz, the major emblematic gift items given by the sultans that constantly figure in historical accounts were luxu­ rious arms and armour, and horses with lavish trappings, notably golden and bejewelled saddles upholstered with velvet and silk. The prominence of military and equestrian items was among Muslim courts unique to Mamluk gift packages of that period.”75 Each polity drew on its local resources and customs to fashion gifts for the world of thirteenth-century diplomacy. Constantinople in Rum 77

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Maria’s portrait as protector of the Byzantine Empire possessed a unique interplay of iconic, diplomatic, and artistic features. Her visage sends a clear message even though it did not travel, for she had traveled and sojourned among the Mongols with resolve, fortitude, and goodwill. Employing the contemporary innovative use of portraiture and her role as intermediary between Tabriz and Constantinople, Metochites visually opted to shift attention to Tabriz as a dominant theme in the Chora mosaics.

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CHAPTER 3

Siena in Tuscany (Land of the Franks)

R

ecovered in the nineteenth century from under layers of whitewash applied at some point to freshen a refectory wall and discard a deterio­ rating, irrelevant painting, The Martyrdom of the Franciscans (1342) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290–1348) at its creation looked out from a vibrant, expansive early fourteenth-century Siena to imagine a court scene half a con­ tinent away in Mongol-held territories. At the center of Lorenzetti’s mar­ tyrdom mural, now located in a side chapel to the left of the main altar in Siena’s Basilica di San Francesco, sits a ruler on his throne elevated above the scene around him. His sword is drawn but lies at rest across his knees. We are amid a psychological drama: figures peer out from behind columns; oth­ ers with intense stares probe the ruler’s face as though questioning the horror he has sanctioned. What spectacle unfolds here? Six Franciscans have been ordered to be executed by this fundamentalist ruler with his Mongol style of clothing and facial details. While set in the Mongol-controlled territory of the Chaghadaid ulus, this is not an affair between Christians and Mongols, who as we have seen were more likely to welcome Christians of various per­ suasions into their courts and families or even to propose alliances against the Mamluks. What, then, is happening here in the court of a sultan with a largely Muslim population under Mongol rule? Three friars on the left await their imminent execution by behead­ ing. Three on the right already lie dead, with their severed heads scattered on the ground. Two groups, five individuals including a shadowy figure in each, stand to either side of the ruler at mid-level in the composition, dis­ playing a range of details in dress, armor, and facial features. Two figures have clearly Mongol features and conical hats in the contemporary Mongol style topped with long, white, feathery plumes, while another to the far left wears a turban, suggesting an Indian presence, and the armor of the third figure from the left is unlike anything worn by warriors of the Christian domains and in its remarkable detail adds a Persian or central Eurasian ele­ ment. The figure nearest the ruler in the group on the left wears a tunic with a collar and diagonal-cross closure like that worn by the ruler himself 79

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and associated with Mongol/Han Chinese dress of the period. Others in the group on the right have clothing styles, hats, and features that identify them as Mediterranean—altogether a very cosmopolitan setting, an artistic fusion of Lorenzetti’s own political imaginary. With his pictorial skills, phil­ osophical bent, and awareness of contemporary events, Lorenzetti’s secular perspective generated social commentary and aspirational vision. His sub­ ject matter was a meditation on matters of peace and violence in a world of political and economic competition fueled by religious divides both domestic and interstate. Once Lorenzetti set out to paint The Martyrdom of the Franciscans, the problem arose of how to depict life at a Mongol court. He had never been to one. On what sources might he draw? The scene is, in fact, very accu­ rate in many of its details. An informed citizen, Lorenzetti conceivably fol­ lowed some of the comings and goings of local travelers to far places and the news of them they might bring back. His fellow Sienese artist Simone Martini was in Avignon when news of the Almaliq martyrdom arrived. The Sienese Tommaso Uzi, who held a prominent position at the Ilkhanid Court in Tabriz, may have figured in Lorenzetti’s conceptualization of life at a Mongol court. While technically the martyrdom took place in Almaliq of the Chaghadaid ulus in 1339, Lorenzetti was seldom so straightforward in his representations.1 Visually, the court scene is both Almaliq and not Almaliq, just as in his painting of Siena in The Effects of Good Government fresco, the city both is and is not Siena, injecting the visuality of the work with philosophical tensions and dynamic commentary. The intolerance of the ruler who temporarily usurped authority at Almaliq in 1339 echoed a potential for intolerance both beyond and within Sienese society, where groups were often persecuted for presumed heretical beliefs. Lorenzetti’s sources for his court scene were an integration of both familiar classical sig­ nifiers and unfamiliar innovative references to Mongolian material culture and authority. SIENA IN EURASIAN DIPLOMATIC AND COMMERCIAL CONTEXT The first question one might ask of this chapter on a city-state peripheral to the Mongol empire is, why Siena? Why not Venice or Genoa, two major commercial centers during the Mongol era? After all, it was the Venetian Marco Polo who helped produce the best-selling book on the Mongol terri­ tories in the 1290s. And as we have seen in the discussion of Constantinople, Venice and Genoa dominated the Mediterranean and Black Sea routes that were crucial connectors to Tabriz and points east. While Marco Polo may have captured the attention of generations of readers, in Tabriz it was the 80 Chapter 3

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Genoese, rivals to the Venetians, who most often participated in the Ilkhans’ diplomatic inner circle. Late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Siena was less visible on these commercial and diplomatic fronts but very much a participant in trade that moved through Lucca and Pisa to Genoa, or south through Rome and Naples. All locations, including the port at Talamone, gave Sienese mer­ chants and adventurers access to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. In addition, Siena was a major city on the Via Francigena, the trade and pilgrimage route that linked southern French and northern Italian territo­ ries with Rome. Something unique happened at Siena. Material conditions related to Eurasian commercial exchange brought into focus an abundant creativity that initiated innovative artistic developments in materials, styles, techniques, and subject matter. A full-scale depiction of a Mongol court set­ ting the likes of which Lorenzetti has given us did not coalesce in Venice or Genoa, or any other social setting. Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255–1319), the great Sienese master who influenced both Lorenzetti and Martini, led the way in looking to the world beyond Siena, a habit cultivated and promoted as well by the merchants who governed the city. The interdependence of these commercial and artistic circles could not find clearer concourse than the commission assigned by the leading merchants to Duccio for twelve strong boxes and a wooden ledger cover, all to be decorated in high-quality art. Duccio seems to have had a contradictory relationship with Siena’s authorities, gaining both prestigious commissions such as the Maestà for the Duomo of Siena and numerous substantial fines for unacceptable activities, including some associated with witchcraft, which would be considered heresy. He drew on both Byzantine conventions and innovative features for his studies. His paintings embodied a greater naturalism, shading to suggest volume, and expressive body language that animated forms. Given early Sienese connections to the highly mobile, translocal cultural zones of the eastern Mediterranean through Pisa and Genoa, it is not surprising that the first thirteenth-century use of pseudoArabic script painted on the trim or tiraz designs of luxury silk robes and draperies appeared on Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna (1285), created for Santa Maria Novella in Florence.2 Only later in the early 1300s. when the inno­ vative use of pseudoscript became a Tuscan fashion, did Giotto develop his own pseudo-Arabic and possibly pseudo-Phagspa (Mongol) script, which he heavily used in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua.3 Vera-Simone Schulz has noted that travelers and artists of the period recognized a “rhythmicized” quality of Arabic script and employed it inven­ tively to create lettering patterns that directed the viewer’s line of vision around central figures.4 The cloth of honor in the Rucellai Madonna details Siena in Tuscany 81

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Iranian textile motifs also found in the works of Lorenzetti and fellow Sienese artist Simone Martini (1284–1344). Martini devoted much effort to innovative techniques that would allow him accurately and realistically to depict contemporary textiles, including the Mongolian gold brocade najis. All of these artists were active in contemporary political, artistic, and com­ mercial discourse. It was no coincidence, then, that Siena’s Golden Age (1260–1348) in commerce, culture, and politics coincided with the rise and fall of Mongol governance across Eurasia. Early starters in the revival of interregional trade and banking, Siena’s mercantile classes diversified their cultural and finan­ cial options, as European leaders entered into new relationships with central and east Asia, for the first time becoming significant participants in Asia’s diverse, rich, and well-established cultural life. The vision of peaceful gov­ ernance beyond the ken of church authority, while only partially a reality in the Republic of Siena, emerged alongside growing European understanding of the dynamics and philosophy of Mongol rule, which itself was rife with warfare yet for the most part held an impartial view of religion in political decision making. The dominance of commerce among the Sienese political elites who claimed to have republican goals ran parallel to the religious tol­ erance of Tabriz, creating a discourse in which secular governance seemed not only viable but desirable. A commercial center on the periphery of Mongol Eurasia, Siena, at the heart of Tuscany, was a hill town with limited water supplies for tex­ tile processing. On the lookout for other opportunities, Sienese merchants found their thirteenth-century wealth not in textile manufacturing but in the circulation of luxury goods stimulated in part by the Mongol integra­ tion of Eurasian markets. As key participants in the commercial resurgence of north-south regional trade and papal banking services, Siena’s Council of Nine, an oligarchy of bankers and merchants, administered the city through a financial body known as the Biccherna, headed by four Provisores selected by the Nine and four consuls of the Merchant Guild, the Mercanzia.5 After 1270 wealthy Sienese families, including the Salimbeni, the Petroni, and the Tolomei, applied diplomatic and economic strategies to leverage profit out of the eastern Mediterranean trade connected to the routes farther east. David Jacoby has discovered that Benuccio di Giovanni of the prominent Sienese Salimbeni family received in Porto Ercole north of Rome in 1338 a shipload of silks from Beirut that had been produced in Mongolian and Mamluk workshops and valued at the grand total of 130,000 florins; the shipment included belts and purses made of cloths of gold that he sold to whole­ salers, retailers, and individuals in Siena over the next year.6 As S. A. M. Adshead has noted, opportunities for the importation of silk increased with 82 Chapter 3

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the Mongol conquests, and by the 1250s Chinese silk was being traded into Genoa, Lucca, and Tuscany from Ayas in Armenian Cilicia via Sivas and Tabriz in Iran.7 These textiles with intricately patterned, delicately woven floral and animal images captured the imagination of merchants, consumers, and artists alike.8 By the late fourteenth century, Italian imitations effectively reduced the demand for Eastern silks. Tommaso Uzi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti may well have known each other within the small elite of Siena, where they both moved in circles of high finance and diplomacy. We know relatively little about either man. By a route of which we know nothing, Tommaso Uzi (active 1305) found his way from the council room of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico to the Ilkhanid court of Tabriz, gaining high status as sword bearer (ildüchi) to Ilkhan Öljeitü, (r. 1304–1316). Known as Tūmān among the Mongols, Uzi in 1305 traveled as an emissary along with a Mongol named Māmāq on behalf of Ilkhan Öljeitü to visit Pope Clement V, King Philip the Fair of France, King Edward I of England, and the doge of Venice, hoping to forge an alliance against the Mamluks.9 It is remarkable that an identifiable fellow Sienese func­ tioned at the Ilkhanid court, let alone so prominently, for we know that many Sienese were inclined while traveling in the Ilkhanate to pass them­ selves off as Pisans, cashing in on the established recognition and privileges of the latter group. Uzi could not have been alone in the trafficking between Tabriz and Siena. He and others would have carried gifts, personal objects, and infor­ mation to Rome and Siena among other places they traveled. In a remarkable show of personal regard for the Mongol rulers of Tabriz, Italian-speaking families in noticeable numbers began naming their sons after Ilkhan Hülegü, Ilkhan Arghun, and Ilkhan Ghazan, calling them Alaone, Argone, and Cassano respectively; Can Grande became the Italian appellation for the Great Khan.10 Marco Polo had mentioned the Ilkhans by name in the last chapter of Divisament du monde, of which by 1309 Niccolo degli Ormanni had produced a Tuscan version.11 In many respects, Lorenzetti’s court scene is an imaginative integration of the Mongol and Latin worlds into an image of contemporary political relevance. French monarchs and papal legates showed interest in Mongol strate­ gies, both domestic and foreign, for several reasons. First, the papacy hoped the Mongols would eventually convert to Christianity.12 The Christian faith already seemed to have a foothold among the Mongol elite families, albeit in the form of Church of the East Christianity, which bordered on hetero­ doxy from the Latin view in Rome. Expressing their optimism that sto­ ries of Mongol interest in Christianity were true, Latin church authority acknowledged illustrations of Ilkhan Hülegü (r. 1256–1265) as a Christian Siena in Tuscany 83

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saint, although his faith was known to be an amalgam of shamanism and Buddhism. Both Doquz Khatun, Hülegü’s wife, and Kitbuqa, his general, were Church of the East Christians.13 Despite the complexities, the Mongol practice of not adopting a state religion but allowing multiple faiths to func­ tion under their auspices seemed to augur well for Latin Church mission­ ary activities. The martyrdom at Almaliq stood as an exception, not the rule, in interfaith dynamics across Mongol Eurasia. While local tensions among groups were always a potential source of conflict, and some groups of Franciscans were known for pushing the absolutism of their god over others, in general officials did not sanction such violence and often actively moved to curb it. This Mongol practice of relative tolerance was essential to Latin strat­ egies for making evangelical inroads into predominantly Muslim territories. The drive to counter Islam in the form of the Mamluk state provided a second reason for Latins to pay close attention to Mongol social and political practices. Ilkhan Abaqa (r. 1265–1282) enlisted the assistance of Armenian, Georgian, and Hungarian Christians, all beyond the pale of Roman ortho­ doxy, in an attempt to negotiate a Latin/Ilkhanid alliance.14 In 1266 a merchant named Arnaldo Marinario, who did business in the vicinity of Trebizond on the Black Sea adjacent to lands of the Ilkhanate, approached Sicilian King Carlos I on a political mission to establish communications with the Ilkhanate. Rulers of Sicily, the Ilkhanate, and the Kingdom of Naples launched an eastern Mediterranean strategy in the 1270s.15 Between 1274 and 1275, Giovanni and Giacomo Vassalli, soldiers in the Mongol forces who were themselves of Georgian birth and most likely Christian, traveled as representatives of Ilkhan Abaqa to Naples via Tabriz in hope of renewed military collaboration against the Muslims at Acre, where alliance between Armenian Christian and Mongol armies had enjoyed a brief vic­ tory in 1260. A Mongol delegation from the Ilkhanate attended the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 to discuss the possibility of a renewed alliance with Christian forces.16 Economic strategies woven through all layers of these strategies met with varying degrees of success. Sienese missionary and commercial contact with Tabriz ran parallel to the activities of other Italian city-states. With the ascent of Pope Nicholas IV (1288–1292), the first Franciscan pope, many friars of the Franciscan order increased their activity in Ilkhanid Iran.17 Pietro Veglione (or Vilione), a Venetian trader, lived in Tabriz in 1264 and acted as contact person for a number of merchants working commercial routes between Tabriz and the Italian city-states. In a grant of 1268 the king of Jerusalem conceded Sienese merchants exemptions from taxes and privileges of commerce in Acre, acknowledging significant Sienese presence in the eastern Mediterranean adjacent to the Ilkhanate and allowing them to function openly as Sienese 84 Chapter 3

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rather than passing as Pisans as they had been doing.18 Genoese merchants had temporary quarters in Tabriz by 1280, and in 1291 Pietro of Lucalongo, a merchant who was resident in Tabriz, offered to accompany Franciscan missionary John of Monte Corvino to Khitai. There were two Franciscan monasteries in Tabriz as of 1286. These early commercial and missionary activities laid the groundwork for more extensive plans by collecting valu­ able geographic and commercial data. In 1321 Marino Sanuto the Elder of Torcello was able to present to Pope John XXII a proposal titled Liber secre­ torum fidelium Crucis super Terrae Sancta (Book of Secrets for Followers of the Cross), which contained the earliest extant regional map of the eastern Mediterranean, drawn by Pietro Vesconte of Genoa. Sanuto argued in this document that Christian use of northern trade routes through Iran could provide an alternative to dependency on Mamluk Egypt for the luxury goods Latin Christendom sought from the East.19 The churchmen, with their own fiscal issues, were very interested. Travel between Rome and Tabriz was a two-way road circulating mate­ rial items and ideas without bounds. Rabban Sauma, Turkic by birth and from the Ordos region north of Kubilai Khan’s capital and a convert to Church of East Christianity, journeyed in 1287 with the support of the khan from Beijing to Tabriz, and subsequently to Rome and Paris under the sponsorship of Ilkhan Arghun, a Buddhist by faith who had many close Church of the East Christian relatives. Rabban Sauma, who traveled the Via Francigena through Tuscany and most certainly passed through Siena, had been escorted westward by Ughetto, an Italian interpreter, and Thomas of Anfossi, a merchant and interpreter who knew Persian.20 The Jubilee Year of 1300 brought an especially visible number of Christian Mongols to Rome hoping to receive promised indulgences. 21 Franciscan Andrew of Perugia expressed skepticism about the quality of these converts when he noted that Buddhist openness to other religions resulted in many baptisms among idolators but few strictly observant Christians.22 Just before the jubilee celebrations there had been rumors of Ilkhanid vic­ tories over Mamluk forces in Syria, which prompted Franciscan mission­ ary Ramon Llull (1232–1315) immediately to set sail for Cyprus, hoping to continue on to Mongol-liberated Jerusalem to study, meet Ilkhan Ghazan, and do missionary work; upon his arrival in Cyprus Llull quickly understood that the Mongol victory did not include Jerusalem and did in fact prove to be short-lived with regard to Aleppo and Damascus.23 John de Cora was appointed archbishop of Sultaniyya by Pope John XXII in 1330 and was a frequent traveler between Rome and the Ilkhanate. In his account titled Livre de l’Estat du Grand Caan (written between 1328 and 1334), he sent home information regarding the ecclesiastical organization of the Buddhists Siena in Tuscany 85

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that he learned about during his stay in Sultaniyya. He was most struck by the similarity of dress between the lamas and the Roman cardinals in their preference for red. He wrote, “This pontiff of idolaters was dressed like a cardinal; ‘porte sur son chief un chapeau rouge, et touslours est vestu de rouge’ [wearing on his head a red hat, and dressed in red].” 24 From the Ilkhanate or the Yuan territories an extant copy of the Lotus Sutra dated 1346, with a gold frontispiece illustrating the life of the Buddha, somehow journeyed into the collections of the Roman Church at this time.25 Pope Benedict XII, in 1338, granted safe passage through the Kingdom of Naples for ambassadors dispatched in 1336 by the Mongol Khan Toghan Timur (r. 1333–1368).26 SIENESE ART IN AN EURASIAN CULTURAL CONTEXT Compared with Venetian and Florentine work of the same period, Sienese art was especially rich in what art-historical literature refers to as Chinese and Iranian design elements.27 Juxtaposing Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans with his Piccolo Maestà (1340) reveals aspects of the material and social environments from which he drew to construct his contemporary spiri­ tual and historical vision. While Sienese merchants and others were a source of direct knowledge about material goods from central and east Asia, Roman churchmen with connections to the bishoprics in Tabriz and Sultaniyya were also major collectors of luxury objects from the East. The Buddhist text of the Lotus Sutra from this period held by the Vatican Library is a reminder of this route of cultural transmission. Commissioned by a prelate of the Roman Curia, the Piccolo Maestà is itself a veritable miniature in the tradition of Ilkhanid illustrated manuscripts of the period.28 Intended possibly as a trav­ eling altarpiece, the Piccolo Maestà highlights objects of clear Iranian origin such as the kilim-style rug probably made in Christian Armenia north of Tabriz, a region that was still home to the Ilkhan’s summer encampments and at least until 1295 to the great Buddhist monastery at Labnasagut. The spotted felines, central Asian signs of royal authority, and windstar (swas­ tika), motifs from Buddhist/Hindu symbols indicate a contact zone of diverse religious communities and the incorporation of these elements into Christian art, first in Armenia and then in Rome. In his Piccolo Maestà Lorenzetti uti­ lized the highest-quality pigments, including rich applications of lapis lazuli obtained through his patron’s connections to Tabriz markets and vicinity. Such pigments were evidence not only of papal commercial reach, given their Afghan mineral base, but also of papal participation in a shared perception of that pigment as a signifier of social value. Another portable piece of art that suggests traffic between Mongolian territories and Italian centers with which Siena had commerce appeared in a 86 Chapter 3

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Ambrogio Lorenzetti, La Piccola Maestà (Madonna and Child with Saints, Doctors of the Church, and Angels), c. 1340. Credit: Scala/Art Resources, NY.

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rather unexpected venue in Genoa in the 1330s. A Latin treatise on the vices (Vices) written by a member of the Genoese Coccarelli family displays a clear intent to apply vivid observational detail from contemporary life to contem­ plation of biblical themes. This is a novel and innovative artistic approach to religious matters. Robert Gibbs has called the Vices “the most encyclopedic representation of the natural world to survive from the whole of the ‘Middle Ages,’ from stag beetles and ermine moths to Tartar Khans and the shops and the harbor of Genoa . . . the artists must have used whole libraries of source materials for their material.”29 Gibbs notes in the same letter that the swarm of birds in a hunting scene is distinctive and has no precedent in any known surviving European sources of the time, such as the De arte venandi cum avibus of Frederick II. We can only imagine what vast and wondrous materials were collected in the library of a family whose members traveled back and forth to Mongol territories where marketplace shops and courtly events provided ample opportunities for collecting a wide range of artistic and literary materials with an equally wide range of quality and skill. At the same time, conditions set in motion by the Mongol conquests created social and political instability, which political authorities sought to control. One leaf of the Vices manuscript catches our attention, for it appears both to mimic and to mock Ilkhanid manuscript illustrations. In a most unusual composition, the trope of a Mongol court scene with feast and music illustrates gluttony, the first of the seven deadly sins in Latin church teach­ ings. Anne Dunlop notes that the image was painted by at least two anony­ mous artists.30 The miniature as part of an illustrated manuscript shows a Mongol ruler at the center top on his throne surrounded by individuals dressed in Mongol-style cross-to-the-right robes with wide banded quar­ ter-length sleeves and one with a mandarin square on its front. Some wear Mongol caps. The ruler is the only figure who is clearly identified by facial features as Mongol. His hat is of the two-feather Mongol style, and he wears large single-pearl earrings in the fashion of the khans and ilkhans. These accurate details, like those in Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom, are based on obser­ vation, either in real life and/or of drawn/painted images. Across the ruler’s lap is a fabric with gold lion motifs signifying royalty. The same lion motif of central Asian origin appears on the rug in Lorenzetti’s Holy Family with Mary Knitting (1345). The Mongol ruler himself looks quite trim, but pre­ sides over a sinister scene with overfed figures immediately to his left and right; the one to his right points a knife at the ruler’s throat while ostensibly cutting a slab of meat. Two decapitated, plucked fowl, one with a knife pro­ truding suggestively from its groin, fill a basket. In another basket a knife appears inserted into the eye socket of an animal skull. Skinny dogs beg and fight over bones. The ruler’s eyes dart suspiciously to his left. On the surface 88 Chapter 3

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a well-ordered scene, the picture has the aura of a house of horrors. Below, musicians of various non-Mongol ethnicities are performing in a variety of costumes and on a variety of instruments that seem in discord and add to the cacophony of the setting. We should note here that this artistic use of the demonic to highlight moral stress resulting from political uncertainties and consequent innovative opportunities arguably found expression within the Islamic cultural frame as well in the genre of Siyah Kalem (Siah Qalam) paintings, to be discussed in chapter 6. As contemporary artistic context for Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom, trans­ mission details are less important than the clear evidence Gluttony presents of collective familiarity with Mongol court scenes among the Genoese elite and the consequent extent to which things Mongolian might be referenced to evoke emotional responses for a Latin Christian audience. The intent of the Gluttony imagery was to rouse fear of eternal hell for the sin of overindul­ gence. The creators of the illustration deemed a contemporary, foreign refer­ ence point most compelling. Anne Dunlop has suggested routes by which artists in Genoa might have come by images from the Tabriz workshops.31 Many of the court scenes with musicians found in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh or The Great Mongol Shahnama, as well as Nepali/Kashmiri artistic designs such as the Dunkhang Royal Drinking Scene at Alchi in Ladakh, echo the com­ positional format of the Gluttony miniature. Banqueting accompanied many royal events, including birthdays, victories, and conferences at the Marāgha Observatory. Marco Polo, during his imprisonment in Genoa, recounted tales of thousands of dinner guests from all over the world assembled at the khan’s banquet, where nothing was spared in food, drink, and costly gifts.32 The banqueting trope found novel usage in the Gluttony scene. The Mongols did not entertain the notion of overindulgence as a Christian sin, but they did generally live frugal lives when not banqueting, which was largely a political activity. Friar Giovanni DiPlano Carpini, bas­ ing them on his travels to the Mongol court in 1247, provided the Franks with their first impressions of the Mongols. Carpini wrote: “They do not have bread, oil, vegetables or anything else besides meat, and they eat so little of this that other people could hardly live on it. . . . One of them cuts and the other takes morsels with the point of a knife and a Tartar offers either more or less meat to another depending upon whether he wishes to honor him less or more.”33 Layered over this habit of food sharing based on social hierarchy, imperial banquets with their unlimited access to food and drink that were the prize of empire became political showcases designed to impress guests with the wealth and generosity of the Mongol rulers. Rashid al-Din describes the banquet of the Golden Ordu in the garden at Ujan, approximately 250 miles to the northwest of Tabriz in Armenian territory, in the summer of 1302. Siena in Tuscany 89

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[Ilkhan Ghazan] had previously given an order to the master craftsmen to construct a golden tent and a golden throne with appropriate appurtenances. For three years many people had worked on it. When the emperor (ilkhan) arrived in Tabriz this time, it had been completed, and toward the end of Dhu’l-Qa ‘da 701 [July 1302] he moved from Tabriz to Ujan, where a wall had been constructed in the midst of an extremely pleasant green meadow with brooks and springs. Large ponds had been made, and all sorts of birds and beasts had taken refuge there. It was a square divided into equal por­ tions. Along two sides were planted rows of willow and poplar trees to serve as avenues for people, but no one was allowed inside the meadow, and every group was assigned a particular way to enter and exit. Inside the square were constructed kiosks, towers, a bathhouse, and a magnificent complex so that the golden tent might be pitched in the middle of the garden along with special courtyards and canopies. . . . [On the banquet day] he ordered countless gold and textiles brought, and after the people were fed with all sorts of victuals, he gave all the gold and textiles away in alms with his own hand so that all received a portion.34

In Rashid al-Din’s account, munificence and natural beauty run con­ trary to the bleak picture of Mongol court life painted in the Gluttony illus­ tration. Genoese merchants and travelers to the Mongol courts had ample opportunity to witness Mongol feasts, and by all accounts these demonstra­ tions of incredible wealth surpassed anything known to the European courts. Yet, the artists who created Gluttony and the audience that received it took the opportunity to infer a negative from this motif of generosity and abun­ dance, which the Genoese themselves, it might be added, desired and sought. Food details in Rashid al-Din’s account remained understated and taken almost for granted, with emphasis placed on the elaborate description of set­ ting, gifts, and drink. Abundance shared morphed into sinful excess in the Genoese representation. Except for the khan, the figures in Gluttony, despite their Mongol dress, are European types, and the instruments, especially the keyboard organ, are identifiable as European. The choice of cast and setting for this meditation on the sin of gluttony reads at one level as “sour grapes” toward a rich neighbor but also carried a subtext of political challenge and disapproval while at the same time pursuing similar goals. Christian con­ tradictions circling around gluttony and the avarice it implies relocate the Mongol court scene into a social space of evil consequences to be warned against. It was a dialogue internal to Genoese and Latin societies that was transformed by its very relationship to familiar yet foreign circumstances. While the artists have translated a Mongol motif into their own Latin structure of beliefs, the very incorporation of this motif also fundamentally 90 Chapter 3

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enlarged and transformed Christian belief regarding wealth, power, and faith. The context for the creation and readability of Gluttony suggests major experiential shifts among the Genoese elite families not unlike those under taken by Sienese merchant families. The Coccarelli manuscript contains a second illustration for gluttony, a drinking scene that is less elaborate and less sinister in tone. It shares the same horizontal split-screen format but otherwise has no specific Mongol references, except perhaps the tile pattern on the upper wall. The cupbearer who lifts glasses of beer up from the cellar echoes royal cupbearing themes. Drinking, which under some circumstances might be ceremonial and con­ ducted with dignity, here has become excessive, common, and inducive of sickness. As one figure vomits on the right, two others cannot guzzle fast enough, and a young man begins down the slippery slope to drunkenness with modest sips. Here the figures are shown in their own familiar envi­ ronment, a tavern down the road. The image of Europeans visually inserted into the perceived corrupt environment of a Mongol court feast was no doubt much more terrifying, especially when accompanied by tales of trav­ eling family members. While the Mongols were admired for their learn­ ing and governance by Roger Bacon and others, they were also perceived as the antithesis of Christian morality; they regularly drank to excess, had more than one wife, and did not answer to Roman Church hierarchy. Again Carpini informed his contemporaries that “Drunkeness is honorable among the Tartars, and when someone drinks a great deal he is sick right on the spot, and this does not prevent him from drinking more”; on the other hand, “It is a great sin among them if any food or drink is allowed in any way to go to waste; they are not permitted to give bones to dogs unless the marrow is first extracted.”35 This ambivalence and complexity of perception served the artist well. While the Coccarelli’s illustrations are simpler and less nuanced than Lorenzetti’s work, they inhabited the same cultural zone, where artists repurposed materials in their social environment of local values and Eurasian positionality. Among Lorenzetti’s own paintings, The Effects of Good Government (1338) is an important context for reading his Martyrdom (1342) fresco. When juxtaposed, these two works created within a short span of each other bring into relief some of the thoughts and feelings that defined Lorenzetti’s artistic process. The Council of Nine commissioned Lorenzetti to paint the mural of The Effects of Good Government in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico where the council met. In this mural, he visualized Siena’s place along the Via Francigena and in relationship to the larger world. Life appears peaceful and productive as a consequence of good secular government. People are depicted attending to their animals and fields in the countryside and Siena in Tuscany 91

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passing freely in and out of the city gate. Local nobility exit on horseback, bound for an afternoon of hunting. Painted on a 45 × 15-foot surface, the overall impression is of a handscroll format. Within the city a school, a book­ shop, a pottery store, and other commercial enterprises are doing business. A wedding party and a troupe of musicians wind their way through the streets. Religion is visually sidelined, and it is suggested that the church tower that does appear in the background corner was added at a later date. We know that actual traffic along the Via Francigena included diplomats from the Mongol court, merchants, Mongol Christian pilgrims, and Tartar slaves, providing ample opportunities for Sienese to observe Mongol-style dress, including the distinctive pointed hats and cross-closing robes. 36 Genoese, Sienese, and others might also have traveled in Mongol-style clothing if they were part of a delegation from Tabriz. If The Effects of Good Government fresco suggests Lorenzetti’s awareness of Siena’s place in the cultural geography of Mongol Eurasia, the Martyrdom of the Franciscans moves the viewer directly into the center of that geogra­ phy. Financed in part by the Siena Council of Nine upon request from the Franciscans, Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom, originally completed for the Sienese Franciscans’ Chapter House, was primarily a collaborative effort of the local Petroni family and the Sienese Franciscans, drawing heavily from among the Franciscan Spirituals.37 Interestingly, one of the central issues in arthistorical discussions of Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom is the question of the scene’s location. Is the setting Ceuta in Morocco, where seven Franciscans martyred themselves in 1227? Or is it Tana in India, the site of a 1321 Franciscan mar­ tyrdom? S. Maureen Burke convincingly argues that “the central location of the scene is confirmed . . . to be Mongol—something new for a European artist to be exploring—[this] underlines the artist’s experimental bent and the intercultural interests of his society.”38 Why was this new setting first explored by Lorenzetti for a Sienese audience? Lorenzetti ultimately created from his selective knowledge and philosophical inclinations a contemporary visualization of martyrdom that was both local and translocally situated. His Almaliq court scene is Almaliq and more than Almaliq. The specific enters into a larger discourse. This is consistent with Lorenzetti’s approach, which embodies a tension between reality and ideals in the social and religious makeup of Sienese politics, what Felicity Ratté has described as “a new sensitivity to being situated—geo­ graphically, historically, and culturally—in time and place.”39 This new sen­ sitivity was raised by the experience of an expanding geography encountered through opportunities opened by Mongol imperial governance. Lorenzetti created an in-between space in which a range of critical, comparative thoughts on his theme of martyrdom were emotionally available. 92 Chapter 3

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At Almaliq, north of the Taklamakan desert in the Chaghadaid ulus, Franciscan friars in a 1339 incident insisted on the exclusive superiority of Christianity during the brief rule of a particularly fundamentalist sultan. The ruler who sits as sultan in Lorenzetti’s mural was both Muslim and not of Mongol ethnic origins. Yet Lorenzetti has portrayed him with Mongol facial features, dress, and a Bodhi-leaf decorative backdrop, which he may or may not have associated with Buddhist motifs. We cannot be certain of the artist’s intent, but many textiles during this period carried central Asian and Buddhist motifs, and Lorenzetti would have had access to them and known of their geographic origins; the choice seems unlikely to be acciden­ tal. The ruler’s hairstyle with its spindly tresses follows central and east Asian conventions associated with Church of the East fashions. These we will see applied to Wang Zhenpeng’s Mahaprajapati as well in chapter 8. Like The Effects of Good Government fresco, Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans is concerned with issues of peace and violence while displaying a delicate natu­ ralism in the detail of costumes and facial expressions. The realism of facial features and finely detailed clothing over natural poses is one of Lorenzetti’s stylistic hallmarks.40 And yet, unlike his fellow Sienese Simone Martini, who captured every thread of the finely woven Mongol nasij (gold and silk) brocade of Saint Gabriel’s robes in his Annunciation (1333), Lorenzetti’s work consistently focused on the simpler Franciscan Spiritual layers of his subject—the plain habit more than the elaborate robe. Simone Martini, in his 1317 altarpiece, reversed the layers. His fas­ cination with the artistic challenges of newly encountered luxury textiles motivated him to invent sgrafitto techniques for mimicking the reflected light of Mongol gold and silver textiles.41 As a consequence he sought oppor­ tunities in his painting commissions to display his innovative skills. In his altarpiece, Louis of Toulouse’s simple Franciscan habit indicating his inner convictions is covered by a sumptuous outer robe of richly detailed fabric of Eastern provenance. Even the most elaborate silk dresses in The Effects of Good Government fresco are simple compared with Simone’s extravagant fabrics. Franciscans Roger Bacon and Raymond Llull, among others, actu­ ally associated the Mongols with material simplicity, presumed to account for the Mongols’ great power, knowledge, and morality, even though at the same time they were viewed as the source of the most highly prized gold and silk textiles desired by elite consumers and royalty, and even imagined as angelic attire.42 Both were true. As we have noted, the ilkhans and khans dealt in a profusion of high-end luxury textiles but were modest in their own courtly attire, as illustrations from the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh and portraits of the khans and khatuns at Dadu attest. Actual possession of great wealth did not require great personal display; in fact it was to be distributed as investment. Siena in Tuscany 93

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The content of Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom fresco is so unusual that thoughts naturally turn to a search for models on which he might have drawn. Giotto’s Saint Francis before the Sultan (1317) in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce church in Florence provides a nearby possibility. Lorenzetti most likely knew Giotto’s fresco, and the two do show some resemblances. Both are set in for­ eign lands with a sultan ruler at center court. The Franciscans were involved in both cases, Francis himself in the case of Giotto’s work. The feeling tone of the Martyrdom is, however, quite different from Giotto’s representation, which is stiff and relatively lacking in expressive nuance. While direct artistic contact from the workshops in Tabriz back to those in Siena are missing, art historians do agree that transfer took place in the Siena-to-Tabriz direction. Art historian Sheila Blair comments that the illustrations in the The Great Mongol Shahnama (1330) “reveal the inspiration of Italian works by the likes of Simone Martini, Lorenzetti, and their contemporaries. The borrowed features are both compositional devices—such as a circular arrangement with repoussoir figures in the foreground and receding panes to indicate per­ spective—and individual motifs, such as gold halos behind faces in profile, transparent veils, and recumbent or mourning figures.”43 Blair writes that The Birth of Mohammed from Rashid al-Din’s 1314 world history reflects European influence in its compositional arrangement of figures suggestive of the typical Christian nativity scene. Artists of the Ilkhanid illuminated manuscripts demonstrated what Robert Hillenbrand has called their “will­ ingness to echo contemporary Italian and French art,” as well as “an equal readiness to copy and refashion elements of Chinese art” that often contained “details taken from Buddhist images.”44 Pathways of cultural transmission are seldom only one-way. And it must not be overlooked that the Franks were generally much more secretive than the Ilkhans. The papacy was seeking and receiving secret knowledge, the workshops of Tabriz were fairly open con­ duits for international transmission of knowledge and art. Given the circles in which he moved, his style of artistic creation, and a contemporary society imbued with Eurasian cultural and diplomatic exchange, it is unlikely that Lorenzetti’s painted images sprang entirely from his imagination, but were a product of his engagement with knowledge of his Eurasian positionality and access to material culture that carried visual evidence of that world. If the Tabriz court illustrators adapted the repoussoir figures into their compo­ sitions, Lorenzetti and others were equally if not more keen on identifying and incorporating motifs from their expanded sense of the world into their work. The exceptional feeling tone of the Lorenzetti Martyrdom resonates more with the quality of work from the Tabriz workshops than it does with work painted at the same time in Florence, and this seems worth noting. 94 Chapter 3

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Two execution scenes, Abu ‘I-Husain Put to Death at Bukhara (1306)45 and The Execution of Jalāl al-Dīn Fīrūzshāh (1314),46 portray with vivid realism the emotional engagement and use of gesture that Lorenzetti has employed in his Martyrdom mural. Individuals in all of these three works actively engage one another through gaze and hand gestures suggesting emo­ tionally intense communication and similarly expressive facial features. The ruler in The Execution of Jalāl al-Dīn Fīrūzshāh has a look of dismay, almost distress, rather than triumph; Lorenzetti’s ruler echoes this expression. If we factor tone of feeling into the traffic of artistic devices that moved among studios and workshops during the Mongol era, then the Martyrdom and the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh share a similar ambient location. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The historical vision of Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans is perhaps its most creative feature. A struggling order trying to define its own rela­ tionship to power—that of the Roman Church with its officially sanctioned Franciscan Order, place-based political authority, and Mongol dominance— the Franciscan Spirituals, in their commitment to Francis’ notions of poverty and peace, sought to assert their own historical perspective. As Jacques Le Goff wrote of the thirteenth century: “The time of ancient history was acces­ sible only to specialists in memory and in its written forms. By contrast, recent history was accessible to the eyes and ears. . . . It was no accident that the mendicant friars played an important part in popularizing both this kind of history and exampla [sic]: they were specialists in recent times.”47 And recent times were rich in new developments and possibilities to be seized. The claim to history was itself a central marker of the Mongol century. New authority required the legitimacy of history, and the process of shaping historical per­ spective became a point of political contention. Rulers of a polyglot empire of customs, practices, and beliefs, the Mongols after their military expansion sought to create legitimacy through authorship. Ilkhanid works attempting to write and illustrate universal histories and guidebooks for royal leader­ ship integrated Christian themes and images into their syntheses. Although The Great Mongol Shāhnāma (1330) and the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh were inclusive in their rendering of the histories of diverse peoples of Eurasia, the diverse peoples were often depicted with Mongol features. Histories were adjusted to eliminate controversy and assimilate groups into a universal, shared past that by divine plan had led to a contemporary world dominated by the great khans of the eastern Mongolian steppes.48 Histories such as those of the Jin and Liao, which would have been relegated to minor status by court historians of Siena in Tuscany 95

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the imperial Chinese dynasties, were given their own historical legitimacy, and all polities were absorbed into a Eurasian world under Mongol rule.49 Mongolian universalism emerged as a competing universalism among those of Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and Confucian inspiration. Recent victory over each of the above groups reinforced the Mongol claim to superiority as well as the initial European perception of Mongol superiority. Lorenzetti’s The Effects of Good Government and his Martyrdom of the Franciscans are both meditations on matters of peace and violence in this context of competing universal ideals. Both compositions employ histori­ cal references and reflections on contemporary conditions to express utopian aspirations. Although Lorenzetti’s compositions had to meet the approval of his sponsors, the ambiguity of images and the possibilities for multiple interpretations left open a wide range for his own convictions and readings of contemporary events; this was a fundamental feature of artistic creativity under the patronage system. By the late 1330s/early 1340s when Lorenzetti conceived the composition for his fresco, heretical activity that conflated Franciscan Spiritual and neo-Manichaean dissent was clandestine but active. Mongol authority dominated the external reference points for oppositional, innovative thinking. Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom, commissioned and supported by Franciscan Spirituals,50 was an effort to capture the political complexities of a moment in Franciscan Spiritual history. An attempt to date Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans provides further clues to the composition’s multiple historical frames. As already men­ tioned, S. Maureen Burke has argued that the setting is Mongolian and therefore depicts the martyrdom of six Spirituals in 1339 at Almaliq in the Chaghadaid ulus. Based on this evaluation she surmises that the work must have been composed in the early 1340s, some fifteen years later than esti­ mates that link the fresco to martyrdoms at either Centua in 1227 or Tana in 1321.51 In fact, Lorenzetti has not given us a clear chronological association, and Burke’s argument appears to have some simple chronological problems. Although the missionaries in Almaliq were killed in June of 1339, Johannes de Marignolli, the Florentine Franciscan who arrived there as a papal legate in 1340 and subsequently learned of the destruction of the Almaliq friary, did not return to Europe until 1353, several years after Ambrogio’s death in 1347. By Burke’s own reckoning, his account of this journey was writ­ ten into his Chronoicon Boemiae between 1355 and 1358, when he returned to Prague. It is not clear, therefore, that Lorenzetti and others in Siena would have had in 1340/43 a detailed written account of the Almaliq mar­ tyrdom. An earlier account of the martyrdom written in 1348 by Johannes Vitodurani most closely resembles Lorenzetti’s depiction, as Burke notes, but also postdates his lifetime. The only discussion of the martyrdom at 96 Chapter 3

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Almaliq during Lorenzetti’s lifetime surrounded a petition to Pope Clement VI at Avignon in 1343 calling for the canonization of the Almaliq martyrs. Both Francesco d’Altimanno Ugurgieri, former Guardianus of S. Francesco in Siena, and Simone Martini were in Avignon during this discussion and were possibly a source of news about the debate when they arrived back in their home territory of Siena. It is significant that Clement rejected this petition. While praising those Franciscans who upheld the standards of the Church-approved Franciscan Order, Clement was aware that four of the six Almaliq martyrs presented a problem for Church orthodoxy—all four were from strong Franciscan Spiritual centers in Provence, Spain, and Ancona. In 1344 Clement went on to denounce a number of Franciscan Spirituals doing missionary work in central Asia. The news about Almaliq, therefore, was ambiguous in terms of adherence to church authority and open to mul­ tiple readings, a point Burke does not weigh in her analysis. With a social life steeped in these complexities, Lorenzetti appears to have played with the artistic and political ambiguities surrounding his rep­ resentation of the martyrdom. The Martyrdom fresco potentially accommo­ dated a number of readings. One view might stress the foreignness of the Mongol court setting and hence its ideological distance from questions of dissent nearer to home. From a dissident perspective, however, the foreign setting potentially universalized the Franciscan Spiritual commitment to poverty and pacifism. The movement begun by Francis of Assisi and carried forward across Eurasia by his committed followers, known as the Spirituals, was in itself a remarkable sudden phenomenon of a magnitude equal to the sudden westward transmission of Buddhism under the early Ilkhans. Among the various cases of heresy in Siena is one from 1321 that involved “an act of idolatry” and was considered important because “many persons in Siena” favored the heresy.52 Although the historical record fills in few details, the incident itself was a cause célèbre. The disputation of this major heresy purportedly entrenched in Siena for more than two decades was held in the Palazzo Pubblico, future home of Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government frescoes (1338–1339). Baroccino Barocci, who argued the heretical position, had served on the Council of Nine in 1308 and 1311. The Council, unable in this case to protect Baroccino given his strong and persistent views, was obligated to turn him over to the Inquisitor and bishop of Siena, who sentenced him to death by burning at the stake. We can only surmise here that the major heresy involved was related to the Franciscan Spiritual/neo-Manichaean currents that moved up and down the Via Francigena. The same years of the early 1320s witnessed the trial and sentencing of four beguins (lay Franciscan Spiritual groups) at Toulouse. All of these individuals were considered martyrs and saints by their fellow Siena in Tuscany 97

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Franciscan Spirituals, and their history was recorded by Angelo Clareno in his Historia septem tribulationum, completed around 1325. This history cir­ culated widely in vernacular translation, with illustrations of the martyrdom that were extreme in their brutality.53 Stories of these martydoms were read aloud to the Sienese community.54 Lorenzetti’s choice of setting and ambigu­ ous imagery for his Martyrdom fresco created a powerful narrative readable within the circles of Franciscan Spiritual dissent and yet fully compliant with orthodox themes. Lorenzetti’s treatment of these historical events allowed him to explore political and religious leadership at two levels—the relationship of the Roman Church to the challenges of domestic dissent and the nature of Mongol rule in relationship to Franciscan Spiritual work. Domestic chal­ lenges to the Roman Church took many forms. Commercial and political groups emboldened by new opportunities for material wealth and power pulled away from spiritual authority toward more secular sources of order and governance. Bolognese illuminated law manuscripts of the period were one local example of this movement toward secular forms of rule that could be highlighted and strengthened by an awareness of the kind of secular approach that resulted from religious inclusion under the example of success­ ful Mongol rule.55 The secularist bent in Lorenzetti’s work and his inclusive imagery in the Martyrdom were parts of a worldview in which secular rule with a place for religious practice seemed possible and worth imagining. It was well known within the Spiritual tradition that Francis himself had chosen dialogue over martyrdom and that in 1219 he had found the Sultan Malik el-Kamil of Egypt to be a man of greater humanity than the pope himself.56 This reality continued to complicate Franciscan Spiritual relations with Roman Church authority. If Lorenzetti’s fresco reflects news of the martyrdom at Almaliq, it is important to note that the ruler who ordered the executions was Ali Sultan, who in 1339 seized the government and poisoned Yesun-Timur Khan. The khan himself had promoted cordial relations with Richard of Burgundy, a Franciscan Latin bishop, and Francis of Alessandra, who cured the khan of a serious disease. The Franciscans at Almaliq, therefore, enjoyed considerable prestige and influence. One of the khan’s sons had even been baptized. After the short-lived attack by Ali Sultan, who ordered the destruction of the Latin church in Almaliq and the death of those who would not recant their Christian faith, Father Marignolli, who arrived just after the martyrdom, and his associates rebuilt the church in 1340–1341 and maintained an active Latin Christian community in Almaliq until the end of the Mongol era.57 This attack on the Franciscans was an aberration in otherwise congenial relations between them and the Mongol rulers of the Chaghadaid ulus. 98 Chapter 3

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However, the papacy’s animosity toward those it deemed heretical, including dissenting Christians, was unrelenting. Olschki suggests a paral­ lel “between Marco’s eulogy of the Mongol Empire and of Kublai ‘as the his­ torical, yet ideal, manifestation of a universal sovereign’ and the Ghibelline ideology of the supremacy of imperial authority over papal authority, cham­ pioned by Marco’s contemporary, Dante Alighieri,” who “enjoyed the patronage of the Ghibelline signore of Verona, Cangrande della Scala (r. 1311–29).”58 Cangrande’s court was famous for its cosmopolitanism and rich Asian display. His name also suggested the Khangrande, Great Khan. Both Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom and the political climate in which it was painted car­ ried speculation about the desirability of secular rule and its viability given the Mongols’ success with religious pluralism. Historian James Muldoon reads the Martyrdom of the Franciscans as an imagined Christian-Mongol alliance against the Muslims, a contemporary proposition that was also well known among those in Lorenzetti’s circle.59 The two figures in Mongol hats with plumes who stand among the diverse members of the court scene are as shocked and dismayed as the Italian- and Persian-looking figures. They seem collectively to wonder if there is not a better way for humans to govern themselves. Siena in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experienced an unprec­ edented surge in artistic creativity, which like the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh stood alone in its unique vision for centuries after the close of the Mongol era. As Timothy Hyman has noted, Lorenzetti’s “panoramic and cosmological imagination was more radical than either Giotto’s or Simone’s; he included more of the world, of everyday life, than any artist before or since.”60 The same could be said of Rashid al-Din’s work, and while the latter was copied by subsequent Iranian rulers, the historical vision of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh was not duplicated until centuries later. A rupture defined these scenarios. As Lorenzetti and others contemplated the effects of good and bad gov­ ernment in Siena, statesman and culture maker Theodore Metochites in Constantinople raised issues of taxation and state authority in his mosaic mural of the Enrollment for Taxation, while artists and officeholders Zhao Mengfu and Wang Zhenpeng worked themes of good government into their paintings of horses and dragon boats for the court at Dadu. Material and intellectual exchange during the Mongol era raised artistic and intellectual awareness of common problems and alternative social formations. The Mongols displayed familiar but also new signs of universal rul­ ership. Responses to local conditions during this era invariably took place within this larger context of possibilities that highlighted distinctive Siena in Tuscany 99

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cultural markers as well as common problems. Lorenzetti’s Martrydom of the Franciscans suggested not only a shared material world through com­ mercial contact but a shared political and philosophical set of issues beyond the power differentials of city-state and imperial governance. Depictions of Ilkhanid court scenes were more likely to assume cosmopolitan central­ ity and forgo the depiction of diverse dress and facial features. A portrait of King Louis IX in the basilica museum of San Francesco in Siena offers a stunning visual fusion of Italian diplomatic and cultural perspectives. Saint Louis appears in a robe that is, by both neck collar and red tiraz sleeve, a pattern of Mongol design. More significantly, even as French royalty he wears a cap of Mongol fashion rather than a crown.61 This intent to emulate appears to be a choice made with the knowledge that Mongol rulers, unlike European heads of state, did not wear crowns but preferred caps of various designs. The cap as opposed to the crown became a cultural signifier of note for Europeans who had traveled to the Mongol courts and back. Perhaps this especially impressed those Franciscan Spirituals who decried the material trappings of this world.

Louis IX with Mongol-style hat and robe, Museum of the Basilica of San Francesco, Siena. Photo by author.

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With relatively little previous exposure to central and east Asian societ­ ies, individuals like Roger Bacon, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti may have experienced the greatest cultural opening in this era of wide-rang­ ing encounters with new people, ideas, and material objects. Opportunities for comparative thinking gave rise to new ideas. Bacon’s claim to greater truth beyond the works of Pliny and other classical authors was that Bacon relied on the experience of recent travelers such as Carpini and Rubruck.62 Though Catholic universalism may have stimulated a European intellectual inclination to explore new horizons, Bacon also experienced Roman Catholic authority as intellectually restrictive. For his work in the occult sciences and efforts to press the Church on teaching Arabic and Mongolian language as tools for missionary work, the Church ordered Bacon placed under surveil­ lance and confined. Franciscans had a major presence in the Black Sea area, and transmission of knowledge regarding Mongol policies owed much to these connections. Popes and monarchs were familiar with the courts at both Sarai and Tabriz and uncertain of their position in relationship to the two. Given the Ilkhan’s demonstrated military actions and consistent politi­ cal policies to overcome Mamluk control of Damascus and territories in the Levant, European attention tended toward Tabriz. Perhaps it was precisely the Siena political and cultural elite’s strong sense of place in a dynamic world of opportunities that contributed to a receptivity for innovative thinking about politics, art, and life. While opportunism and a quest for political control ruled both the Mongol and Latin worlds, as well as others of course, the engagement of Mongol eclecticism and Catholic orthodoxy generated a creative spark in the art, philosophy, and literature of the Latin world. In 1340 Özbeg Khan of the Kipchak ulus (Golden Horde) sent a Hungarian Franciscan named Elias as envoy from his capital at Sarai on the Volga River to Avignon to convey his hope to Pope Benedict XII for good relations between Christians and Mongols. From this mission, Simone Martini, who was in residence at the papal court, had gathered impressions of the Mongols’ dress, manners, and political views.63 Pope Benedict XII recognized the eclectic nature of Mongol court politics when he sent a return message to Özbeg Khan reminiscent of Nicholas IV’s letter to Arghun, encouraging conversion to Christianity and specifically addressing the wives of the Mongol rulers, based no doubt on knowledge of the presence of Christian wives at the court of the Ilkhans. Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale, written a half-century later, appears to carry the cultural memory of the entourage that accompanied Elias, mapping reli­ gious tolerance, as Kathryn Lynch has suggested, onto Mongol governance.64 Looking at the historical context of The Squire’s Tale, Vincent Dimarco sees Siena in Tuscany 101

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ample opportunity for Chaucer (1342–1400) to have known the details of political discourse that spun off of the Mongol era.65 The association of the Mongols with religious tolerance may even have been enhanced in memory as a road not taken, for in reality it did not at that time become a sustained possibility in the Latin world. When seventeenthcentury Enlightenment discussions of the value of secular government and the detrimental effects of religion rose to debate, Voltaire, Leibniz, and oth­ ers in an era of chinoiserie once again looked eastward to imagine principles of good government for a French audience. Perhaps their look to the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties was conditioned by the earlier attention Bacon and others had first given to the relative secular approach of the Mongols. Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom fresco envisioned a stance against religious intolerance in which both Mongols and Italians might have a place.

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Abaqa on Horseback, c. 1350. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Birth of Mohammad, Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, 1314. Credit: Edinburgh University Library.

Deeis mosaic, Chora Church, 1321. Photo by author.

Maria of the Mongols, Deeis Mosaic (detail), Chora Church, 1321. Photo by author.

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Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martyrdom of the Franciscans, 1342. Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ART130816.

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Gluttony in Coccarelli Treatise, 1340. Credit: British Library.

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Adoration of the Magi, Saint Catherine Monastery, Mount Sinai, 1260. By permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. Photograph courtesy of the Michigan-PrincetonAlexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai.

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Royal Drinking Scene, c. 1250, Dukhang Alchi, Ladakh. Photograph courtesy of Jaroslav Poncar.

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The Mountains between India [Al-Hind] and Tibet, Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, 1314. Credit: The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. MSS 727 folio 22a (262a of the reconstructed manuscript).

Lamentation of Alexander the Great from The Great Mongol Shahnama. Credit: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment. F1938.3.

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Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Lamentation of Christ, 1340. Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY ART190524.

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Siyah Kalem, Spinning Rope, Hazine 2153, f.73b. From Ben Mehmed Siyah Kalem, Insanlar ve Cinlerin Ustasi [I, Mehmed Siyah Kalem, Master of Humans and Demons] (Istanbul: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanligi, 2004), 204–205.

Khubilai Khan. Credit: National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Chabi Khatun. Credit: National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Wang Zhenpeng, Dragon Boat Regatta on Jinming Lake, 1323. Credit: National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Wang Zhenpeng, Mahaprajapati Cradling the Infant Buddha, early 14th century. Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

CHAPTER 4

Cairo in Egypt (Mamluk Sultanate)

A

n iconostasis beam crafted in Syria in 1260 and later installed at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai displays a particularly stunning integration of iconographic innovation and contemporary politics. In one of thirteen scenes that illustrate the life of Christ, the artist(s) produced a novel combination of closely merged nativity and adoration scenes that at once referenced a heightened Christian optimism and placed a major contemporary military battle within a Christian historical narrative. This hybrid scene effectively doubled the commissioner’s enthusiastic viewpoint that the birth of a new era had arrived and that messengers from the East had great gifts to offer. Art historian Kurt Weitzmann identifies the right­ most of the three Magi figures as Kitbuqa, the Christian (Church of the East) general in command of the Ilkhanid Mongol forces in Syria. Jaroslav Folda extended this identification to name the central figure as Bohemong VI, prince of Antioch at the western terminus of the silk-road networks, and the leftmost figure as Hetoum I, king of Armenia. A contemporary Mamluk literary source, not used by either Weitzmann or Folda, allows us further to affirm the identity of Kitbuqa in the trio’s portrait. Close examination reveals a large pearl earring in Kitbuqa’s left ear, a clear decorative feature of elite Mongol men, and a distinctive hairstyle described in literary sources that ref­ erence Kitbuqa. This alliance of three produced a major, though short-lived, Christian/Mongol victory over Islamic Mamluk forces at Damascus in 1260. As we saw with sources on Maria of the Mongols, Armenian authors, with political designs of their own, consistently conveyed positive images of the Mongols to the Latin Christians, hoping they would soon join in an Armenian-led Christian/Mongol alliance against the Mamluks. To seize this opportunity immediately to commission an iconostasis beam celebrat­ ing a victory in which the Armenians were central players fit well with their overall stratagem. The Latins, for their part generally divided among them­ selves, just as consistently held back from full commitment to an alliance with the Mongols, sometimes to the benefit of the Mamluks.1 Produced near 103

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Acre in 1260 by artisan craftsmen working in Byzantine-inspired styles, the beam was to decorate a newly reclaimed former Byzantine church that had been functioning as a mosque. The refurbished beam would have a place of honor in the iconostasis wall, a prominent architectural feature behind the altar symbolizing passage between this world and the heavenly realm. So located, the nativity scene would forever remind the faithful of the criti­ cal role an Armenian-Mongol alliance played in reclaiming this space for Christian worship. Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai became not only the final resting place for the iconostasis beam with Kitbuqa’s portrait and its unique histori­ cal content but also the location for extensive artistic interaction through­ out the eastern Mediterranean during the Mongol era. Constructed in 565 by Byzantine emperor Justinian, the monastery enclosed the Chapel of the Burning Bush, the site where Moses was believed to have received the Ten Commandments from God. Although maintained under Byzantine auspices, Saint Catherine’s was a significant site for all schools of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Contemporary traveler and collector of travel accounts John Mandeville offers detailed descriptions of the importance of Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the thirteenth-fourteenth-century geographic imaginary. He notes that the monks at Saint Catherine’s were Arabian and Greek, and that, because of the many great miracles and relics associated with the monastery, “we Christian men certainly ought to visit that holy place with great devo­ tion.”2 Over 120 extant icons at the monastery display a hybrid style defined by thirteenth-century contemporary Eurasian eclecticism, itself a statement of geopolitical realities.3 Jaroslav Folda has looked at the convergence of art and politics in the eastern Mediterranean during the early Mongol era and found that the period between 1250 and 1291 “reflects vigorous diplomatic, military, and cultural interactions” among Mongols, the Mamluks of Egypt, and Christians.4 The Virgin Mary’s appearance in the iconostasis panel found at Saint Catherine’s reminds us also of the many artistic adaptations her image inspired during the Mongol period. Hers was possibly the most well-traveled image, evidence of which can be detected in the many stylistic and icono­ graphic transformations of her likeness across the continent. In the iconos­ tasis panel with Kitbuqa, her gaze looks over the head of the Armenian king toward Kitbuqa as though to welcome the newest guest from afar. A distinc­ tively swooning Madonna appears on the pulpit sculpted in 1265–1268 for the Duomo in Siena by Nicola Pisano (c. 1210–1218). This unique periodspecific representation appears also in a 1270 Crucifixion painted at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, as well as the illustrated Gospels produced for Queen Keran and Prince Vasak of Armenian Cilicia.5 On the way to becoming the 104 Chapter 4

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more natural and secular figure of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s knitting Madonna, and possibly the model for the Mahaprajapati Cradling the Infant Buddha, the Virgin Mary was first elevated to the Queen of Heaven, signified by the innovative use during the period 1250–1290 of chrysography (gold high­ lighting on her robes), an artistic transfer from Byzantium into Italian centers—Pisa and Siena at first—through the crusader states and possibly Sinai.6 The greatest artworks of the Mamluk period were large-scale, intri­ cately illuminated Qur’ans without figural representations, unlike the illus­ trated manuscripts of secular literature or historical texts produced in Tabriz. Reaching for the mantel of new caliphate in the face of challenges from both Mongols and Franks, the Mamluk sultans invested heavily in volumes with stunning decorative displays. While styles and motifs passed through Cairo between Constantinople and Siena, Egypt’s location in the international pig­ ment markets during the Mamluk period also linked diverse artistic commu­ nities in which both the Saint Catherine’s nativity iconostasis beam and the large format Qur’ans found a place. As Cheryl Porter has noted, “all artisans in Cairo, whether Muslim or Christian or whether producing Muslim or Christian books, had access to and could use the same colors and techniques. There seems to have been no such thing as faith-based colors. Most impor­ tant factors influencing choice of pigment . . . were geography and price: what one can find and what one can afford.”7 At the same time, yellow was avoided among the Franks and associated with illness but viewed positively by central and East Asian illustrators as representative of light; blue, a longtime favor­ ite in Egypt, Persia, and East Asia, was of little interest among European illustrators and consumers prior to 1200.8 Politics also played a role in color selections. The Umayyad Caliphate chose white as its identifying color, so the Abbasids who successfully overwhelmed them in 750 CE chose black; Qur’anic verses associated Paradise with the color green, and Caliph alHakam II (r. 961–976) owned a great red tent as it was thought Muhammad had when going into battle; rival Umayyads, Fatimids, and Isma’ilis identi­ fied with yellow to press their legitimacy and sometimes donned red as well to capture their opponents’ color signifier.9 HISTORICAL LAYERS AROUND CAIRO (AL-KAHIRA), A HORIZONTAL CITY The Mongols of Tabriz were interested in Egypt primarily because, over centuries, it had successfully profited from its location in the eastern Mediterranean trade zone, producing a horizontal city with extensive com­ mercial reach, social diversity, and material wealth.10 World conquest, the Mongol game plan, required that all places of value be integrated into their political resource base. Although the Mongols never succeeded in bringing Cairo in Egypt 105

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Egypt under their authority, the effort to do so had consequences for both Egypt and the Mongols. By the thirteenth century, Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia had a long his­ tory of cultural exchange and military contact. Cairo (al-Kahira) itself was first established as a town by the Fatimid caliph al-Mu‘izz in 970. Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers claimed new land around old royal structures and neigh­ borhoods rather than razing and building over them. In this way the city grew horizontally to have multiple centers, incorporating rather than sub­ merging previous centers. The historical basis of Cairo’s thirteenth-century status rests as far back as the second millennium BCE, when rivalry between the rulers of Hattusa in central Anatolia and Egypt sent armies in both directions up and down the eastern Mediterranean. Egyptian victories built a strong economy and drew the area into subsequent conflict and cooperation with peoples of the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic empires. Persian armies of the Achaemenid empire controlled Egyptian lands from 525 to 402 BCE and 343 to 332 BCE. Alexander the Great liberated Egypt from Persian rule and in 333 BCE founded the city of Alexandria, which prospered under the Ptolemaic dynasties and began to function as a coastal commercial entrepôt. From 30 BCE to 641 CE Roman rule held sway in Egypt, includ­ ing Byzantine control in the fourth century CE. A second wave of Persian rule came with the Sassanian conquests in 619 CE, at which time Egyptian political allegiance shifted from Greek Orthodox Christian Constantinople to the Umayyid and Abbasid centers of Islam. Shortly thereafter, in 646 CE, Alexandria fell to Muslim Arab military forces. The Fatimid Caliphate (969–1171 CE), an Isma‘ili Shi’a Islamic caliphate, claimed territory from the Maghreb in northeast Africa to Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean. As governors of Egypt and rivals to the Abbasids, the Fatimids formed an alliance with the Persian Ismal‘ilis. When the Seljuq Sultanate attacked Ismal‘ili strongholds in 1078 CE, the Seljuqs forced the Fatimids out of Syria. Frankish Crusades also opposed the Fatimids in Syria and in the 1190s succeeded in pushing them out of the Palestinian coastal areas. With the defeat of the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ayyubid dynasty (1171– 1260 CE) came to power in Egypt. The Ayyubids were a Muslim dynasty of Kurdish origin founded by Saladin, himself originally a vizier to the Fatimid rulers. Saladin enjoyed a major victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, at which time the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell under Egyptian rule. Hence, by the time Mongol forces entered the area, the political and intellectual cul­ ture of Cairo was thoroughly embedded in epochs of eastern Mediterranean and Iranian history. Hülegü’s 1256 successful assault on the Ismal‘ili strong­ hold at Alamut and his 1260 attack on Aleppo brought Ayyubid rule in the 106 Chapter 4

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area to an end, creating a power vacuum and facilitating the consolidation of Mamluk authority. Cairo’s location in successive long-distance commercial networks built the city’s well-established, lucrative place in the pre-Mongol world of Mediterranean commerce and also prefigured competition with Mongol net­ works of commercial exchange. Trade through Egypt and the Red Sea deliv­ ered spices, pearls, silks, and other commodities arriving from the Arabian and Indian Oceans. Interest in Asian markets was well-developed long before the Mongols threw open the doors to land-based routes and new opportu­ nities. Early commercial layers included a remarkable group of Jewish mer­ chants known as the Radhanites, who worked land and sea routes across Eurasia from the end of the Roman Empire into the Islamic period until the eleventh century. Persian geographer and Director of Posts and Police for the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu’tamid, Ibn Khordadbeh, in his Kitab al-Masalik wal-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) recorded around 870 CE that Radhanite merchants connected a layer of transcontinental trade routes from the land of the Franks to Antioch and Baghdad through the Persian Gulf to Indian and Chinese ports.11 Although not heavily documented, Radhanite merchants of this description would have been the initial layer of Eurasianwide regularized trade networking to have dealt in spices, silks, and jewels. They appear to have effectively played the field and relied on contingent strategies to stabilize their enterprises in a business environment with no continent-wide political arcs. Hebrew inscriptions carved in rock at a cara­ van stop on the Indus River west of Chilas in the vicinity of Kashmir and Alchi in Ladakh offers tangible evidence of Jewish trade activities, possibly Radhanite, in the Western Tibetan regions.12 Charlemagne’s administrative reforms in the early ninth century and Roman Church efforts to lower the high level of feudal military conflict began to reorganize European society around the politics of interregional trade. Markets for luxury goods in Europe expanded, and the lure of the Eastern markets grew proportionately. This drew European attention to mar­ kets at Alexandria. Also at this time, an extensive network of Islamic mer­ chants began to blanket overland routes to the Eastern markets, creating an expansive commercial culture with its own institutions. The Muslim Karimi merchants were among the most successful. Sponsored initially by Saladin in 1183, and later promoted by the Ayyubid and then the Mamluk rulers, the Karimi merchants dominated the Red Sea trade and the port district of Cairo, effectively blocking Frankish efforts to break the Egyptian monop­ oly on trade between the Mediterranean and the South Asian seas.13 The Karimi family-owned firms did not directly take part in political authority Cairo in Egypt 107

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but acquired great wealth and became the bankers to sultans and kings. They developed complex financial institutions that allowed them to extend credit, finance military campaigns, and invest in major cultural and religious projects. This extraordinarily successful Islamic commercial world did not exclude Christian Europeans from participation, but also did not favor their interests. As historian Carl Petry describes, the Karimi merchants of Egypt stand as one of the brilliant commercial classes of Near Eastern history. They exhibited an abiding concern for the cultural aspects of their society and endowed it richly with waqfs in support of libraries; chairs for scholars, teachers, mystics, and poets; mosques that were magnificent architectural monuments; public fountains and baths; orphanages, hospitals, and rest homes. With regard to the practical requirements of their profession, they endowed guest houses along trade routes, improved harbor facilities, and built up a system of warehouses, khans (inns), and caravanserais in which business could be carried out efficiently. They maintained contacts through­ out the ports of the Indian Ocean, and kept themselves abreast of political developments from Europe to China. The karimi merchants were among the best-informed people of the Middle Ages and often served their gov­ ernments as bankers, viziers, ambassadors, secretaries, and controllers of privy funds.14

Mongol control of land routes across Eurasia offered Europeans alternative trade networks, while the Karimi maintained their dominance during the Mongol era over the Red Sea and South Asian seas. The Karimi merchants straddled the before and after of the Mongol conquests, so we have run ahead a bit in our story. The Eurasian outline of commercial conditions first began to shift in the tenth and eleventh centu­ ries. Local governance became significantly less stable, and Radhanite abil­ ity to sustain transcontinental trade suffered debilitating blows. The collapse of the Tang dynasty (618–906 CE) in the East rendered exchange with that region more difficult. Turkic invasions of Persia brought forth the Seljuks (1037–1194), who remade the terms of local power in Iran, Anatolia, and Syria. At the same time, Radhanite merchants found it more difficult to compete with the growing strength of small city-states such as Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, startups ready to gamble and explore alternatives. The Latin Crusades, through an ebb and flow of large-scale military activity, began to generate their own commercial momentum that greatly benefited Venice and other Latin merchants—all competitive rivals seeking to cash in on trade between Europe and the Indian Ocean through Egypt. Northwest of Marseille, the harbor at Aigues-Mortes developed to promote commerce 108 Chapter 4

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with Alexandria and the Eastern markets. French king Louis IX (1214– 1270) departed from Aigues-Mortes when he set off on crusade in 1240 and again in 1267. The same crusading King Louis IX appointed Etienne Boileau the provost of Paris in 1261. This position made Boileau, who was the author of the “Books of Trades” and “Weights and Measures,” the commercial head of the French government. Sea routes provided cheaper transport than over­ land travel, but because the Egyptian merchants and officials routinely raised fees for goods in transit as well as in the marketplace, Latin merchants con­ stantly faced the challenge of trying to find a way into the Eastern trade on terms more profitable to themselves. When the Mongol conquests occurred, a path seemed to open. In 1321 Marino Sanuto the Elder of Torcello understood the potentials of the situa­ tion. He presented to Pope John XXII a proposal titled Liber secretorum fide­ lium Crucis super Terrae Sancta (Book of Secrets for Followers of the Cross). The volume came with a map of the eastern Mediterranean drawn by Pietro Vesconte of Genoa. It remains the earliest known European representa­ tion of the geography of Iran at the time the Mongol Ilkhanate. The pri­ mary object of the volume and the map was to present Sanuto’s argument that Christian merchants could reduce dependency on Mamluk Egypt for Eastern luxury goods by using northern routes through Iran as an alterna­ tive.15 A later mapping of Eurasia, the Catalan portolan charts (c. 1375) created after the collapse of the Mongol Empire seem nevertheless to have incorporated images associated with trade conditions characteristic of the Mongol era.16 From the start European royalty and church authorities pro­ moted conditions that favored economic development and their own control of its consequences. Commercial competition fueled by religious ideology clearly preceded Mongol entry into the eastern Mediterranean. Such com­ petition, with its potential for the development of foreign exchange, was essential to the Mongols’ synergetic empire-building activities that extended westward the effects of the commercial revolution of the far eastern Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), stimulating waves of domestic market expansion throughout Eurasia.17 RED SEA, BLACK SEA POLITICS: THE CRUSADER FACTOR WITHIN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN Crusader activities prior to the arrival of the Mongol rulers would frame diplomatic engagement between Mongols and Franks during the first three decades of Ilkhanid rule. Breaking the Egyptian monopoly on the Red Sea trade and the Byzantine control of the Black Sea were major points of ref­ erence for the Franks and for the Mamluk and Byzantine defenders. After Cairo in Egypt 109

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1258 the Mongol Ilkhans and Golden Horde rulers joined the competition for land and resources. Begun a century earlier in 1095, when the Roman Church called for crusade against the Muslim Seljuk Turks, this first cam­ paign resulted in the establishment of crusader states at Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli. The Seljuks (1037–1194), who had soundly defeated Byzantine forces in 1071 at Mazikert, loomed large in the imagination of many Christian groups. Seljuk victory placed the Greek Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire in great jeopardy and disrupted Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Many Latin Christians responded to these threats with frenzied anti-Muslim rhetoric. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), however, during the fifth crusade in 1219, took a different tack. He made his way to Cairo in that year to meet Sultan Malik al-Kamil for a peace dialogue. Although the exact content of their dis­ cussion remains unknown, the central Italian artist Giotto has left us a picto­ rial interpretation of his visit. Francis, in many of his life choices, responded to the growing commercialism of the Italian states. His own father, whom Francis rejected along with the family business, was a successful silk mer­ chant who undoubtedly had vested interests in east Mediterranean trade. Growing commercial activity generated dissent among other groups as well, prompting the papacy to call for the Albigensian Crusade (1208–1229), the Baltic Crusade (1211–1225), and the prosecution of other groups considered heretical well into the early fourteenth century. The Mediterranean Sea during the eleventh and twelfth centuries func­ tioned as a general “merchant culture that involved shared cultural norms and expectations of behavior, while they also highlighted the complex multiple identities that individuals activated in their relations as they circulated within that culture.”18 Conflicts, by mutual appeal to a merchant group’s reputation and economic interests, tended not to invoke religious or political arguments. When two Pisan pirate galleys seized three Muslim ships at Tunis in 1200, confiscated their cargo, killed several Muslim shipmen, and abused some of the Muslim women on board, diplomatic and commercial mechanisms for resolving the situation swung into action without heated anti-Christian or anti-Muslim rhetoric.19 Tunis authorities invoked the Islamic rules of fair trade that were in place throughout the Muslim world with regard to debt collection and fair practices. Pisan merchants and others essentially entered into the Mediterranean markets on these terms. In this case, Muslim com­ mercial authorities in Tunis consulted Pisan merchants in Tunis to appeal to their self-interest as well as contacting city officials in Pisa to seek a peaceful resolution, which included punishment for the pirates and return of the cap­ tured ships and their cargo. At this time, Pisans expected to play by the same rules in order to protect future profit making. The Mongol era of expansive 110 Chapter 4

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trade would soon create increased opportunities to challenge and circumvent these terms of commercial exchange. Pisan merchants and diplomats are mentioned in contemporary sources as a sort of tag-along group—that is, not major players compared with Genoa and Venice. Pisan positionality, however, traced a unique path through the commercial and diplomatic byways of the eastern Mediterranean zone. Venice and Genoa jump-started their commercial ventures during the Crusades. Pisa had long been the primary port on the western coast of the upper Tyrrhenian Sea. When Virgil wrote the Aeneid, Pisa was already a city of note. In the seventh century a Pisan fleet assisted Pope Gregory I against the Byzantines of Ravenna. Even when nearby Lucca gained in prominence, Pisa remained Tuscany’s most important city in the tenth cen­ tury, developing its naval capacity in these years by responding to Muslim military attacks in north Africa and Salerno. The Tyrrhenian Sea was an area of battle with Muslim rulers who held territory in Corsica, Sicily, and North Africa. In the 1160s, Pisan forces helped defeat the Muslims at Palermo in Sicily, and with the gold they captured from the Palermo treasury began to construct the famous cathedral and leaning bell tower of Pisa. Riding high in maritime power and papal support, Pisan fleets took part in the First Crusade that captured Jerusalem in 1099. They also looted several Byzantine islands and established trading colonies in Antioch, Acre, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria, and Constantinople, among other places. With trade privileges and immunity from taxation, Pisan commercial power grew in both the western and eastern Mediterranean. Pisa and Lucca fought for control of the castle of Montignoso and the Via Francigena, main trade route between France and Rome. Genoa sought connections to markets in the Rhone valley, Lombardy, and Provence. Pisa had connections to Marseille and Barcelona. Pisan domination continued until 1284, when they suffered a first defeat by Genoa. In 1290 Genoese destroyed Porto Pisano, leveling it to the ground. Among the personalities of note at the courts of Tabriz and Dadu was Isol di Pisan. In the mid-fourteenth century John Mandeville described a welltraveled route from Pisa, by way of Corfu, Constantinople, and Cyprus, to Alexandria, where he noted that the Muslims made the Christians white­ wash their churches to “hide the frescoes and images that were decorating the walls.”20 The early tiraz textile trade linked Siena, possibly through Lucca and Pisa, to the rich Egyptian markets. As noted previously, the first known European example of pseudo-Arabic and Mongol script painted on the trim or tiraz designs of luxury silk robes and draperies was the work of Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna in his 1285 Rucellai Madonna.21 This work of the Madonna and Child was commissioned for Santa Maria Novella Cairo in Egypt 111

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in Florence, where it later became known as the Rucellai Madonna for the merchant family that sponsored the new chapel. Only later did Giotto, in the early 1300s, develop his own patterns of pseudo-Arabic and Phagspa (Mongol) script so heavily used in the Arena Chapel in Padua.22 The cloth of honor in the Rucellai Madonna details Persian textile motifs also found in the works of Lorenzetti. Compared with Florentine work of the same period, Sienese art was especially rich in Chinese and Persian design ele­ ments.23 Similarly, the first depictions of translucent white silk are found in Sienese art, including the brilliantly executed gauze loincloth with its white embroidered tiraz script design worn by Christ in Segna di Bonaventura’s Crucifixion scene, completed between 1298 and 1327.24 To protect their authority in the eastern Mediterranean including Egypt, the Abbasid Empire (750–1256) originated a highly developed mili­ tary slave system that became the defense profile for many Islamic regional rulers who moved to enhance their own positions as the regime in Baghdad eventually weakened over decades, long before Ilkhan Hülegü’s final con­ quest of the city in 1258. Following this model of military security, the Fatimid rulers of Egypt purchased adolescent boys from Armenian, Turkic, Georgian, Circassian, Coptic, and Sudanese families of Christian faith, who were then brought to and educated in the Citadel of Cairo. Once trained to serve their patrons as soldiers and administrators, the slave soldiers (mam­ luks) often retained supportive ties to their home families, but demonstrated primary loyalty to the Egyptian rulers on whom they depended for legiti­ macy and advancement. This system of government based on a warrior class of slave soldiers made the rulers of Egypt both able and interested players in Eurasian developments. They constantly needed to renew their sources of slaves in the Black Sea markets across political boundaries that traversed the Byzantine Empire and eventually the Golden Horde ulus of the Mongol Empire, bringing them into conflict with the Ilkhanate and Latin worlds. Ayyubid sultana Shajarrat al-Durr (Tree of Pearls) and King Louis IX played critical roles in the transition to Mamluk rule. As an Armenianborn slave and concubine to the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Salih Ayyub, Shajarrat al-Durr (d. 1259) gained her freedom and the political status of sultana after she gave birth to the couple’s son. When the sultan died in 1249, the sultana moved quickly and effectively to secure the transition of power to her son, who was away in Iraq. In the same year, Louis IX of the Franks launched the seventh crusade that pushed beyond the initial Latin goal of rolling back Seljuq presence in the lands of Jerusalem. This crusade extended the fight to Egyptian Islamic rulers. The sultana forged the sultan’s signature on official documents to conceal his death until her son could return from 112 Chapter 4

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abroad and oversaw the rollback of Frankish crusader advances on Egypt. During her brief three-month reign, Sultana Shajarrat al-Durr managed to negotiate the defeat of King Louis IX at Mansura, set his ransom conditions, and recapture Damietta, which resulted in peace in the region.25 While she held down the fort and served as proxy for her son in his absence, Sultana Shajarrat al-Durr also sent Louis IX “royal raiment” gifts to celebrate the birth of the king’s newborn son. This Arab-style dress appears on figures of a luxury text known as the Arsenal Old Testament, commissioned by Louis IX in the years soon after the sultana’s reign.26 This was certainly a curious and revealing interlude between a sultana and a king. By 1250, after a struggle for power among Mamluk factions that had surrounded Shajarrat al-Durr, a group led by vice-regent Qutuz over­ whelmed the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt and founded the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517). Louis IX had in effect inadvertently strengthened a future foe of the Mongol Ilkhans. Having hoped to establish Frankish control over the critical geopolitical location of the Egyptian Red Sea commercial zones, and having lost his bid to do so, Louis IX within three years shifted his sights and sponsored William of Rubrick on a reconnaissance mission deep into Mongol territory, reaching the court at Karakorum to seize political and military potentials in that direction. The year 1260–1261 saw the rise of four prominent rulers who were major players in the interplay between Red Sea and Black Sea politics: Byzantine ruler Michael VIII (r. 1259–1282); Baybars (r. 1260–1277), sul­ tan of Mamluk Egypt; Berke Khan (r. 1257–1266) of the Golden Horde; and Hülegü (r. 1256–1265) of the Ilkhanate. Aristocratic factions around Michael Palaiologos regained control of a much-reduced Byzantine Empire in 1261, one year after the 1260 Mamluk victory at Ain Jalut and Baybars’ Mamluk seizure of the Egyptian court. In this political environment, rul­ ing houses scrambled for allies in an ever-shifting terrain of economic and military factors. Baybars sought ties with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Sicily, who had long been welcomed at the Egyptian court, and who in the con­ flict between Guelph and Ghibelline factions on the Italian peninsula rep­ resented opposition to papal designs on eastern Mediterranean affairs. He deftly shifted to support for a papal candidate when the Hohenstaufen col­ lapsed in 1266, hoping to divert King Louis IX’s next crusade away from Egypt toward Tunis. On the Byzantine front, Baybars formed an economic alliance with Emperor Michael VIII and the Genoese merchant communi­ ties with whom Michael did business.27 In relationship to the Mongol world, Baybars was militarily dependent on the Golden Horde and ideologically hostile to the Ilkhanate. Southern Cairo in Egypt 113

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Russia within Golden Horde territory was critical to the Mamluks’ sup­ ply of young boys and men for induction into their elite military ranks that controlled and governed Egypt. When Berke Khan of the Golden Horde converted to Islam in 1260, he moved toward alliance with the Mamluks and decisively against his cousin Hülegü, who had captured Baghdad and executed the caliph. Baybars fueled the sparks of jealousy when he sug­ gested to Berke by letter that Hülegü favored his Christian wife Dokuz Khatun over his blood kin. The letter read: “Reports have come one after the next, [saying] that for the sake of his wife and her Christianity [the Nestorian Dokuz Khatun], Halawun has established the religion of the cross, and has advanced the observance of his wife’s religion over your religion. He has settled the unbelieving Nestorians Catholicus ( jathliq) in the home of the [Abbasid] caliphs, [thereby] preferring her over you.”28 The Mongols of the Ilkhanate, on the other hand, not only remained committed to their Buddhist practices for longer but pursued military operations in 1260, 1281, and 1299–1303 in their attempts to conquer Mamluk lands. With changing and multiple motives, the Ilkhans pursued a sixty-year period of war against the Mamluks.29 Egypt was not only a key center of wealth and historical value in Mongol imperial designs but also a strategic location in Eurasian maritime trade. All of this placed Constantinople in a difficult position. Drastically weakened by the Fourth Crusade that resulted in Latin rule between 1204 and 1261, a Seljuk-Byzantine frontier defined the region from 1206 to 1279. The Empire of Nicaea under the Byzantine Laskaris royal fam­ ily found itself between the Latin Empire to the west, which held control of Constantinople and the Bosphorus, and the Sultanate of Rum to the east under Ilkhanid Mongol suzerainty. Byzantine emperor Michael VIII found himself in a tight spot amid these forces when in 1263 embassies from Baybars and Hülegü crossed paths in Byzantine territory.30 Gifts had been sent from Baybars to Michael to be forwarded to Berke. However, an embassy from Hülegü was in Anatolia negotiating with Michael. Wanting to hide, or at least not draw attention to, his contacts with the Mamluks and Berke, both enemies of Hülegü, Michael sent the Baybars embassy back to Constantinople, where they were indefinitely delayed, causing many of their animals to perish. This four-way tug-of-war created a playing field in which the Genoese, Pisans, and others could attempt to scheme and maneuver to their advantage. Along these multiple routes gifts that included artistic creations accompanied embassies. Diplomacy opened opportunities for eco­ nomic exchange at other levels as well, including the masses of itinerant and market-town merchants. 114 Chapter 4

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HÜLEGÜ CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAIRO SOCIETY AND POLITICS

IN THE MONGOL ERA

Eastern Mediterranean politics shifted significantly with the arrival of the Mongols in Iran and Iraq in the mid-thirteenth century. The end of the Baghdad Caliphate, which had been waning for decades if not centuries before the Mongols arrived, created a vacancy in the Islamic world for a government that could pose as the protector of Islam. Along with political authority, trade routes shifted north to Tabriz. The Mamluks, with their military and economic strength, took on the challenge to become the defend­ ers of the faith and found themselves with a two-front battle against both Ilkhans and Crusaders. As Stephen Humphreys has noted, “After 1260 Mamluk policy had to be multi-focal, simply because the Sultanate’s vital interests were challenged from every direction.”31 And yet there were ways in which this situation differed significantly from the past. Although the Mamluk Sultanate, like the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt before them, had to be militarily prepared on two fronts, the challenge from the east was now the mighty Mongol Empire, with a transcontinental reach that changed the dynamics of regional politics. Mongol destruction of Shi’a Ismali strongholds left the Ayyubids without allies in Iran and pushed the Mamluk rulers into a militant defense of Islam that called for jihad against Ilkhanid authority. Perhaps it was fundamentalist Islamic metaphors of purification asso­ ciated with jihad that prompted Mamluk bureaucrat and scholar al-Yunini to include some unexpected details in his official biography of Christian Mongol commander Kitbuqa. Al-Yunini wrote an account in which he claimed to see the commander relieving himself more or less in public: “The people were watching him, and his private parts were exposed.”32 This bit of narrative detail could certainly be read as a metaphorical subtext suggesting that, no matter how great, the Mongols were offensive, ignorant infidels. The Ilkhans applied their imperial inclusive religious and ethnic policies toward Islam, but this gained them no favor with the Mamluks, whose loyal scholars saw such efforts as little more than politically motivated corrupt dissembling. And we remember that inclusiveness was always premised on acceptance of Mongol authority. The Mongols’ quick and effective efforts to establish administrative control over the Syrian region followed the same multiethnic strategies they would employ from Tabriz to Quanzhou. As Reuven Amitai has described in the case of Syria, led by Kitbuqa, “the new bureaucracy was composed of local, mostly Muslim, officials: Persians, Central Asian, and even the occasional Mongol. While this edifice is impressive for its complex­ ity and the quickness of its establishment, it seems to have left little imprint Cairo in Egypt 115

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on local consciousness or institutions.”33 Unlike at Quanzhou, in Syria the military conquest was not sustained and the results were short lived. For the Franks with expansionist interests in eastern trade, the Mongol militariza­ tion of Syria and continuing conflict with the Mamluks led the Latins to step up their search for routes through Anatolia to Tabriz and points east that would bypass Egyptian markets. Increasingly, merchant houses associ­ ated with the Roman papacy, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and subsidiary city-states sought to maneuver their own courses, often independently of prioritized faith-based beliefs. In addition to a two-front defensive policy, the Mamluk Sultanate had a major ideological problem. After the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258, the Mamluks made the case that Cairo was the heir to Islamic universalism. However, Baghdad fell to the Mongols, many of whom were Muslim, not to the Mamluks. In addition, as a ruling house founded on the institution of soldier slavery, Mamluk claims rested on dubious foundations. Anne F. Broadbridge has pointed out that “The stigma of servitude, combined with the corresponding Mamluk lack of lineage, posed a significant and long­ term ideological problem for Mamluk rulers in their interactions with the Mongols.” Both Hülegü and Armenian king Hetoum I were quite forthright in their disparagement of their opponent Mamluk sultan Baybars, Hetoum referring to him as “a dog and a slave.”34 Because the Mongols of the Golden Horde and the Chaghadaid ulus converted to Islam and the Ilkhanid rulers did not until 1295 under Ilkhan Ghazan, the Mamluks tended to find natural allies among the Golden Horde and Chaghadaid rulers, who, conveniently for the Mamluks, were also at odds with the Ilkhans. This did not, however, preclude rocky relations between the Golden Horde rulers and Mamluks on occasion. The experience of Princess Tulunbeg of the Golden Horde is one example. After lengthy, strained nego­ tiations to deliver a Chinggisid bloodline bride to Sultan Nasir, the latter rejected the princess within five days with no explanation and no further discussion of the matter. On another occasion, Özbeg of the Golden Horde executed a Genoese merchant who was a close friend of the sultan to express his dissatisfaction with the latter over his lack of support for action against the Ilkhans. The threat to cut off access to slaves from the Golden Horde ter­ ritories was also periodically invoked.35 Even after Ghazan’s official conver­ sion, his Islamic claims were not considered bona fide by the Mamluks, who increasingly assumed a conservative, defensive posture within the broad spec­ trum of Islamic values. Mamluk legitimacy rested on their image as soldier protectors of Islam, including pilgrimage routes to Mecca, ceremonial prac­ tices, jihad against non-Muslim aggression, and support for Shar’ia, Islamic law. Mamluk sultans in effect sought to take on the ceremonial and political 116 Chapter 4

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roles that had belonged to the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. In keeping with this outlook, the Mamluk court treated emissaries from the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate to Cairo quite differently. Those from Tabriz were often fed and housed in inferior accommodations and received with less decorum. The favor was generally returned by the Ilkhans in the event of diplomatic visi­ tors from Cairo. Both sides favored low-grade animosity to an outright break of diplomatic relations. Stirring the pot of rebellion and dissent could also be effective. Baybars (r. 1260–1277) offered assistance to the Seljuk rulers in Mongol-dominated Anatolia and to regional rulers in Iraq and Iran who resisted Ilkhanid rule. In response to this situation, the Ilkhans periodically sought Christian allies of every variety against the Mamluks. Within the context of a Mamluk fundamentalist posture, cosmopoli­ tanism in Cairo society was primarily an Islamic affair. Francis of Assisi may have caught the attention of the Ayyubid Sultan in 1219, but interfaith discourse, historically associated with Buddhism and Islam of eastern Iran, was not a feature of Mamluk-sponsored activities. Philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun in 1382 marveled at the architecture and markets of Cairo and conveyed the sentiment that “Whoever has not seen it has not known the glory of Islam.”36 While people of many faiths and ethnicities might have business on the streets of Cairo, they did not find easy access to or accep­ tance at the Mamluk court. That was difficult enough for the Egyptian elite groups of the Delta region with tie-ins to Alexandria (al-Iskandariya) and Damietta (Dumyat). Geographic, linguistic, and ethnic diversity entered into Cairo society as a consequence of official requirements that all four legal schools of Sunni Islam be maintained. While the majority Shafi’i school drew from the native Egyptian population, the minority Hanafis, Malikis, and Hanbalis schools depended on scholars from Syria-Palestine, Anatolia, Iraq, and Arabia, among other places.37 Communities of foreigners grew up around these scholars. The Mamluk military, as we have seen, was cosmo­ politan by virtue of its recruits who hailed from the Black Sea region. Between a general populace and a slave-soldier ruling class there existed a civilian elite composed of bureaucrats, jurist-scholars, and religious functionaries. All members of the civilian elite shared a common founda­ tion in Islamic scholarship, giving them a common language and worldview. The social classes below the civilian elite included merchants, shopkeep­ ers, artisans, skilled craftsmen, and laborers. Because basic tenets of Islam inferred a measure of equality among believers, education was open and a means of upward mobility into the elite professions. The bureaucrats col­ lected taxes, staffed the government offices, and kept the archives. Their members were predominantly Syrians and Muslims of the Egyptian delta. These groups tended to serve their Mamluk leaders with unabashed devotion Cairo in Egypt 117

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and became thoroughly interdependent in their mutual pursuit of power and wealth. Absolute authority garnered limitless opportunities for subtle and not so subtle forms of corruption, fueling their well-deserved public image of sleaze. Jurist-scholars, on the other hand, generally sought to maintain their autonomy in opposition to Mamluk authority. As lawyers and teach­ ers, they belonged to “a truly international fraternity: the Sunni ‘ulama’” and maintained strong ties with Sufi communities whose members were con­ centrated in artisan-commercial lines of work.38 Cairo Sufi establishments remained distant from the political inner circles and became the meeting place of groups determined to steer clear as much as possible from Mamluk political interference. In Tabriz, by contrast, Sufi groups joined court life at every level and played a role in the Ilkhanate’s eventual conversion to Islam. Religious functionaries were the most distant from Mamluk political authority. Their work was in the neighborhoods and communities, and their legitimacy derived from the ideals of their faith, which they sought to keep untarnished by the wealth and corruption of the state. Although the Mamluks were viewed as oppressors, there was little rebellion or dissent. Religious leaders for the most part taught forbearance as part of religious practice. A few situations, such as perceived preferential treatment of Christians or Jews over Muslims, might spark defiant challenges to state authority. Committed jurist-scholars generally sought to protect and promote their traditions, making necessary accommodations and expecting their schools of thought and practice to outlive Mamluk rule in the long run. Mutual assistance among the elite benefited both religious and political leadership. Within more secular groupings, there were also no institutional mechanisms or ideological precepts through which political dissent might mobilize. Self-serving bureaucrats depended on the status quo to protect and pursue their own machinations. In keeping with the norms of other Islamic states, authority at the top might be delegated but never surrendered to groups below, resulting in a complex interplay of unmatched political and social hierarchies.39 KITBUQA AND THE CAIRO ARMENIAN COMMUNITY The iconostasis beam with Kitbuqa was a unique but not isolated example of religious syncretism with political overtones. Within Mamluk society a sub­ terranean pluralism flourished alongside interreligious strife. Armenian com­ munities produced art such as the biblical narratives in The Harrowing of Hell and Nativity/Adoration panels found in the al-Mu‘allaqa Eastern Christian Church in Old Cairo. Motifs of dragons and phoenixes, popular during this 118 Chapter 4

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period as symbols of royalty, were also adopted by the Armenian court.40 King Hetoum of the Nativity scene including Kitbuqa was, of course, well known among the elite of Old Cairo who traveled back and forth through Damascus and Constantinople as well as to Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai. Legions of itinerant craftsmen and painters also made these journeys. Images of the al-Mu‘allaqa scene share many of the apocryphal narrative details found in Armenian queen Keran’s Gospel illustrations.41 Melkite Eastern Christian craftsmen also worked on the church’s painted icons and frescoes. Art and politics ran fast and loose, creating a pliable set of interpre­ tive and visual options. A metal basin dated 1240–1250 and inscribed to Sultan al-Malik alSalik Najm al-Din Ayyub includes scenes associated with Islamic elite life, including polo playing, hunting, and feasting, as well as scenes from the life of Christ, including the Virgin and Child with angels, the Annunciation, and the Entry into Jerusalem.42 The seeming anomaly of this juxtaposition of topics resolves to a coherent whole when they are considered as signifiers of a cosmopolitan elite culture. This is not very different from the appearance of pseudo-Arabic tiraz design with Qur’anic verses prominently displayed on the clothing of Mary and Christ in the works of Giotto and many other thir­ teenth- to fourteenth-century Italian painters. We should also remember that Mary was a celebrated personage in the Qur’an, a truly ecumenical diplo­ matic figure in her own right. The symbols in each case registered awareness of a larger world of values and established their relationship to local tradi­ tions and beliefs. The Annunciation scene on a metal basin designed for a member of the Muslim community in Cairo both claimed and reframed the significance of the story of Gabriel and Mary, just as the inclusion of tiraz in the clothing of selected biblical figures suggested the material setting of the eastern Muslim and Byzantine worlds. The effect in each case was to secular­ ize the borrowed element by rendering it primarily as a signifier of elite value. The stories of Hisham and Yovhannes, introduced in the prelude previ­ ously, might be recalled here to underline in this chapter some of the philo­ sophical complexities surrounding visual culture and its thirteenth-century structure of feeling.43 During a conversation with the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, the story goes, Hisham the merchant-scholar from Mecca pre­ sented the ruler with a beautiful cube-shaped box with many compart­ ments. Heraclius slowly opened each drawer, revealing in sequence portraits of Adam, Noah, and Abraham. Upon viewing the portrait in the last com­ partment, Hisham and his companions began to weep, for they recognized the face of the Prophet Muhammad. The moral of the story was that these images were of divine creation, not painted by the hand of man.44 Here was Cairo in Egypt 119

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an example of the uncreated image and the structure of feeling that allowed conversation and translation among diverse artistic traditions and belief sys­ tems. Vardan, we recall, told another story of the Armenian Christian ascetic Yovhannes, who saw mural paintings of the apostles in Jerusalem. Dismayed to see the damage done to the images by disapproving Muslims, he also won­ dered as a Christian if this sort of depiction of holy figures was appropriate. In this story the apostles themselves speak and offer the monk this answer: “You begged us to disclose to you [our views] about the Christians’ drawing us. It is not at all pleasing to us, and we are vexed. We indicate [this] every­ where, but they do not heed us.”45 Vardan’s story gives strong voice to at least one view among the Armenian Christians who shared an ambivalence about figural images. The pronouncements of Peter and Paul made it clear that they were as vexed as the Muslims. The first Eastern polity to convert to Christianity, the Armenian Church believed that the holy books condemned “worship of the created” as idolatry. However, the Church also held that the apostles and their suc­ cessors had the power to lay their hands on a cross, offer a prayer, and “as the Spirit moved them, that the sensible matter might receive the intelli­ gible power of God.”46 This was the image created by man and anointed by God. The establishment of Christian Constantinople shortly after the con­ version of the Armenians put a new focus on images in the form of painted icons. The Byzantines anointed figural images in the way the Armenians anointed the cross and transformed them with Spirit. These images were deemed miraculous, for they contained the power of God. Icon worship soon became a disputed practice in Armenia, where it was commonly known as the Greek heresy. Periodic outbursts of iconoclasm also occurred within the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, where holders of different views on the matter contended. However, despite Armenian references to the Greek heresy, one well-known icon, a wooden relief of the Descent from the Cross, continued to be venerated in Armenia. According to legend, “John, witnessing the Virgin’s grief, had taken a piece of the cypress wood left from the cross, and begged Christ to imprint His image on it. His prayers were answered, the miracle took place, and the Virgin filled with great joy took the image, embraced it, pressed it against her face, and wetting it with her tears exclaimed: ‘This is truly portrayed, my crucified Son, called the Saviour.’”47 The miraculous imprinting is similar to the image of Muhammad found on the silk cloth in the story of Emperor Heraclius and Hisham. And finally, the “image created by man” without pretense of anoint­ ment described a position inhabited largely by the Latin Church. There was, with few exceptions, nothing holy, in the sense of God-invested Spirit, about 120 Chapter 4

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the murals or statues that graced the monasteries and cathedrals of Latin Christiandom. Figural art was symbolic, a powerful memory prod for the faithful, a guide to inner spiritual life. The wine and bread of the Eucharist ceremony under the authority of a priest could be transformed by the power of God according to Catholic belief, but not the image. Latin Church policy generally held that images could be adorned and venerated for the personages they represented, but not worshipped—a devotion reserved for God alone. That said, Latin Christendom, too, came to include iconic images such as the statue of Christ in the Volto Santo at San Martino church in Lucca on the Via Francigena. Christ’s face was believed to have been completed by the hands of angels. The historicity of the iconostasis beam in which Kitbuqa appears offers an essential and often overlooked perspective on the sudden stylistic shifts that moved among Byzantine, Crusader, and Islamic art during the Mongol era. Jaroslav Folda writes of “the relatively sudden artistic transformation of the Virgin Mary from the human Mother of God, Mater Theou, who is the Theotokos in Byzantine icons, to a resplendent Madonna bathed in the golden light of her heavenly home with Christ and the angels as found in central Italian panel painting in the late thirteenth century, where she appears as the Queen of Heaven, Regina Coeli.”48 As Folda goes on to argue, the appear­ ance of Mary dressed in robes with golden highlighting (chrysography), a technique used by Byzantine icon painters only for Christ, the saints, and the angels, is one example that affirms significant artistic exchange within the eastern Mediterranean zone. That zone, however, also integrated artis­ tic materials and styles from beyond the Byzantine and crusader communi­ ties. Depicting Mary in the high fashion of the present employed the newly encountered golden highlighting of Byzantine art as well as the rare lapis lazuli pigments that traversed the Mongol Empire from Afghanistan. The main goal was to capture for Mary the best the present could offer in keep­ ing with her long-standing place in Latin Church ideology as the Queen of Heaven. In similar fashion, Simone Martini made painstaking efforts to cap­ ture the stylish golden brocade najis textiles of the Mongols’ Saint Gabriel’s cloak in his painting of the Annunciation. Kitbuqa’s inclusion in the Nativity scene is a historical and political statement directly linked to the contempo­ rary passion for detailed cultural references that establish relationship to the Mongol powerhouse. This turn was historical and natural. The portrait of Kitbuqa is not merely a symbolic, stylized image; it is based on the real per­ son, with attention to individual details. This artistic tone that favored iden­ tifiable association with contemporary persons and places was shared by the period elite in many settings. In Siena, as we have just seen, contemporary Cairo in Egypt 121

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fashions in rugs, ceramics, and brass collected by churchmen and merchants from the Tabriz area appeared in Lorenzetti’s Piccolo Maestà along with the naturalistic pose of his Madonna and Child. We are fortunate to have a contemporary literary source against which to measure the details of Kitbuqa’s appearance on the iconostasis beam. The match is quite convincing. Al-Yunini, a contemporary who had seen Kitbuqa in person, wrote: “He had a sparse beard under his chin, intertwined like a rope, because of its length. Sometimes he put its end in a ring in his ear, and sometimes he let it hang on his breast, and it reached his navel.”49 In the Nativity scene, Kitbuqa does have a sparse beard that intertwines like a rope, collects at his chin with either a thin extension that runs down his chest or possibly wraps around his head to an ear ring on the right, ending tucked behind his neck. We cannot see his right side, and the trim on his coat makes for an ambiguous visual reading. To run his long beard to his left ear would have been visually awkward. In his left ear, however, is a distinctive large metal ring with a sizeable single pearl, a Mongol fashion trademark. We can add this evidence to the reasoning of Weitzmann and others that this figure is indeed Kitbuqa. In addition to the historical events of the Mongol-Armenian victory at Damascus in 1260, there was a narrative basis for associating Kitbuqa with the Magi and hence the Nativity. Lucy-Anne Hunt writes that “A Syriac apocryphal text from a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century source tells of the Virgin giving the magi one of the swaddling bands, which they took back to Persia, where, having survived the test of fire, it was venerated as a relic. These eastern traditions clearly became intermingled in this period. The Armenian writings on the Infancy of Christ, the star bringing the magi from the east, [and] the swaddling bands originated in Syriac sources, but it was from Armenian texts that the Venetian Marco Polo derived his story of the magi from Persia coming to worship Christ.”50 From his personal his­ tory, we know that Kitbuqa was born into the Naiman tribe and shared their propensity for the Christian faith of the Church of the East, often referred to as Nestorian. Within his role as a commander (muqaddam) of Mongol forces, however, his religious identity was subordinated to Mongol law (yasa) that gave no priority to the beliefs of any one group. Art historian Kurt Weitzmann has written that “Artistically, the painter of the beam must be counted among the less skillful crusader crafts­ men. While his faces are on the whole rather carefully executed, sometimes, as in the case of the angels in the Nativity picture, they are too rounded and too fat.”51 Weitzmann also noted that the replacement of the apostles with archangels only was a move away from Byzantine iconography toward Latin emphasis on the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, a pronounced feature 122 Chapter 4

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of thirteenth-century Italian art, perhaps seeking to distinguish itself from Byzantine art forms. Jaroslav Folda has written extensively about the art of Nativity and Magi scenes that innovatively combined the themes of birth and adoration, projecting new beginnings and new hopes for Christian alli­ ance with the East. A new time required a new iconography. A sense of new possibilities pervaded thirteenth-century Armenian historiography as well, with less emphasis on the “End of Times” and more focus on human agency. Zaroui Pogossian finds that historian Kirakos, whose views were shared by other authors of the time, sought to understand the Mongols within God’s plan for humanity: “he provides realistic and factual information on the Mongols where they are presented as just another group of peoples with no supernatural or apocalyptic attributes.”52 Something new began to stir within the received religious frameworks, new attitudes matured within a received apocalyptic framework that focused on human action in the working out of God’s plan. Created in Syria, the beam may have found its way to Sinai by route of the Melkite Syrians at Sinai or the Armenian community in Cairo.53 The images were, in any case, intended as portraits of specific people. The turn toward realism in portrai­ ture was partly facilitated by wandering artists during Latin occupation of Byzantium who produced model-books of images they saw while travel­ ing: “Byzantine paintings provided the best available models for the artistic reconquest of the physical reality of the human body.”54 Byzantine art, how­ ever, was not the only artistic model for greater physical reality of the human and natural worlds. The Armenian communities that networked throughout the Mongol Empire, the Ilkhanate in particular, created paths along which visual dialogue transmitted through copy books, textiles, and other artifacts circulated in the west Asian/eastern Mediterranean zone. Kitbuqa’s career followed an upward trajectory, a distinguished arc. When Möngke Khan assigned Iranian lands to the conquests of Hülegü in 1252, Kitbuqa Noyan of the Naiman tribes held a position as commander of the advance troops (yäzäk) that led the initial attack to the west through Khurasan, participated in the eventual defeat of the Ismali fortresses at Alamut, and laid siege of followed by the capture of Baghdad in 1258.55 Kitbuqa, as an effective military leader, followed standard Mongol procedure in offering terms of surrender before exerting merciless strategies of slaughter excepting craftsmen and learned scholars. Baghdad was not only the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, it was also home to the Church of the East (Nestorian) Patriarch. The city’s potential fall carried significance for Armenian Christians that Latin Rome did not share, as the latter were dubious at best about the orthodoxy of Church of the East (Nestorian) beliefs and practices. Nonetheless, from the Armenian Cairo in Egypt 123

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perspective there was plenty to suggest an alliance with the Mongols. Hülegü’s mother was Assyrian Christian. His first wife, Doquz Khatun, was also an Assyrian Christian and protector of Church of the East com­ munities throughout the Ilkhanate. As already mentioned, Kitbuqa affiliated with the Church of the East as well. Creative diplomacy and historical imagination exercised by Armenian leaders and their commissioned artists made credible the representation of the Christian/Mongol Magi, where “Christian” was intended to elide the Latin, Armenian, and Church of the East faiths. Armenian and Church of the East groups often found common purpose at the Mongol court. Both, unlike the Latins and Greeks, had early on submitted to Mongol rule. As Christians independent of Roman authority, Armenians and Church of the East groups could enhance their positions at the Ilkhanid court while attempting to orchestrate a general Christian/Mongol alliance against the Mamluks. Roman aversion to independent Christian groups was a factor in the failure of these attempts. A letter of Cilician Constable Smbat (1248) and a treatise by Hayton of Corycus titled “Flos historiarum terre orientis” (1307) both demonstrate ways in which Armenian authorities attempted to control image making with “information” on the favorable conditions of Christians in Mongol-controlled territories.56 Kitbuqa was presented as a descendant of one of the Magi in keeping with widespread stories of the Persian origins of the Three Wise Men, lost Christian tribes, and Prester John, who would emerge from the East to rally support for Christian claims to the holy lands. Ethnically Turkish Uighurs in the area of Turfan, who held high positions in the Mongol government, were also active at this time as members of both Armenian Church of the East and Buddhist associations. When in 1260 Hülegü continued into Syria on his mission to bring Mamluk Egypt under submission, it is not surprising that Kitbuqa, with his record of exemplar service, once again led the vanguard forces. At Aleppo, Kitbuqa oversaw operations at the Anatolia Gate, where fighting was fierce in December of 1259. An Armenian goldsmith was the only one spared in the fighting, according to historian Rashid al-Din, who also noted words attributed to Hülegü on the occasion, saying, “Just as rouge is an adornment to women’s faces, red blood is a cosmetic adornment to the faces and beards of men.”57 In the face of this display of Mongol might, the authorities of Damascus decided on a peaceful submission. Having the commanding posi­ tion in Syria, Ilkhan Hülegü then sent messengers to Egyptian sultan Qutuz informing him of the Ilkhan’s terms of surrender. After some consultation among his advisers, Qutuz, who described Kitbuqa as “like a raging lion and fire breathing dragon lying in ambush,” replied by executing Hülegü’s envoys and thus inviting a showdown.58 124 Chapter 4

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Meanwhile, on the eastern front of the Mongol Empire, Möngke Khan had died in efforts to capture Manzi, southern territories of the former Song dynasty that included the cosmopolitan port city of Quanzhou. Obligated to withdraw and attend the council that followed Möngke’s death, Hülegü left his commander Kitbuqa in charge. Without sufficient resources and outma­ neuvered, Kitbuqa faced defeat at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. He either died in battle or was captured and executed by order of Qutuz.59 Although Qutuz was soon deposed, the Mamluks continued to battle the Ilkhans as the two forces sought control of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Syrian Prince Abu’l-Fidā, sultan of Hamāh (1273–1331), recorded the subsequent ups and downs of military encounters between Mamluk and Mongol forces. Armenian troops frequently took an active part in these ventures, as they did in late 1299 when Ilkhan Ghazan campaigned to retake Damascus. Abu’l-Fidā wrote: “When Ghazan came with the Mongol hosts to Syria, the Armenians had designs on the territories which the Muslims had conquered from them. The Muslims were unable to hold them, so the garrison-troops and footsoldiers there left them and evacuated them. The Armenians occupied them, regaining Hamūs, Tall Hamdūn, Kūbar, Sarfandkār, al-Naqīr etc. Of all these citadels, only that of Hajar Shaghlān was left to the Muslims. The Armenians occupied the other fortresses and territories to the south of the River Jayhān.”60 Continuous military preparedness required the Mamluks to raise substantial financial resources: “When reports were received of the return of the Mongols to Syria, a levy of a third of their wealth was made on most of the rich people in Egypt and Syria for the service of the fighters.”61 Peter Jackson has noted the tendency of Armenian authors and dip­ lomats to emphasize their positive connections to the Mongols even in the case of conflicts and difficulties. Early European impressions of the Mongols were in general divided: Were they the wild people of Gog and Magog that Alexander the Great confined behind a wall built across the Caucasus Mountains? Or were they the army of Prester John, Christian king of India come to the aid of the Christian world against Islam? While the Latin world, through embassies sent into Mongol territory by popes and kings, tried to figure this out and in the meantime held back cooperation with the Ilkhans, Armenian Christians early on accepted submission to Mongol rule and sought to raise an alliance against the Mamluks. As mediators between Mongols and Latins, the Armenians attempted to weave a tale of famil­ iarity and common history. The Nativity scene in which Kitbuqa appears captured the historical moment when an alliance among King Hetoum I of Armenia, his son-in-law Prince Bohemong VI of Antioch, and Kitbuqa of the Ilkhans successfully held most of Syria on their way to potential vic­ tory over Mamluk rule of Egypt. Both the Ilkhans and the Mamluks were Cairo in Egypt 125

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recently arrived contenders for authority over Syrian and Palestinian ter­ ritories. The Armenians had a longer history of non-state and small-state involvement in regional politics and commerce. The imagery for the iconos­ tasis beam designed for a recovered church in Damascus, was also intended to produce an image of the Mongols that would draw support for an alliance from the Latin Church and kingdoms. The western legend of Prester John was employed to translate the leadership of Kitbuqa and hence the Mongol rulers into terms that would sympathetically resonate with the Latin world. Armenian and Nestorian groups created and circulated stories that linked the Mongols and the Franks, generating a historical genealogy as a platform for contemporary political action. The installation of the Nativity with Kitbuqa at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai was embedded in strained and complex relations between Muslim and Christian groups in Cairo, each with multiple perspectives and agendas. The beam itself was introduced in 1260 through Church of the East networks that were largely marginalizaed and under the radar of the newly established Mamluk rulers. By 1290, however, as Mamluk/Ilkhanid conflicts continued, members of the elite within Mamluk governing circles began actively to recruit from among Coptic Christian groups for positions as scribes as well as high bureaucratic offices. No longer impoverished on the sidelines, many Copt families rose to positions of power and wealth, mak­ ing them visible targets of Muslim discontent. Christians, along with Jews, occupied the status of dhimmīs within Muslim society, protected but also restricted, and certainly not expected to command authority over Muslim populations, as some contemporaries charged. “You have appointed to office the newly converted Copts and given them control over your state and the Muslims. . . . You have made the Muslims subject to the Copts and strength­ ened their religion,” accused al-Bakrī in an incident over candles taken from a mosque to a church with official approval.62 Mamluk amirs, on the other hand, with their eye to commerce and self-consciousness of their outsider origins as Turks of slave status converted to Islam, actively sought contacts and expertise from foreign Christian and Jewish merchants, in part to counterbalance the pull of opposition from among Muslim religious and secular groups. The general population that the Mamluks governed seethed with latent interreligious hostilities that some­ times broke through an apparently calm surface. Major incidents took place in 1293, 1301, 1321, and 1354.63 Many of the incidents of looting and burn­ ing happened near the Mu‘allaqa Church in Fustat, Old Cairo, where we have noted the Armenian community kept a strong presence; the Byzantine emperor, Jaime II of Aragon, and the king of Abyssinia all intervened dur­ ing these decades on behalf of Christians in Egypt.64 In response to criticism 126 Chapter 4

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of the Christian and Jewish presence in high bureaucratic offices in Egypt, Syrian prince Abu’l-Fidā noted a 1301 decree in which the Mamluk govern­ ment declared, “The dhimmīs were required to wear distinctive clothing, so the Jews wore yellow turbans, the Christians blue, and the Samaratans red.”65 This effort to regulate and control had mixed or little effect given that the government relied heavily on the expertise of Jewish and Christian financiers to keep their system running. Consequently, the government often sought to appear to curb Christian presence without effective follow-through. The 1260 Nativity scene, like the continuing Christian presence itself, became a reminder, not of the Christian/Mongol success for which it was intended, but the dilemmas of Mamluk rule nested among a multitude of political and religious conflicts. The whole idea of an alliance between Rome and the Ilkhans against the Mamluks remained dubious from the Latin perspective. In many ways both Rome and Cairo faced divisive domestic circumstances that impeded their international agendas. Also, if a Latin-Mongol alliance had succeeded, the Mongols, with their continental empire, would be the stronger partner in any shared authority over captured territory, possessing both resources and contiguous landlines that would sustain their presence in the eastern Mediterranean. If possible, the Latin rulers, including Rome, preferred to chart their own course by capturing and holding Alexandria and Jerusalem. In fact, the crusader states often negotiated their own local alliances in the advance and retreat of east Mediterranean politics, and Egypt remained an elusive prize for the Latins and the Ilkhans alike. In spite of the inability of the Mongols to gain control of Egypt, the Ilkhans were poised to take advantage of contradictions within Egyptian soci­ ety that enabled a flow of material and artistic innovation into the eastern Mediterranean. Kitbuqa’s image at Saint Catherine’s Monastery is indicative of this cultural flow. Combat, commerce, and artistic expression circulated the makings of innovative creations that fused religious and historical nar­ ratives. Situated in relationship to the Golden Horde, the Ilkhanate, and the weakened Byzantine state, merchant communities in Egypt experienced Mongol rule as a diverse set of opportunities and challenges that both sup­ ported and ran contrary to Mamluk political centralization. Mamluk society itself held contradictions in its perpetuation of Sunni Islam under condi­ tions of Mamluk rulership and dependence on non-Muslim power holders. Although the Mamluk workshops excelled in highly sought-after ironwork items, glasswork, ceremonial robes, swords, and ornate equestrian parapher­ nalia bearing Muslim aesthetic designs, the Mamluk economy was, in many Cairo in Egypt 127

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respects, constrained by the dominant Mongol Empire of exchange that circulated goods of every variety and quality in large volume. With the fall of Baghdad in 1259 merchants under the Mamluk regime had to maneu­ ver to keep their momentum at sea as well as on land. Muslim diasporic communities that linked the Mediterranean to the seas of al-Hind prior to the Mongol Empire continued to play a role in the long thirteenth cen­ tury. These networks, too, were subject to Mongol activities that sought to link an empire from Tabriz to Dadu through routes that connected at Quanzhou. Ilkhanid-Yuan coordination of communications and commer­ cial facilities from the waters off Basra into the Western Seas competed with coastal Muslim merchant networks in which a range of Egyptian merchants had a strong foothold. Linkage between past and present, as well as the shifting realities of the Mongol era, appear in the history of the old Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou. Established in 1009 by Arab Muslims who took Cairo as their point of refer­ ence, the Ashab Mosque shared distinctive features with Egyptian mosque architecture that continued in vogue during the first centuries of Mamluk rule.66 As thirteenth-century Persian Muslim merchants from the Ilkhanate took up residence in Quanzhou, they frequented the Ashab Mosque, estab­ lishing their own community in the neighborhood. With the rise of Mongol authority, Muslim merchant centers shifted their internal connections and allegiances to better position themselves for new opportunities. In general, although contemporary styles found pathways into Mamluk artistry, official patronage did not promote innovation. As Oleg Grabar has written, “Mamluk art impresses one by its secure conservatism, by its numer­ ous variations on the same themes.”67 Competition with the Ilkhans led Mamluk patrons to commission bigger and more impressively decorated buildings and Qur’ans for public display, but not to produce the integrative, experimental figural art found in the Ilkhanid illustrated texts. Elaborate and repetitive designs, composed of inscriptions and geometric patterns, defined the Mamluk style applied to frontis- and finispieces of large-sized Qur’ans. Illumination of this kind became “an attribute given to a book and not, like an illustration, issuing from it.”68 The Mamluks sponsored no illustrated his­ tories, and, in the words of art historian Bernard O’Kane, their illustrated literary texts “are perfunctory compared with either Iranian or thirteenthcentury Arab examples.”69 Mamluk historical awareness found expression in monumental architecture and the metal, glass, and tile work used for elabo­ rate and exquisite decoration. Sponsors sought to reaffirm and enlarge their commitment to Sunni Islam, not to adapt it for translation and integration with other creeds, including Sufi schools of Islam. 128 Chapter 4

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Egyptian illustrated narrative works were mostly of Coptic and Byzantine inspiration. These cultural spaces provided opportunities for the transmission of themes and styles, including new renditions of the Madonna and Child motif. At the crossroads of Mamluk commercial exchange, artis­ tic practices transformed the image of the Madonna into a universal notion of the Queen of Heaven with a one-size-fits-all adaptability. The human­ ity of Mary had an appeal that extended far beyond the intent of Christian orthodoxy. Through Mongol imperial ideology, with its Buddhist intent of inclusivity, this new humanism and naturalism found resonance with Wang Zhenpeng’s Buddhist conceptualization of mother and child and The Birth of Mohammad in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh. What became the naturalism of early fourteenth-century Italian painting in Siena, and later in Florence, began in the sweep through the crusader period and later picked up innovative ele­ ments of realism through contact with Iranian and Chinese artistic practices. These works shared the same political and artistic space, proceeding to what art historian Robert S. Nelson has described as a “heightened intimacy” in the case of Italian art of the period.70 We might consider that Tuscany was just one location where a heightened intimacy, with its focus on portraiture and movement toward the secular, found expression in the long thirteenth century.

Cairo in Egypt 129

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CHAPTER 5

Alchi in Ladakh (Greater Himalayan Region)

I

n the high Himalayan Kingdom of Ladakh, along the upper reaches of the Indus River at ten thousand feet, stands the Buddhist temple com­ plex at Alchi. A temple inscription informs us that two priests of the ’Bro family founded the temple, one of whom was wealthy and sponsored the construction of a bridge and fort as well. “Alchi” is not a Tibetan name and may derive from the local Dardic language. Most of the temple’s his­ tory is obscure. Within the complex, a radiant collection of exquisitely detailed mural art decorates all interior surfaces. Color schemes favor the reds (kirmizi), with subtle shades ranging from pinks to violets and orange to scarlet.1 Gold adds accent. Local sources of lapis lazuli (blues), turmeric (yellows), and saffron (greens) produce pigments of a high-desert palette. Among the dense and richly portrayed scenes with their awe-inspiring intensity, one image captures special attention, the Royal Drinking Scene of the Dukhang temple. The subject matter of this painting is open to scholarly debate. Overall, the image suggests courtly affluence, with rich textiles and jewelry tastefully displayed in a mosaic of symbols that make visible the cosmopolitan reach of local authority. There are pearled rondels with lions, a motif of royal Iranian and Central Asian popularity. The scene portrays an event related to the temple’s late twelfth-, early thirteenth-century history, mostly likely con­ temporary with the event itself rather than referencing the past. A lady on the right delicately offers a man a drink in a short-stemmed goblet that is the focus of the composition. On the left, a young man kneels and drinks from a cup of a slightly different style that appears to have a handle. Both men sit facing the woman at what appears to be an important moment. Is this a royal wedding among the local elite? Is it a ceremony to recognize patronage of the temple? Art historians do not agree on the date of this painting but generally place it at the end of the twelfth, beginning of the thirteenth century. Roger Goepper argues for 1200–1220 as the earliest possible date for the temple complex.2 Madanjeet Singh suggests that the Royal Drinking Scene was of 130

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the Mongol era.3 An undated inscription below the scene generically iden­ tifies the figures as a local king and queen, but unnamed, who sanctioned the building of the temple complex.4 The story is perhaps more complex and more revealing. Artistic exchange among western Tibet and Central and East Asia had a long history before the Mongol era. Many works contain numerous visual references to previous centuries of Iranian/Buddhist artistic contact during the Parthian (277 BCE–224 CE) and Sassanian (224–651 CE) empires. A kind of recycling and repurposing of artistic elements resulted. In this way, motifs that appear in the Alchi murals as themes from Iranian art actually display elements from earlier inflections of Buddhist visual arts into eastern Iranian territories. After the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) in East Asia, Mongol contact with Greater Tibet, including Ladakh, consti­ tuted a third diffusion of Buddhism into the western and eastern reaches of Eurasia. Scholars concur that during the thirteenth century activity around the Alchi site surged. When local ruler ’Bhag dar skyabs expanded his con­ trol to include the Alchi temple, a Mongol ruler, likely Hülegü given the suggested time frame of 1252–1255, conferred on ’Bhag dar skyabs’ son the title of khri dpon (governor).5 A thirteenth-century Kashmiri priest by the name of Tathāgatabhadra, active at the Mongol courts in Khitai, translated a text on the goddess Tārā that contributed to a revival of her cult in Kashmir and her prominence in the Alchi murals.6 Ultimately the Alchi style would itself be altered during a century of upheaval that brought Nepalese Buddhist artists into prominence at the Yuan court and raised them as a standard of excellence in the Himalayan region including western Tibet.7 The Royal Drinking Scene with the cup-bearing woman is a visual reference to the indigenous western Tibetan culture encountered during Mongol entry into the region. Ilkhanid interest in western Tibet was keen. Tabriz-Kashmir-Ladakh connections included economic and political ties, and eventually a transfer of expertise for the vigorous round of Buddhist temple building sponsored by the early Ilkhans. Soyoung Choi, in her study of the Ilkhanate and Tibet, has detailed five decades of Ilkhanid contact with monastic establishments in western Tibet.8 Artistic legacies visible in the paintings at Alchi, along with the Buddhist cave art of the southern Taklamakan and Nepalese art of the Pala/Sena schools, became a visual inventory of motifs and styles carried by artisans from one job to the next. When the time came to select a lim­ ited number of topics to be illustrated for the Tabriz production of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, the mountains and waterways of Hind and Tibet were consid­ ered important enough for inclusion. Mongol context for the Alchi murals Alchi in Ladakh 131

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thus appears in paintings of The Mountains between Hind and Tibet and The Seas of al-Hind prepared for the History of Hind and Sind.9 Together these works at Alchi and Tabriz referenced the same cultural geography while rep­ resenting the concerns of distinctive temporalities—times and places. HISTORY OF LADAKH: HIMALAYAN CROSSROADS The Kingdom of Ladakh in western Tibet was historically part of the greater Himalayan region that included Nepal, Kashmir, and central Tibet. A shared field of Buddhist architecture and art connected this region to Central Asia and East Asia. Originally settled by Dardic people of Indo-Iranian stock, Ladakh over the centuries became home to diverse populations. In the sec­ ond century CE, the corridor connecting Himalayan kingdoms with Central Asia passed through Ladakh and was under the control of the Kushan Empire (30–375 CE). Families from among the nomadic Yu peoples immi­ grated into the area of Gandhara. After a period of intense and destructive warfare, Kushan king Kaniska made a policy decision to support the culti­ vation of Buddhism in his realm as a way to maintain his power and mini­ mize military expenditures. During this period, Ladakh absorbed elements of Buddhism along its southwest borderlands with Kashmir, itself a major center of early Buddhist culture in the area. Kushan sponsorship of large Buddhist projects in Gandhara to the north of Ladakh produced temple complexes with statuary and stone reliefs that fused Hindu and Hellenistic traditions to create the first widely diffused images of the Buddha in human form. When Tibetan and Tang dynasty armies clashed in the eighth cen­ tury, Ladakh had a largely Buddhist population of immigrant Iranian ances­ try that fell first under Tibetan control then passed briefly to the armies of the Tang dynasty (612–906 CE).10 After the Islamic defeat of Tang forces at Talas in 751, the Tang rulers lost their initiative and gradually withdrew from Central Asia and the Ladakh area, including Kashmir. Tibetan control returned from 751–842, during which time commerce flourished, bringing Sogdian merchants from Samarkand and close cultural as well as commer­ cial exchange with Kashmir and its strong Buddhist legacy. Royal families fleeing the fall of the Tibetan monarchy in 842 traveled west, where they competed for authority over new lands. Among them, the ‘Bro, Pa-ts‘ab, and Cog-ro families established states in western Tibet, and from the Cog-ro the firstborn, dPal-gyi-mgon, became the founder of the Ladakhi kingdom in the mid-tenth century.11 By some accounts Ladakh’s political influence at its height extended as far as Mustang in Nepal, which paid tribute to the Ladakhi court and sent representatives annually. 132 Chapter 5

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Map 3. Mapping Artistic Exchange: Hindu Kush/Taklamakan Zones

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The kings of Ladakh ruled as a lay monarchy under the law over a semifeudal agrarian society. Large landowners held hereditary right to their estates. Officials held hereditary titles but not offices and were granted usu­ fruct estates with some customary rights to first grain harvested and first beer brewed in their home place.12 While there was no formal legal code, the ruler was known as the “Great king ruling according to the law.”13 A tenthcentury geographical treatise, the Hudud al-‘Alam, notes that the people of the Ladakh region were “chiefly merchants and lived in tents and felt-huts.”14 The land produced a subsistence livelihood based on barley and wheat, with some apricots, apples, and grapes. State revenue came to depend on a transit tax that differentiated between local merchants who paid a customs fee at the border and long-distance merchants from Central Asia. The king and oth­ ers who received elite privileges enjoyed duty-free status on their commercial transactions and were thus able to accumulate significant personal wealth.15 The Ladakhi state monopoly was pashm fine wool sold to Kashmiri weavers for making shawls; Central Asian trade included felt, horses, and silver.16 A house tax and labor obligations contributed to state revenue. Those with documented real estate, not including land, paid taxes per house, and those without legally recognized households were liable to labor service, including carrying obligations for goods moving through the kingdom or postal and military service. In the rural areas, village headmen oversaw disputes and issued settlements. Difficult cases passed to the authorities at Leh. There were several routes to and from Sind and Hind. Travelers risked overland routes to Tibet for the high-quality musk available only from Tibetan deer. Located on a major north-south trunk route of the silk-road networks, the capital of Leh in the Kingdom of Ladakh beginning in the ninth and tenth centuries functioned as a major bazaar between the markets of Hind and Central Asia. In addition, travel from Tabriz through Herat and Kabul to Kashmir and Ladakh provided transport for south Asian and Himalayan luxury goods. The Alchi murals document the thriving trans­ continental textile trade that made possible the wealth of the ‘Bro family, founders of the temple, as well as the Ilkhan’s interest in the area. In this relatively remote Himalayan kingdom, artists had access to textiles that in their design and motifs would have been familiar to shoppers in the bazaars of Tabriz or Turfan, or even Siena. Locally sponsored artists rendered tex­ tiles in paint with remarkable precision, conveying the status of their patrons within a recognizable framework of continental commercial value. Along these same routes during the Mongol period, material and cultural transmis­ sion of Tantric Buddhist knowledge crossed Eurasia, encompassing central, east, and west Asia.17 134 Chapter 5

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ILKHANID RELATIONS WITH LADAKH AND KASHMIR Because of the importance of the history of Buddhism to the overall narra­ tive of the present study, some background notes are helpful to appreciate the context and significance of thirteenth-century developments. Within Iranian lands, there were two earlier patterns of encounter with Buddhism that left traces into the Ilkhanid period. Khurasan, with a center at Balkh in eastern Iran, was a stronghold of Iranian Buddhism in the second and third centuries. Nothing explicit is known of the doctrinal features that defined the Iranian “New Buddhism” of these and later centuries. Archaeological evidence, how­ ever, from regions of Bactria and Marv reveals an abundance of Buddhist artifacts, including a third-century CE wall painting at Kara-tepe in southern Uzbekistan (ancient Bactria) that bears the inscription “Buddha Mazda” and depicts an image of the Buddha surrounded by a halo of flames, a signifier of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda.18 Mkrtychev Tigran has noted evidence of twenty different Buddhist sites from the first to the eighth centuries in the area of Bactria-Tokharistan as well as indications of Kashmiri Buddhist art­ istry into the eleventh century.19 The Naw Bahar (New Monastery) at Balkh survived into the eighth century as a prominent center of learning and political authority with no overtly Buddhist identity; Muslim contemporaries associ­ ated the monastery with Zoroastrianism, the native Iranian faith. The power­ ful Barmakid family of Balkh descended from a hereditary line of Buddhist priests and was possibly of Kashmiri ethnicity.20 During their service to the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth century, the Barmak viziers introduced paper mills to Baghdad; print technology was itself a Buddhist innovation of the eighth century. The political use of the doctrine of metempsychosis invoked during the Khurasan rebellion conceivably drew on Buddhist associations. As Richard Bulliet has written, it is possible to see in “the Naw Bahar at Balkh the last functioning segment of what was once a string of monaster­ ies stretching from Bactria to Kurdistan and devoted to a form of Buddhism that was uniquely identified with Iranian speakers.”21 Melikian-Chirvani concludes, “It is for its royal significance that the Buddha was clad in parni­ yan/parand attire as the Lord of the Universe, a concept which almost entirely entered Buddhism when it was refashioned to a considerable extent in Iranian lands.”22 Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995 CE) wrote that the Buddhists of Khurasan descended from among the most exalted people of the earth. They were faith­ ful, charitable, and selfless. He counted the Buddha as a prophet.23 Eighthcentury translation projects undertaken by Central Asian Muslim scholars of Buddhist texts produced an Arabic literature on Buddhism including such works as Bilawhar wa Budhasaf and Kitab al-Budd.24 Alchi in Ladakh 135

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Umayyad and Abbasid centers of learning in western Iran, the heart­ land of Islam, showed interest to a lesser degree in Buddhist texts and ideas. Umayyad Islamic scholar Wasil ibn Ata (700–748) was versed in Buddhist ideas and fused Greek and Buddhist ideas into his school of Islam. Arab author Umar ibn al-Azraq al-Kirmani, also of the Umayyad period, sought to explain Buddhism in terms that drew analogies with Islam. He wrote an account of the Nava Vihara center of Buddhist learning in Balkh that appears in the tenth-century work the Book of Lands by Ibn al-Faqih alHamadhani. During the Abbasid period, Buddhist scholars were invited to Baghdad to participate in translation projects at the Bayt al-Hikma or House of Wisdom. Yahya ibn Barmak, chief minister to the caliph and possessing family ties to the Nava Vihara Monastery in Balkh, utilized his connections to bring additional Buddhist scholars from Kashmir to translate Buddhist medical texts from Sanskrit into Arabic.25 Preconditions of the thirteenthcentury Buddhist revival in the Yuan territories were quite different. There the basic tenets of Buddhist belief, concepts of reincarnation, the existence of bodhisattvas, and the teachings and symbols of the Buddha, were already familiar quantities easily associated with Tibetan variations. Contrary to generic stories of an early Mongol affinity for Tibetan Buddhism, Chinggis Khan and his immediate successors initially viewed Tibet and its culture primarily as a political puzzle. Although the Mongols had earlier captured the Tangut Kingdom of Xi Xia with its own histori­ cal connections to Tibetan Buddhism, Mongol rulers did not at first show an interest in Buddhism. Beyond the nomadic shamanism around which they organized their spiritual lives, the Church of the East Christianity (Nestorianism) was the only other religious tradition with strong connec­ tions, primarily through its female members, to Mongol families. Because the Tibetan empire had collapsed into a decentralized feudal system in the ninth century, no central leadership existed. This created a problem for the Mongols, whose effective conquest required that orders of surrender be received by a central authority in command. Faced with a fragmented political scene and an extremely difficult natural environment, the Mongols’ solution, which emerged slowly, was to promote the Sa-skya family, and eventually the Lama Phags-pa (1235–1280), in ways that facilitated the family’s consolidation of power in Tibet. This solution sanctioned the massive destruction and murder of other Tibetan Buddhist and Bon communities by a Mongol–Sa-skya alli­ ance. Western Tibet, including Ladakh, became a battleground for inter-ulus Mongol competition. Khaidu Khan, Kubilai’s rival in the Chaghadaid ulus, allied most of the time with the ’Bri-khung-pa sect, and the Ilkhans sup­ ported primarily the P’ag-mo-gru-pa communities.26 By 1260 Kubilai Khan, in cooperation with the Sa-skya sect, declared the Mongol conquest of Tibet, 136 Chapter 5

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though local conflicts did not entirely cease. From the Sa-skya Tibetan per­ spective, Mongol endorsement created a strong patron-protégé relationship in which Sa-skya groups retained their religious authority and gained secu­ lar protection from a powerful state. The “pearl document” ‘ ja’ sa mu tig ma, issued on May 28, 1264, granted exemptions for clergy from taxation, ser­ vice, and accommodation of imperial messengers; it did not grant temporal authority to Phags-pa over the whole of Tibetan-speaking countries as some Tibetan sources claimed; the Yuan rulers retained that power.27 Hülegü’s contacts with Kashmiri Buddhist communities began early in his career.28 Although initially northern Buddhist leaders responded with caution to Mongol expansion, gradually a general Buddhist revival emerged. Turkic Uighur families who practiced Buddhism were early supporters of the Chinggisid claims to world leadership and continued to be valued as military and political advisers to the khans throughout their rule. Within the Han Chinese domains, one eminent Buddhist monk, Master Xingxiu (Hsing-hsiu, 1166–1246), responded to the political uncertainties of early Mongol rule by retiring to write. He produced a two-volume work titled Record of (the Lodge of) Leisureliness (Congrong (an) lu [Ts’ung-jung (an) lu]) that recounted the lives of one hundred Chan masters who had achieved enlightenment and served to promote Chan teachings. Hülegü attended Chan religious ceremonies at Da Qingshou under the direction of Grand Mediation Preceptor Haiyun. Hülegü and Möngke both provided extensive financial support for the renovation of the Da Qingshou Temple, where they attended study sessions. For a decade before his departure for the western regions in 1251, Hülegü supported and learned from the Buddhist cultural center at Da Qingshou Temple. When he left the region, he sought Haiyun’s blessing for his work.29 For all schools of Buddhism, the sudden reality of Mongol dominance offered significant new opportunities for sponsorship. As waves of Tibetan and Kashmiri priests found audience with the khan at Karakorum, Chan Buddhist groups experienced a gradual eclipse of their authority. The Mongol court issued invitations to Dharmasvamin and other Tibetan monks famil­ iar with the Nepalese Buddhist communities who became a major source of Buddhist teachings in this period.30 With Haiyun’s death, this shift gained momentum, and ties to Tibetan Buddhism through Tangut Buddhism grew. In 1247 Mongol rulers in Karakorum had began a major project to reprint and circulate the highly prized Tangut text of the Golden Light Sutra. New printing blocks were carefully prepared to replace those that had succumbed to Mongol destruction. The text itself detailed the duties and rewards for rulers who governed in keeping with the Dharma. Once reprinted, the text was widely circulated and promoted as a guide to leadership and a statement Alchi in Ladakh 137

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of Mongol political ideology. Ruth Dunnell observes that, in the preface author’s words, the text was to be “spread abroad as medicine, to heal and restore the faith.”31 By invoking a political use of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, Mongol rulers inserted themselves into the sacred histories of past Tangut and Tibetan lineages, locating their origins among the royal house of the Buddha himself and claiming ultimate legitimacy in the present. Associations of the good life with Tibet had a long pedigree. Marvazi in the early twelfth century wrote, “A particular feature of their country [Tibet] is that whoever enters it and settles in it becomes ever gay and smiling without knowing the reason for it, and never a sad (face) is seen in it.”32 Hülegü’s initial appanage in western Tibet extended from the upper Indus River valley east to the lower Yarlung River valley. Each time Yuan authorities made adjustments, Hülegü’s allotments diminished in favor of Sa-Skya control. By the 1270s most of the estates associated with the orig­ inal appanage were lost. 33 Nonetheless, ties between western Tibet and the Ilkhanate remained open and strong. When Rashid al-Din in 1304 needed an expert on Buddhism he enlisted the assistance of the Kashmiri scholar Kamalarashi. Bar Hebraeus, a contemporary witness to the spread of Buddhist practices into eastern Anatolia, recorded in his history of the period observations on Buddhist monastic dietary restrictions that had no previous mention in written sources available to him. He noted: “And those priests when they are offered to them meat to eat, ask who brought it: ‘You killed this living being for us or did you buy [the meat] at the market?’ And if he replies ‘For you,’ they do not even taste it.34 The non-killing of animals and consequent vegetarian diet associated with Buddhism became one of the hallmarks of thirteenth-century novelty in the western lands noted by Marco Polo and many Franciscan travelers as well. Bar Hebraeus possibly encountered this information in dialogue with Buddhist communities at Marāgha, where he often visited to use the obser­ vatory library. Rashid al-Din in his history recorded that Arghun and other Ilkhans regularly met with Kashmiri learned men (bakhshi) at Qonqor Ölöng near Sultaniyya for religious ceremonies. Archaeological evidence supports this literary source, and the village that sits on the plain of extensive palatial ruins today carries the name Viyar, a possible cognate of vihara, Sanskrit for Buddhist monastery.35 The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh tells us that Arghun Khan was highly devoted to the bakhshi and followed their path. He constantly patronized and favored them. One bakhshi came from India [Hind] and claimed to have lived a long time.36 In order to show his fervor, he [Arghun] built lofty idol temples at Khabushan in Khurasan, and he performed his duties in such a way that 138 Chapter 5

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all the bakhshis and monks were astonished by his degree of asceticism and rigor.37 The practice of idolatry, which had been completely eliminated throughout the region from the beginning of Islam, reappeared during their time, and that group had become powerful. . . . In Khurasan as gov­ ernor and commander of the army, he [Arghun] built major idol temples in Khabushan, and he spent most of his time conversing, eating, and drinking with the bakhshis in those temples. The belief he had for that sect and the worship he performed of the idols were beyond description.38

Kashmiri masters were well known for preserving a refined form of Buddhism that incorporated “both the speculative and logical tradition and the practice of Tantra and ritual.”39 Although Buddhism had ceased to be a dominant presence in the region of Kashmir by thethirteenth century, a long and rich tradition of scholarship was a distinctive feature of this area.40 Marco Polo traveled through this area on his way across the Pamir moun­ tains into the Taklamakan. He noted that The people of Kashmir are also idolaters, speaking a language of their own. Their knowledge of devilish enchantments is something marvelous. They make their idols speak. They change the weather by enchantment and bring on thick darkness. They accomplish such marvels by magic and craft that no one who has not seen them could believe them. I may say that they are the past masters of idolatry and it is from them that idols are derived. From this country there is a route leading to the Indian Sea [seas of al-Hind].41

In the late 1250s, distinguished scholar and Tibetan monk Orgyan pa made a pilgrimage to Orgyan in the region of Kashmir, where he drank from the turquoise waters of Lake Maru and visited the five springs of Garnatama mountain. At the prosperous town of Malot, Orgyan pa visited a temple he described as having been built by King Hülegü (Ilkhan Hülegü).42 After the second Mongol invasion of Kashmir in 1253, Hülegü also received wealth and slaves from the region, possibly skilled labor, to help with the construc­ tion of Buddhist temples in the Ilkhanate.43 Kashmiri monks Otoci and Na-mo supplied Hülegü with military and political intelligence, which he used successfully to defeat Quli Sultan (Hu-li Suan-T’an) and begin the pro­ cess of political control of Kashmir.44 When Kublai became khan in 1260, he retained the lion’s share of authority over Tibetan regional leaders, but Hülegü continued to post his own representatives and maintained sizeable territories in the area of Kashmir and western Tibet, including Ladakh. With the establishment of the Yuan court at Khanbalïq (Dadu) in 1271, Alchi in Ladakh 139

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Kashmir territories, home to various Buddhist sects, were divided between Hülegü and Möngke. Lakshamadeva (r. 1273–1285) was invested as both raja of Kashmir and Mongol vassal. Soyoung Choi, as noted earlier, is pres­ ently working on exciting research that demonstrates a fifty-year-long con­ nection between the Ilkhans and the monasteries they sponsored in western Tibet. She postulates that many Persians migrated to Tibet on the Ilkhan’s orders.45 Quanzhou, as we shall see, was another location for Ilkhanid­ sponsored migration intended to connect the dots of imperial overseas and overland trade communities. Local sect leaders such as Togdugpa (1203–1267) continued to bargain for connections to Mongol authority. A prominent Tibetan Buddhist monk of the Dagpo Kagyu school known for its artistic productivity, Togdugpa confirmed the rich gifts sent to him by Hülegü on three separate occa­ sions. In a letter addressed to “King Monke and Bodhisattva Prince Hülegü,” he wrote: After having completed the accumulation of merit, in order to gain Awakened Buddhahood fully, the Bodhisattva Prince who had gained con­ trol over many kingdoms, has given two large bre [approximately two kilo­ grams] of gold each, and a golden bowl each to glorious Pagmodru and precious Drigung Thel. Specifically, Pagmodru, to my humble self, a Great ‘Ja’-sa for the worship of Heaven and a walking stick with gold decorations topped by a rock crystal knob arrived. Then, to the monastic community staying at the glacial mountain Ti-tse [Mount Kailash], four great bre of sil­ ver arrived as financial support for the worship of Heaven. For all the great lamas (bla-chen) you had temples built and for the building of monastic institutions you gave many bre of gold. We keep these things in mind. . . . by taking ownership of this precious Kagyü school you have accumulated a great wave of accumulated merit. Even more specifically you have taken the ownership of Pagmodru, and keep it in your heart.46

Togdugpa also wrote to Kublai to make the case for additional sup­ port from the Yuan ulus.47 Ladakh was not included, however, in the 1268 and 1288 census takings conducted by the Yuan Mongols in Tibet, suggest­ ing that Ladakh retained a separate status.48 During the Mongol period, Hülegü exercised suzerainty through local representatives (yul bsruns) who held administrative and military authority.49 This history appears to have left a linguistic marker, for unlike other Ladakhi administrative terminology, the term for assistant village headman (do-ga-c‘e) is not Tibetan in origin but was most likely derived from the old Mongolian term darughaci.50 140 Chapter 5

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THE TABRIZ/ALCHI DIALOGUE: TEXTS, TEXTILES, AND TEXT MESSAGING IN MIDDLE EURASIA The illustration The Mountains between India [Al-Hind] and Tibet in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh draws our attention to the Ladakhi region and to an uniden­ tified temple of western Tibet. Although it is an imaginative leap to link this temple with Alchi and the Royal Drinking Scene of the Dukhang, it is also a historically viable consideration in terms of the geopolitics that defined Ladakh in its Eurasian context. Rashid al-Din, compiler of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, paid personal financial and political attention to developments in the Ladakh region. He purportedly had investments as well as cultural interests in the area. As already mentioned, when he needed expertise on Buddhism he turned to Kashmiri monks, among others. During Hülegü’s reign, large numbers of craftsmen were brought from Hind to Tabriz. The Royal Drinking Scene of the Dukhang shared an ethnic and cultural milieu with which Mongol, Turkic, and Iranian delegates from the Ilkhanate con­ nected. We do not know if any of them visited Alchi, but given contemporary diplomatic relations such a visit was within the realm of possibility. Taken together, these two paintings sustain a Eurasian commentary on thirteenthcentury material culture and provide an intriguing glimpse into the social world of women. The imagery of The Mountains between India [Al-Hind] and Tibet attempts succinctly to say something important about Buddhism and to con­ nect this with contemporary references to geopolitics. The artists who created this image hailed from the western Tibetan/Kashmiri area, near Ladakh. They fashioned familiar local details of dress, architecture, and geography into a composition that evoked an Ilkhanid perspective, including the trans­ mission of Buddhism to the Ilkhanate and the Mongol connection to the lands of Buddhism. The painting contains many puzzles. What mountains and what river bring the two sides of the picture into relationship? Are the two depicted figures simply travelers on the route between Tibet and Hind? Why did the artist choose to show a female figure in his representation of Tibet? Why is she sitting rather than walking? Why is the Indian figure on the move toward the west? The materiality of the scene points to some clues. Art historian Sheila Blair writes of this illustration that “the building on the right with down-turned eaves apparently derives from the Nepalese tradition of wooden architecture, and in front of it sits a woman in somewhat Tibetan dress. Her cross-legged pose, with small feet in black pointed shoes, is adapted from the standard figure of a Chinese emperor or an enthroned king.”51 Why, we might ask, does a woman sit in the pose of an enthroned Alchi in Ladakh 141

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king? Is she a queen? Is her dress somewhat Tibetan, Ladakhi (western Tibetan), or is hers the red jacket of the hula’an tägäläns, peoples noted in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh for their distinctive red dress and communities in Khitai on the Tibetan border?52 Blair goes on to write that the building on the left “with upturned eaves resembles a Chinese pagoda; the woman in front wears Indian dress with bare feet, trousers, sari, and shawl. Her trousers are made of a fabric decorated with paired wavy lines, a pattern that became common under the Ottomans.”53 Why is a woman in Indian dress walking toward a Chinese pagoda-like structure? The building on the left also fits the archi­ tecture of houses in the Uighur Qocho style, a feature of Turkish Buddhist material culture. Annemarie von Gabain has detailed this architecture and noted that the “brick foundation is made of alternating slate and light-blue bricks (glazed tiles), the banisters of both floors are woodwork in rusty red. The lower and upper ends of the rows of roof tiles, the first beams and their three decorations and the roof ridges are light green.”54 Thus the build­ ing on the left shares distinctive features with an older western Turkestan style. The composite architecture of the two buildings creates a space that is decidedly Buddhist but just as decidedly indicates a variety of ethnic and regional groupings within Buddhism. Considering the illustration from the perspective of artistic choices, the Turkic element is of note, as is the deci­ sion to construct the scene around two prominent female figures with no men in attendance. Returning to the dress of these two women, the figure on the left pres­ ents a particularly rich display. If her trouser fabric became a recognizable Turkic design under the Ottomans, was it a Turkic pattern in the thirteenth century? Marjo Alafouzo deduces from the work of al-Biruni that Buddhist Turks inhabited an area to the northeast of Kashmir in the eleventh century and began to appear in the historical records of Ladakh after this time.55 Blair writes of this figure that “She is festooned with jewelry, including a gold necklace and bracelets and ropes of pearls in her hair, and her earlobes are extended to her neckline. She carries a silver-tinted chauri, the fly-whisk made from a yak’s tail. The lavish use of silver and gold shows the importance of the painting.”56 What do we make of this innovative iconography? Is this a woman with elongated earlobes or an androgynous Buddhist figure?— perhaps a bodhisattva figure: elongated earlobes generally designated bud­ dhas, bodhisattvas, and saints. This does not look like a Buddhist nun and is no ordinary traveler. The contrast between the figure’s bare feet and ornate headdress is striking. Monks traveled barefooted, most travelers chose pro­ tective footwear for rough roads. The elongated earlobes indicate nobility and wealth in this or a past life, when heavy bejeweled earrings weighted down 142 Chapter 5

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and stretched the lobes. This figure suggests a living, walking Buddha— Buddhism on the move in the present. The emphasis on landscape suggests additional clues and layers of meaning with multiple signifiers. The river that holds the center of the illus­ tration between two mountain ranges must be the Indus River. In actual­ ity, the upper Indus River runs through Ladakh, where it descends from its source between Nepal and Tibet. “Upper Indus graffiti” left by travelers on rock surfaces from earlier centuries testify to the diversity and density of populations that passed through this region as well as to the extent to which Tibetan influence extended westward into Ladakh.57 What is most signifi­ cant visually about the Jami ‘al-Tarvarikh illustration of the Indus is that we are looking at its source, and by metaphorical extension at the source of Buddhism, located from this perspective in western Tibet and the Ilkhanid holdings in Ladakh. The Ilkhans beginning with Hülegü oversaw terri­ tories in fifteen specific locations throughout this area of western Tibet.58 These territories included pasturelands, market towns, and transit routes in a vital area between Tibet and Iran.59 The Indus River, as it flowed from Leh to Sind, also signified Ladakh’s connection to the seas of al-Hind. When Ilkhan Arghun sponsored three hundred Genoese to build a fleet at Basra that he might deploy to the Gulf of Aden to challenge Mamluk access to the Western and Eastern Seas, he was affirming the importance of trade along this al-Hind coast including passage on the Indus into Kashmir and Ladakh. More than a casual travel image, this illustrative choice carried with it the intent to highlight a region of economic and political importance to the Ilkhanate. The two female figures who inhabit this geographic space and con­ sequently define the social landscape call to mind the trope of the Land of Women fabled to reside in western Tibet among the Buddhist Turks. Contemporaries were well aware of these tales that circulated among travelers and authors. The trope had many versions and locations adapted to different times and places. Hamd-Allah Mustawfi al-Qazwin (1281–1349) produced for his patrons in Tabriz an account of the lands women governed in Iran and surrounding geographies. One particularly intriguing section tells of a City of Women located in the middle of a desert somewhere in the Maghrib near the equator. Mustawfi described that the women accepted Islam and lived without men, who perished if they accidently entered this land. The women reproduced by sitting in a special spring of water and becoming pregnant with girl children only. The women did all the work normally done by men and did not seek wealth or decorate themselves but instead shared all wealth equally. They had no desire for men in the City of Women, but if acclimated Alchi in Ladakh 143

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to outside lands could come to love a man. Mustawfi added, “Surely women such as these are to be preferred for excellence to most men.”60 Although this image of the land of women appears in other times and places, Mustawfi’s rendering is particularly sympathetic as an egalitarian, peaceful society, a sort of utopia made possible by the necessary exclusion of men. Much of Mustawfi’s geographic information drew on existing geogra­ phies from which he selected and edited passages. His adaptation seems well suited to his patrons at the Mongol court, whose lifestyle included women’s domains within their social organization and strong women, although not able to impregnate themselves! Previous versions of this tale had tended more toward ridicule and male sexual fantasy than thoughts about social fair play. Earlier allusions to a land of women included references to al-Waqwaq, a place with diverse locations and stories, all of them carrying disturbing and largely negative images of societies of women. Mustawfi, in his geography, did note a place called Waqwaq, which he identified as an island where the breeze wafting through trees made the sound of “waqwaq,” a place where there was abundant gold and a scarcity of iron, and where the king of the country was known by the name of Kashmir.61 The last detail is a segue into a plethora of riddled geographies and worldviews. The location of the land of women is ambiguous, but seems to have the greatest historical specificity with reference to the lands of western Tibet, including Ladakh. Herodotus’ fifth-century BCE histories included sto­ ries about woman warriors of Iranian extraction from the Black Sea area. When troops accompanying Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE returned home they brought with them stories from Iran and Hind about a utopian society of women called Uttarakuru, both a mythic and real land in Vedic and Buddhist literature.62 Many of the Greek accounts are of an ideal society ruled by women, suggesting the possibility that stories derived most directly from the upper Indus region were the most positive. This might account for some of Mustawfi’s laudatory perspective given that Buddhist scholars from Kashmir were a part of the Ilkhanid court research base. From recorded history we have a 445 CE account of Haza raids on Khotan that continued down the Indus River into Gandhara, where the raiders captured golden wine vases from the Land of Women (Nüguo in Chinese) and offered these to the Chinese court. The same year there is record of an envoy from Nüguo at the Chinese court. While Nüguo floats in the geographic imaginary between eastern and western locations on either side of Tibet, the western location is exactly in the area of Ladakh south of the Pamir Mountains, iso­ lated and an island unto itself for the most part. Xuanzang, a sixth-century CE Buddhist pilgrim, mentions a women’s paradise on the border between 144 Chapter 5

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Hind and eastern Iranian lands, where author Bettina Zeisler suggests there may have been many queendoms.63 The Royal Drinking Scene might credibly be read as a welcoming cer­ emonial and diplomatic event. From the historical record we know that the Land of Women produced drinking cups of great beauty. Although women in Mongol/Turkic nomadic communities joined in drinking and therefore political discourse, the cupbearing female was an unusual visual motif by any measure.64 There is one other example in a mural at Mangyu, Ladakh. As Marjo Alafouzo has noted, “it seems that the iconography of the cup offering is unique to 11th century Ladakh, and this geographically limited artistic representation suggests a specific politico-historical situation in the region.”65 In most subsequent extent representations of royal drinking scenes, the ruler already holds the cup.66 Women did not generally appear as cupbearers. If male cupbearers were present, a female would be depicted in a kneeling position. The Alchi image speaks of female authority that empow­ ers a male offerant. The welcoming female figures have authority from the Buddhist Turks’ perspective, suggesting a significant agreement between the two groups. Perhaps the Turks are to serve as patrons of the Alchi temples, bringing military protection for vulnerable communities with whom they share a commitment to Buddhist beliefs. The inscription associated with this image gives no names for the couple. It would be out of place for a mural in this temple location to be a standard marriage scene. It could, however, be read as an innovative take on ceremonial commitments, a kind of metamar­ riage of shared local interests. The Royal Drinking Scene appears from this vantage point to be a meet­ ing between nomadic Turks and the female ruler of a local Buddhist commu­ nity, both of whom are highlighted with halos. No inscriptions tell us who these individuals are, what they are doing, or when the scene might have taken place. The image occupies a foundation/donor location at the entrance of the hall. If it is a wedding scene, many features of the iconography are unexpected, suggesting either that it is not a wedding event or perhaps that is a symbolic “wedding” of mutual interests. “The hair of the centrally seated woman in the Dukhang is depicted in multiple thin plaits, which are entwined with strands of blue jewelry and similar strings of jewelry are also visible around her neck. . . . the central female also has a big blue ornament placed on her forehead, which resem­ bles the arrangement at the front of the perak (perag) headdresses in modern Ladakh.”67 The three figures who stand behind the cupbearing female are all women, in contrast to the five male figures who attend the Turkic gentle­ man.68 The robes of the women attendants are similar to each other. Are they Alchi in Ladakh 145

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religious figures? Buddhist nuns?69 The central woman’s feet are crossed in typical Khitai ruler pose; the man’s are in typical nomadic ruler pose, one leg extended out and the other bent beneath him. Why does the woman’s pose suggest that she comes to this ceremony as a ruler, a person of authority, more than the daughter of a royal family? Contemporary writers located a land with eighty towns ruled by a woman in the K’ang-yen valley including the gorges around Gilgit in the Gilgit-Indus River area.70 The central woman’s garment, though faded, appears to be red and plain compared to the decora­ tive Turkish style. Mustawfi, we remember, noted the simple dress of women in the Land of Women, exemplifying a devotion to simplicity. The Turkish man is more worldly with his entourage of soldiers and advisers. The woman is visually more central than the man. Her attendants are also higher up than the man’s. She is framed as a personage unto herself whereas the central man is paired with a smaller male figure also wearing a chequered waistband. The figure below who offers a drinking cup and scarf looks directly at the woman, not the man, as do other figures below. A female attendant above points to the central man, completing the circle of motion around the woman. Within the context of Ladakhi/Ilkhanate relations, the Royal Drinking Scene conjures additional interpretive possibilities. Created in the years immediately prior to the arrival of Hülegü in Ladakh and the subsequent diaspora of Kashmiri artisans to Tabriz, the social and intellectual milieu of the Royal Drinking Scene imagery intersects with both the pre-Mongol and Mongol eras. Visualization of exchange between two unmarried royal cou­ ples is entirely unusual in the art of surviving Tibetan temples. If the connec­ tion to Buddhist Turks is emphasized here, the role of Islam in the Ilkhanid regions must also be factored in. Charles Melville notes the Islamic Turkic component of Mongol royal imagery: We may suggest then, that in their appropriation of the literary vocabulary of pre-Islamic kingship, the Mongols (or rather, their advisors) were fol­ lowing a well-established model, which had been honed to a high polish in the ethical literature of the Saljuq period and was now absorbed into the historiographical works of the Il-Khanid era. As targets for this advice to rule with wisdom and justice and to keep society in order, the Mongols dif­ fered little from their Saljuq Turkish predecessors—whose outlook and life­ styles so closely matched their own—except that the Saljuqs were already Muslims when they arrived in Iran. This difference may partly explain the greater visible success of the Shahnama as a vehicle for this education of the new arrivals; . . . an attempt to mold the new conquerors to the image of the shahs of old, galvanized by the creative and artistic energy released by the Mongol’s conquest of Asia.71 146 Chapter 5

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While the Seljuqs and Mongols were equally nomadic, the Ilkhan’s ini­ tially Buddhist ideology arguably placed a stronger emphasis on the Mongols’ governance principles derived from the Mongol yasa and Tangut Buddhism, which could then be adapted to Islamic political guidelines. Buddhism, com­ bined with the challenges of governing a multicultural empire, moved the playing field toward secularism to a further extent than Islam had previ­ ously. In this connection Melville notes a decided secularism in the Great Mongol Shahnama compared with the frequent references to god and the divine descent of kings in Ferdausi’s Shahnama, written in 1010. Shifts in the direction of secularism and increased recognition of female authority to some measure went hand in hand. The court setting of The Royal Drinking Scene, with its distinctive depiction of male and female rulers, also resonated with the social environment that produced numerous Ilkhanid court illus­ trations showing Ilkhan and Khatun seated side by side as a royal couple. Many of these are collected in the Diez Albums and the illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama, an Iranian princely guide to kingship. Every khan shared his throne visually with a khatun. The scenes of the Mongol royal couples at court departed in significant ways from earlier ways of spotlighting leadership at the top. Seljuq court cul­ ture did not produce visual imagery of court life in general, let alone images that showed male and female rulers in the same frame. Women played important roles in Seljuk court life, but Buddhist ideology with its image making highlighted women’s roles at the Yuan and Ilkhanid courts. Relative to Buddhism, Islam did not tend to serve as a platform for women’s partici­ pation in central governmental matters. Counterevidence for this might be seen in the diminished status of Mongol women in Iran once Mongol rul­ ing elites converted to Islam in the later decades.72 This would seem to con­ firm a relationship between social options for women and governing beliefs. Nepalese/Tibetan Buddhist art, however, did not apply male/female imagery to political subjects until it crossed paths with women of the Yuan Mongol court. Nomadic practices and the roles women played in empire building drew out of Buddhist ideology a greater public and private space for female activity, which in turn provided a political legitimacy for elite female author­ ity. Turkish Buddhist communities would have shared this general outlook. The Alchi mural’s unusual features allude to this Turkish Buddhist milieu. Painted representations of textiles that cover the ceilings at Alchi carry many intricate dye designs, including a woman warrior design on several panels. Medallions surrounded by pearl roundels within depict two women paired off in stylized, dance-like combat. While the motif of “symmetrical pairs of female hunters is found in Coptic and Early Islamic textiles,” the female fig­ ures in the Alchi paintings share Hindu pictorial body types; in addition, the Alchi in Ladakh 147

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hunting and warrior themes display elements from Iranian artistic traditions, specifically of the Ghaznavid court.73 Women warriors, familiar to nomadic societies, were also a constituency within the Land of Women. And while hunter and warrior share certain sets of skills, the images included at Alchi specifically select women warriors, ritualized into dance forms. Such images of women were part of the cultural context relevant to contact in the era when Ilkhanid workshops were receiving artisans from Kashmir and western Tibet. The workshops at Alchi and Tabriz recognized different inflections of a visual language derived from the contact zone that included Tibetan Buddhism. Artistic circulation throughout western Tibet during the Mongol era is similarly visible at Alchi in a several-stories-high richly adorned clay bod­ hisattva that models a practice of producing clay figures when stone was not available. The “technique was apparently derived from eastern Turkestan where quarried stone did not exist. These clay figures were then painted with bright colors and the draperies decorated with flowers and designs and sometimes, as at Alchi, with different scenes from mythology and contempo­ rary life. The drawings of the Painted Garments of a Bodhisattva [at Alchi] were done at a period much later than the making of the statue itself and are apparently painted on top of an earlier layer of paintings. The Bodhisattva’s loin cloth reveals a fantastic world of designs.” 74 Madanjeet Singh dates the bodhisattva’s painted garments and other murals at Alchi to the thirteenth/ fourteenth century. He places The Royal Drinking Scene in the same time period, when it too may have acquired additional layers of paint and updated signifiers. Given the artistic status of the Dagpo Kagyü school in Ladakh and its ties to Hülegü, we might legitimately wonder if any of the touch-up work on the Alchi murals was done by artists of this school in keeping with Hülegü’s patronage of Greater Ladakh. The Alchi murals make visible the past history of transcontinental drift between Iranian and Buddhist motifs as well as the kinds of artistic materials that inspired a thirteenth-century textile messaging. Whether it was Mary’s robe of ultramarine or Green Tara’s gauze fitted top and tile-patterned skirt, these pigments and designs communicated status and location on a transcon­ tinental spectrum. Beyond clothing in The Royal Drinking Scene, paintings of luxury textiles cover the walls and ceilings with motifs of Iranian, Kashmiri, Tibetan, and Indian inspiration. Designs and pigments were signifiers of cosmopolitan reach and yet also unique expressions of the locale. The exact stylistic precedents of the Alchi murals are richly complex and have yet to be fully determined.75 Given the working environments of craftsmen and arti­ sans trained by the eleventh century in well-established local schools where they were free to follow employment possibilities, indigenous practitioners of 148 Chapter 5

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the arts easily integrated and circulated a variety of motifs including Hindu/ Buddhist swastikas, lotus-leaf patterns, and Parthian shot horsemen.76 The windstar (swastika) motif, for example, found in abundance in the painted ceiling textiles and robes of the Buddha at Alchi, would have been familiar to the elites of Siena or Constantinople as part of the contemporary reper­ toire of signifiers that connoted worldly status.77 A portrait of Saint Louis of Toulouse, today found in the Siena Pinacoteca, shows Louis clothed in a robe with large swastikas decorating a wide collar down both sides of the front of his jacket, not because of ancient world associations with the symbol, but because of contemporary references that both he and his patrons recognized. An auspicious sign in previous historical contexts, the windstar now took its significance from the political and commercial realities of the thirteenthcentury world of textile arts moving through Eurasian emporia. Armenian rug designs created north of Tabriz moved motifs from Eastern realms into Christian religious and trade networks. Certainly, Islamic decorative arts from the pre-Mongol period—the Palantine Chapel and the facade of the Cathedral in Palermo come to mind—had already set a pathway along which Eastern motifs traveled, but their value in the thirteenth century shifted to a Mongol Eurasian context. In the realms of Buddhism, which included overlap with Tabriz culture, Roger Goepper reminds us that Buddhist religious communities dressed their temples with great ceremony and at great expense. Tibetan-Himalayan imagery often created figures with few but always luxurious clothes and abundant jewelry, especially lavish strings of perfect pearls, the jewel at the heart of the lotus in Buddhist meditative practice. Pearl rondels framed many of the motifs that appeared on textiles and mural paintings, a borrowing from Buddhism into western Iran and back into Buddhist Kashmir. Just as Simone Martini labored over Saint Gabriel’s robe to create in paint an accurate rendering of Mongol nasij gold brocade, so the artists of the Alchi murals meticulously re-created images of luxury textiles on ceiling panels and clothing items. In both cases, the goal was to create the illusion of the real fabrics, which were extremely complicated in their structure, design, and coloring, and to integrate fiber arts with local standards of beauty and social value making.78 Interestingly, at the heart of the luxury textile world, Ilkhanid manuscript illustration chose not to produce elaborate representa­ tions of such fabrics. This may have been in large part due to the Ilkhanid use of Chinese ink-and-brush styles that emphasized fine line and wash techniques, a minimalist approach to convey meaning. It could also be that, as the possessors of Mongol imperial luxury textile wealth, it went without saying that the Ilkhanid court was drenched in such textiles. This did not have to be advertised; everyone knew. It could also be that in the context of Alchi in Ladakh 149

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Lippo Memmi, Saint Louis of Toulouse (paired with a portrait of Saint Francis), c. 1330. Credit: Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.

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Islamic preferences for nonfigural art, the effort to appeal to a Muslim audi­ ence required that luxury clothing be toned down. In general, however, the exquisitely crafted and painted textiles at Alchi prefigured, without predict­ ing, both the creation of signature Mongol najis gold brocade textiles and their transcontinental adulation. Geographically isolated, the Himalayan Kingdom of Ladakh was culturally and politically at the crossroads of centuries of history including the era of Mongol conquests. Most notably, many of the motifs found at Alchi, includ­ ing the lion-hunting scenes and pearl roundels, returned from Iran before Ilkhanid/Kashmiri/Ladakhi exchange only to be carried once again west­ ward, this time with Mongol imperial Buddhist inspiration, into Iranian lands including Tabriz. While the material base for colors was shared across Eurasia by the thirteenth century, techniques for using pigments varied by region and artistic conventions and were always subject to adaptation to local tastes. For technique, Ilkhanid manuscript painting drew primarily on the brush-and-ink style of Chan Buddhist and Song dynasty artistic conven­ tions, capturing individual features with energetic minimalist line strokes and evocative empty space. A minimalist palette of black, red, and blue dom­ inated Ilkhanid illustrations. Central Italian depictions used tempura paint to fill in details of textiles and space. The Italian palette also emphasized reds and blues, but included greens, yellows, gold, and white, as well as browns and black. At Alchi, mural art left no space unfilled while also applying fine line strokes within the practice of Buddhist and Hindu iconography. These Kashmiri-inspired paintings paid full attention to textile details and a range of colors. The lapis lazuli that appeared in each of these artistic venues trav­ eled from Afghanistan through shared networks of commercial and intel­ lectual exchange. Highly valued at each location, the same mineral conjured up a heightened sense of longing and exotic space at its most distant destina­ tions. Within the Buddhist frame of reference, the chant “Om Mani Padme Um” correlated colors with each of its six syllables based on Sankrit treatises on painting; colors evoked emotion that created visions, not simply images.79 Our path next runs north from Ladakh over the Hindu Kush and along the Tarim Basin to Turfan, over high snow-covered passes and hot sandy desert floors, a treacherous but also well-traveled route traversed by mer­ chants, religious figures, and armies before, during, and after the Mongol conquests. Viewing the Sumtek at Alchi before departing, we might pause before a mural identified as a Prayer Session with Buddha and Manichaean Cross of Light. The image glows in shades of crimson and orange. Medicinal plants prominently occupy the space between individual figures who vary Alchi in Ladakh 151

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Prayer Session with Buddha and Manichaean Cross of Light. Credit: Photograph courtesy of Jaroslav Poncar.

in their clothing, headdresses, and gestures. Everyone sits on a mat, no one kneels. Only the figure with a Mongol-style hat rests on a striped mat (stripes added during the Mongol era?), giving visual accent to his person. A plant defined by three branches with red leaves suspends itself above the Buddha’s head. The foundation row shows members of royal families on the left and a row of Buddhist monks on the right. Of the three laymen nearest the center, two wear Turkish-style headbands of the style seen in the Drinking Scene of the Dukhang, the one nearest the center sports a Mongol-style hat (again, added during the Mongol era?), and all wear central Asian-style robes. Two of these figures hold their hands front center in prayer position, a third one offers what looks like a flower. All face the Buddhist monks. The second and third layers frame the image of the Buddha toward whom all heads turn. The figures at this level are bare chested with similar hairstyles, long pieces of—white silk? pearls?—strung in swirls through their hair. One figure at the right-hand foot position sits with legs folded together. The Buddha’s right arm hangs down in this direction. A small altar with candlestick, chalice (or second candlestick?), and circular offerings rests above three white diamond shapes. In all this intriguing detail, the Manichaean cross interests us as a leitmotif that recurs through layers of Eurasian artistic and intellectual life and our story of eight independent but also interconnected cultural spaces. Several paintings at Alchi show strong Manichaean iconogra­ phy. Uighur Turks of eastern Turkestan, the area of Turfan, converted to Buddhism from their earlier Manichaean faith, which had a strong pres­ ence from Cairo to Quanzhou. Manichaeism is one of the world’s great lost religious traditions, especially with respect to the arts, that flourished in a subterranean fashion on the lead-up to and during the Mongol era. Manichaeism carried Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity in a theo­ logical and artistic mix. The Uighurs of the Turfan area were major partici­ pants in the contact zone of Iranian and Manichaean elements embedded in a Buddhist frame of belief that included the Alchi murals.80

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CHAPTER 6

Turfan in Uighurstan (Tarim Basin)

F

rom the worn and tattered paper fragments of a woodcut print, fortyseven faces obliquely gaze leftward in their quiet moment of prayer. Dressed in uniform ceremonial robes, the women wear distinctive Uighur Mongolian boqtaq headdresses while the men appear as monks with shaven heads or laymen with belted waists and head caps. Only one figure gazes rightward, a monk at the center of the top row. This is the Uighur Mungsuz family of Buddhist faith.1 The woodcut that captures their portraits is a frontispiece from a lost Buddhist text unearthed in Turfan and dated around 1300. Each figure is individually portrayed and named. Like the social diversity of Turfan itself, personal names reflect Chinese, Mongolian, and Uighur origins.2 All belong to a prominent lineage in service to the Mongol Khans at the Yuan court in Dadu. Produced in Beijing with cop­ ies sent to family members in the Uighur town of Qocho, the Mungsuz family portrait is steeped in layers of Uighur steppe culture. Perhaps more than any venue we have considered Uighur culture with its unique blend of Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Han to Song intellectual traditions was his­ torically the artistic core of thirteenth-century Eurasian artistic exchange. Educated circles in Iran/Iraq and Byzantium had long recognized the superior skill and enchanting qualities of portraiture and landscape art cre­ ated in the Turkic Buddhist contact zone. Both al-Ghazali in the tenth century and Rumi in the thirteenth century celebrated the region’s exper­ tise associated with vivid expressionism and realism in the depiction of liv­ ing organisms. Nizami wrote about the vivid paintings in the temples of Turkestan in his late twelfth-century novel The Haft Peykar (The Seven Portraits). The details of these reflections on art will be recounted below. With the Mongol era, the Franks too encountered the high regard in which these paintings were held and came to share in the exaltation of “eastern” art. The exact geography of this art was often confused. Marco Polo and others conflated the generic Khitai/Cathay in their contemporary usage with refer­ ences to the art of the Chin (eastern Turkestan), which in translation mistak­ enly became “Chinese.” As Leo Jungeon Oh has rightfully and insightfully 154

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noticed, the cloud motifs so commonly categorized as Chinese motifs when analyzing Ilkhanid miniatures of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh and other works are actually Buddhist cave art motifs and not found in Song literati land­ scape art.3 While possessing features from the Han to Song artistic conven­ tions, the art of Chin was that of the Buddhist temples and caves of eastern Turkestan, the region of Turfan. The Mungsuz family portrait drew on a rich and highly evolved artistry founded in earlier Manichaean and Uighur practices as well as pictorial tradi­ tions out of Buddhism, both Tibetan and Chan, from the pre-Mongol cen­ turies. The passionate importance affixed to painted images in relationship to religious belief was a critical layer of Buddhist art in the Turfan region. When in the third century Mani introduced his Manichaean synthesis of Christianity, Buddhism, and Mazdayasna (Zoroastrianism from the Greek) into the Eurasian world, he, as an artist himself, made clear that beauti­ fully executed manuscript and mural illustrations were an essential aspect of religious faith. Images evoked emotions that enhanced belief. Art was not an afterthought to faith but a foundation of faith. The more exquisite and well-executed the art, the more effective the spiritual experience. This commitment to the visual arts took root to the east in Buddhist and Church of the East centers in the centuries between Mani’s death and the Mongol

Mungsuz frontispiece. From Franke, “A Sino-Uighur Family Portrait: Notes on a Woodcut from Turfan,” The Canada-Mongolia Review La Revue Canada-Mongolie 4.1 (1978): 39. Turfan in Uighurstan 155

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Mungsuz frontispiece. From Annemarie von Gabain, “Ein Chinesisch-Uigurischer Blockdruck” (A Chinese-Uighur Woodblock), Tractata Altaica, dedicated to Denis Sinor (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 8–10.

expansion and traveled back to Iran and into Europe in the thirteenth cen­ tury via Mongol cultivation of the arts and the innovative applications it encouraged. The “raised arms expression of grief ” motif, to be discussed later in this chapter, is one example of thirteenth-century artistic transmission that spans the Turfan-Tabriz-Siena pathways. TURFAN’S UNIQUE HISTORY IN THE TARIM BASIN Environmental factors were critical to the social dynamics that made the Tarim Basin a commercial and cultural engine of the silk-road networks. Pulling goods and ideas into this area through the passes of the Pamir mountains, the Gansu corridor, or over the Hindu Kush supports a nar­ rative of circulation both material and intellectual. Doug Hitch offers the following analysis of Turfan’s unique profile.4 Home to twenty languages but possessing no native language, Turfan had a population of diverse faiths including Buddhist, Manichean, Church of the East Christian, and Mazda/ Zoroastrian communities. Other Tarim towns were exclusively Buddhist and possessed an identifiable indigenous language. East of the Pamir mountains, Turfan was also the only location with the karez irrigation system, known in the Tabriz area and perhaps introduced by Sogdian merchants in the eighth 156 Chapter 6

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century. Turfan’s legal institutions were also distinct from other Tarim oasis communities. Hitch suggests that climate change and consequent migratory patterns explain part of Turfan’s unique features: humid environmental con­ ditions that supported grasslands attracted pastoral nomads around Turfan unlike the drier desert landscape and oasis agriculture of other Tarim towns; when the climate gradually became drier around Turfan starting in the sec­ ond century CE, pastoralists appear to have slowly retreated as grasslands turned to desert leading to a period of immigration from the west bringing with it multiple languages that became dominant and knowledge of keraz irrigation that turned Turfan into a site for oasis agriculture; after a renewal of warm and humid conditions in the ninth to twelfth centuries, Turfan was once again dry from 1300 to the present. In other words, climate change that alternated between dry and humid made Turfan alternately a desirable site for pastoralists and then oasis agriculturalists who left behind linguistic and technical traits unique to Turfan in the northeast corner of the Tarim Basin. This scenario, born out by pollen records in the area, suggests that during most of the Kushan empire (second century BCE to third century CE), Turfan was a nomadic site rather than an administrative center based in oasis agriculture. Hence, Turfan remained outside of the legal and linguis­ tic reach of the Kushan. Once Turfan became a sedentary agricultural oasis state beginning in the late Kushan, the area experienced sudden, large-scale immigration. This was the period when emperor Kanishka I (127–150 CE) extended the Kushan military and Buddhist cultural reach from Turfan to the Gangetic plain with his capital in Gandhara. The possibility of agricul­ ture at Turfan made the land appealing to numerous Iranian groups who brought Manichaean beliefs into the area and built irrigation networks simi­ lar to those found at Tabriz. The second to eighth centuries were rich in artis­ tic developments that blended Manichaean and Buddhist imagery. By the ninth century Manichaean Uighur control of the area bought further invest­ ments in infrastructure and art. Even as more humid conditions returned in the ninth to twelfth centuries, Turfan retained its urban cosmopolitan environment enabled by karez technology and a wealthy political elite. As a result, “Because of climate change, much new oasis agricultural land became available in Turfan. The new land attracted immigrants from all directions, from many ethnicities, religions and languages. They created a cosmopoli­ tan community, probably not often paralleled in the history of the world.”5 The political history of Turfan was the back drop to the region’s artistic legacy, which included cave art at Qocho, Bezeklik, and Kizil. Early history of the area comes into focus with the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) con­ quest of the Tarim Basin in 107 BCE, after which Turfan see-sawed between being an independent state and a tribute state to regionally dominant powers, Turfan in Uighurstan 157

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as it did during most of its history including the Mongol era. A primarily Turkic nomadic peoples of the Altai mountains, the Uighurs during the fourth to sixth centuries engaged in a series of struggles against rival Turkic tribes and the Buddhist Rouran Khaganate that dominated the Mongolian Steppe from 330–555. During political turmoil that eventually brought the extension of Rouran authority over the Xiongnu state of the Northern Liang (397–460), many prominent families including Uighur groups fled the chaos with the most prosperous among them seeking new investment opportuni­ ties and choosing to became patrons of the first Buddhist cultural centers in Gansu. Giving way to pressure from the Rouran in 439, remnants of the Northern Liang royal Juqu family fled to Gaochang where they established a state, founded Buddhist caves, and promoted the protection and marketing of superior silk textiles, only to have it all perish at the hands of Rouran forces in 460. Gaochang itself, however, despite the rise and fall of powers, had continued to rise from its status as a Han military colony established in 60 BCE to political and commercial prominence that peaked during the years 442–500. Uighur families in the area who converted to Buddhism spon­ sored the Thousand Buddha caves at Bezeklik. Work began on the Mogao caves to the southeast of Turfan in 366, and the Buddhist caves at Kizil and Yunkang were developed beginning in 450. Toyok, considered to be the oldest Buddhist cave temple site nearest Turfan, was also begun in the fifth century. Always maneuvering to sustain its own autonomy, Turfan entered into a period under Turkic rule in 487–541 just prior to the conquest of the Tarim Basin by the Tang dynasty (618–906) and an extended period of com­ petition for the area among Tibetan, Tang, and Turkic rivals. The Qu family (ethnically Han) ruled as the Gaochang Kingdom (500–640) for nine gen­ erations under ten kings until the Emperor Taizong (r. 627–649) brought Turfan under Tang dynasty domination. It was Qu Wentai who welcomed the celebrated Buddhist monk Xuanzang to Turfan in 626. Qu Wentai later formed an unsuccessful alliance with the western Turks against the Tang dynasty rulers who eventually subjugated Gaochang gaining access to Tarim and Transoxiana. When the Rouran began to fail, the Göktürk (Türük) emerged as suc­ cessor rulers of the steppe. Only a successful alliance with the Sui-Tang rul­ ers eventually brought the Uighurs back into stable control of the steppe. The Uighurs conducted themselves adroitly in this complex political envi­ ronment. As an ally to the Tang, Uighur forces helped defeat western Turkic tribes and assisted in the suppression of the mid-eighth century An Lushan Rebellion that severely challenged the stability of the Tang. Political reali­ ties across the region began to shift as Abbasid Islamic forces made their first moves into Central Asia successfully engaging Tang forces at Talas in 158 Chapter 6

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744 but also realizing the limits of their military action. Taking advantage of this situation, the Uighurs leveraged a competitive edge over their own rivals through mutually beneficial arrangements with the Tang. From 744 to 840, the Uighur Khaganate commanded the eastern steppe. Victory over other Turkic tribes, an alliance with the Tang against Tibet, and support of Sogdian merchants all added substantially to state revenue made this pos­ sible. During the reign of Uighur Kaghan Tengri Bögü, the empire stretched from Shiwei (Manchuria) through the Gobi Desert to the Altai Mountains. From Central Asia looking east Turfan blended into the land of the Khitai, from the Tang perspective it was called Xizhou, the western state. When for a short period in 792 Tibetans controlled Turfan and the Gansu corridor, a pathway for Tibetan beliefs and material culture briefly opened that would be reactivated once again in the thirteenth century. Manichaeism, popular among the Sogdians, became at this time the state religion of the Uighurs, giving them access to both Christian and Buddhist practices. By 840 Uighur leadership precipitated a conflict with neighboring Kyrgyz tribes for the lat­ ter’s support of Uighur enemies. Mobilizing a fierce defense, the Kyrgyz defeated the Uighur Khaganate. The victorious Kyrgyz then returned to their secured homeland with little interest in the labors of empire building. Loss of empire sparked a Uighur diaspora. Persecution faced by Uighurs in Mongolia after the fall of their empire resulted in massive migration of Uighur populations into the Turfan region.6 Communities dispersed west­ ward from the steppe into the Turfan area, leaving the rest of their for­ mer territory to local rulers. Meanwhile, a Sogdian diaspora fleeing Muslim rule moved eastward for Turfan. The Sogdians from the area of Samarkand brought not only Manichaeism into the Uighur kingdoms but a formidable skillset of commercial and administrative abilities including a system of writ­ ing that the Uighurs would adapt.7 Two centuries later Uighur communi­ ties, having assimilated Sogdian culture, would play this role as managers of wealth and learning for the Mongols. Uighur kings (idiquts) retained their nomadic lifestyle moving between Qocho in winter and Beshbalik in the summer. A concentration of Uighur communities gathered at Gaochang from where they governed through the Ganzhou (870–1036) and Qocho Kingdoms (856–1209). At Gaochang they collected fees on goods in transit along rich commercial routes that also had military value, but the Uighurs of Turfan were traders and culture bearers not soldiers. They were espe­ cially well-known for their musical skills and instrumentation to which pic­ torial evidence attests.8 These communities continued to sponsor Tibetan Buddhist and Manichaean art as they rebuilt political prestige, moving between the vicissitudes of independence and vassalage to the Kara-Khitans and others. Although cave art had developed in the Turfan region prior to Turfan in Uighurstan 159

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the establishment of the Uighur Khaganate, art historian Zsuzsanna Gulácsi has noted that, “The artistic output of the Turfan region was undoubt­ edly boosted by the arrival of Uygur [sic] control in the early ninth cen­ tury. Simultaneously, the once solely nomadic Uygur society and culture went through dramatic changes.”9 Uighurs eventually cast their lot with the Khitans under the Liao dynasty and allied with the Mongols when the lat­ ter defeated the Liao. Uighurs essentially gave up their empire building and instead prospered as a client state with commercial and bureaucratic privi­ leges. Through almost three centuries, Turfan was the destination of mer­ chants, artisans, and scholars of all faiths and ethnicities. THE MANICHAEAN SUBSTRATA OF EURASIAN ART AND BELIEF The “raised arms expression of grief ” motif found in The Lamentation of the Buddha (8th cen Turfan region), the Death of Alexander the Great in the Great Mongol Shahnama (Tabriz, 1330s), Simone Martini’s Lamentation of Christ (Siena, 1340), as well as Byzantine entombment scenes both before but mostly after the Mongol period provides an artistic arc for a brief introduc­ tion to Manichaeism.10 The Iranian philosopher Mani (216–76 CE) launched a powerful movement in Eurasian history that we have all but forgotten or erased. His impact had consequences that were both wide spread and long lived, for even when the faith was suppressed, the artistic impulse prevailed. A Uighur artistry devoted to Buddhism within a Manichaean frame pro­ duced exquisite art, much of it mural paintings in caves at Bezeklik to the east of Turfan, Kizil to the west, and Dunhuang to the southeast, all in the area of the Tarim Basin and northern silk-road route above the Taklamakan Desert. The hills surrounding Turfan were home to numerous temples and their art. Much of the artistic output of Turfan region resurfaced in the early twentieth century as A. von Le Coq discovered a wealth of written documents including fragments from the illustrated text of Mani’s Gospel.11 Across the Eurasian continent, Mani’s artistic and religious philosophies had a relationship to matters of art and faith for over a thousand years. From the third to the seventh century Manichaeism had a major presence in the Roman-Byzantine world as it did from the third to the tenth in the SasanidAbbasid territories that extended to Ladakh. Hans-Joachim Klimkeit sug­ gests that the fresco paintings at Alchi show evidence of Manichaean artistic practices and that Alchi may have been a refuge for Manichaean painters during the Islamization of Central Asia.12 From the eighth to the eleventh century Manichaeism was especially strong in the Tarim Basin that included Turfan and extended into the east Asian zone south to Quanzhou.13 While 160 Chapter 6

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nearly all societies had a pictorial practice, Manichaeism elevated figural and nature art to a canonical place. In each of the four examples mentioned above, the desire to innovate by artistically representing powerful emotions prompted a search for appro­ priate imagery, alongside the conviction that high quality visual effects best conveyed spiritual messages. Earlier periods of exchange and transmission come into play here. When Uighur artists in the eighth century, newly con­ verted to Buddhism or Manichaeism, began to produce art for their Turkic communities, they drew in part from images developed in the Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms to the southwest including Gandhara, whose art and architecture were a fusion of Hellenistic and Hindu body imagery from the third century. Eye-catching expressions of passionate grief in scenes that depicted The Lamentation of the Buddha appear to have inspired Uighur art­ ists working on murals at Kizil and other Tarim Basin sites.14 These artists sketched figures with rounded, full bodies that hinted of their Hindu inheri­ tance through the Gandharan Buddhist heritage. The same figures pulled at their own hair, cut their faces and breasts, and raise their arms in shat­ tering grief. Such motifs became part of the artist’s playbook for expressing extreme sorrow of especially exalted personages. It was during the seventh century in Byzantium that the Life of the Virgin by Maximus the Confessor first introduced the notion that Mary’s experience at her son’s crucifixion was one of unbearable anguish and tender compassion.15 George of Nicomedia in the ninth century and Anselm in the eleventh century continued a textual tradition that highlighted Mary’s emotional state and her extreme sorrow. Stephen Shoemaker notes that within the Latin Church this attention to Mary’s very human grief did not appear in texts until the eleventh century.

Lamentation of the Buddha. From Annemarie von Gabain, Das Uigurische Königreich von Chotscho, 850–1250 (The Uighur Kingdom at Qocho, 850–1250) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961), 27, fig. 5.

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Looking at the situation from the perspective of the visual arts, we find that the imagery for representing extreme grief in visual terms has clear examples in the early Gandhara to Turfan transmission of Buddhist art. The integration of Buddhism with Manichaeism and Church of the East prac­ tices at Turfan provided the medium for further transmission of the “raised arms expression of grief.” In the Latin world prior to the Mongol era, the raised arms position signified prayer, not grief. While the Greek Orthodox Church produced an earlier textual tradition emphasizing Mary’s compas­ sion and grief, there are few Byzantine artistic examples of the “raised arms expression of grief ” before the Mongol era. Not until the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries did this motif simultaneously appear in the Latin world and at Tabriz. The Death of Alexander the Great in the Great Mongol Shahnama and Simone Martini’s Lamentation of Christ both innovate with the raised arms and hair pulling images we find in sketches related to the Buddhist Kizil murals. The textual basis for this innovation was set earlier, but the impetus and opportunity to seek appropriate visualizations of this heightened emotion came with an opening of the Mongol cultural empo­ ria. From what we have seen, the European and Iranian consideration of art from the Uighur and Khitai regions is not surprising. There was a well-estab­ lished consensus that the best art came from this region. Behind this attri­ bution of superior artistic skill to eastern groups identified in translation as “Chinese” was the assumption widespread in Muslim literature of the tenth to fourteenth centuries, as Michal Biran has pointed out, that when flee­ ing Sasanid persecution, Mani had escaped to “China” where he converted most of the population to Manichaeism and gained a following devoted to cultivation of Mani’s high artistic skills.16 We also know that the pathways opened by Mongol rule allowed fluid passage of imagery through diplomatic and commercial routes from one artistic environment to another. The con­ temporaneous appearance of this precise expression of grief across geopo­ litical centers suggests visual confirmation of shared standards of excellence and mutual access. No matter how we look at all this mixing and match­ ing, Manichaeism was a subterranean current that flowed beneath Eurasian attention to the painted expression of human emotion and beauty. The story of Manichaeism presents itself here as a philosophical under­ current of Eurasian art history from the third to the fifteenth century CE. Sharaf al-Zaman Tahir Marvazi writing in the early twelfth century recog­ nized the widespread appeal of Mani’s philosophy and its association with the arts. He connected the high quality of the arts of the region of Sin and Cin with Manichaean beliefs: “With them the art of (making) images is held for (divine) worship and approach to God because Mani had given them such orders and beguiled them with the words of philosophers. The latter say as 162 Chapter 6

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the final conclusion of their philosophy that one is agreeable to God in pro­ portion to (what) human power can achieve.”17 Marvazi accurately identified the faith’s profound commitment to images. By the thirteenth century hun­ dreds of Buddhist and Daoist monasteries extended from the Turfan region to the Pamir mountains diffusing the arts of south and east Asia. Ernst Diez has argued that in viewing the mural art of these structures, “we are fac­ ing Mongolian, not Chinese, paintings” and that their style constitutes “an advanced form of Medieval Buddhistic painting preserved in the caves of the Northern Tarim Basin.”18 Of these same murals Annemarie v. Gabain with regard to multi-ethnic diversity of the region and the genre of portraiture has written, “By sharpening and typifying the gaze of others, the Uighurs naturally recognized themselves more clearly, and this circumstance enabled them to develop a portrait art. The intention to achieve portrait similarity is particularly evident.”19 Manichaean male and female figures abound: favor­ ite colors were red and blue. Gabain and others have also noted that in many Pranidhi (Vow) pictures from Turfan “the Buddha is surrounded by a whole court of reveries, namely, beings from the world of the gods, yaksas and men, the latter being fathers and saints of the past, from far and near countries, as well as by the presence of foreign and related peoples.”20 First an artist and then a religious leader, Mani understood the power of art to move people’s beliefs and emotions. Mani had declared, “I am a prophet through painting.” 21 For Mani, who proposed a synthesis of Ahuramazdaism (Zoroastrianism), Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism, finely painted images were an essential way for most individuals to receive knowledge of his new faith, Manichaeism. On the illustrated manuscript page or mural wall, people could “see” the integration of motifs from various beliefs into a new, beautiful whole. In the Greek Platonic tradition this was consistent with the idea that through education people would learn to love what was beautiful. For Plato, however, that could not be left in the hands of artists. Seeing no significant divide between philosopher king and artist, Mani attempted to articulate and illustrate a syncretic religion, for this he was eventually flayed alive until dead. His followers, however, continued to develop his ideas alongside the practice of spreading their beliefs through beautifully illustrated manuscripts. Perhaps because Mani sought to integrate separate belief systems he saw a heightened value in relying on images to educate and emotionally draw converts to Manichaeism. One thousand years later, the Ilkhanid Mongols would sponsor a similar use of heavily illustrated manuscripts to integrate a polyglot empire of even more diverse religious groupings. Plato’s republic did not envision a society of such diversity. The Platonic quest for the Ideal would eventually carry into Islamic preferences for the text over the picture in descriptive matters. Beauty, desire, and belief Turfan in Uighurstan 163

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merged in the Manichaean artistic tradition. The world for Mani was a sea of suffering, beauty opened the path to desire for salvation. Desire motivated by beauty achieved salvation. Hence, Mani produced not only texts but paint­ ings, and not only paintings but paintings in color. This became the prac­ tice of his disciples. Even hideous images could be painted to accentuate the Light of god, symbolized by the sun, the moon, and pearls.22 By Persian legend, Mani spent a year in a cave and emerged with an astonishing Picture Book (Ardahang) that was evidence of his divine mission. Perhaps this is related to the clear preference for cave complexes and art within the Buddhist/Manichaean tradition. Aside from literary evidence of the Picture Book, the murals, miniatures, and silk paintings found in the Turfan region are our only surviving knowledge of this book and its impact. The Ardahang was a book of Mani’s teachings with beautifully executed illus­ trations of his most important cosmological concepts and written in an ele­ gant calligraphic script developed by Mani himself.23 Bayanu ’l-Adyan, an eleventh-century Persian author of note, wrote, “Mani, they say could draw a line on a piece of white silk in such a way that, if one pulled out a single thread, the whole line disappeared; he was the author of a book with vari­ ous kinds of pictures, which they call the Erzeng of Mani; it exists in the treasury of Ghaznin.”24 A current of Manichaeism linked every one of the eight sites visited in this study from Siena and Cairo to Alchi, Turfan, and Quanzhou. As a stateless religion for most of its existence, Manichaeism was vulnerable to official persecution but also functioned within extensive neighborhood-based networks that provided their own strength and flexibility, pulling toward Christian or Buddhist emphasis depending on the composition of local com­ munities. Alongside a Manichaean monastic movement in Egypt, Rome, and Anatolia, Manichaean activities flourished around 290 in the Fayum district of Egypt, where Coptic Manichaean manuscripts in Persian and Aramaic have been found.25 Eustathius in 370 began to establish Manichaean mon­ asteries in Anatolia. Julia of Antioch converted the city of Gaza to Mani’s Religion of Light in the fourth century at the same time that the Mogao caves developed at Dunhuang southeast of Turfan displayed Manichaean elements. As the Latin Church attempted to consolidate an orthodoxy from the fifth century forward, persecution of popular Manichaean groups went into full swing. Pope Leo in 443 and Gregory I from 591 to 604 engaged in extensive antiManichaean book burning campaigns at a time when Mani had followers in Africa, Sicily, and Calabria. Queen Isadore mobilized against Manichaeans in Seville during the decades 601–636. Manichaean movements, known as Cathars, would revive across northern Italy, southern France, and Spain in 164 Chapter 6

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the tenth to thirteenth centuries. In 1167 Manichaeans had their own church council at Toulouse, attended by five French Bishops plus one from Lombardy and one from Constantinople. The Roman Church in response stepped up persecution of Manichaeism with charges of heresy and death sentences. 26 Further east, Manichaeans did not fare much better in Byzantium where book burnings and death penalties for monks forced groups undercover. Although some Islamic rulers considered Manichaeism to be a religion of The Book along with Christianity and Judaism, the Abbasid rulers did not gener­ ally tolerate Manichaean and forced its retreat from Baghdad to Khorasan and Samarkand. Repeated persecution of Manichaeism through book burn­ ing had taken its toll by the tenth century when Persian scholar al-Biruni had to search for fourteen years to locate a copy of Mani’s Mysteries.27 Al-Biruni could find no texts west of Samarqand, though there were Manichaean tem­ ples around Khorasan at the time of his search. Although the Tang dynasty in its later years issued edicts against Manichaeism, the faith generally found it easier to function below the radar of state authority in east Asia. Some Manichaean texts had been worked into a revised Daoist canon in the twelfth century; these found popularity in Henan and the coastal province of Fujian. In Turfan, during the height of the Uighur Khaganate (744–840) when Manichaeism enjoyed state sponsorship, Master Yazd-Mari-Aryansha from 790 to 795 produced new Manichaean texts and translated existing texts. Over the centuries, many Manichaean texts written in Persian and Aramaic Syriac were deposited in Turfan for safe keeping.28 SIYAH KALEM (BLACK PEN): SHADOW WORLD OF THE MUNGSUZ PORTRAIT? A collection of fifty to eighty images held in the “Central Asian/Mongol” files of the Topkapi Sarayi Library among hundreds of related miniatures from the period, the Siyah Kalem miniature paintings have been the subject of much scholarship and debate.29 The subject matter, painter, and place of origin are all undetermined, and likely to remain so. The extant min­ iature paintings have long since lost their context as illustrations in bound manuscripts. They do, however, display visual elements from Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Sufism without belonging entirely to any one artistic practice or belief system. The images of the Siyah Kalem miniatures on several counts are unique to the Mongol and immediate post-Mongol periods.30 Considered as a genre of Mongol-era Turfan, the robust, animated images of dancing demons and laundry-washing campers are perhaps less of an enigma if we discard the search for a single creator. In style, emotional tone, and innova­ tive quality, they are perfect expressions of late Mongol-era social conditions that created new spaces for artistic expression. Gürbüz Erginer has identified Turfan in Uighurstan 165

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the creators of the Siyah Kalem paintings as “Marketplace Painters” of the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries familiar with silk-road destinations. 31 David J. Roxburgh notes the painter’s or painters’ “wide-ranging visual affinities” and “visual learnedness” in terms of artistic styles and subjects, again sug­ gesting the expansive material and cultural opportunities that were a hall­ mark of Mongol rule.32 For Robert Hillenbrand the Siyah Kalem paintings belong to a genre of secular art, including illustrated editions of the romance of Bayad and Riyad and al-Hariri’s al-Maqamat (Assemblies), about which he observes, “An entire panorama of 13th-century Arab life unfolds before our eyes. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, this world vanishes forever for rea­ sons that cannot easily be fathomed.”33 Completed in 1237, the al-Maqamat belonged to the Baghdad school of manuscript illustration. With the con­ quest of Baghdad by Hülegü’s forces in 1258, much of the city’s finest literary and artistic collections was carted off to Tabriz, where artists in the imperial workshops fused styles and themes from across the empire into the signa­ ture products of the Ilkhanid court. Hillenbrand notes a unique emotional depth in the Siyah Kalem paintings that he does not find in the Baghdad manuscripts. Motion and emotion marked artistic creations in relationship to Mongol aesthetics. Olga Grabar describes the Baghdad school approach found in al-Wasiti’s al-Maqamat as a “realism of intent.”34 Although the works of the Baghdad school sketched everyday life with delightful and skill­ ful artistry, the images of plants, animals, and people remained stereotypic and caricature-like, short of the realism and naturalism that defined the Siyah Kalem images. Gürbüz Erginer has pointed out that the Siyah Kalem miniatures in fact show little, and in some cases nothing, of the main signifi­ ers of nomadic life—tents and herds; rather, the images are constructed more around the theme of a journey and those who journey.35 Because the Siyah Kalem images were from their origins a visual fusion of daily life and spiritual exercises and were not primarily illustrations of secular stories as were those of the al-Maqamat, the former achieved a striking realism through expressive body language that conveys spiritual struggle: powerfully grounded figures that are at the same time off-ground. This use of body images fell into dis­ favor among post-Mongol illustrators of Arabic literature. Textual links to the Siyah Kalem collection have not been explored and may provide a critical missing link. M. S. İpşiroğlu briefly mentioned Buddhist iconographic context for some of the Siyah Kalem miniatures but saw the subject matter of the images as primarily nomadic. Emel Esin did more to develop the connections to Tantric art but held to the shamanism of nomadic life for her primary context. Additional contextual evidence may reside in some of the Tantric texts specific to the Turfan region. Here recent 166 Chapter 6

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work done by Nobuyoshi Yamabe on Turfan visualization sutras offers cor­ roboration for the Buddhist-centered world that inspired the artists of the Siyah Kalem and the Mungsuz family portrait. While demons were part of shamanic lore, the yaksas descriptions in the Turfan visualization texts reso­ nate in detail with the paintings of Siyah Kalem. Yaksas were black-skinned demons that inhaled and spit fire. Flames could exude from the pores of their bodies, and they could set houses on fire. Their bodies and faces took on gro­ tesque and bestial shapes. Textual passages titled Observation of Monstrous Experiences as Meditative Objects introduced visualization exercises designed to allow the practitioner to encounter the yaksas as a path to growth of con­ sciousness. Turfan visualization sutras describe states of consciousness in which “[The practitioner] sees yaksas who are naked, black, and skinny. Two fangs go upward, and fire burns on their heads. Their heads are like those of oxen, and the tips of their horns rain blood.”36 Both demonic and human figures of the Siyah Kalem share the same physical features of wrinkled skin, a range of skin tones, contorted pos­ tures, and intensity of emotion. While all the Siyah Kalem figures have a solid earthy stability, their feet are often arranged soles turned upward in a way that could not support their physical weight, creating a paradoxical posture. The soles of feet in Buddhist iconography suggest spiritual beings; graphically they suggest stages of movement. M. S. İpşiroğlu has beauti­ fully captured this paradoxical physicality in a comparison with the work of Michelangelo. While Michelangelo contains his figures within a geometric ordering, Siyah Kalem releases tumultuous energies without measure; there is common to both “a striving to catch the movement and dynamism of the body, a striving which brings a loosening and dissolution of its mass.”37 The dualism of forms characteristic of the Siyah Kalem further substan­ tiates ties to Tantric texts and their teachings. Many of the images invoke intense engagement between two forms: two demons eyeball-to-eyeball saw­ ing a tree (Hazine 2153.141a), two rope makers (Hazine 2153.141a), three figures blocked as two with hemp plant (Hazine 2160.10a), and two dancing demons (Hazine 2153.64b). The dualism of forms suggests dynamic tension, motion within a whole—earth and heaven, good and evil, self-love and love of the other, the persona and the shadow, yin and yang. This space is the existential crucible of change and spiritual growth blended into a story that follows the daily life of diverse silk-road travelers in real time. Talat Parman describes the function of this dualism, “the double shows us that it is our fate to be divided. . . . What is described as simultaneous time is actually the time of the metamorphosis in mirror image.”38 These are energetic parts of a paradoxical whole. The bull and lion (Hazine 2160.90b) that engage each other are separate, but a magnetism holds them in locked relationship, eye Turfan in Uighurstan 167

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to eye, every muscle set to the move of the other. The horses paired in the camp scene (Hazine 2153.8b) are mirror images in that we see the front of one and the back end of the other, separate but side by side. Figures in this same image pair off, one clothed, one unclothed, again separate but side by side, involved in a way that suggests action prior to the scene and wonder­ ment about what will come next. Like the enigmatic teachings of visualization texts, these miniatures are visual puzzles. They invite third-party imaginative reflection. There are paradoxes for meditation. Common tasks such as braiding rope or sawing wood do not make sense. Images that look real beg the question, What is wrong with this picture? The rope maker’s spindle has no staff from which the finished cord could be drawn; there is no understandable relationship to the source of material—in this case raw goat hair. In another image demons appear to be cutting a tree that is alive (standing) but not alive (no branches and foliage). Their bodies seem to push forward rather than back and forth. The saw blade cuts vertically and horizontally at the same time. These images illustrate a lost narrative text but nonetheless retain the visual power to extract lively psychological resonance with fear, whimsy, and intrigue. Observing

Siyah Kalem, Sawing, Hazine 2153, 141a. From Ben Mehmed Siyah Kalem, Insanlar ve Cinlerin Ustasi (I, Mehmed Siyah Kalem, Master of Humans and Demons) (Istanbul: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanligi, 2004), 228–229. 168 Chapter 6

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that the Siyah Kalem paintings invite a narrative reading associated with no longer extant texts, David J. Roxburgh also suggests that “Perhaps the point of [the] paintings was that they would remain enigmatic?”39 The Tantric Buddhist elements associated with the Siyah Kalem images are also compatible with its Islamic cultural and spiritual layers. The material culture of Qalandar Sufism (related to Tantric Buddhism), for example, pro­ vides some clues to the Sufi clothing styles and hats found in the Siyah Kalem miniatures. James White has recently argued that the Siyah Kalem paint­ ings be considered as satirical and a response to the Mongol era. He writes that “satires of both mainstream and antinomian Sufis may have assumed a particular relevance when the social and political instability created by the Mongol invasion had begun to augment the popularity and visibility of der­ vish groups and their sheykhs.”40 The presence of Sufi groups at the Ilkhanid court was a well-known factor in Mongol conversions to Islam. White makes the case that, when placed within the larger context of Persian and Arabic legal and literary materials, the Siyah Kalem (Siāh Qalam) images convinc­ ingly caricaturize illicit behavior that overtakes reason. Alcohol and hash­ ish appear as concerns.41 The observation made above regarding the puzzle images of sawing and spinning that do not make logical sense are consistent with this reading of the images as moral lessons, not dissimilar to the scene of Gluttony associated with demonic behavior in the Genoese text of the Vices created for the Coccarelli family. The worries about demonic possession and loss of control as societies shifted across Eurasia during this period appear to have been of concern to more than one locale and inclination of faith. This historical perspective perhaps makes sense of some of the seem­ ingly contradictory and inexplicable elements in the Siyah Kalem collection and the cultural milieu of Turfan during the Mongol era. In a sense, all extant scholarship on these images is true—different parts of the same danc­ ing demons. Perhaps the questions have been too narrowly focused. Even following the thesis of Zeki Velidi Togan that Siyah Kalem was an early sixteenth-century artist working at the Herat court, the artistic base of his creations was clearly Buddhist Uighur mural art of the Turfan/Kashmiri cultural exchange zone during the Yuan period.42 Mazhar Şevket İpşiroğlu, after additional study, concluded that the Siyah Kalem miniatures belonged to fourteenth- to fifteenth-century Central Asian Turco-Mongol commu­ nities.43 The western drift of these images suggested by this scholarship might indicate new layers of Sufi repurposing of Uighur imagery. Gürbüz Erginer summarizes recent scholarship by noting a consensus among art historians that Siyah Kalem was a designation added perhaps by a cataloger to works created by a number of artists, possibly itinerant artists, that shared the same style, perhaps a school in Turkestan in the fourteenth to fifteenth Turfan in Uighurstan 169

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centuries.44 In addition, no school of art continued to produce images in this genre after the influence of Mongol-sponsored Buddhism passed, suggesting that, although the paintings may date to the fifteenth century, their original environment was placed closer to the Mongol era. THE MUNGSUZ FAMILY PORTRAIT: SECULAR IDENTITY

IN THE UIGHUR BUDDHIST CONTEXT

As members of the Uighur Tantric Buddhist communities, the Mungsuz family positioned itself in relationship to political power, both religious and secular, through the social and artistic interactions of diverse individuals and groups navigating the dominant realities of Mongol authority. The family had deep roots in the town of Beshbalik, just outside of Turfan, and resi­ dence in Dadu, where they established a distinguished history of service to the Yuan dynasty. As contemporary expressions of a similar environment, the Siyah Kalem miniatures captured the meditative, shadowy aspects of the con­ templative Buddhist life with which the Mungsuz family associated itself by virtue of their Uighur heritage and their political identity. The family patri­ arch Mungsuz (1206–1267) was an accomplished scribe by the age of fifteen who came to the attention of Chinggis Khan and later served Tolui Khan as a manager of his wife’s lands and taxes.45 When Kublai Khan became acquainted with Mungsuz’s skills, he employed Mungsuz as a close adviser. For some unknown reason, however, Mungsuz never accepted a formal posi­ tion. Mungsuz also married a sister of Kublai Khan’s wife Chabi, who when Mungsuz died offered money from her own treasury to purchase land for Mungsuz’s burial place. The Mungsuz family stayed in relationship to the inner court at Dadu, but also maintained a clear Uighur identity and politi­ cal network. For the most part, daughters were married to Uighur statesmen and scholars rather than into Mongol or other ethnic families. The commis­ sion of a family portrait for the frontispiece of a Buddhist sacred text was a celebration of the Mungsuz family’s political success and Uighur identity. Beyond capturing the ethnic and social diversity of the Turfan region, the Siyah Kalem paintings position themselves as a site of inter-court politi­ cal and artistic discourse. The collection includes images of dark-skinned African/Indian persons, curly-blond-haired Eastern Christians, and Central Asian Turkic nomads, reflecting the demographics of Turfan and its domi­ nant Uighur population. At Dadu, where one of Mungsuz’ sons, As Temur (1249–1309), served on the Military Council and later at the Han-lin Academy, the inner literary and artistic circles consisted of many members of the imperial family, including Princess Sengge Ragi, and literati paint­ ers, including Zhao Mengfu, Guan Daosheng, and Wang Zhenpeng, all of 170 Chapter 6

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whom we shall meet later. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt has suggested that some of the Siyah Kalem paintings show evidence of the brush of Song lite­ rati artist Gong Kai (1222–1307) in his depictions of emaciated horses and traveling royalty with demons.46 That the painters of the Siyah Kalem collec­ tion interacted with the artistic themes and styles of the Yuan period is fea­ sible. However, while Gong Kai may have shared in the artistic conventions from which the Siyah Kalem illustrators drew, his work and that of the Siyah Kalem may have been two contemporaneous expressions of the same artistic repertoire adapted to different social and intellectual environments in which cultural legacies already overlapped. As far as we know, Gong Kai retired to Hangzhou to ride out the disaster, as he saw it, of Mongol rule. The social diversity and painting traditions available to Turfan artists as they engaged in the process of adapting and interpreting elements of these traditions for local contemporary purposes would have included the nomadic Turkic art and subject matter found in Tang dynasty painting as well as the literati paint­ ing styles of subsequent dynasties. In other words, a Uighur artist may have been trained in styles associated with Han Chinese literati painting without being Han Chinese or requiring inspiration from contemporary literati art­ ists such as Gong Kai. If anything holds true for this eclectic period, it is that entire bodies of artistic work emerged from a shared cultural environment brought into focus by dominant political realities and did not fall into single or binary stylistic categories. The Siyah Kalem paintings also raise the possibility of connections to the Tabriz court. Bahadur Khitai, a Turkic artist in service at the Ilkhanid court, created dynamic figural images using shading techniques that blended Sino-Uighur styles.47 Amir Daularyar, a slave of Ilkhan Abu Sa’id, learned the qalam-i siyahi (black pen) from court artist Ahmad Musa.48 David Talbot Rice notes that an artist he calls The Master of the Battle Scenes in the 1306/7 edition of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh worked in a style with strong simi­ larities to the miniatures of Siyah Kalem and the details of Mongol horses and martial arms.49 Along these same lines, Leo Jungeon Oh offers evidence of numerous detailed examples of iconographic Buddhist motifs found in both the cave art of the Tarim Basin and Ilkhanid manuscript illustrations pre­ served today in The Great Mongol Shahnama, the Diez Albums, and the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh. For example, many motifs, such as stylized cloud forms that are often labeled “Chinese” clouds, were not found in secular Han, Tang, or Song landscape art.50 Such motifs evolved specifically within the Buddhist iconographic traditions of the cultural pathway linking the Ladakh region to Turfan and vicinity. While the artist who captured the images of Mungsuz family members is unknown to us, we do know something of the woodcut tradition in which Turfan in Uighurstan 171

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he worked. Yuan-period innovation in the arts fostered extensive use and development of woodblock printing. Whereas brush and ink were the literati artistic tools of choice, the artists of the Siyah Kalem images used pens made from wood, and Buddhist sutras had long been reproduced using woodblock prints, the earliest form of print technology anywhere, with extant examples from 868 CE. During the Mongol era, woodblock printing expanded, devel­ oping new uses and old. The theatrical arts, promoted with great enthusi­ asm by the Mongol elite, made extensive use of printed playbooks. Scripts with illustrated directions and costumes proliferated. Hangzhou, capital of the southern Song, Kaifeng, Meishan in Sichuan Province, Dadu, and Pingyang in Shanxi Province (Jin dynasty territory) produced the highestquality woodblock prints. James C. Y. Watt points out that woodblock prints during the Yuan achieved a new independence as works of art that could stand alone without textual context, and that many of the illustrations cre­ ated for printed books from popular stories became a source of decorations on blue-and-white porcelain, one of the Yuan dynasty’s innovations in luxury manufacturing.51 This transfer of woodblock print scenes from popular books to porcelain designs guaranteed the motifs’ circulation through transconti­ nental commercial markets. Technical manuals such as the Nongshu (Book of Agriculture) also multiplied. Many such manuals traveled with Yuan minis­ ter Bolad (1241–1313) to the court of Arghun in Tabriz in 1285 and became a source of agricultural information used by Rashid al-Din (1247–1318). Produced under Yuan auspices in 1313 and widely circulated, the Nongshu included many woodblock prints that detailed agricultural machinery, spin­ ning and weaving equipment, and water pumps. Illustrated Buddhist texts, however, remained the most common use of woodblock artistry. Frontispiece illustrations for Buddhist sutras followed the same general format as that produced for the Mungsuz family, with some striking differences. In commissioning a woodblock frontispiece, a patron would first select an artist of talent to produce a painting of the sub­ ject matter. With their imperial connections, the member of the Mungsuz family who commissioned the work would have gone to one of the best shops in Dadu. Many elements of a painting would be drawn from standard forms in copybooks compiled for artisan workshops. There was, of course, always room for variation at the painter’s suggestion and/or patron’s request. Variables might include the number of bodhisattvas, the inclusion of musi­ cians, the style of robes, or the placement of celestial beings. The general program of a scene, an image of the Buddha with his attendants arranged to his right and left for example, was set. After the painting was complete, the next step involved transferring the image to a woodblock into which the lines would be cut. 172 Chapter 6

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At this point, one wonders how the variety of facial features in the Mungsuz family portrait was achieved. Did each person visit the painter’s shop to pose for a sketch to identify some distinguishing individual features? Surely the painter did not just hand out random characteristics. Many of the individuals were still alive and would expect to be able to recognize them­ selves to some extent in the figure next to their name. Or maybe not. The rank of presentation was also significant and would have been conveyed in the commission. We don’t know how this conversation took place, but we do know that individual identification was important. The painting completed to the satisfaction of the commissioner, it was then transferred to a wood­ block and cut for printing. At a printer’s workshop illustrations and text were printed in multiple copies, then bound and distributed at the patron’s direc­ tions. An inscription on the frontispiece of another Buddhist sutra printed in 1307 confirms this process. It reads, “Painted by Yang Te-ch’un; printed and distributed by the Yang family shop north of the Chung-an-ch’iao Bridge in Hang-shou.”52 The fragments of the Mungsuz frontispiece follow a similar arrange­ ment. Because all the family members are facing leftward except for the monk at top center, one wonders if we have only half of the original print. Standard iconography for sutra frontispieces would suggest that an image of the Buddha was at the center of the full, original print of the Mungsuz fam­ ily, with more of the family depicted on the missing right. The cloud motifs below and above the rows of figures suggests that we have a complete vertical slice of the original print and that no bodhisattvas or celestial beings were included. The image leans toward the secular side of the belief spectrum. Herbert Franke noticed that the monks’ names are all secular rather than monastic or Buddhist names, from which he concludes that “the monastic status of the persons in monks’ robes was considered not as important as the family affiliation which is expressed in the secular names.”53 The Mungsuz family member who commissioned this woodcut at a Dadu workshop made a very unusual request. He wanted all the atten­ dants to be recognizable, a striking merger of secular and spiritual frames. Donor portraits were not uncommon in including images of secular family members, but the representation of dozens of family members in religious pose without the finely woven and decorated garb in which donors typically appeared constituted an innovative artistic move. This vision imaginatively placed the Mungsuz family in the presence of the Buddha teaching, a merg­ ing of contemporary daily life with spiritual narratives, and consequently an assertion of human will.

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Art of the Taklamakan Desert oasis communities filtered into the thirteenthcentury circulation of cultural exchange by multiple cultural and social path­ ways. These images were reminders of finding one’s way in the material world, whether through a dramatic presentation of forty-seven family mem­ bers in perfect Buddhist harmony or through contemplation of demonic forces within human nature. Pilgrimage maps for travelers carried the same motifs and signifiers, clothing covered sojourners with the same symbols to protect and guide them on treacherous spiritual journeys or across actual des­ ert and high mountain terrain. Wealth and power were central to effective­ ness both for images and for action in the world. Members of the Mungsuz family, like many before and after them, shared names that contained char­ acters meaning jade, gold, or profit.54 Mahayana Buddhism associated mate­ rial wealth with spiritual health. A language of images and motifs that drew primarily from Buddhist iconography by the thirteenth century became a reference point for travelers of all persuasions, from Mongol and Uighur elite families to Catholic missionaries and Italian merchants. Designs and even portraiture migrated across artistic media, appearing in mural work, illus­ trated manuscripts, metal work, and pottery. Luxury silk textiles, appreciated for their aesthetic qualities and daily use value, became the primary means of artistic transmission. Requiring highly skilled labor and difficult to access resources, these fabrics were the vehicle by which motifs from one locale traveled to others. To some extent motifs could travel independently of their embedded meaning. Complex techniques in textile production favored this outcome.55 As long as a work­ shop had the skilled labor and equipment it needed to produce a design, its makers did not need to know the tenets of Buddhist philosophy or imperial law. However, elite selectivity and sensitivity to symbols of royal power and authority did create structures of meaning. If to produce the complex weaves of Mongol-era textiles one needed the highest levels of expertise, equipment, and materials, these were not commonplace and could be acquired only by those who already possessed great wealth and power—the khans, princes, and popes, among others. Although great profit was to be gained in pro­ ducing knock-off versions of luxury goods for the middle- and lower-price markets, an Eurasian elite created and sustained the core visual language of desire and authority. Like the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh and Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Francis­ cans, the Mungsuz family portrait and the Siyah Kalem miniatures shared a realism and naturalism distinctive to the long thirteenth century that was not revisited in regional artistry for centuries after the Mongols, if at all. Through an inflection of daily life into spiritual belief and practice, the Siyah Kalem 174 Chapter 6

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miniatures achieved the same heightened levels of emotional and narrative momentum as the Holy Family with Mary Knitting by Lorenzetti or Wang Zhenpeng’s Mahaprajapati Cuddling the Infant Buddha of our last chapter. The Mungsuz family portrait integrated spiritual belief and practice into the daily life of politics and social status.

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CHAPTER 7

Dadu in Khitai (Great Yuan)

W

hen we turn to the Yuan court at Dadu, our themes of sudden appearances and artistic innovation come together in the per­ son of Anige (1245–1306), a Nepali artist of the highest order, who served the court for forty years as Supervisor-in-Chief of All-Classes of Artisans (Zhu se renjiang zongguan).1 His rare combination of artistic bril­ liance, charismatic personality, and administrative acumen touched every aspect of the Yuan art world. 2 Born into a Nepalese family of moderate means and recruited by Tibetan monk ‘Phags-pa (1235–1280) to enhance the political career of Kublai Khan and create works of art and ritual implements for Buddhist ceremonies to be performed at court, Anige was deemed espe­ cially masterful at rendering the spiritual realm into material form. During the final campaigns against the Southern Song in 1274, Anige produced stat­ ues of Mahakala, Tibetan deity and designated guardian of the Mongols, to raise divine assistance for the khan’s armies.3 For believers and skeptics alike, the statues, aligned to face the enemy and fortified by prayers, appeared to enable Mongol victory. The final victory was the capture of the Song impe­ rial art collection at Hangzhou, whose treasures from the Tang and Song periods became a concurrent source of Yuan artistic inspiration. Anige, in his official capacity, oversaw the creation of literally thousands of art works of every type and description, from jewelry and brocades to painting and architecture, including Daoist and Confucian objects but primarily works of Tibetan Buddhist inspiration. From this emerged the distinctive features of Sino-Himalayan art of the Yuan. Regarding the Yuan world of art in general, Sherman E. Lee and Wai­ kam Ho have written that, “All questions of evaluation aside, the accepted standards and appearance of Chinese painting were radically altered in the fourteenth century. No historically accepted painting of importance executed after the Yuan dynasty looks very much like any painting of a previous time. Sometime about the middle of the fourteenth century the precarious balance between tradition and innovation was destroyed.”4 Anige, as a transmitter 176

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of mid-thirteenth-century Newar styles and artistic traditions into Yuan circles, was a prime contributor to this shift. In the words of art historian Anning Jing, “The magnitude of his [Anige’s] accomplishments rivals those of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Leonardo in the West.”5 While the com­ parison is not necessary to establish Anige’s genius in its own right, it does speak to the tremendous creativity generated out of the Mongol century, for in many respects Leonardo and company are not imaginable without the artistic and intellectual dialogue of the long thirteenth century. Among the few remaining works attributable to Anige, his posthumous portraits of Kublai Khan (brother of Hülegü Ilkhan) and his primary wife, Chabi Khatun, are the most well known.6 They recast the stylistic standard for imperial portraiture and exemplified the Tibetan Buddhist aesthetic that had a lasting influence on East Asian art. Anige’s portraits were intended as painted sketches from which tapestries could be woven for display in the portrait hall of the Da Huguo Renwangsi Imperial Buddhist Temple near Dadu. It is worth noting here that the highest regard went, not to the painted image, but to the textile product. At the time of Da Huguo Renwangsi’s construction, Chabi Khatun was a major figure in the art world and a close associate of Anige, who designed the project. Fellow members of the Sa-skya sect promoted by ‘Phasgs-pa, Anige and Chabi had ample opportunity for mutual discourse that no doubt contributed to the persona Anige sought to capture in his posthumous portrait of the khatun. It took Anige three years to complete his tapestry portraits of the royal couple.7 Although the tapestries no longer exist, these images inspired a series of royal portraits in the same style, which itself was an integration of ele­ ments from classical imperial and Tibetan Buddhist portraiture. Tapestries of head monks had long had a place in Tibetan religious practice, but the translation of this artistic form into imperial portraiture was innovative. The extant Yamantaka Mandala of 1330–1332 provides us with some sense of con­ text and content for the missing Kublai/Chabi portraits in its similar fusion of secular and religious art. This work explicitly situates portraits of secular rulers as patrons of Buddhism into a tapestry also intended for display in the Imperial Family Portrait Hall. The donors portraits are, from left to right, Tugh Temür, great-great-grandson of Kublai Khan, who reigned as Emperor Wenzong of the Yuan dynasty from 1328 to 1332; Khosila, elder brother of Tugh Temür, who reigned briefly in 1329 as Emperor Mingzong; and Budashri and Babusha, their respective spouses. Budashri was the daugh­ ter of Mongol princess Sengge Ragi, great-granddaughter of Kublai Khan and prominent art connoisseur in her own right during the Yuan. It was Togon Temür (Yuan emperor Huizong), son of Sengge’s brother-in-law Tugh Dadu in Khitai 177

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Temür (Yuan emperor Wenzong), who received a gift of fine horses from the Avignon pope Benedict XII sent in 1338 with a papal embassy headed by Giovanni de’ Marignolli. The Yuan court occupied a special place at the heart of the Mongol Empire and in relationship to Tabriz of the Ilkhanate. Kim Hodong makes the important point that the Mongols did not see their government at Dadu as another Chinese dynasty but as a break with the dynastic sys­ tem, the beginning of a fundamentally new era with new origins. Da Yuan (Great Yuan or Great Origins), as the Mongols translated this concept into Chinese, referred to the entire Mongol Empire (Yeke Mongyol Ulus) com­ posed of a number of smaller and larger ulus units associated with specific leaders and territories.8 As subordinate rulers to the Great Khan in Dadu, the Ilkhans (originally of the Hülegü ulus) relied on the Yuan court for legitimacy, expertise, and general direction. At the same time, they were integral players in empire building. As Dadu took the lead in the Buddhist revival across much of the empire and into its borderlands, the Yuan broad­ cast a high regard for the visual arts. The fact that the Chaghadaid ulus and Qipchaq ulus (Golden Horde) rulers remained largely outside of this phe­ nomenon, preferring shamanism and alliances with Islam, defined lines of conflict within the empire from 1260 to its end. Two major currents flowed into Yuan court sponsorship of the arts: one derived largely from the Yuan encounter with Tibetan Buddhist art; and a second drew from the artistic conventions of the Tang and Song dynasties. The great interest of some members of the Mongol royal family in the visual arts of previous dynas­ ties, as well as the work of contemporary artists, speak to the remarkably diverse cultural interests of the Yuan elite, which set a clear imperial stan­ dard. Reliance on visual materials for cross-societal dialogue and willing­ ness to look at everything of quality and mutual taste made for a strong, effective expression of authority based on degrees of cultural integration under the Mongol label. Sometimes viewed as evidence of the Sinification of Mongol leadership, this eclectic approach to visual culture and cultiva­ tion of a multivalent intervisuality points equally to the secular bend of Mongol governance and to a revolutionary event in East Asian art.9 The Mongols’ own world-historical vision complements Richard Vinograd’s advocacy for locating Yuan art history within its “larger horizons of politi­ cal assertion and critique. Yuan painting viewed in this way, set within continental contexts and among multilayered cultural arenas, requires more global than narrowly centered perspectives”; this approach reveals “visual signs of racial diversity” that “trace larger networks of transcultural encoun­ ter and appropriation.”10 178 Chapter 7

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Map 4. Mapping Artistic Exchange: Dadu/Eastern Seas Zones

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DADU IN EURASIAN POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS The road to conquest of the Song dynasty was longer and harder than any of the other Mongol campaigns. In many respects, the political center of the empire took the longest to consolidate its position. Although Kublai declared himself Great Khan in 1260 and inaugurated the Great Yuan in 1271, this was only a beginning.11 Internal conflicts within the Chinggisid line set off a complex series of events over which Kublai eventually prevailed to a large degree.12 Conflict between the Yuan and Chaghadaid ulus over pasturelands, commercial interests, and Chaghadaid suspicions of a Yuan-Ilkhanid alliance against them continued well past the 1260 fissures pronounced at the start of Kublai’s reign.13 By the time the Song imperial family surrendered to Kublai Khan’s forces at Hangzhou in 1276 and a naval battle at Yamen handed final victory in 1279 to the Mongols, three khans had directed military efforts against the Song for almost four decades. Because of the long lead-up to Mongol victory over the Song, developments in progress elsewhere in the empire produced resources and knowledge essential to eventual success. Significant expertise required to meet these challenges came in part from the Ilkhanate. Mongol general Aju, facing massive city walls at the crucial battles for Xiangyang and Fencheng, asked Persian military experts from the Ilkhanate to provide siege machinery that had been improved from early Song designs and used to bring down the walls of Baghdad in 1258. These Persian-designed counterweight trebuchets allowed for more accurate placement of explosives.14 In the development of manufacturing, we have already noted the massive movement of artisan populations from Iran into the Mongol-controlled territories in the east to jump-start their produc­ tion of unique luxury textiles with high diplomatic and commercial value. Meanwhile, Islamic and European centers experienced an influx of silver during the Yuan period, owing to state policy that officially continued to use cao paper currency, leaving large stores of confiscated silver in the hands of Mongol ortuy merchants, who circulated the ingots throughout the empire, stimulating local and interregional economies.15 Infrastructure development was a major feature of Yuan governance. On a site near the conquered Jin capital of Zhongdu, a new capital was con­ structed at Dadu (Khanbuliq) with opening ceremonies in1274; Marco Polo arrived two years later and documented the grandeur of the palace, which today still lies under the foundations of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The city had eleven gates, a walled circumference of about 17.75 miles, and prom­ inent drum and bell towers that marked the nightly eight-hour curfew. To supply the new capital with the required abundance of grain, food delicacies, 180 Chapter 7

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and other luxuries from the productive Yangtze valley, Kublai Khan funded a project to construct the Grand Canal system that stretched from Dadu to Hangzhou. In addition to new construction, engineering entailed repairing, extending, and connecting existing canals and river ways. The canal also functioned as a vital route for communications between north and south. A magnificent engineering feat that began in the early 1280s and was com­ plete in its northernmost extension by 1293, the canal was a symbolic and practical expression of Mongol political will in its larger vision of world con­ quest. Earlier dynasties had their capitals along the Yellow River; Dadu was farther north. During the Song agricultural and commercial revolutions, the Yangtze River valley became an economic and cultural dynamo as the coastal areas to the south expanded commercial activities into the southern seas and beyond. The Mongols were the first dynastic rulers to attempt a full north-south unification that would harness the resources of the coastal south and Yangtze River valley to the political authority of the far north. Imperial vision included an aggressive effort to connect the southern port cities with sea routes to the Persian Gulf. Ilkhanid intent to capture Mamluk Egypt, a strategic piece in Eurasian seafaring networks, was another active front in this maritime policy. Resulting opportunities stimulated communities along minor river routes to invest in local improvements that might enhance commercial tie-ins to the larger national network. Such projects were particularly in evidence in the Yuan part of the empire in large part because Kublai and others inherited here a highly effective imperial bureaucracy and a local elite that was familiar with being tasked to address issues of local infrastructure. Once the Yuan rulers had reconstituted bureaucratic personnel under their own authority, they had a constructive tool that existed in no other part of the Mongol Empire. Bureaucratic infrastructure enhanced the arts as well in both their creativity and transmission, allowing large-scale deployment of talent and materials for imperial projects. In this sense art was a complex technology that conveyed essential information through unexpected structures of feel­ ing and administration. THE YUAN SINO-HIMALAYAN SCHOOL IN PORTRAITURE Jane Casey has convincingly argued that a surviving tsakli portrait intended as part of an introductory set of images to the Bhaisajyaguru Mandala (Medicine/Healing Buddha Mandala) depicts Kublai Khan associated with the Tibetan Buddhist deity of wisdom, Manjusru.16 Casey writes that “This iconographic innovation is in keeping with Tibetan artistic norms. For Dadu in Khitai 181

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centuries, Tibetan artists had been adapting traditional Indian Buddhist iconography, presenting their own revered political and religious leaders in the guise of Buddhist divinities.”17 This mid-thirteenth-century tsakli or ini­ tiation painting speaks to the flow of artistic/political exchange between the court at Dadu and centers of Tibetan Buddhism. A portrait figure of Manjusri, Buddhist deity of wisdom, appears in Mongol dress with shortsleeved blue tunic and gold tiraz borders similar to those worn by the royal figures of the Yamantaka Mandala discussed in the artistic prologue to this chapter. Both mandalas indicate evidence of integration of imperially spon­ sored Sino-Mongol-Tibetan-Himalayan signifiers. By the Mongol period, a rich and complex flow of artisans and mate­ rials across the Himalayan foothills shaped the iconographic and stylistic features possessed by Tibetan art. At Nalanda monastery and university, the Gupta Empire of the fifth and sixth centuries supported a flourishing Buddhist intellectual and artistic culture, with its extensive teaching and research facilities, libraries, and artisan workshops. Knowledge from this center traveled to the Abbasid court in Baghdad during the eighth cen­ tury, transferring knowledge, including the mathematical use of zero. With the subsequent rise of the Pala Empire, rulers over Bihar and West Bengal began to favor features of Tantric Buddhism in their art. The Pala style had its impact on early traditions in Kashmir, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. In painting applied to illustrated manuscripts and wall murals, this style was naturalistic, modeled after bronze and stone sculpture, and emphasized the sensuous presentation of the human figure. Brushstrokes carried black or red pigment to define forms in delicate outline. Red, blue, black, and white filled larger flat surfaces, while green, pink, gray, and yellow were used as secondary pigments. The range of colors obtained from plants and minerals in the Himalayan ecosystem was extensive. Decorative elements in jewelry and textiles layered images with elegance and fine detail, creating a distinc­ tive and dazzling effect. When around 1200 Mamluk armies from Delhi brought tremendous destruction to the Nalanda regions, artisans abandoned the monasteries and workshops, creating a diaspora of artistic talent west­ ward into the Kathmandu Valley and as far as Kashmir. At Kathmandu, the Newar lineage established their expertise in the Pala style and were highly sought after. This was the artistic and social environment from which Anige emerged to carry his own superior skill to the court at Dadu, where by 1260 the Mongol interplay with Buddhism was already in full swing. Early Mongol and Turkic nomads structured their political and social practices with shamanistic beliefs and ancestor worship, creating a material culture that prized the textile arts of felt making and woven fabrics. In the 182 Chapter 7

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spiritual realm, stone markings with simple painted portraits honored their dead, who were presumed to continue to participate and be a presence in family matters. The spiritual and material realms were entirely integrated. Felt-covered and textile-decorated yurts represented a microcosm of the social and heavenly universes. When a combination of tribal reorganization, prophecy, and environmental factors resulted in the early thirteenth-century expansion of nomadic warriors under the leadership of Chinggis Khan, their initial encounter with urban centers of the Jin and Khitan territories brought the nomads and their beliefs into close contact with Buddhist artistic centers. During the initial period of conquest, Mongol encounters with Buddhism were far from accommodating, but this rough start eventually took a very significant turn in the direction of wholesale embracement of Tibetan Buddhist theological and visual culture. While the Islamic Mamluk forces were destroying Nalanda but not rebuilding it, the Mongols were plan­ ning their destruction of Tangut centers of learning. The 1209 invasion of Tangut (Xi Xia/Western Xia) territories led to a temporary vassal state status for the Tangut rulers, only to be undone by subsequent geopolitical develop­ ments. In retaliation for betrayal by the Tangut, Chinggis Khan launched a battle without mercy from 1225 to 27. It was the last campaign of Chinggis’ life, and he possibly died in a battle that saw the massacre of Yinchuan’s capital city population. The intended goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Tangut culture, a punishment considered to fit the crime of allying with an enemy state after signing on for vassal status within the Mongol Empire. Because the culture of the Tangut was Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist centers of learning and worship fell to rubble; the requirements of war and empire building came first. Once the tasks of governance came into focus, however, Buddhism appeared in a different light. The shamanism of the Mongols was too paro­ chial for their aspirations toward universal rule. The Golden Light Sutra, a highly prized Tangut text on kingship, appeared as the perfect statement of good leadership already familiar to those the Mongols hoped to subjugate. In 1247 the decision was made by Karakorum to undertake the huge task of preparing new printing blocks for the sutra, which had only two decades left before being destroyed under the same Mongol authority. The writer of the preface made it clear that the text was to be “spread as medicine, to heal and restore the faith.”18 Here Güyük Khan (r. 1246–1248) and Möngke Khan (r. 1251–1259) set the pattern of the Mongol ideological framework that they would promote as a guide to political leadership legitimized by the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. Here, too, was the template for blend­ ing contemporary history with the sacred narratives of the past: the Mongol Dadu in Khitai 183

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rulers inserted themselves into the Tangut and Tibetan lineages, locating their origins among the royal house of the Buddha himself and claiming this as the ultimate source of their legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Chan Buddhist tradition within the former Tang and Song societies was on the defensive and would eventually give way to Tibetan Buddhism as the Yuan rulers sought to adapt an outside Buddhist tradition to their own needs. Initially cautious in response to early Mongol expan­ sion, northern Han Chinese schools of Buddhism withdrew into scholar­ ship. Master Xingxiu (1166–1246) recorded the lives of one hundred Chan Buddhist masters as examples of enlightened beings in his “Record of (the Lodge of) Leisureliness” (Congrong (an) lu). Such works attempted to pro­ mote Chan teachings at a time when the school was losing ground. Turkic Uighur families of Manichaean Buddhist orientation in Xinjiang were among the early supporters of the Mongols and served as military and polit­ ical advisers to the khans throughout their reigns. It was in this context, too, that the Uighur Mungsuz family (see chapter 6) exemplified the Yuan turn toward a devotion to portraiture within the Tibetan Buddhist conceptions of lineage. Both the Tangut and the Uighur had previously been heavily influ­ enced by Buddhism from western Tibet and Kashmir, and it was to these schools of Buddhism that the Yuan and Ilkhanid rulers increasingly turned. When Kublai became khan in 1260, he retained authority over Tibetan regional leaders. The Tibetan monk ‘Phags-pa became Imperial Preceptor, created a Mongolian script, and, most significantly for our discussion, began the recruitment of talented artists specifically for the purpose of creating the visual magic that would enhance Kublai Khan’s competitive position in the political arena. This strategy more than anything else launched the thir­ teenth-century Buddhist renaissance in art and the diffusion of HimalayanNepalese artistry into the Sino-literati artistic traditions. The template for the plan to synergize Tibetan Buddhism and Mongol political goals was first articulated by Sa-skya Pandita (1182–1251) and Godan Khan (1206–1251) at a meeting in 1244 in which they acknowl­ edged their mutual benefit to each other as the spiritual and secular halves of a political whole. Pandita could provide the Mongols with a compelling spiri­ tual aura for their conquests, and the khans in turn could provide Pandita and his Sakya sect with imperial connections that would assist with challenges from rival sects. Sa-skya Pandita’s talented student and nephew ‘Phags-pa and Kublai became heirs to this arrangement and pursued it to its maximum effect. Enlisting the visual arts for this project became a primary modus ope­ randi. Toward this end ‘Phags-pa returned to Nepal to collect superior artists and artisans of the Newar school of Pala-Sena techniques. Anige became the leader of eighty talented individuals who accompanied ‘Phags-pa back 184 Chapter 7

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to Dadu. In 1260, to commemorate the life of Sa-skya Pandita, ’Phags-pa drew up plans to build a stupa near Dadu. For this project he introduced Anige, a youth of sixteen, to Kublai Khan, who was won over by his finesse and charm. From that point on Anige worked directly in accordance with the desires and vision of Kublai and his Khatun Chabi. Anige’s unique ability to create especially compelling, animated Tibetan Buddhist imagery won him the confidence of many at court. When Kublai began his final move against the Southern Song in 1274, ‘Phags-pa sought divine assistance for Kublai by calling upon Anige “to build a temple for Mahakala, a terrifying Tibetan tantric deity who was recognized as the guardian of the Mongols. Anige made the statues of Mahakala and his divine entourage and situated them facing the Southern Song territory. The Imperial Preceptor ordered Da-Pa (1230–1303), a Sa-skaya monk known for his magic powers and a cultist of Mahakala, to consecrate the statue, and ‘Phags-pa himself blessed it, granting it special powers. The Mongol army soon swarmed across South China, and the Southern Song capital Lin’an surrendered without a fight.”19 When booty was distributed after the fall of the Song, for his part in marshaling the powers of Mahakala, Anige received top value, including the lands, palaces, laborers, and storehouses of wealth captured from the heir apparent to the Song throne as well as his grand­ daughter as wife. He was also among those who had first pick of the Song imperial art collection. One of his selections, the late Song portrait of cel­ ebrated Tang dynasty poet Li Bo by Liang Kai (c. 1140–1210),20 was a legacy work of art but also an interesting choice given Anige’s creative sensibilities for perfection and animation. The lotus leaf and the twisting-turning garments that reveal colorful undersides are two motifs that appear to owe their Eurasian circulation to the Sino-Himalayan circuits of artistic exchange. A canonical motif within Buddhist iconography, the lotus leaf signifies enlightenment and is associ­ ated with royalty. In addition to his artistic genius, it turned out that Anige possessed remarkable organizational skills. He oversaw thousands of artisan households and established seventeen additional departments, including a porcelain bureau at Jingdezhen: “Anige inspected the Jingdezhen kilns per­ sonally and provided designs for blue-and-white wares. His provision may, in part, account for the prominent use of lotus leaves from Buddhist art in the decorations of porcelains of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”21 As blue-and-white porcelain traversed the continent as a luxury commod­ ity of high fashion, so the lotus-leaf design circulated through trade and diplomatic routes on fashionable textiles and painted images. The distribu­ tion of the twisting-turning garments that reveal colorful undersides motif is even more remarkable. Yuan court artists trained in the Newar style by Dadu in Khitai 185

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Anige traveled after his death to central Tibet, where they were employed to work on murals at Shalu monastery (1306–1333). While many similari­ ties exist between the tsakali created by Newar-trained artists in Dadu and the murals at Shalu, the fabrics painted by the artists from Dadu at Shalu reflect Nepalese rather than Mongol textiles. Another textile feature found in the Shalu murals, however, is distinctively from the Six Dynasties/Tang/ Song repertoire. Goddesses wear long, flowing scarfs and skirts that twist and turn, revealing their undersides in contrasting colors. This motif also occurred in the tsakli (created at Dadu). Jane Casey points out that “This distinctive manner of handling fabric is not seen in Himalayan painting before it is introduced by Yuan court artists in the murals of Shalu, and pos­ sibly through other contacts between Tibet and Chinese Yuan artists.”22 The twisting and turning of garments revealing colorful undersides also appeared as an innovation in textile representation in the work of Simone Martini and many other Frankish, Italian, and Byzantine paintings. Multiple artis­ tic pathways, all leading through the Yuan territories, account for the wide­ spread dispersion of this technique for rendering draperies in motion. The flair it offered to an otherwise static image suggests a common sensibility for desired visual effects also mediated through networks of shared cultural transmission. THE TANG/SONG ARTISTIC INHERITANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF YUAN POLITICS Dadu’s artistic program, in addition to reaching across the Tibetan pla­ teau, dug deep into layers of Sino-dynastic art history. Because the road to full conquest of the Song was protracted, the Mongol rulers’ cultivation of Tibetan Buddhism preceded their capture of the Song imperial art collection at Hangzhou. Yuan sponsorship of contemporary art, therefore, took place in a creative admixture of artistic practices wrapped around Mongol sensibili­ ties and political designs. Heirs to these especially rich and long-lived artistic legacies, the Mongols who captured the Southern Song imperial art collec­ tion at Hangzhou, with the help of Anige’s Mahakala statues, immediately perceived the opportunity to identify their new authority with established visual conventions while at the same time selectively borrowing themes and incorporating them into an integrated vision of contemporary political cul­ ture. Nomadic life in the Mongol tradition had produced both a strong aes­ thetic sensibility and an eclectic inclination. In combination with empire building, this artistic proclivity activated policies that scoured local talents and traditions in an attempt to construct a visual language with politically 186 Chapter 7

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transformative authority. Both the preexisting Mongol relationship to visual culture and the need to create a legitimizing aura encouraged this process. Among the art works captured from the imperial art collection were 147 works of calligraphy and eighty-one paintings; among the paintings there were more images of fancy birds, landscapes, horses, animals, and pal­ aces than portraits of emperors from the Han, the Six Dynasties, and the Tang and Song dynasties.23 The inclusion of portraits of the Tang and other emperors in Rashid al-Din’s Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh provides another instructive example of the contrasting approaches to portraiture followed by the Yuan and Ilkhanid courts. The figures in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh are small, with more emphasis on full-body poses than individual facial detail, let alone the placement of each hair on one’s head, as Anige would attempt. The Yuan rul­ ers operated in an immediate context of a long line of imperial leaders from the Han to the Song. Placing themselves in this lineage was not a direct priority for the Ilkhans, who were inclined to imagine their place in rela­ tionship to an expanded historical framework that included more than the dynastic outline of Han-to-Song leadership. For their needs, the Yuan rul­ ers saw the importance of fully developed portraiture and through Anige’s work attached themselves to conventions of Tibetan Buddhist portraiture to heighten the affective value of imperial iconic images. Among the other subjects already noted, horses, palaces, landscapes, and Buddhist imagery became the materials most referenced by court artists drawn from the former Song literati circles. These individuals, who included Zhao Mengfu, Guan Daosheng, and Wang Zhenpeng, served the foreign Mongol rulers with an eye toward blending contemporary moral issues with images appealing to the Yuan court that simultaneously evoked and repurposed elements of the dynastic art heritage. For the Mongols, victory in East Asia, the heart of their transcontinen­ tal empire, meant capturing the southern capital of Hangzhou. It also meant claiming the art of the imperial collection at Hangzhou. Because Empress Dowager Xie peacefully surrendered Hangzhou to the Mongols in1276, the city and its art escaped wholesale destruction. This collection was immedi­ ately confiscated and transferred to the Yuan capital, leaving some works behind for sale by the Guangjiku, a government storehouse for property cap­ tured by the Yuan military forces.24 Consequently, the new Mongol rulers in East Asia inherited a particularly rich and extensive artistic legacy, which they appreciated and utilized for imperial purposes. In this process, themes of both imperial rule and nomadic lifestyle from the Tang and Song past slid easily into the Mongol present. Mongol efforts to incorporate indigenous art themes into their governing cultural ethos often amounted to a recovery Dadu in Khitai 187

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of nomadic themes both associated with their own lifestyle interests and embedded in the court life of the Tang, a dynasty of Turkic nomadic origins, and the Song, a dynasty preoccupied with preventing nomadic threats from the north. Major figures who shaped Sino-artistic visual culture included Gu Kaizhi (344–406 CE), Wu Daozi (689–755), and Guo Xi (1020–1090), among many others.25 Wu Daozi had a reputation for having painted a land­ scape mural that was so realistic and enlivened that he walked into it one day and did not come back. This story is reminiscent of the stunning artistic realism in later stories by al-Ghazali, Rumi, and Frankish accounts of the superiority of Chinese art. Yuan intervisuality layered the practices and phi­ losophies of these legacies into a contemporary discourse on politics and art, a translation of the power of art into political power. In this way, contemporary political realities motivated a renaissance of discussions about classical art. Upon successful conquest of the last strongholds of the Song dynasty, Kublai Khan, in his efforts to create a world culture to ensure his world con­ quests, sponsored, in addition to the Nepalese team of artists recruited by ‘Pags’pa, talented literati artists from among the Song families who were willing to serve the Mongol Yuan dynasty. This, of course, was a fine line to walk, and Han Chinese artists often justified their service to the Mongols by purporting to act as cultural mediators and proponents of classical val­ ues. Prominent among this latter group was the talented literati artist Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), who descended from the Song imperial line. He came to the attention of Kublai Khan and entered the inner literati circles at Dadu. Emperor Renzong especially appreciated his work, which was often based on studies of horses and animals presented as portraits of individual crea­ tures with psychological and cultural dimensions in reference to contempo­ rary political conditions. Many of his works have the innovative quality of presenting images in a middle ground that has both depth and immediacy. Zhao cited the Jin dynasty artist Gu Kaizhi (344–406 CE) as his inspiration and source of classical literati traditions in art. Acknowledged as the founder of portrait painting in the Chinese art tradition, Gu Kaizhi (344–406) articulated the theory and practice of por­ traiture in three books on painting that established his authority. In Gu’s biography we read that “When he completed the painting of a human fig­ ure, often he waited several years before he would touch up the pupils. When asked for an explanation, he would answer: ‘The beauty or ugliness of the limbs and body is in fact all there without miss. But the subtle point where the spirit can be rendered and perfect likeness portrayed lies just in those lit­ tle spots.’”26 The practice of adding a dot of paint as the last touch in finishing a portrait was also a Buddhist and Daoist ceremonial practice when dedicat­ ing a work of art. That touch of reflected light gave life to facial features. It 188 Chapter 7

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was this strong interest in creating an “ambient portrait” that captured the attention of Mongol rulers.27 At the Yuan court in Dadu, Tibetan Buddhism eventually prevailed and set the tone for portraiture with highly differenti­ ated facial features and personal identification. It is somewhat ironic that we know of Gu’s remarkable works only through literary accounts and copies. For the Mongols who embraced their own variety of Tibetan Buddhism in their transcontinental reach for authority, it was significant that Gu worked in a century when major interest in schools of Buddhism spread among the elites of northern territories. Gu’s literati/Buddhist/Daoist environment of the fourth-century Jinling area produced methods for visually embodying the mind and spirit of an individual in portraiture. Artist-monks moved this high standard and expertise through Buddhist circles into the Turfan region, where they met with skilled craftsmen moving north from western Tibet with their own iconographic styles. In the Turfan region, Islam first encountered art of such exceptional vitality that it became the reference point in western societies for excellence in the visual arts. Zhao Mengfu moved in his own social and artistic circles with the inspiration of Gu Kaizhi and others close at hand. One result of this dia­ logue between past and present were Zhao’s paintings of allegories of good government. Kublai Khan’s horizontal reach across the Song-Yuan dynastic divide and social order stabilized potential cultural and political dissonance. Art historian Shane McCausland has noted that Zhao “put new value in art of the past by using it as a resource for self-expression, but also to create an allegory of good government, as well as a model of artistic practice.”28 Zhao Mengfu’s painting Man and Horse (1296) was a plea to the new Mongol rul­ ers to recruit upright and talented scholars for government office. The stable geometry of his horse and groom reference not only Tang horse painting but specifically the legendary figure Bole, who was skilled at judging quality in horses, a metaphor for good officials. The nobility of nomadism was cap­ tured by Zhao in his many depictions of animal and pastoral life. His Hermit under Rock and Tree expresses an alternative mood of temporary withdrawal from society as a response to the dilemmas of government service under for­ eign rule. The emperor Renzong also commissioned Zhao Mengfu to paint a picture of grain to mark an especially abundant harvest that the emperor hoped would augur well for the future of the dynasty. The emperor’s use of a star artist to commemorate a bumper grain crop is a notable expression of royal values. Both visually and ceremonially, the Yuan rulers expanded the stories they deemed central to their governance. Mazu, the patron deity of sailors, appeared in Canton Khanfu before 1240 and arrived in Tianjin by 1326. It was under Mongol rule that her role was expanded to patron saint of the Yuan’s overseas grain-transport system.29 She became the second most Dadu in Khitai 189

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important female deity after Guanyin and was represented in woodblock prints, paintings, and carved wood. Within East Asian art legacies, the Mongols found elements that reso­ nated with their own contemporary politics, nomadic culture, and Buddhist views. The Yuan Buddhist revival carried gendered elements as well from the earlier period when nomadic social relations and state sponsorship of Buddhism defined the Tang dynasty (618–906) elite culture. Tang dynasty artist Zhou Fang (730–800 CE), highly regarded in his own time, was pop­ ular among Yuan art collectors including Princess Sengge Ragi. His abil­ ity to capture the women’s cultural sphere of horse riding, music, and court elegance appealed to both the Tang and the Yuan sense of social norms, quite distinctive from those of the intervening Song dynasty. Nomadic women and Mongol women in this instance were well known for their active lifestyle and measure of independence both in decision-making processes and access to resources. Human agency in the Mongol scheme of things definitely crossed gender lines, whether in the equal inclusion of women in Ilkhanid court scenes or the Yuan portrait galleries. Zhao Mengfu’s paintings of horses were certainly of equal interest and appeal to all horse riders. Yuan art culture produced written texts that attempted to articulate contemporary interests. The period’s pronounced interest in portraiture finds expression in a treatise by art critic Wang I. The Hsieh Hsiang Mi Chieh (The Secrets of Portrait Painting) provides further insight into the received phi­ losophy and techniques of portraiture painting. Wang I wrote: Whoever paints a portrait must be thoroughly familiar with the rules of physiogomy. For in each case, the situation of the parts of people’s faces such as the “Five Mountains” or the “Four Rivers” is different. And even if their mutual location has been ascertained, their expression and colour will be different according to the Four Seasons. Only during a lively conversa­ tion will they show their original and genuine character. Then I remain quiet and try to find them out, silently noting them in my memory. Even with my eyes closed, it is as if I had them before my eyes, and when I take up the brush it is as if (the strokes) were already on the point of the brush. After that, I fix them down with pale ink and build them up successively. . . . The uncultured painters of modern times . . . ignore the laws of change and movement. They ask (the living model) to sit stiffly erected with his garments orderly arranged like a statue of clay and then start painting. [Wang I describes a method of beginning with left side of the nose and moving to the eyes and eyebrows.] It is necessary to proceed like this from one part to another so that not even a single hair will be omitted.30 190 Chapter 7

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Instructions for colors included duck’s-head green, moonshine-white, gooseyellow, dew-colored garments, withered-bamboo garments, sand-fish color, musk color, tea color, wooly silk, and the familiar indigo. Certainly, the emphasis here on movement and seasonal variation appealed to nomadic sen­ sibilities of meaning and place that integrated the natural and social worlds. The embodiment of spirit in portrait painting imbued the royal family por­ trait gallery with iconic traits heightened by physical verisimilitude. What we see as the last vestiges of a lost era those who commissioned the portraits of Kublai Khan and Chabi Khatun envisioned as an enduring spiritual legacy connected to the tangible, eternal truths of Mongol universal rule. To stand before such a portrait was to be in the actual presence of those leaders who had forged the policies to fulfill Tengri’s mandate. THE KUBLAI AND CHABI PORTRAITS Partly because of Anige, portraiture had a more prominent place in Yuan imperial society than in the Ilkhanate, where biography was generally a case of placing figures within a narrative context. Different visualization practices might have contributed to these effects. Pre-Mongol Arabic and Persian lit­ erary sources had carried a strong preference for visualizing narrative texts unassisted by pictorial images. In any case, Anige’s style as introduced in the royal portraits of Kublai and Chabi spawned a series of khan and khatun por­ traits meant to match and extend the original two. In a world wherein body odors and personally worn items of clothing possessed charismatic power, a portrait of great similitude with a lifelike presence evoked tremendous authority. Anige’s portraits certainly stressed and achieved verisimilitude, but they went much further: these images were iconic. Anige took his Newar Pala artistic set of skills into an environment already shaped by Daoist, neoConfucian, and Chan Buddhist aesthetics. He not only had the paintings of the Song imperial collection for his personal study, but he learned Chinese calligraphy and made images for both Daoist and Confucian temples. In fact, the Department of Buddhist Images that he oversaw was also tasked with making Daoist and Confucian images, including a work of Confucius and his ten disciples and another of 191 sculptures and sixty-four wall paintings for a Daoist temple.31 When Anige came to paint the posthumous portraits of Kublai and Chabi, he was poised to produce a work that was recognizable within the Sino-dynastic tradition, innovative in its use of Tibetan Buddhist portraiture, and stunning overall. He did just that. By the time Anige put brush to silk for the portraits of Kublai and Chabi both leading figures had passed from the world. Anige’s artistic talent Dadu in Khitai 191

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had earlier launched Kublai’s final move against the Southern Song with his winning evocation of the powers of Mahakala. Now he would use those same skills to capture the persons of Kublai and Chabi for posterity, which at the time was envisioned as the Mongol Empire of the distant future. Anige knew each of these individuals personally and up close. He was their personal artist, so to speak. He took orders from them, shared with them a religious faith in Sakya Tibetan Buddhism, consulted on projects, and was rewarded by these rulers with the highest official acclaim and remuneration. What features of these personalities would Anige attempt to render for posterity? By personality and actions, Chabi was an engaging and principled pres­ ence with strong views and commitments in line with her Buddhist convic­ tions. From the Yüanshi we learn that she was granted the official epithet “Chaste and Good, Bright and Sagacious, Compliant to Heaven, Wise in Culture, Brilliant in Responsiveness Empress.”32 Multiple examples cite her efforts to curb wastefulness in spite of her access to imperial abundance. She reportedly recycled old bowstrings to make cloth for clothing and sewed together discarded sheepskins to make rugs.33 She was also something of a fashion designer, adding a visor to her husband’s cap to keep the sun from blinding him while he was out shooting and sewing together a garment that eased motions required for horse riding and use of the bow.34 Both became instant fashions. In addition to her devotion to situations and people around her—such attention was also extended to Anige in making sure he had the land and wives that would keep him personally content and artistically pro­ ductive—Chabi was an astute stateswoman and a genuinely compassionate ruler. When celebrations over the defeat of the Southern Song began at the Dadu court, Chabi alone expressed great sadness in thinking of the dif­ ficulties of displaced Song royal families. When offered jewelry captured from the Southern Song imperial treasury, she refused it, saying it was not intended for her, that it belonged to the sons and grandsons of the Song; she later advocated on behalf of Empress Dowager Hsieh and Empress Ch’üan of the Song, in the end agreeing to have them supported in Dadu rather than returned to the south, which was their first choice but could have had negative political ramifications, as pointed out by Kublai and his advisers.35 At the same time, Chabi’s compassion was attuned to power, and she is credited with playing a critical role in securing Kublai’s successful rise over Arigh-Böke, Möngke’s youngest brother and challenger for the throne. Chabi was first and foremost an empress who took an active personal role in governing. Religious toleration was a part of her personal and political profile. She patronized Islamic financial ministers and Confucian schol­ ars as well as Buddhist monks.36 Although Anige had many opportunities to converse with Chabi and did so, what did he choose to capture of this 192 Chapter 7

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larger-than-life personality and political figure in his portrait of her? What conventions did he employ and depart from in order to convey Chabi’s great authority and compassion to contemporaries and future generations? First, he chose a textile format for which the painting we have was only a draft. An exquisite silk-woven textile expressed the power of the woman who had soaked bowstrings to make cloth; this was not a contradiction, it was a neces­ sity. The power image and tales of ordinary life, for those who knew both, generated the perfect emotional harmony that lodged Chabi’s persona in historical memory. Kublai had to be portrayed as the superior in an equal relationship. He might depend on Chabi for advice and on occasion be cor­ rected by her, but it was ultimately his greater wisdom as a ruler to place the good of his realm above all other considerations that defined his character. In the end, he was responsible and obliged to make decisions that might need to override compassion. At the same time, his skill and contributions as a ruler could not be taken for granted. Latent in contemporary politics was the view that the Mongols were inexperienced at statecraft and dependent on Han Chinese advisers for any good that might come from their policies. The hope of the Song loyalists was that Kublai and others would move toward Sinification or arrive there in spite of efforts to retain their Mongol iden­ tity. The very strategies that the Mongols used to maintain their cohesive­ ness worked against the grain of Han Chinese society, as one might expect. An institutionalized ethnic hierarchy that favored Mongols and non-Han Chinese in matters of inheritance, commerce, and law created unsustainable, wasteful institutions, as Nicola di Cosmo has argued.37 One cannot help but wonder if the stories of Chabi’s campaigns against waste were popularized as a counterweight to this ingrained problem. By any measure, Kublai had an extraordinarily delicate political situa­ tion on his hands, and he managed it with great finesse and general success. Anige was one of the many superior talents he identified and mobilized for his empire building in an effort to overcome, or at least outrun for a while, entrenched systemic problems. Mungsuz, of Uighur background, discussed in the previous chapter, was among a large contingent of advisers who spoke and read Chinese, which Kublai did not, and who often assisted with trans­ lation, including messages from the prominent Han Chinese court artist and official Zhao Mengfu.38 The classical scholars to whom Kublai did give voice tended to be those who interpreted their own tradition with a degree of innovative spirit not acceptable to the more orthodox and conservative. Chao Pi (1220–1276) and Yao Shu (1202–1278) were two outstanding examples of scholar advisers from the Ruxue tradition of Chinese classical learning.39 In general, however, Kublai was pragmatic and sought talent and loyalty from any source. This eclecticism sustained his Mongol heritage in a complex Dadu in Khitai 193

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situation. How would Anige transcend these slippery issues of ethnicity and power? As an artist, of course, these matters were secondary, but every brushstroke and compositional decision moved through a social environment that shaped the meaning of his creation and its impact. Anige had been on the front lines of more than one political situation and was well aware of the force of human will on historical consequences. Anige conceived the portraits of Kublai and Chabi as a set, two images in relationship to one another. Intended to be placed near each other rather than viewed alone, these images significantly broke with Tang and Song conventions of portraiture. First is the format of matching male and female royal images. A consistent feature of Yuan and Ilkhanid portraiture was the inclusion of female subjects paired with their male partners and presented as equals. To underscore a correspondence between the portraits, their faces turn slightly toward each other. The second innovation was the inclusion of the viewer in relationship to the portrait. Both figures look straight into the viewer’s eyes. Both figures engage and directly address the viewer. These fea­ tures had no precedent in earlier imperial portraits. Tang and Song emperors appeared in three-quarter pose, with their gaze off to the side. Borrowing from pre-Mongol methods, Anige used the tapered brushstroke that trails off at the hem of a garment and the outline brushstroke to shape his figures before adding color. Anning Jing, however, points out that, over all, Anige’s portraits departed from the spirited and didactic qualities of Six Dynasties, Tang, and Song imperial portraits. Instead, while achieving an uncanny verisimilitude, Anige’s images also carried a supernatural quality conveyed through an unnatural perfectionism. Each hair was placed with an exacti­ tude and symmetry that defied normal grooming. Most interestingly, Chabi’s pearls showed the same perfectionism and unnatural exactitude in their uni­ form selection for size. This too was new. While this might seem a familiar standard to us today, it was not a measure in prior imperial portraiture. Pearls signified great spiritual and material wealth. They were a major commod­ ity in the Mongol land and sea strategies. Pearls also featured in Tibetan Buddhist art and were always selected for their uniform size and shape. This is abundantly visible in the Pala tsakli portraits already discussed and in the murals at Alchi in Ladakh, where Kashmiri styles met with the western reach of the Pala traditions. One wonders about the particular style of pearl decoration on Chabi’s hat; in its three dangling strands on each side, it is reminiscent of Byzantine royal styles as seen in Theodora’s pearls at Ravenna. The last point aside, Anning Jing concludes that, “despite the use of some Chinese techniques, the stylistic principles and aesthetic taste that under­ lies the portraits [of Kublai and Chabi] are Nepalese rather than Chinese.”40 If the historical record composed in subsequent centuries by Han Chinese 194 Chapter 7

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produced written portraits that “clearly distorted and denigrated Khubilai’s and the Mongols’ achievements,” as Morris Rossabi has suggested, perhaps Anige’s portraits capture not only an intended impact on the future but a truer image of the past.41 In noting the innovative features of the Kublai and Chabi portraits, and by extension the innovative quality of so much of Yuan dynasty art, the ques­ tion of the extent of this originality arises. Jerome Silbergeld questions the “revolutionary” nature of Yuan art, pointing out that during the Song dynasty Su Shih (1037–1101) explicitly announced the end of all further innovation in art after the stunning work of Wu Daozi (689–755). Silbergeld writes, “I have not found any Yuan writer who wrote of Zhao Mengfu’s role in these terms, nor any who wrote of the Yuan transition and its aftermath as revolu­ tionary.”42 The use of the term “revolutionary” here is misleading. Certainly, no one in the Yuan or before, or long after for that matter, would have used the term as we do today based on the political and artistic experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also, the Song and the Yuan periods produced equally potent but also different experiences of social change. The Song literati attempted to shore up social cohesion during a period of rapid expansion of the agricultural commercial status quo. The Yuan conquest was a revolution in itself, and one that the literati recognized for its discontinu­ ity with the past. In many respects, the revolutionary aspects of the Yuan period were abundant and evident, embedded in contemporary upheaval that did not call forth comment on the obvious. Yuan art was not a matter of quiet reflection on the distant past but an upfront seat in artistic exchange that relocated the past in a contemporary vision of new world possibilities. These were two different kinds of revolutionary moments at the very least. Art historians Sherman E. Lee and Wai-kam Ho consider this rupture to be a consequence of the condition that “Yuan innovators were primarily con­ cerned with painting as a moral act, a statement of where the artist stood in his world.”43 Moral acts had potential revolutionary consequences in this case because they reverberated not only within the Yuan territories but beyond, through the social and cultural zones of Mongol Eurasia. The creation of a Sino-Himalayan school of art at Dadu brought together a unique blend of artistic practices, defined by material and social condi­ tions with exceptional political, bureaucratic, and artistic integration, due in large part to the Mongols’ intervention in East Asian art and their intent to seek out great talent from any source that would strengthen and honor their imperial goals. Through this series of encounters with Tibetan schools of Buddhism, the Mongols first encountered formal portraiture, and they Dadu in Khitai 195

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were no doubt impressed by it. Their devotion to ancestral spirits encoun­ tered an enchanting new way to create images that were stunning in their ability to produce the optical illusion of a recognizable person. Although the Mongol rulers in the thirteenth century did develop a written language and a textual foundation, the very lack of an originating text-based tradi­ tion left image making unfettered by concerns over maintaining orthodoxy. This consequently stimulated innovative, market-testing creativity. Kublai Khan embraced the painted image with unqualified enthusiasm and used it as a means of translation among diverse traditions past and present. Images became the vehicle through which the Mongol rulers would attempt an ideologically unification of their empire. Elaborate, well-funded govern­ ment agencies sponsored transcontinental networks of resources and skills to support a high level of artistic achievement. This activity was a matter of intentional policy. The synergy of Kublai’s orchestrated material and intel­ lectual culture was stupendous. He welcomed individuals of diverse back­ grounds into his imperial guard, the inner sanctum of court life. Of note in connection with Buddhism in western Tibet, Ladakh, and Kashmir is the personage of Tiege from the prominent Gainai Buddhist lineage in Kashmir, who was tapped by Kublai for imperial guard service.44 Bolad (c. 1240–1313), a statesman and intellect of superior qualities and ministerial right-hand man to Kublai, oversaw Tiege’s preparation for service. Among his multiple high-ranking positions at Dadu, Bolad, along with a Chinese colleague, was tasked by Kublai with the establishment of the Imperial Library directorate that collected books, maps, and pictures plus prohibited works on sorcery and geomancy.45 It was none other than Bolad who, also under at Kublai’s auspices, played a major role in the transmission of Song/Yuan agricultural, technical, and historical knowledge to the Ilkhanid court in Tabriz, includ­ ing information critical to Rashid al-Din’s Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh.46 Fortunately for the intellectual circles gathered at the Rab ‘-i Rashidi, Bolad’s return from Tabriz to Dadu was blocked by conflict in the Chaghadaid territories. Anige, contemporary to Bolad and others of extraordinary talent, shared an equally prominent role at the political center. The Yuan bureaucratic apparatus mag­ nified and multiplied exceptional intellects, producing a most unusual his­ torical confluence of political and creative energies. In the case of the genius of Anige, this happened through the tens of thousands of artisan households that he oversaw through his official appointments. As already noted, the Mongol rulers of the Yuan and Ilkhanid territo­ ries were heavily invested in the arts. They spent huge portions of their state revenue on artistic endeavors without which heightened levels of creative productivity would not have been possible.47 The ruling families of the Yuan experienced their political centrality in a way that cultivated a leadership cult. 196 Chapter 7

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Portraiture was a part of devotion to iconic leaders, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions in portraiture offered a means to that end. Although the greater loss of Ilkhanid Buddhist art means there is distortion when comparing the role of portraiture in Yuan and Ilkhanid visual culture, it does seem clear that the Yuan within their own circles favored portraiture over narrative formats. Court painters at Dadu painted Yuan rulers into history through portraits that bore a likeness to real khans and khatuns and followed Tibetan Buddhist pictorial conventions that individualized depictions of spiritual leaders.48 Even when the subject matter was daily life, such as Liu Guandao’s Kublai and Chabi Hunting (1280), the large format (72 × 41 inches) and con­ text of a strong pictorial arts legacy introduced a remarkably high level of detailed exactitude. Ilkhanid artists, by contrast, painted history through narrative illustrations in which figures were more generalized, though not without individualizing features that sometimes seem a bit cartoonish. The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh included depictions of Roman popes, Frankish kings, and Mongol rulers. None of them, however, appeared in the lifelike forms cre­ ated by Anige for the Yuan court. All shared facial features that were uni­ formly Mongol, sometimes Persian, and dress that was Muslim or Mongol in style. Historical figures such as Alexander the Great in the Great Mongol Shahnama were given similar dress and facial details. Time in Yuan portrai­ ture was suggested through the portrait’s gaze, connecting past, present, and future. Time in Ilkhanid painting was experienced through the narrative flow of past, present, and future; illustrated biography, for example that of Ilkhan Ghazan in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, provided scenes from stages of life: babyhood, early childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. Ghazan was defined more through the pictorial narrative of family and political relations than individual portrait features. Again, we do not know if more Ilkhanid portraits have been lost. There is one literary reference to a portrait of Ilkhan Arghun that is no longer extent. Yuan Buddhist philosophical pluralism maximized the creative envi­ ronment in which artists moved through a rich admixture of Islamic, Persian, Byzantine, and Buddhist literary and visual cultures. In some regions, such as Khorasan and Azerbaijan, Buddhist revival percolated across cultural forma­ tions that had previously absorbed Hindu and Buddhist elements from the eras of the Khushan Empire and the early decades of the Abbasid Caliphate. In areas such as Turfan this revival repurposed a Buddhist legacy that had gone through numerous iterations inclusive of contact with Manichaean and Church of the East iconographies. A Buddhist renaissance, radiating out from the Yuan, prospered in a cultural milieu inhabited by schools of Tang and Song painting practices and talent drawn from communities in Nepal, Greater Tibet, and Uighurstan. Rulers of the Golden Horde and Chaghdaid Dadu in Khitai 197

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ulus, less involved with Buddhist practices, sponsored sophisticated artistry in metalwork and textiles but did not pursue the Yuan and Ilkhanid devo­ tion to the painted image. In collecting Buddhist art of previous dynasties, the Yuan rulers claimed their role as contemporary leaders of the Buddhist world. They were well aware of their place in the history of Buddhism, being responsible for a major Buddhist revival across thirteenth-century Eurasia. In this revival politics and art were integral to each other. The Tibetan Buddhist fluores­ cence in East Asia settled into a social environment already imbued with layers of Buddhist practice, making Tibetan Buddhism familiar in some respects but suspicious in others. Travelers from western Europe for the first time became aware of Buddhist art and specific features of Buddhism. Marco Polo and others wrote home about the concept of the transmigration of souls. William of Rubruck transmitted the Tibetan Buddhist prayer Om mani padme hum from Karakorum to Paris. Islam encountered Buddhism during the Mongol era, not for the first time but in an entirely new way. After initial contacts with Buddhism during the early Abbasid period, Buddhism had waned only to reappear in the Iranian heartland under Ilkhanid aus­ pices. Ilkhanid Buddhism had to compete with indigenous Islamic traditions fully developed by the thirteenth century. A major presence in the areas of Tabriz, Sultaniyya, and Khorosan, Buddhism from western Tibet, Kashmir, and Turfan left its mark on Ilkhanid governing philosophy and artistic ambi­ ance before being overwhelmed by schools of Sufism and Islam. Temple sites at Labnasagut and other locations housed Buddhist texts, textiles, paintings, and sculptures. All of this is lost. For imagery related to Buddhism from the Ilkhanid period we have only the “History of Hind and Sind” in Rashid al­ Din’s Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh. Here the historical Buddha himself appears within a narrative format possessing Muslim-style clothing and Central Asian facial features.49 Specific rulers depicted in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh could sometimes be identified by their facial features and context within a story line, but their visages were not intended to capture individual spiritual and psycho­ logical qualities, as was the case with the full-face portraits of Kublai and other members of the royal family. From Dadu to the west of Tabriz the thirteenth century was not only a Mongol century but a Buddhist century in world history.

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CHAPTER 8

Quanzhou in Manzi (Great Yuan)

O

n the Mongolian prince Ayurbarwada’s twentieth birthday, Yuan court artist Wang Zhenpeng (active 1280–1329)1 presented the heir apparent with an intricate and stunningly beautiful scroll of a dragon boat regatta, set on Jinming (Golden Bright) Pond in the northern city of Kaifeng (Bianjin). Mongols had conquered Kaifeng almost a century earlier, and thirty-one years had passed since Kublai Khan’s complete con­ quest of Song territories. At Ayurbarwada’s birthday gathering, his twentyseven-year-old sister Mongolian princess Sengge Ragi (c. 1283–1331) took keen notice of the scroll and let it be known that she desired a painting of this boating scene for her own. Not until 1323, when invited to a literary soiree sponsored by Sengge, did Wang present her with a similar painting of the long-admired dragon boat regatta. It is lucky for us that she made the request, for the emperor’s rendition seems not to have survived. In 1311, Prince Ayurbarwada (1285–1320) became the Yuan emperor Renzong and by extension the eighth Great Khan of the Mongols, with their claims to a Eurasian empire. Why had Wang selected this subject for his presentation to the prince, and why was the scene particularly appealing to the princess and others? Mongol seafaring policies were well established by this time and ongoing. The Dragon Boat Regatta reads as a microcosm of Yuan involvement in sea­ faring commercial ventures, suggesting Yuan court relationship to merchant culture and hence to southern seafaring culture. The official and popular story associated with the dragon boat festival commemorated the life of the loyal minister Qu Yuan, who died in 278 BCE by drowning himself in protest against official corruption. The festival reenacts the desperation of bereaved common people who set out in simple boats to find and save Qu, but to no avail. The story of Qu Yuan was a marker of southern culture.2 Qu was a minister in the state of Chu that occupied a central region along the Yangzi River but politically and culturally constituted a fringe area to the dominant north. The coastal areas were even farther from northern reach. 199

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Known as the inspiration for the Chu Ci (Songs of Chu or Songs of the South), Qu Yuan was also associated with the classical poetic arts. By the Mongol period, boat scenes invoked associations as well with the cult of Mazu (Goddess of the Seas). Originating in popular culture and later incor­ porated into state ceremonial practices, Mazu was officially promoted by Yuan authorities with the title “Protector of the Empire and the Brilliantly Outstanding Heavenly Princess.”3 Quanzhou, the site of the earliest official temples dedicated to Mazu, became a center from which her cult radiated out to communities of the Southern Seas; she purportedly protected villagers not only from storms at sea but from the ravages of piracy and official corrup­ tion in tax and commercial practices.4 The Dragon Boat Regatta captured the spirit of cultural bridge building, ingeniously incorporating multiple levels of emotion laden sentiment (festivities and birthdays) into a signature image of Mongol state authority. Like many of his contemporaries, including Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Rashid al-Din, and Theodore Metochites, Wang occupied a social position defined by an awareness of Eurasian artistic and political relationships. These individuals on the artist-statesmen spectrum visualized thirteenth-century societies through image making that shared the perception of an expanding and diverse world. Richard Vinograd has suggested that Wang Zhenpeng’s positionality in Yuan court patronage circles makes him a key figure for rethinking the significance of Yuan art in its Asian context.5 We might con­ sider in addition that Wang’s personal connections to southeast coastal cen­ ters offer a way of seeing Yuan art in its Eurasian context. Born in Wenzhou, Yongjia during the Yuan period, Wang grew up in a social milieu that was at once isolated and turned toward the wider world. A mountainous coastal area between Hangzhou inland and Quanzhou farther south, Wenzhou with its vibrant artistic and theatri­ cal traditions provided Wang with a regionally strong, southern, cultural identity outside predominant northern Han attitudes. At the same time, under the Mongols the social dynamics of the region became more com­ plex. Southerners were at the bottom of the Mongol official hierarchy, yet southern literati, of whom Wang was one, were highly sought after by the rulers at Dadu. Semuren, second to the Mongols in the Yuan official hierarchy, included Westerners, Persians, Arabs, and Hindus, all of whom had strong communities in the southern seaports and now enjoyed official preference over both northern and southern Han groups. This reconfigu­ ration stirred social relations and significantly stimulated new pockets of commercial, intellectual, and political activity. Wang’s world was wide open in every direction. 200 Chapter 8

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QUANZHOU AND MARITIME EMPIRE IN THE MONGOL BLUEPRINT

FOR WORLD CONQUEST

The last stop in our tour of long-thirteenth-century Eurasian places brings us to the port city of Quanzhou,6 approximately five hundred miles to the south of Hangzhou, the former Southern Song capital captured by Kubulai Khan’s forces in 1276. Rashid al-Din from his perspective in Tabriz wrote of Quanzhou (Zayton) as “the port to Hindustan and the capital of Machin.”7 He was unaware that “Machin” and its equivalent “Manzi” both derived from northern Chinese language terminology applied derogatorily to people of the south. Rashid al-Din noted that Kublai Khan had ordered a canal built connecting Dadu in the north to Quanzhou, a forty-day journey by boat, from the south. Rashid al-Din also recorded the names of governors of Quanzhou, many of which were Muslim Persian. Hamd-Allah Mustawfi of Qazwin, in his fourteenth-century geography, observed that “The Mongols call this land Manzi, while the Arabs name it Şïn. . . . The population for the most part worship idols (being Manichaeans) of the sect of Mani the Painter.”8 Qazwin described the southern region, and Hangzhou in particu­ lar, as having very expensive dates and mutton, a concern for those favor­ ing a Muslim diet. He also noted that “Most of the people are Infidels [Buddhists], yet the Moslems [sic] though so few in number have the power in their hands.”9 Buddhism and Manichaeism merged in these accounts. Not typically associated with maritime activity, the Mongol conquerors in fact under­ stood the importance of sea trade in world commerce and hence world con­ quest. Writing on the subject, Tansen Sen notes that the Yuan was the first dynasty to send court officials beyond the Straits of Malacca with the intent of developing diplomatic and commercial alliances.10 They worked the poten­ tial connectivity of these routes from both ends. If they were to fulfill their self-proclaimed mandate, every center of potential wealth had to be subor­ dinated to their control, including the coastal ports of south Asia and into the Arabian Sea. The initial effort of Kublai Khan to secure direct Mongol access to the southern seas was through overseas conquest. Simultaneously as Ilkhan Hülegü set out to capture Baghdad in January 1258, Kublai launched the first Mongol invasion of Dai Viet (northern Vietnam). After repeated maritime failures to secure a foothold in Dai Viet and Champa as well as a thwarted attempt to invade Japan in 1274, Yuan policy makers increasingly directed their resources toward the conquest of the Southern Song as the best way to gain a strong presence on the Southern Seas. From this vantage point Quanzhou in Manzi 201

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Quanzhou, with its long history of maritime activity prior to the Mongol conquests, loomed large in Mongol design for world commercial integration. Reliance on Persian and Arabian trade networks operating out of Quanzhou did not, however, forestall Kublai’s own maritime projects. From 1275 to 1279, Mongol naval power grew tenfold, and intensive shipbuilding pro­ grams every year produced thousands of new sea vessels with improvements on Song ship technology. The Song dynasty had promoted extensive statesponsored shipyards that existed together with private shipbuilders along the Fujian coast. Technicians developed putty materials to address problems with corrosion of iron fasteners during the Song. Abundant coastal oyster and clam beds provided “oyster lime” with its 90 percent calcium carbonate for mixing with tung oil to create a putty material excellent for its adhesive and waterproofing qualities; interestingly, a Yuan source refers to “horse boats” built by natives caulked with mud that routinely caused leakage problems.11 By the late Song, technological improvements enabled increased ship size, strength, and buoyancy across a wide variety of seafaring venues. Yuan pro­ duction continued to improve on these standards. Kublai sent missions to alHind ports explicitly to gather data for further technical innovations.12 Plans for overseas conquest, however, were never successful, including renewed invasion attempts of Champa and Dai Viet from 1283 to 1288 and a massive 1281 attempted invasion of Japan staged in part from Quanzhou. Although it did not achieve Kublai’s ultimate vision, the Mongol mari­ time project produced extensive commercial and cultural connectivity on a Eurasian scale. From Quanzhou vessels came and went along passages through the Eastern Seas that included the South Sea (Nanhai), the Sea of Tonkin, the Straits of Malacca, and the Western Seas, including the Sea of Calicut, the Sea of al-Hind, and the Persian Sea.13 It was precisely this route that Marco Polo himself traveled on his return home to Venice in 1291–1293 as a member of an official party charged by Kublai Khan to escort seventeen­ year-old Mongol princess Kökötchin from Quanzhou to Tabriz, where she was to become the bride of Ilkhan Arghun, though, owing to the latter’s death before her arrival, she was married instead to Arghun’s son, Ghazan.14 Mongol princesses typically carried valuable books and paintings as part of their dowries.15 The Ilkhans at their end of empire pursued maritime connectivity by cultivating Genoese seafaring skills, to the mutual advantage of both. The Genoese, with privileged information and Ilkhanid protection, monopolized European presence along the al-Hind seas, to the chagrin of their Venetian rivals. Virgil Ciocîltan, who has examined data on Italian merchant activity in the South Asia sea routes, concludes that “for the first half of the four­ teenth century it was overwhelmingly a Genoese creation. The Genoese kept 202 Chapter 8

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it a closely-guarded secret, thereby defending it for their own exclusive use.”16 After 1260, sea routes were essential to empire building under Yuan auspices as conflicts between the Yuan and Chaghadaid ulus periodically made transit along northern land routes difficult or impassable. The transformative impact of Mongol maritime policy was in many respects made possible by the earlier history of Quanzhou. An active site for trade as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), Quanzhou evolved into a major commercial hub during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Song dynasty (960–1279). The port city’s distinctive economic prosperity became the foundation of maritime expansion during the Yuan period (1279–1368). Among imported commodities the Quanzhou trade superintendent recorded pearls, frankincense, coral, glass, medicinals, copper, mercury, ginseng, sil­ ver, ambergris, pepper, and gum benzoin. Quanzhou was not, however, the primary consumer of these and other imported goods. In fact, maritime trade alone would not have made Quanzhou the major commercial center it became. Equally important was the development of Song dynasty state policies that created bureaucratic infrastructure and distribution mecha­ nisms. Huge profits depended not only on the intake of goods from vast overseas markets (the Kingdom of Goryeo and the Kamakura Shogunate to the Southern Seas, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Persian Gulf) but on the delivery of these commodities to wealthy northern impe­ rial centers. As Hugh R. Clark has written, “At one level, what occurred in Quannan was different from the norm. The distinct role of Quanzhou City as an entrepôt in the South Sea trade created a dynamic that could have been shared by only a limited number of economic systems throughout China and indeed the rest of the world.”17 Clark refers to this overseas network in which Quanzhou was situated as the “Asian littoral from Japan to Arabia.” K. L. So makes the case for Quanzhou’s uniqueness by noting the urban-rural distribution of popula­ tion within the county compared with other southern Manzi coastal cities. He writes, “Such a high degree of urbanization within a county territory is likely to have been extremely unusual among Sung [sic] cities.”18 So finds that fully one-half of the Quanzhou population made its livelihood solely off commerce, compared with one-third in Fuzhou, another Manzi port city to the south. Perceived through diverse linguistic and intellectual traditions, the geography of the Eastern Seas was both a shared physical encounter and a social experience that led to a hodgepodge of peripatetic place markers. In the Greek and Islamic intellectual traditions, as Hyunhee Park has noted, the “concept of sea division” organized geographic thinking about the shape of the world.19 Places had multiple names and locations depending on linguistic Quanzhou in Manzi 203

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and historical genealogies. The Mediterranean Sea was known as the Sea of Rum and also as the Western Sea. The Indian Ocean (modern usage) was the Abyssinian Sea, the Erythraean Sea, or, on Albert Herrmann’s map of the Mongol era, the Green Sea.20 This map also shows a Sea of Hsi-lan to the northeast of Ceylon and a Sea of Cin between Goryeo and Khitai. The “Cin” is the character for gold and possibly designated the Kin clan of Sin-lo (Korea) noted by Zhao Rugua in his Record of Foreign Lands.21 Al-Idrisi’s famous twelfth-century map of the world condensed the space of the modern Indian Ocean into a Sea of Zanj between Ethiopia and Sind/Hind. Despite the diversity of names, the usage of “sea” (bihār in Arabic, hai in Chinese, mare in Latin) rather than “ocean” to designate waterways remained consistent. During this era there was little to motivate routine oceangoing ventures. Seas functioned as prosperous transit zones along coastal lands; oceans were remote, largely without value, and perilous. The concept of ocean was reserved for the great sea that was imagined to surround the world at it farthest reaches between heaven and earth. Less descriptions of routes than detailed clusters of constellation and monsoon data for specific points along the coast, sailing instructions relied on an oral tradition of memorization in verse rather than literary and travel accounts that were considered impracti­ cal; pilots renowned for their extraordinary skills were known as “Lions of the Sea” (luyūth al-bihār).22 Consequently, Quanzhou existed on a littoral continuum of seas defined by directional signifiers and port names. Just as there was no “India” in the modern nation-state sense, so there was no Indian Ocean. A route composed of multiple seas carried travelers between Quanzhou and ports along the way to al-Hind and Basra. Similarly, without a “China” there could be no China Sea. The work of twelfth-century geographer Sharaf alZaman Tahir Marvazi makes it clear that our current misusage of “China” to translate Şïn leads to confusion. The inhabitants of the eastern territories he noted “are divided into three categories, namely, Şïn, Qitay, called by common people Khitay, and Uyghur, of which the greatest is the region and kingdom of Şïn.”23 Şïn in Marvazi’s accounts was one kingdom contain­ ing many countries and diverse peoples. A southern region, he notes called Machin (Manzi), was linguistically distinct from the northern lands of Şïn (or Çin). Marvazi also conveyed a seascape view of the world: “The Second Clime begins in the East and stretches across China [read Şïn], Hind and Sind, passing through al-Mansura and Daybul. It cuts through the Green Sea, the Sea of Basra and the Arabian peninsula (across) the territories of Najd, Tihama, Yamama, Bahrayn and Hajar. It cuts through the Qulzum Sea and runs through Upper Egypt and the territories of Maghrib, across the central part of Ifriqiya, then across the Berber lands, ending in the Sea 204 Chapter 8

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of Maghrib.”24 Contemporaries sailed into the port of Zaitun, the Arabic name for Quanzhou, and hence the waters or Sea of Zaitun, not a Yuan Sea or Machin Sea, and certainly not a China Sea. These seas, and the Mediterranean as well, were domains dominated by Muslim commercial culture that regularized practices for financial transac­ tions and the adjudication of disputes.25 Mongol authorities understood the need to engage through these established networks and customs wherein each domain had its own dynamics and yet the Mongols were not always successful in their strategies. Janet Abu-Lughod notes that thirteenth-cen­ tury world economy was diffuse and not hierarchically organized relative to the sixteenth century, but interactions, both commercial and political, were far from lacking principles of hierarchy, as we have seen in carefully tal­ lied official gift giving and abilities to access prized resources.26 The ques­ tion of similarity between the Mediterranean and Eastern Seas also arises. Historian Wang Gungwu describes a process of commercial integration at work in the Eastern Seas beginning in the tenth century that he suggests was for the first time becoming a cohesive maritime zone similar to the Mediterranean.27 It appears, however, that by the thirteenth century, the Muslim merchant culture in the Mediterranean began to give way to Italian merchant challenges, making the region increasingly less like the maritime culture of Muslim emporia along the seas of al-Hind, Malacca, and Tonkin, and more like a system of piracy with advanced accounting and bookkeep­ ing skills acquired from knowledge of Arabic learning. Travis Bruce notes an early history of shared terms of commercial negotiation under the umbrella of Muslim diplomacy among trading firms at Genoa, Pisa, and Tunis. With the rise of commercial prospects opened by the Mongol intervention, merchants with Genoese and Pisan associations could increasingly afford opportunistic gambles that defied the status quo of Muslim maritime standards.28 Anthropologist Mingming Wang reminds us that Quanzhou, a loosely administered city during the Tang and Northern Song, experienced a dra­ matic shift toward administrative uniformity during the Southern Song: “The insertion of administrative centers for control and pacification amounted to the casting of a net over the city, and by the mid-fourteenth century, the administrative net had taken over the urban landscape.”29 A pujing system and its alterations over the centuries marked the development of state mech­ anisms that created the Quanzhou example. Pu (ward) in the early Song referred to units of the postal system in which a building was ideally placed every 10 li (approximately three miles) to facilitate commercial and political communications. Later the Song government regularized the system, and those who staffed the offices gained official training and status and conse­ quently became more beholden to the state than the amateur messengers had Quanzhou in Manzi 205

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been. Within Quanzhou, the city was administratively divided into huafang (mapped neighborhoods), each of which had its own pu police station every three hundred feet.30 The resulting mechanisms of control coincidentally created a business environment infrastructure that maximized profit-making opportunities (roads, communications, security) and attracted those seeking them. Given that the Mongols first rose to power by reorganizing nomadic tribal units according to the Khitan and Jurchen military decimal system based on units of ten (arban), one hundred (mingghan, jaghun), and ten thou­ sand (tumen), it is not surprising that the Yuan rulers immediately recognized the value of Quanzhou’s pujing system. Kublai Khan essentially multiplied and extended the existing stations for communication and policing purposes, and took one step farther by bringing three thousand “Persian mercenar­ ies” from Yangzhou to Quanzhou to serve as police, some of whom were assigned to the new pu units.31 A minority population beholden to the Yuan rulers sought to control a diverse but also predominantly Han population. Innovative state-sponsored uses of existing cultural forms, including both the pu and the Mazu temples, made this possible.32 Wang Zhenpeng’s painting utilized this same set of cultural tropes and arranged them to satisfy the per­ sonal sensibilities and political designs of the new Mongol rulers. The Mongol conquests seriously impacted and unsettled the interde­ pendence of rural and urban economic life, stressed in Lorenzetti’s depiction of good government as a critical measure of social well-being. While elev­ enth/twelfth century developments in Quanzhou as well as Siena and Genoa had produced localized preconditions essential for the economic takeoff experienced in conjunction with Mongol commercial policies, social change resulting from thirteenth-century transcontinental commercial expansion seriously challenged status-quo arrangements that had favored agricultural communities. Quanzhou was one case where strong rural-urban interdepen­ dence and state intervention assisted new economic potential under Mongol authority. In the Ilkhanate, where Rashid al-Din belatedly sought to culti­ vate rural reconstruction, his appeals were not as convincing. The agricultural base was weaker, and Ilkhanid Mongol rule did not deem it crucial to remedy the situation. Maximizing trade though diplomacy and imperial command remained the Ilkhanate’s nomadic mode of operation. At Quanzhou, initial large-scale immigration into the area came as a consequence of political conflicts in the north in the eleventh century. This immigration put pressure on an environment that was not rich in agri­ cultural potential. The land was stony and could not be plowed effectively. In addition, the land near the sea was salty. Agricultural options for small owner-cultivators (nongmin) were limited. With fewer options in agriculture, 206 Chapter 8

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people turned to trade investments, which offered larger profits over a shorter time. The sea brought possibilities the land could not provide. As already mentioned, central state-sponsored administrative development of the area was essential to the eventual success of these commercial strategies. When population growth reached a point where the land could not provide enough food, grain imports from the Guangzhou area became a necessity, as did food imports from the South Sea markets. It was cheaper to import the surplus of rice produced in the Yangzi valley and Guangzhou regions into Quanzhou than to grow it locally. Quanzhou farmers more profitably put their labor into salt production or lichee orchards. Pottery (stoneware and porcelain) and mining (iron, metalwork, silver, and copper), as well as cotton cloth, became major export items and hence sources of local income. Major imports into the city included indigo and pearls.33 A distinctive cultural synergism encompassed the region that included Quanzhou and Hangzhou, capital of the Southern Song dynasty. The arts, politics, and religion all shared in this atmosphere. Hangzhou in the fourth century CE was home to a major Chan Buddhist community founded by the monk Hui Li, who had traveled from the Nepalese territories. The Lingyin Temple complex (Temple of the Soul’s Retreat—literally, the Soul’s Shadow Temple) grew by the tenth century to become an expanse of multiple pavilions and halls designed to accommodate up to three thousand monks and thirteen hundred dormitory rooms. The mountains around Hangzhou became a major concentration of Chan Buddhist communities, with travelers to these locations sojourning throughout Quanzhou on their way to or arriv­ ing from parts of south and southeast Asia. Zhen Dang (active 1163) com­ mented that “Quanzhou is called the Land of the Buddha, and its traditions are pure and simple. Its ships travel among the islands and to the barbarians, so the city has great wealth.”34 Maritime activities circulated the philosophi­ cal ideas, political paradigms, ritual technologies, artistic motifs, and mate­ rial culture of Buddhism among communities between the Bay of Bengal and the Korean peninsula from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries.35 Buddhist monasteries in this Quanzhou environment became major commercial players, which as we have seen was consonant with their theolog­ ical views. Already possessing independent resources, monastic communities more easily acquired land and gradually became large landowners and cen­ ters of wealth. Occupying a central place in this Buddhist maritime environ­ ment, monasteries at Quanzhou were poised to profit from maritime trade. Having accrued more land per capita than the nearby lay communities, the monasteries moved easily toward agricultural specialization and commerce.36 By the thirteenth century, when the Mongols entered the scene, Buddhist communities held up to 22 percent of the land in the Quanzhou region; each Quanzhou in Manzi 207

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member of a monastic community had access to the produce of one and a half qing of land, while for the lay population seventeen people sustained themselves on one qing.37 This concentration of arable land in temple hold­ ings provided a surplus beyond consumption that encouraged specialization. Lichees and sugarcane developed as major commercial crops, and assess­ ments collected on refined sugar production became a significant source of local tax revenue.38 Given the dynamics of Quanzhou’s commercial wealth, it is not surpris­ ing that the city’s demographics would reflect a remarkable Eurasian posi­ tionality. By the mid-fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta compared Quanzhou to the Egyptian port of Alexandria. But in fact Quanzhou’s cultural diversity was even greater. The city became a center where Islamic, Hindu, Catholic, and Manichean communities intermingled with local popular sects, Buddhist and Daoist practitioners, and Confucian scholars. The Sufi Kazaruni Order (Ishaqi Order) had hermitages (zāwiyah) along the coast from the Persian Gulf to the South Sea where during the Yuan period they created a large establishment at Quanzhou.39 The local elite became a commercial one with little direct involvement in official bureaucracy.40 Whereas the Song state generally subordinated merchant status to officialdom, at the same time leav­ ing ample free rein for commerce, the Northern Song pattern at Quanzhou strained this relationship. A booming maritime economy linked to markets in the interior provided a platform on which a new elite might emerge. The Yuan rulers pushed the independence of the commercial elite even further. Through policies that favored prominent Muslim traders and their overseas networks, merchants increasingly constituted a power elite beyond the reach of bureaucratic controls that might check or undermine merchant wealth. THE MONGOL TRANSFORMATION OF QUANZHOU Quanzhou fell to Kublai Khan’s forces in 1277. Communications with the Quanzhou Muslim commercial networks of Pu Shougeng presaged a rela­ tively smooth transition to Mongol rule resulting in little destruction of infrastructure or disruption to economic activity. Current scholarship holds that Quanzhou’s economy was in decline in the early thirteenth century. Given conditions of decline, it is noteworthy that a short-lived revival of Quanzhou’s prosperity took place as the Mongol rulers sought to capital­ ize on the city’s track record by enlarging and energizing the very institu­ tions had that stimulated Song commercial growth and could be mobilized to contribute to the Mongol game plan for global empire. By significantly minimizing or altering the sources of Quanzhou’s mid-thirteenth-century decline—piracy, corruption, and demands of the imperial family—Mongol 208 Chapter 8

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policies revved up the local economy for another few decades before these endemic difficulties once more took hold. Quanzhou quickly shifted to busi­ ness as usual under the new conditions. Import taxes increased, but imperial support for maritime commerce also increased. A major consequence of the Mongol capture of Quanzhou was the latter’s significant new maritime connection to Tabriz. John Chaffee dem­ onstrates that Yuan trade was more focused on direct commerce between Quanzhou and the Persian Gulf than had been the case during the Song period.41 Kish merchants, based on an island near Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, provided the Ilkhanid court in Tabriz with experience and expertise connected to the seas of al-Hind and the ports of the Eastern Seas that struc­ tured much of the Muslim maritime diaspora during the Yuan period. Djamal al-Din Ibrahim, the Lord of Kish, for example, coordinated multiple ortuy (trade partnerships) that did business in the Yuan and al-Hind ports. He was in the confidence of Ilkhans Abaqa, Arghun, and Ghazan, who appointed his son Fahr al-Din Ahmad as the Ilkhan’s envoy in charge of commerce at the Yuan court; in addition, the regions of Khorasan and Azerbaijian in the Ilkhanate supplied the majority of Muslim officials appointed to the Yuan bureaucracy, making the Ilkhanate a major presence in the Yuan govern­ ment.42 The Yuan rulers employed Muslim merchants, but the Ilkhans were imbedded in the central Asian heartland of Muslim commercial networks. With a stagnant agricultural sector, the Ilkhans had additional incentive to pursue sea trade. Pu Shougeng, the Muslim merchant magnate who surren­ dered Quanzhou to Kublai Khan’s forces, was instrumental in advising the court at Dadu to pursue long-distance maritime commercial relations. The wealth commanded by the Persian merchant community was staggering, and no doubt well known to Mongol agents. Pu’s son-in-law, Fu Lian, according to author Zhou Mi (1232–1308), “usually sent out eighty sea ships abroad [each year]. When he died in 1293, his daughter was still young and with­ out male descendants. The government confiscated his property and found 130 shi of pearls and many other things.”43 At sixty kilograms per shi, that is 7,800 kilograms or 8.5 tons of pearls. Considering the chests in which pearls were transported and the high value the Mongols placed on pearls, considered second only to luxury textiles and gold, this incredible quantity becomes credible. Possessing great wealth, expertise, and knowhow, Persian merchants like Fu Lian literally laced the Mongol Empire together like a string of pearls from the Persian Gulf to Quanzhou and the court at Dadu. A signifier of great commercial, political, and cosmic attraction, pearls, not surprisingly, appear regularly in the art of the period, showing up in rondelle designs, large earrings for Mongol men of elite status, and, of course, on the magnificent headdresses of the Mongol khatuns. Quanzhou in Manzi 209

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By all accounts, Mongol rule exponentially enhanced the cultural diver­ sity of Song dynasty Quanzhou. Flexible and overlapping social categories defined more by functional relations than strictly ethnic, linguistic, or reli­ gious boundaries were the norm. The term Huihui, today used to designate Muslim Chinese, during the Yuan described more than a Muslim popula­ tion; it functioned as a term for various groups defined by their official nonHan identity. For example, Zhuhu Huihui referred to Jewish people, Xindu Huihui described Muslims of north India, Lüjing Huihui indicated Christians of Caucasian descent, and Louli Huihui identified Gypsies in the interior of Yuan territories.44 If opportunity called, and it did under the circumstances of Mongol rule, Han Chinese might also move toward a kind of Huihui iden­ tity if it benefited them. After the Yuan government incorporated Muslim ortuy into their system of commercial control, Han Chinese merchants began to register as ortuy to promote their own businesses.45 Wenzhou (Yongjia), birthplace of Wang Zhenpeng, was a coastal city between Quanzhou and Hangzhou that would have given Wang early contact with seafaring culture. The dragon boat imagery, a multivalent signifier, car­ ried socially familiar and emotionally meaningful cultural associations that could be leveraged to invoke visions of transcontinental empire. Because boat races were often included in imperial festivities, these events and their depic­ tion carried connotations of royal championship and victory. The policies of Kublai Khan sought to bolster this culture by addressing the main issues that had begun to arrest Quanzhou’s maritime prosperity: piracy, corrup­ tion, and the expenses of the Song imperial family that increasingly drained the local economy. As Tansen Sen has noted, “the aggressive policies of the Yuan court under Qubilai Khan facilitated the creation of Chinese maritime networks to southern Asia, consisting of intertwined private trade, govern­ ment, and shipping segments”; this resulted in a significant, sudden increase of commercial exchange that coincidentally carried cultural by-products.46 Coastal communities with commercial potential invited piracy, whether as havens for boats and crew after a long day of plundering or as targets of plunder. The line between a community’s decision to invest in trade or piracy was often thin, depending on local resources and a cost-benefit analysis given specific circumstances. Today’s nest of sea pirates might be tomorrow’s lawful citizens, and vice versa. Piracy was a livelihood response to changing social conditions. An exploitative state or the absence of a protective, stable state might tip the balance that stimulated or detered piracy. Sometimes the state itself mobilized piratical violence to combat maritime state rivals.47 Rather than ban maritime trade, and consequently turn the seas over to unchecked piracy, as the Ming (1368–1644) would do, the Yuan continued the Song 210 Chapter 8

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policy of state-controlled maritime activity and greatly expanded maritime opportunities. Yuan rulers created channels for prominent pirates to enter government service and profit through legal activities. Zhu Qing and Zhang Xuan, pirate lords of Chongming island at the mouth of the Yangtze, in 1273 offered their services and a fleet of five hundred ships to Kublai Khan to insure grain transport to Dadu. Kublai accepted. At the level of state bureaucracy, the Mongols inherited and contin­ ued to make use of specific regulatory structures, the value of which they immediately perceived. The most innovative of these structures was the Song dynasty institution of the Maritime Trade Superintendencies. These were unique to Song and then Yuan trade relations, and integral to the commer­ cial magnetism of East Asia. Both the Song and the Yuan were friendly to maritime trade. Initially three, the number of superintendencies expanded to eight, including Quanzhou in 1087. These offices oversaw lighthouses every ten miles on the approach into harbors, naval escorts into ports, protection for merchants, and annual feasts for foreign merchants. Officials collected import tariffs, set standards for compulsory state purchases of imported goods, and inspected exports. Foreign merchants were welcomed and their activities promoted to the benefit of both the merchants and the state. The state also encouraged a system of foreign headmen selected by foreign com­ munities to govern themselves by their own laws. Foreign merchants who wanted to travel beyond the port city could obtain a certificate, and the sons of many of these merchants studied in “Chinese” schools.48 In addition, Muslim merchants, organized into merchant associations (ortuy), came under state supervision during the Song and Yuan, offering ready-made, strong, and well-established commercial networks through the Straits of Malacca, to Hormuz and Tabriz. Muslim merchants had far-ranging monopolies in gold, pearls, and textiles that brought in huge profits and revenue for the state. Although Cairo and Tabriz were politically hostile to one another, commerce in the seas of al-Hind included exchange among merchants of Mamluk, Persian, and South Asian origins alike. The Yuan rulers, as ethnic outsiders, manipulated these institutional mechanisms to their advantage by systematically placing Muslims and other non-Han groups ahead of Han Chinese in government appointments includ­ ing those related to trade. Persian and Arabic were the primary languages into which imperial edicts regarding trade and other matters were translated. A full one-third of superintendents of maritime trade during the Yuan were Muslims, and in Quanzhou the Arab (Dashi) and Persian (Bosi) communi­ ties formed largely self-governing entities.49 Well-established communities of Persian and Arab merchants maintained their own militias in the vicinity. Quanzhou in Manzi 211

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In contrast to the Song period, when the Muslim population of Quanzhou was primarily Arab, Mongol policies facilitated the immigration of Persian Muslim families. As John Chaffee has informed us, “Mongol rule elevated the status of the Muslims while the Mongol ecumene made possible a large influx of Muslims from the Middle East and provided unprecedented mobil­ ity for them, both within China and between China and their home coun­ tries, thus significantly altering the nature of the communities and their diasporic identity.”50 Connections between Tabriz and Dadu were critical in this matter. With official encouragement, Persian Muslim merchant immi­ gration to Quanzhou gained an ease that significantly increased their num­ bers. Upon arrival, Persian Muslim merchants enjoyed an unprecedented level of central government support. Mongol conquest of the Quanzhou/Hangzhou region transformed existent Buddhist temple networks as well. Kaiyuan Temple, the most famous Buddhist temple in Quanzhou originally built in 868 during the Tang dynasty and developed as a major repository of Buddhist sutras during the Song, included a shrine to Shiva with carvings from 1283, suggesting that a Tamil Hindu community in Quanzhou shared this space. The Eastern Pagoda (865) and the Western Pagoda (916), both originally built in wood, were rebuilt in stone in the first half of the thirteenth century. After Mongol forces captured Hangzhou in 1276, Kublai Khan, along with his wife Chabi, already committed to Tibetan Buddhism, appointed Yang Lianzhenjia, an Inner Asian monk of the Tibetan Sakya sect, to the Hangzhou Branch of Tibetan and Buddhist Affairs.51 Yang oversaw the renovation of Buddhist lands and temples in the Hangzhou area and effected a shift from Chan to Tibetan Buddhism by transferring resources from Chan temples and former Song imperial estates to projects that introduced art imbued with Indic and Tibetan elements into existing Buddhist environments. Many Chan monks who fled Manzi during this period went to the islands of Japan, where they established the sect that would become known as Zen Buddhism. Yuanperiod stone carvings at Feilaifeng on West Lake in Hangzhou embedded images with Tibetanized script and physical representations into preexisting collections of Chan-inspired art. Artists Guan Daosheng and Zhao Mengfu were among those southern literati who did not welcome the shift away from Chan Buddhism that came with official sponsorship of Anige’s Tibetan/ Nepalese school of art. Both Guan and Zhao were dedicated practitioners of Chan Buddhism, especially the teachings of master Chung-feng Mingpen, from whom they drew both artistic inspiration and a sense of identity distinct from the ethnic diversity cultivated by the Yuan court.52 A few Chan Buddhist temples remained active around Hangzhou and Quanzhou. 212 Chapter 8

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QUANZHOU AND THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY WORLDS OF ART Thirteenth-century Quanzhou was at the heart of a sudden, major expan­ sion in the private and marketplace circulation of art. With the fall of the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou, the victors gained control of vast impe­ rial art collections, as was the custom when a dynasty fell. Yuan officials ordered the most prized individual pieces of art sent north to the new impe­ rial court at Dadu. They also released large quantities of high-quality art into local markets, thus commercializing the value of art to an extent not previ­ ously experienced when the creation and circulation of art had been primarily a nonmarket-driven, literati affair. Members of the social elite who fell on hard times as a result of the political transition sought marketing strategies to leverage value from their private art collections. It was a buyers’ market with copious amounts of high-quality art available. For someone with a discerning eye, bargains and incredible finds could be discovered in the most unlikely places. A masterpiece from the tenth century might be found in a peddler’s basket at a street market, or a biscuit vendor might be spotted displaying his baked goods on an ancient platter with a classical character inscription.53 Much like Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s triptych panel that showed up later as the underside of a kitchen table, the value of art was created, maintained, and sustained in the eye of the beholder. In the Hangzhou region, former offi­ cials, unemployed scholars, and insider wheelers and dealers all contributed to an upsurge of art-market activity that included potential buyers and trad­ ers among the large Arab, Latin, Armenian, and South Asian populations at Quanzhou. Expanding market networks created routes for material exchange and art transmission, whether as gifts, commodities, or biscuit trays. A lit­ eral flow of images passed through the hands of antique dealers, bookshop owners, and officials. Even tea-shop owners displayed art for sale on their shop walls. By force of circumstances and sheer opportunism high-quality works from both the imperial collection and private elite collections found their way into commercial transactions whence they might travel as valued items to seaports and beyond. In addition to the domestic release and circulation of vast quantities of imperial art into the Yuan domain, the long thirteenth century included the introduction of Tibetan Buddhist art by Anige and others at Dadu and a sudden influx of art from western and central Eurasian locales, much of it through the Quanzhou/Hangzhou/Yangzhou region of Manzi. We have seen evidence of elaborate tent churches with sacred pictures embroidered on scarlet fabrics and liturgical furnishings described as “manufactures of western art” pass into the Mongol courts at Tabriz and Karakorum.54 There Quanzhou in Manzi 213

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were few ideological or social barriers to the multidirectional movement of religious objects and their images. Church of the East members were often intermediaries in the transmission process, being both Christian from one perspective and closely tied to Buddhism and Manichaeism from another. We might recall Mongol commander Eljigidei, who made clear in his 1248 letter to King Louis IX that from the Mongol perspective all Christian groups were simply Christian (Arka’un of Erke’un) without regard for doc­ trinal differences.55 Diverse Christian groups moved freely and with signifi­ cant support through Mongol circles. An example of the transcontinental movement of images appears in the iconography of “Angels carrying Saint Catherine to rest at Mount Sinai” engraved on the tombstone of Katerina Vilionis, a member of the Yangzhou Franciscan community, who died in Yangzhou in 1342; three Church of the East congregations functioned in Yangzhou at this time as well.56 Inscriptions from thirteenth-century Quanzhou reveal evidence of Church of the East materials in Syriac and Turkic.57 The Great Khan not only recognized the bishop sent from Rome to Quanzhou but granted him an official salary as a state employee, allow­ ing him to preach and convert without restrictions. Andrew of Perugia, who served as bishop of Quanzhou, wrote: “I live on the bounty of the Emperor which I have already referred to and which, according to the estimate of the Genoese merchants, may amount to the value of a hundred gold florins or thereabouts. And a great part of this alms I have spent in this house (in Quanzhou) and I think there is not a heritage among all those in our prov­ ince to be compared with it for beauty and convenience.”58 Beauty certainly included works of art. A wealthy Armenian woman resident in Quanzhou built and furnished a “remarkable church” complete with house, grounds, and provisions, a facility that she left to the charge of Brother Peregrine of Castello and other Roman Churchmen.59 This environ­ ment, into which Franciscans in Quanzhou and Yangzhou brought images of the Madonna and Child to explain their faith, was Wang Zhenpeng’s artistic milieu as well, rich with high-quality art and creative possibilities. Guanyin, who prior to this period was not represented with child, began during the Yuan to appear holding a small child, resembling representations of the Madonna and Child. Figures of the child-giving Guanyin continued in vogue into the post-Mongol era.60 Manichaean communities present in thirteenth-century Quanzhou fused Christian and Buddhist iconographies alongside Franciscan and Church of the East motifs.61 The Eurasian positionality of Wang Zhenpeng’s work shows strikingly in another of his major paintings, the Mahaprajapati Cradling the Infant Buddha. Mongol Princess Sengge Ragi may have commissioned this work 214 Chapter 8

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too, and art historian Shane McCausland suggests that one of the figures in the Mahaprajapati may even be a portrait of Sengge.62 Princess Sengge was herself no minor character among persons in the Yuan art world. As a female, her assumption of authority over prized pieces of imperial art was not unusual. Huishu Li has written extensively on the agency of women as artists, teachers, and art collectors in the previous Tang and Song periods, and we know that women of the Mongol elite regularly managed their own separate spaces and resources.63 What was unusual was that Sengge inhab­ ited a political center with transcontinental cultural reach. Her interests and activities were personal and yet also integrated into a political strategy that included projects for collecting the past to reinvent the present. A reference in the Yuanshi indicates that Sengge clearly had the habit of proceeding on her own initiative to accomplish her goals. In 1319 she ordered the release of twenty-seven prisoners in a region of Inner Mongolia that was her ances­ tral home.64 Although within the Buddhist practice of releasing imprisoned beings, her actions in the context of imperial politics ran counter to her brother’s authority as emperor, and he was compelled to countermand the local authorities who had complied with her wishes, requiring them to round up and reincarcerate the freed prisoners. Like the Regatta, the Mahaprajapati displays a similar eclectic style that blends elements visually into a coherent, innovative compositional program with a Eurasian positionality. Mahaprajapati demonstrates a contemporary “eye” on the richly diverse social and ideological multiverse of the Yuan court: the peach that Mahaprajapati offers the future Buddha is a Daoist sym­ bol of longevity; the rock adorned with lingzhi fungus and antiquities sug­ gests Ruxue. In its immediate artistic context, Wang’s composition employs the technically demanding baimiao (plain outline) method associated with Northern Song artist Li Gonglin, placing Wang’s scroll, with its unusual Buddhist subject matter, within a well-known set of stylistic references.65 Maxwell Hearn sees the fourteenth-century Fen River wall paintings with their outlined figures and linear elaborations as part of Wang’s inspira­ tion. Hearn also notes the jeweled tree, patterned tile floor, ornate dais, and “royal ease” pose that derive from Buddhist murals or sutra illustrations.66 In Wang’s painting, the infant Buddha is not actually nursing but is presented in a nursing position, a clear compositional choice that allowed a fusion of associations from Buddhist, Church of the East, and Latin Christian iconog­ raphy.67 The theological home of the mother figure of Wang’s Mahaprajapati appears complex, perhaps intentionally so. Mahaprajapati, according to legend, took up the care of the infant Buddha when his mother, Mahaprajapati’s sister, expired upon being Quanzhou in Manzi 215

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overwhelmed by the perfection of the son to which she had given birth seven days before. Mahaprajapati herself had a son the age of the infant Buddha who appears with his own nanny in Wang Zhenpeng’s scroll. Another con­ tender for the mother image is Hariti, who after a long life spent horrifying and devouring children, mended her ways upon counsel from the Buddha and became a protector of children. Art historian Gabain identified an image found at Chocho near Turfan, an early Uighur Manichaean center, as “Hariti as children’s protector.”68 At the same time, it is clearly a hybrid image rec­ ognizable for its Church of the East Mary and Child motif, a single seated woman, with covered head and long diamond-pattern-decorated gown, nurs­ ing an infant; the five or more chubby children surrounding the scene are faint and detached from the quiet focus of mother and child. Hariti typically also appeared with a male partner at her side. In popular Buddhism by the thirteenth century Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, not Hariti, was the go-to figure for prayers on pregnancy, safe childbirth, and the well-being of chil­ dren. A Seljuq ceramic from the late twelfth century further contextualizes the Church of the East mother-and-child nursing pose. On this ceramic, produced near Kashan in Iran possibly for a Church of the East community, the figure of a woman with crown sits nursing a child; the piece appears to be a container for breast-milk transport.69 The hairstyles of Mahaprajapati and her attendants are distinctive in their long, separated, spindly tresses, a fashion shared with Church of the East and Manichaean figure painting.70 Contemporaries would have recognized the allusion. By any measure the theme of the infant held in nursing position was itself rare in Buddhist iconography and overlaps most with Church of the East and Franciscan iconography. With its overarching Buddhist narrative, Mongol court setting, and Christian compositional motif, the internal logic of Wang’s painting visually invoked the story of Christ but also replaced him with the Buddha, leaving ambiguous the relationship between these two leaders in the spiritual domain. Within the Yuan court context, Western things could carry great imaginative value, but ultimately their significance was to reinforce and expand the meaning of familiar structures of belief. Each locale we have visited did the same in its own way. In this sense, the Christian compositional element enhanced the Buddhist narrative and rein­ vented its links to Manichaean and Church of the East beliefs. Eugene Y. Wang notes a similar artistic move in his discussion of The Tribute Horse from Europe, a scroll painted by Zhou Lang in 1342 to commemorate the magnificent horse brought by papal emissary Giovanni Marignolli to the Yuan court, where the creature was exalted for its fit with existing domestic political agendas and narratives of auspicious omens.71 At the same time, the fusion of classical literary conventions with papal gifts constituted a novel 216 Chapter 8

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and expansive perspective. The image of mother and child, whether of Latin, Byzantine, or Church of the East inspiration, was powerful; it integrated the concepts of divinity across religious and philosophical traditions into a Buddhist-inspired present. Once Wang artistically settled on the theme of the cradled Buddha, he faced the same problem that the illustrators of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh encoun­ tered after their decision to illustrate the birth of Muhammad: how to rep­ resent a scene from the written narrative of religious texts that had little or no iconographic precedent in the contemporary art of that tradition, and in a way that was relevant to a dynamic present. Merging secular and sacred became a powerful strategy toward these ends. The Birth of Mohammad and a Timurid copy of The Infant Ghazan Nursing (wet-nursing in this case), dis­ tinctive illustrations associated with Rashid al-Din’s world history, employed Latin and Greek nativity scenes not only to imagine the scenario artisti­ cally but to absorb competing recognizable tropes into an alternative worldview. In the depiction of Ghazan, the application of Christian/Church of the East iconography transformed a commonplace secular scene into an indi­ cation of divinely sanctioned leadership. Lorenzetti’s numerous Madonna images, including one scene in particular of the Madonna knitting while Jesus plays with the spun yarn and Joseph sits nearby, were ultimate expres­ sions of permeability between mundane and divine. Wang’s Mahaprajapati Cradling the Infant Buddha similarly utilized available Christian/Church of the East iconography to achieve a level of visual and ideological integra­ tion in a single image that spoke to daily political and cultural conditions in Yuan territories through allegories of nurturance and good government. During a century of sudden, rapid political change across Eurasia, these concerns dominated both political and artistic discourses, as we have seen. Lorenzetti’s good government mural in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico and the tax assessment scene in the Chora Church at Constantinople are two of our pre­ viously discussed examples. Within the Yuan frame of references, good gov­ ernance was assumed to be nurtured by ideological traditions of Buddhism incorporated with elements of Daoism and strains of Confucian ideology. Zhao Mengfu’s Horse and Groom and Zhao Yong’s Noble Steeds are two wellknown paintings that express these principles.72 Wang and Sengge were equally well aware of the Mongol ideological claims to universal authority, as they would also have been aware that Christianity was a world faith and the Church of the East was its most familiar form among the Mongol elite, especially among its women. For Sengge, the representation of mothering may have had its own personal appeal in addition to its political dimension that stressed careful nurturance. Mahaprajapati Gotami, the aunt who fos­ tered the young Buddha after his own mother’s early death, later established Quanzhou in Manzi 217

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the first monastic community for women, both a social and philosophical commitment. Sengge Ragi’s circle included individuals with varying religious pref­ erences, social backgrounds, and artistic sensibilities. Mongol women of the Keriat and Onggirat groups were well known for their preference for the Church of the East Christian faith and its accompanying imagery. Yahu, a member of the Onggirat tribe, was a prominent presence at the Yuan court, a frequent participant in Sengge’s gatherings, and a practitioner of the Church of the East faith.73 As a tutor in the Imperial Hall of Composition (Kuizhang Ge), Yahu dealt with writings on art and scholarship. He composed poetry admiring the Daoist artist Zhang Yanfu. Individuals such as Yahu were positioned to foster a dialogue of exchange among religious perspectives and artistic practices. They had the opportunity, the interest, and the means. We remember here also the figure of Baidu, contender for the position of Ilkhan, who regularly conversed with Maria of the Mongols on matters of Christianity, and who by some accounts became partial to the faith. Most interestingly, we also know that Sengge became acquainted with the most famous woman artist of the Yuan period, Guan Daosheng (Kuan Tao-sheng, 1262–1319), an icon of female achievement well into the Ming dynasty.74 Guan’s creative roots were in the south near Hangzhou, but her career was promoted in Dadu. Sengge’s borther, the emperor Renzong, commissioned Guan to produce a copy of the One Thousand Character Classic in the callig­ raphy for which she was celebrated. Guan’s work received the seals of both Sengge and the Renzong emperor; we know that she met Sengge person­ ally. The empress also actively praised her work and included her in courtsponsored gatherings of artists and scholars. In addition to praise from the empress, other female patrons at court supported Guan, who dedicated her painting of Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain to a “Lady of the Qu Kingdom.”75 Xia Wenyan’s Precious Mirror of Painting (Tuhui bakjian, 1365), a late Yuan history of painting, presented Guan Daosheng “as an extraordinary female artist, who worked in a genre of painting invented by a woman, Lady Li.” 76 In 1317 the imperial court granted Guan the honorary title of “Lady of the Wei Kingdom,” but Guan never felt at home in the north; she died in 1319 on an official boat bound for home.77 In 1323 Sengge Ragi hosted a historic cultural gathering at Dadu in the Tianqing Temple, where scholars and artists sipped wine as they viewed and wrote commentaries on highly valued works of art.78 The princess herself had selected many of the works on display from the Hangzhou imperial art collection captured by the Mongols in 1279. Among artists who gathered, Wang Zhenpeng was the best-known contemporary contributor to Sengge Ragi’s inventory. The Dragon Boat Regatta was among the works on view; the 218 Chapter 8

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Mahaprajapati was not. Perhaps the latter was a more personal piece. Those present certainly delighted in the expert execution of the Regatta imagery and may have mused on its allusions to childish water play, issues of loyalty and corruption, and the Mongols’ relationship to popular and elite classical culture. The seascape pointed as well to the importance of maritime trade for the Mongol imperial treasury and signified the transcontinental empire of Mongol political and economic activity. The version of the Regatta on dis­ play was the one Wang had created for Sengge twelve years after the prince’s birthday party. Why he waited so long after the initial request is something of a mystery. Although Wang remained committed to his southern literati background, a conservative intellectual who pursued court status during this era could not avoid awareness of the expanded world consciousness the Mongols had helped to create. Although classical Chinese political philoso­ phy pulled away from notions of world conquest, Wang, perhaps ironically, could not help but appeal to the global vision of the Mongol elite and per­ haps his own profit. The Mahaprajapati certainly expressed this awareness of a multicultural social environment. On the inscribed version of the Regatta done for Sengge, Wang recalled the circumstances of the original painting and the poem he had written at that time. Although couched in the lan­ guage of classical clichés about the nature of good government, the mention of “competitors of the world” had a contemporary ring of its own. He wrote: Although the prizes could not be worth much, The river-boys from the Wu District Were heedless in the height of their ecstasy. They remind us of all the foolish competitors of the world Who strive forward by inches and backward by feet. But what actually counts is the idea of shared Pleasures with the entire populace.79 In the end, Wang himself was a player in the world of foolish competi­ tors. Gifted both artistically and politically, Wang Zhenpeng, for his efforts and keen observations, gained in 1327 one of the highest-ranking bureau­ cratic positions in the Mongol government: supervisor of sea transport of tax grains.80 After Persian and Arab militias rebelled against declining Mongol authority in 1357, Quanzhou suffered a ferocious backlash against its foreign traders, resulting in a massacre led by Yuan commander Chen Youding. The expan­ sive outlook that had dominated Quanzhou during the Mongol era began to Quanzhou in Manzi 219

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wane. A map known as the Selden map of the South Sea region, drawn in the early seventeenth century by an unknown cartographer familiar with detailed coastal routes, captures the Mongol outlook more than the later Ming/Qing era in which it was created. A remnant of bygone seafaring activity, this map layered Yuan maritime knowledge into Zheng He’s stunning 1405–1433 voy­ ages to coastal Africa.81 In the late fourteenth century, antimaritime policies of the Ming dynasty sealed the great port’s doom, reducing it to a pale ver­ sion of what Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and others had described. Although consciousness of the world expanded across Eurasia in the long thirteenth century, it did not necessarily expand in the same ways for everyone. Wang Dayuan, Rashid al-Din, and Roger Bacon all celebrated knowledge acquired from experience. They proudly included details about places and people they had seen with their own eyes or verified from other eyewitness accounts. They clearly believed in the value of experiential knowl­ edge and sought to distinguish it from knowledge received from classical texts that were considered not up to date and often in error because authors had relied solely on what others had written. The world of new possibilities included not only material gain but a vision of societies that both confirmed and challenged one’s own assumptions about human nature. Artistic expres­ sion visually captured a comparative framework for thinking about beliefs and customs. Expanded geographic awareness in terms of detailed knowl­ edge of more places and relationships among diverse peoples was a clear consequence of long thirteenth-century encounters. Never had so much of the world known so much about who was out there and where and how they lived, misunderstandings and hostilities included. As we have noted earlier, this was truer of some locales than others, but the world grew larger and more nuanced for everyone. At the same time, the reorganization of space and time produced a more homogenized worldview made up of larger pieces. Where Arabic docu­ ments had organized the world around seven seas and Song literature spoken of four, Yuan authors conceptualized two—the Dongyang (Eastern Seas) to the east of Singapore and the Xiyang (Western Seas) to Singapore’s west.82 Similarly, Marco Polo, in emphasizing the eastern lands of the khan, imag­ ined an east/west binary that both informed and misled his constituencies. In Tabriz, in his history of India, Rashid al-Din described in detail the com­ merce of the seas of al-Hind, affirming the extent to which contemporaries recognized this region as a burgeoning center of the world economy and link between the lands of the Ilkhanate and those of the Yuan.83 The third volume of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, lost to posterity, was devoted entirely to the geog­ raphy of the known world and surely would have told us much. Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena attempted the same project with his large, wheel-shaped 220 Chapter 8

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mappa mundo, also no longer extent. These projects in both cases and others were motivated by the desire to imagine anew the whole known world and one’s place in it. It was a sign of the times. While the Ilkhans in Tabriz were politically subordinate to the khans of the Yuan, commercially and diplomatically they were on a par with, if not at the center of, emerging global markets. As Yokkaichi Yasuhiro has written, the Mongol Empire “brought about not only a political reorganiza­ tion of international relations in Asia, but also a considerable transformation of the economic structure of the region” that “emphasized central Eurasia rather than China.”84 Maritime linkage between the Ilkhanate, with its geo­ graphic centrality, and the Yuan, with its political centrality, was essential to this economic shift in which the integration of sea and land trade made possible the intersection of Eurasian market forces at Tabriz. We recall here the work of Nicola Di Cosmo and Gheorghe Bratianu, who suggested that the Black Sea was the westernmost emporium for Mongol land and sea trade systems.85 Mongol efforts to capture port connections in northern Vietnam and Japan were an unsuccessful part of Mongol strategy, and direct access to the Mediterranean eluded them as well. Connecting the dots of littoral communities along the Western and Eastern Seas, at the same time, pro­ duced critical access to wealth that shifted the merchant maritime culture of the Mediterranean toward Italian city-state practices and away from tenthand eleventh-century Islamic approaches to maritime commerce. Through the long thirteenth century, terms of trade in the Mediterranean world were becoming less compatible with those along the coasts of al-Hind and the routes to Quanzhou.

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CONCLUSION

Theme and Variation in the Post-Mongol World

T

he Mongol “episode” seven hundred years ago opened new possi­ bilities in Eurasian history without making its outcomes inevitable. Much of our current discussion of world history as a field of inquiry begins with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and works backward to create structure and meaning. We are preoccupied with the question of how the West came to rule largely because the consequences of Western domi­ nance, for better and worse, haunt our world. We are aware that this preoc­ cupation is flawed, but we cannot seem to break with it. Along these lines, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu have recently proposed two con­ sequences of Mongol rule that they consider most critical for the emergence of the capitalist West: technological innovations and catastrophic disease, both set in motion by the commercial imperative of nomadic rule during the Mongol era.1 Given that technologies circulating during the Mongol era did not devolve to Europe alone and the bubonic plague struck many places across the continent, we are still left to wonder why capitalism, and why capitalism out of the European experience of the Mongol Empire? The acceptance, rejection, and modification of commercial and technical options out of the Mongol era were a matter of continuing political choice and social circumstances at the local levels of decision making. Where matters of eco­ nomics and technology seem to have been paramount, sheer happenstance, too, must be tracked among the factors that distinguish regions in the postMongol era. That is to say, major factors such as the discovery of two con­ tinents’ worth of potential resources by a relatively resource-poor collection of European polities did not ensure evolution of new economic structures; but, most certainly, the inclination to pursue this geopolitical vision and the technical means to do so had incubated within Mongol Eurasia, a space of mutual cultural engagement by multiple place-based centers. This study has sought to explore how the Mongol unification of Eurasia initiated a turn to materialism, naturalism, and humanism that continued apace to infuse not only artistic expression but commercial and intellec­ tual activities during the post-Mongol era. The habit of repurposing images 222

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to create contemporary cultural capital continued to pave different routes toward the subsequent unfolding of modernity. As the Mongols lost their ability to coordinate continental resources for the benefit of their Eurasian empire, military and political leaders, as well as artisans and merchants, became part of the adaptive movement of people, skills, and ideas. While much of Eurasia spent the last half of the fourteenth century recovering from the continent-wide consequences of the bubonic plague, by the fifteenth century, reorientation in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests was in full swing. A distinctive mix of regional conditions and cultural dispositions shaped local priorities and styles, but a clear turn toward historical and bio­ graphical narratives in the visual arts remained a mark of social awareness. Because of its socially embedded materiality, artistic exchange offers a way to think about the Mongol turn as a prelude to societies with robust commercial profiles and expanded geographic vision in the emerging fifteenth century. In the Islamic world, the Mongol era of artistic exchange left multiple ripples in its wake. The Timurid Empire (1370–1507), based in Persia, and the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), in the Indian subcontinent, embraced the Ilkhanid interest in both illustrated historical narratives and portraiture. In waves of migration, scholars and elite families from Iran gave miniature painting a new life at the Timurid Herat court and later the Mughal courts. Literary interest in life stories had an artistic parallel, and biography found “its analogue in a pictorial expression inflected now by a concern to show physiognomic difference (gender, facial and bodily peculiarities, race, and age).”2 At the Mughal court a similar concern with verisimilitude continued to evolve, producing an aesthetic characterized by “an appreciation of fine drawing, a growing preference for volume and texture over elegant line and unmodulated color, and a taste for figures with some sense of an inner life or psychological presence.”3 The inclination to note date of creation and artist by name on most paintings of the Mughal period celebrates an individuality often associated with humanist sensibilities. An expanded geographic aware­ ness, unfolding during the Mongol era, continued to shape Mughal politi­ cal goals and imperial imagery. Two paintings by Abu’l Hasan—one the Emperor Jahangir and Shah ‘Abbas of Persia (1618) and another titled Emperor Jahangir Triumphing over Poverty (1620–1625)—include representations of the terrestrial globe as signifier of world conquest, displaying the terrain for­ merly encompassed by the Mongol Empire.4 In these instances, “the world” in which Mongol political figures had situated themselves continued to be the standard for post-Mongol rulers.5 Book illustration continued to proliferate in the post-Mongol Persian and Mughal domains. Strictly religious themes, including Muhammad’s life story as illustrated in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, fell into disfavor and did Post-Mongol World 223

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not revive, but the popularity and market value of illustrated literary and historical texts persisted. The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh itself was still copied and sometimes illustrated, but the concept of world history did not develop fur­ ther, lacking, one might surmise, the motivation of a world conqueror that inspired the need for a world history story. Although the Spanish, Dutch, and English would eventually set out to rule large parts of the world, their stories remained tales of national triumph among competing nation-states. Visualization through engagement with written texts remained the religious norm, though sacred words now came in luxuriously decorated volumes that developed the nonrepresentational potential of the art of book illustration promoted during the Mongol era. Illuminated copies of the Qur’an became abundant and stunningly beautiful, with colorful, intricate, geometric, nonfigural designs. Jamal J. Elias cautions us to remember that “the definition of what is considered Islamic religious art needs to be expanded so that one can develop new understanding of the nature of ritual and practice, aesthet­ ics and art, as well as material and social culture in Islamic society.”6 An aes­ thetics based on nonfigural, geometric, and text-based contemplation bore traces of Mongol visual culture while pursuing alternative ways to concep­ tualize human relationship to God. In the genre of illustrated literary works, the stories of Khalila and Dimna gained a robust life during the Ilkhanate and remained fashionable into the post-Mongol era, when illustrations fur­ ther developed elements of naturalism and realism first introduced through the Tabriz workshops.7 Nizami’s twelfth-century Persian romance the Haft Paykar (The Seven Portraits), with its focus on the use of words and men­ tal visualizations to convey the power of portraiture, was itself transformed through interaction with the Mongol propensity for painted figural represen­ tations. The Haft Paykar lived on to become one of the most frequently and beautifully illustrated Persian literary texts of many centuries. In East Asia, the Yuan intervention in dynastic imperial politics launched Anige’s innovative Sino-Himalayan artistic standard at court as well as a commercial and intellectual frontier culture that settled into Jiangnan, the lower Yangtze River valley, including Hangzhou and its coastal extension to the south Quanzhou. As Michael Sullivan has noted, in the post-Mongol era “it was among the independent scholar painters who refused to serve in the capital that the most significant developments occurred.”8 Unlike in the Yuan period, creative experimentation that encouraged dia­ logue among ethnic groups, artistic materials, and practices was not a priority for the Ming rulers, whose innovations intended to maximize bureaucratic refinement and the social stability it might bring through reforms of the examination system and recovery of the governing apparatus by the major­ ity Han groups. Pulling against this intellectual ossification, groups in the 224 Conclusion

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Jiangnan region produced three innovative schools of painting that stood in contrast to the largely stultified art of the imperial academy: the Zhe school of the late fourteenth/early fifteenth centuries; the Wu school of the six­ teenth century; and the perhaps most influential late sixteenth/early seven­ teenth-century Songjiang school that included the prominent artists Dong Qichang, Chen Jiru, and Zhao Zuo.9 This same intellectual milieu and com­ mercialized world of art and books produced the circles from which would emerge radical political and social philosophies: Wang Yangming (1472– 1529) moved away from orthodox political ideologies in ways comparable to the challenges Martin Luther launched at Roman Church orthodoxy; Li Zhi (1527–1602), born in Quanzhou to a lineage that had ties to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, in the late fourteenth century contested social norms including the inequality of women. Anxious to consolidate the identity of a new Ming orthodoxy in the aftermath of Mongol rule, early Ming officials moved to draw clear lines of distinction between Buddhism and Confucianism. However, the Jiangnan commercial/literati elite had their own projects, including an upsurge in illustrated texts on the life story of Kongzi (Confucius). Although stylized portraits of Confucius existed prior to the Yuan, the early Ming produced the first pictorial narrative biography of the sage’s life. The Shengji tu (Pictures of the Sage’s Traces), issued in woodblock print format in 1444, represents a dramatic departure from accounts of the life of Kongzi. Contrary to state goals, the Shengji tu texts reinforced the integration of Buddhism and Ruxue (classical learning) that had slipped into place under Mongol auspices. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the extended, illustrated narrative of Kongzi’s life grew from twenty-nine episodes to 121 and included many visual references to Buddhist narratives.10 The woodblock-print format was another of the many art forms the Mongols gathered from preexisting repertoires, expanded, and repurposed. A veritable biography of the Flowering Plum, the 1261 Meihua xishenpu (Manual of Flowering-plum Likenesses) unfolds myriad aspects of the life of the flowering plum in artistic as well as botanical display through one hundred printed images.11 The 1313 Nongshu (Agricultural Manual) as well as Rashid al-Din’s source material for his study of the Tansuqnama (Medical Cosmologies) came from woodblock-illustrated texts circulated from Yuan collections into the Ilkhanate and possibly beyond. Commercial interests drove innovation and volume output. Perhaps the greatest growth sector in woodblock-print production during the Mongol era was popular literature and drama. By the end of the Ming in the Nanjing, innovative duoban (mul­ tiple-block) color printing technique produced technical illustrations that increasingly stood on their own as artistic creations. Post-Mongol World 225

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In the land of the Franks, which from the perspective of Tabriz had always included the Venetians, Genoese, and Sienese, among others, engage­ ment with trade and ideas during the Mongol era was a critical factor in the cultural transmission to which the Florentines became heir. It was spe­ cifically the long thirteenth century that induced an enthusiasm for associ­ ating everyday life with religious history that would be developed further in Florentine Renaissance art. Art historian Michele Bacci has written of the mental exercises that “were recommended, from the late 13th century onwards, by many representatives of the new Mendicant orders, who went on to speak, in this respect, of a specific technique named ‘locative mem­ ory’ and consisting in imagining the holy events, especially those of Christ’s Passion, as taking place in a familiar context.”12 These mendicants, of course, were among the friars stationed under Roman auspices in Tabriz, Marāgha, Sultaniyya, Dadu, Quanzhou, and other points in the Mongol Empire. The visualization of religious themes in everyday life found expression also in the tradition of Books of Hours. Often traced to the monastic move­ ment of the ninth century when they were chanted, Books of Hours prior to 1200 were typically unillustrated or minimally decorated and used mostly by the clergy. In the thirteenth century they were produced for laypersons among the elite. This is similar to the repurposing of religious materials we saw in the transferal of monastic to imperial portraiture during the Yuan. Books of Hours functioned as meditation aids to remind the owner of his or her relationship to Christ. Blanche of Burgundy (1296–1348), countess of Savoy and granddaughter of King Louis IX, who sent many diplomatic and commercial missions into Mongol territories, was, as far as we know, the first to commission in 1330 an illustrated Hours of unprecedented mag­ nitude, thus setting a new fashion for contemporaries. Blanche’s Hours was purported to have more than two hundred miniatures that contained about eighty portraits of Blanche.13 The sheer numbers here speak of novel interest in this genre. Just as Lorenzetti had envisioned the Virgin Mary knitting while the Christ child played with yarn and Joseph looked on, some Books of Hours illustrations envisioned the Passion framed by the window of a lady’s sewing room. Portraiture in this cultural venue made personal entry into the biblical narrative a visual reality. The time frame and family connections of Blanche’s sudden commission of such an innovative work are interesting. King Charles V owned the Savoy Hours in the 1370s and added sixty-eight miniatures, nearly half of which included portraits of himself. His brother Jean duc de Berry was jealous of this treasure and commissioned his own Hours with portraits—hence the Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry, created in 1414. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries more Books of Hours were commissioned than any other texts including the Bible. Between 1480 226 Conclusion

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and 1600 approximately 1,775 different Hours were produced. Entire folios were devoted to finely crafted images.14 The Mongol conquests brought a rupture to sacred narratives and the need to rethink relations in a larger historical narrative that was more secu­ lar by virtue of its cultural multiplicity. Art of previous eras had certainly incorporated different ethnic groups and religious symbols into the same scene, but the Mongol integration was both deeper and wider. Images with an integrative humanist impulse, whether it was the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh’s baby Muhammad in swaddling clothes, Lorenzetti’s Madonna knitting, or Wang Zhenpeng’s cuddled baby Buddha, visually articulated and spiritualized the material aspects of everyday life. Imagery during the Mongol era nudged faith with the call to human will, a visual template for action in real time and space, in the here and now. A noticeable consequence of the intensi­ fied circulation of art materials and artists under Mongol rule was a dra­ matic upsurge in illustrated manuscripts and realistic portraiture across the continent. Lengthy illustrated biographical narratives seem either to have originated or proliferated as a consequence of the Mongol period, facilitat­ ing visualization as a process in identity adjustments within an expanded geographic and historical dialogue. A novel emphasis on illustrating scenes from childhood offered common ground to diverse audiences while at the same time tending to secularize the sacred and highlight the shared human factor. With the Mongol emphasis on new, expansive beginnings and a total­ izing historical vision, representations of authority had moved into narra­ tive themes with naturalistic styles in painting—illustrated manuscripts and miniature art. Art and book markets that multiplied during the Mongol era con­ tinued as a powerful generator of intellectual discourse in diverse cultural venues, challenging the notion that most Eurasian societies returned to a pre-Mongol status quo in both worldly vision and productivity. Paris, Shiraz, and Nanjing offer examples. In French-speaking regions, illustrated texts increasingly made on speculation for the tastes of the times reached marketvolume highs. Among Safavid and Ottoman elites of the sixteenth century, art historian Lâle Uluç notes the purchase of large numbers of deluxe man­ uscripts produced by the Shiraz workshops for open-market distribution. Interestingly, often the most innovative and complex illustrations were com­ pleted, not for the royal families, but for what Uluç labels “sub-royal” patrons with abundant resources and a taste for intellectual and artistic quality.15 The commercial book culture of the lower-Yangtze valley remained vital to intel­ lectual ferment and social differentiation that came to distinguish the Ming. The Mongol era illustrated a variety of new narratives, and like all new stories their accounts gained credibility by refashioning old imaginings to Post-Mongol World 227

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articulate contemporary aspirations. It took the Mongol intervention in the Eurasian domain to alter social perceptions of time and space, geography and chronology, and hence historical awareness itself. The Mongol intervention in Eurasia became the Mongol creation of Eurasia. This radical departure was an unintended consequence of historical events that might have been less radical without the accidental consequences of subsequent world-historical developments.

228 Conclusion

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A Brief Chronology of the Long Thirteenth Century

BYZANTINE EMPIRE (330–1453) 1077 909–1171

Battle of Manzikert

FATIMID CALIPHATE (Cairo)

SELJUK SULTANATE OF RUM 1077–1308 1200 Fourth Crusade and Siege of Constantinople 1204/Partition of Byzantium 1206– MONGOL CONQUESTS: 1207 Siberia 1211–1234 Jin dynasty 1216–1220 Central Asia and eastern Persia 1222, 1236–1242 Invasion of Europe 1222–1327 Invasion of Hindu lands 1231–1259 Invasion of Korea 1235–1279 Song dynasty 1209–1229 Albigensian Crusade 1215 Magna Carta 1220 802–1431 950–1575 1171–1260 1227 1238–1492

KHMER EMPIRE (Angkor) KINGDOM OF LADAKH (Leh) AYYUBID SULTANATE (Cairo; Aleppo after 1250) Death of Chinggis Khan NASRID KINGDOM (Alhambra)

1240 1241 1243

Death of Ögedei Khan Battle of Köse Dag (NE Anatolia) 229

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1243 1248–1254 1250–1517 1256 1256–1335/1353 1258

ULUS OF JOCHI (GOLDEN HORDE) (Sarai)

Seventh Crusade

MAMLUKE SULTANATE (Cairo)

Battle of Alamut

ILKHANATE (Tabriz)

Fall of Baghdad

1260 1185–1333 1260 1260 1260 –1264 1261 1266 1274, 1281

KAMAKURA PERIOD (Kyoto)

Battle of Ain Jalut (Syria)

Battle of Montaperti (Tuscany)

Toluid Civil War

Byzantine recapture of Constantinople

CHAGADAID ULUS (Almaliq)

Mongol attempted invasions of Kamakura state

1280 1277 1279–1368 1291

Superintendent of Foreign Trade Office (Quanzhou) YUAN ULUS (KHANATE/DYNASTY) (Dadu) Fall of Acre

1300 856–1335 918–1392 1309–1377 1313–1320

KINGDOM OF QOCHO [aka Gaochang or Kara-Khoja] (Turfan) KINGDOM OF GORYEO (Kaesong)/YuanVassal state 1270–1356 Avignon Papacy Restoration of Chora Church

1320 650–1377

SRIVIJAYA EMPIRE (Malay)

1340 1347–1348

Bubonic Plague across Eurasia with periodic recurrences

230 Chronology

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth?” 503–504. 2. Allsen, “Technician Transfers in the Mongolian Empire,” 24. 3. Anievas and Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule, 66. 4. Historians, anthropologists, and philosophers debate problems of periodization. Bruno Latour, sociologist of science, in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1993) challenged the notion of a nineteenth-century modern. Harbans Mukhia, historian of medieval India, commented on the problem in the context of world history in his article, “Wasn’t the World Always Modern?” The Hindu, December 4, 2015. 5. Among others, Biran, Chinggis Khan; Morgan, The Mongols; Rossabi, The Mongols; Fitzhugh, Rossabi, and Honeychurch, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. 6. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. 7. Jacoby, “Silk Economies and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction,” 197–240; Jacoby, “Late Byzantium between the Mediterranean and Asia,” 20–41; Wardwell, “Panni Tar­ tarici,” 95–173. 8. Allsen, “Technician Transfers in the Mongolian Empire,” 2; here, Allsen notes that “the empire’s massive and systematic mobilization of artisans constitutes a most important and still largely unwritten chapter in Eurasian cultural history.” See also Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, 30ff. 9. Among others, Hourihane, Interactions; Watt, The World of Khubilai Khan; Conta­ dini, A World of Beasts; Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting. 10. Nelson, “The Chora and the Great Church,” 85. 11. Juneja, “Tracking the Routes of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia,” 57. 12. Juneja, “Tracking the Routes of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia,” 59. 13. Robin O’Bryan suggests “sudden appearances” as a concept in “Merchants, Mis­ sionaries, and the Allure of India,” 2–20. 14. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, 25–26. Rashid al-Din writes: “Each of these nations had a leader and a commander, and from each of them branched off tribes and clans like the Jalayir, the Oyirat, the Tartar, etc., as will be explained in this chapter. Their yurts [grazing grounds] and dwelling places were in des­ ignated areas, and their features and language resembled those of the Mongols, for at that time the Mongol branch was one of the Turkish nations, whereas now, because of their great fortune, might, and magnificence, all the other nations have been subsumed under the name Mongol” (37). 15. Golden, “Inner Asia c. 1200,” 18–25. 16. Ján Hála, Pod Tatrami, 9. 231

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17. Peter Jackson, “From Ulus to Khanate,” 1–25. Jackson has clarified that the ulus at the time of Chinggis Khan was more organic and multifaceted. During Möngke’s reign and subsequent state building, through a process of suppression of large numbers of ulus appan­ gages, four ulus became dominant and are often designated as khanates. 18. Abulafia, “The Impact of the Orient,” 29. 19. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 29. 20. Cutler, “Gifts and Gift Exchange,” 277. 21. “Valadat-i padishah-i humayun-i kainat—‘alayhi al-salam-” (Birth of grand king of the universe—salam upon him). The main text is Arabic. The writing on the image is Persian. Padashah and humayun are both Persian. The Persian insert was likely added when the manuscript passed into the Mughal court at a later date. 22. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, 63, 80, 89. 23. Williams, The Long Revolution, 64, and Marxism and Literature, 128–135. 24. Juvaini, Genghis Khan, 236–237. 25. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 33–40. 26. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 7. 27. Jing, “Financial and Material Aspects of Tibetan Art,” 239. 28. Hillenbrand, “Propaganda in the Mongol ‘World History,’” 29–38. 29. Bloom, “Paper,” 289–302. 30. Daljeet, Fragrance in Colour, 10. 31. Berrie, Leona, and McLaughlin, “Unusual Pigments Found in a Painting by Giotto (c. 1266–1337),” 2, 8. 32. Dunlop, “Materials, Origins and the Nature of Early Italian Painting,” 472. 33. Finlay, Color, 147. 34. Cennini, The Craftman’s Handbook, 36. 35. Marco Polo, The Travels, 105–106. 36. Gasparini, “A Mathematical Expression of Art,” 2. 37. Casey, “Buddhist Initiation Paintings,” fig. 20. 38. Bruce-Gardner, “Realizations,” 193. 39. Lotman, Universe of the Mind, 124–125. 40. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint, 77. 41. Juneja, “Tracking the Routes of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia,” 65. 42. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint, 62–64, 75–77. 43. Jacoby, “Oriental Silks at the Time of the Mongols,” 112–113. 44. Lipo Memmi, Saint Louis of Toulouse, painting 1325, Pinacoteca, Siena, Italy. 45. Andrew of Perugia, “Letter,” 237. 46. Elliott, The Old World and The New, 1492–1650. 47. Among recent works on the vitality of pre-Mongol interregional cultural contacts, see China and Beyond in the Medieval Period, edited by Dorothy C. Wong and Gustav Heldt. 48. Akbari, Idols of the East, 68–69. 49. Marvazi, China, The Turks and India, 14. 50. Davidson, “Hidden Realms and Pure Abodes,” 167–168. 51. Dunlop, “Materials, Origins and the Nature of Early Italian Painting,” 472. 52. Jacoby, “Oriental Silks at the Time of the Mongols,” 111, 120.

PRELUDE TO THE MONGOL INTERVENTION IN EURASIAN HISTORY 1. Bentley, Old World Encounters, 111–164. 2. Marco Polo, The Travels, 125.

232

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3. Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), philosopher and theologian of Islam, held that the nature of the universe was unchanging; man could not create anything god had not already cre­ ated. Recognition of human limits found expression in the preference for nonfigural art, the search for God’s light in geometric design, and the Sufi concept of the polished mind as reflector of God’s creation. 4. Grabar and Natif, “The Story of Portraits of the Prophet Muhammad,” 20–21. In some versions of the story the Lord created the images for Adam, who wanted to see the prophets who would follow him. In other renderings Daniel had the images put on silk, and in still others Alexander the Great transmitted the box. 5. Thompson, “The Historical Compilation of Vardan Arewelc’i,” 219. 6. Nersessian, “Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 414. 7. Nersessian, “Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 410. 8. Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting,” 9. 9. Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth?” 508–509. 10. Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth?” 503–504.

CHAPTER 1: TABRIZ IN AZERBAIJAN (ILKHANATE) 1. Lambton, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia, 167. 2. Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,” 48. 3. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 577. 4. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 78, 82. 5. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 61; for the high­ way system, see 56, 162–179. 6. Ptak, “Images of Maritime Asia in Two Yuan Texts,” 55. 7. Sperling, “Hülegü and Tibet,” 145, 147, 156. Hülegü’s name appears in Tibetan sources as Hu-la-hu and Hu-la, and he is referred to as the patron of the Phag-mo gru-pa subsect or as the “Stod-Hor king.” 8. Siddiqui, “The Qarlugh Kingdom in the North-Western India,” 77, 80, 82. 9. Tucci, “Translation of the Itinerary of Orgyan pa,” 46–47. Also Sperling, “Hülegü and Tibet,” 152n26. 10. Allsen, Technician Transfers in the Mongolian Empire, 14, 15. 11. Prazniak, “Ilkhanid Buddhism,” 661–667. 12. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political History of the Il-Khans,” 380. 13. Jing, “Financial and Material Aspects of Tibetan Art under the Yuan Dynasty,” 116–117. 14. Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, 28–29. 15. “Church of the East” is used throughout this text to designate the Christian Church within the Syriac tradition of Eastern Christianity that includes the fifth-century exodus of Nestorius’ supporters into the Sasanian Persian empire, where they joined local Church of the East congregations and gradually introduced their Nestorian views. 16. Saints Constantine and Helena, represented in a Church of the East Syriac manu­ script, c. fifth–sixth century CE; Hülegü Khan, with his Church of the East Christian wife Doquz Khatun, from a thirteenth-century Syriac Bible. 17. Petrushevsky, “Rashid al-Din’s Conceptions of the State,” 149–150. 18. Di Cosmo, “Mongols and Merchants on the Black Sea Frontier,” 410. 19. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 315. On Arghun, see also Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 102. Notes to Pages 21–32 233

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20. See Olschki, Polo’s Asia, 398, and Muldoon, Travelers, 321, 323–329. 21. Encyclopedia Iranica, Italy iv. Travel Accounts, Michele Bernardini, Anna Vanzan. 22. Korobeinikov, “Diplomatic Correspondence between Byzantium and the Mam­ luk Sultanate,” 53. 23. Korobeinikov, “Diplomatic Correspondence between Byzantium and the Mam­ luk Sultanate,” 57–58. 24. Ryan, “Christian Wives of Mongol Khans,” 416. 25. Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,” 74. 26. Ibn Battuta, Travels, 101–102. 27. Kolbas, The Mongols in Iran, 200, 201, 205. 28. Kolbas, The Mongols in Iran, 203–204. 29. Jacoby, “Oriental Silks Go West,” 72, 73. 30. Martinez, “The Eurasian Overland and Pontic Trades,” 52. Also see 164 on papal relations with the ilkhanate. 31. Blair, “Religious Art of the Ilkhanids,” 112. 32. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 209n7. 33. Twitchett, “The Monasteries and China’s Economy in Medieval Times,” 533, 536, 540; Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians, 39; Ang, “Buddhist Monasteries,” 187, 191; Kudara, “The Buddhist Culture of the Old Uigur Peoples,” 185–186; Sen, Buddhism, Diplo­ macy, and Trade, 214, 216–217. 34. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians, 51. 35. Makhdumi, “Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah,” 35, 42n24. 36. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 56. 37. Petrushevshy, “The Socio-Economic Conditions of Iran under the Il-Khans,” 510. 38. Togan, “References to Economic and Cultural Life in Anatolia in the Letters of Rashid al-Din,” 93,101. Leiser discusses the controversy surrounding these letters, 85–87. 39. Togan, “A Document concerning Cultural Relations between the Ilkhanide and Byzantines,” 11. Togan suggests that “the Frank physician” was George Chioniades from Trebizond. 40. Togan, “A Document concerning Cultural Relations between the Ilkhanide and Byzantines,” 9, 15. 41. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami ‘u’t-tawarikh, 685. 42. Ibn Battuta, Travels, 101. 43. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami ‘u’t-tawarikh, 685. 44. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami ‘u’t-tawarikh, 687. 45. Hoffman, Waqf im Mongolischen Iran, 268. 46. Hani Khafipour, “A Hospital in Ilkhanid Iran,” 107. 47. Hani Khafipour, “A Hospital in Ilkhanid Iran,” 104 48. For higher estimates, see N. Behboodi, A. Kiani, and A. Heydari, “A Historical Reflection of the University of Rabe Rashidi, Iran,”140–147. 49. Hoffman, “In Pursuit of Memoria and Salvation,” 179. 50. Shimo, “Ghazan Khan and the Ta’rikh-i Ghazani,” 109. 51. Soudavar, “The Han-Lin Academy and the Persian Royal Library-Atelier,” 469. 52. Grube and Eleano, eds., Between China and Iran, fig. 437, Berlin SB, Diez A Fol. 71, 31. 53. Welch, “The Arts of the Book,” 49. 54. Jahn, “Paper Currency in Iran,” 131; Carter, The Invention of Printing in China

234

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and Its Spread Westward; Jahn, “Tabris, ein mittelalterliches Kulturzentrum zwishchen, Ost und West,” 209. 55. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 84, 95. See also Franke, “Some Sinological Remarks on Rasid ad-Din’s History of China,” 21–26. 56. For brief biographies of Rashid al-Din, see Krawulsky, The Mongol Ilkhans and Their Vizier Rashid al-Din, 119–34; Özgüdenli, “Rasdîdüddin Fazlulläh Hemedânî,” 19–21; Kamola, Rashid al-Din and the Making of History in Mongol Iran, 102–129. 57. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 23–27. 58. Thompson, “Introduction,” 28–29. 59. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 63–64. 60. Yeazell, Picture Titles, 30. 61. E-mail exchange with Sheila Blair, February 18, 2017. 62. Ashtor, “The Economic Decline of the Middle East during the Later Middle Ages,” 58. 63. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political History of the Il-Khans,” 403. Also see Ji Kaiyun, “Lüelun Zhongguo yu Yilang lishi wenhua de gongxing,” 59. 64. Allsen, “Biography of a Cultural Broker,” 15–18. 65. Allsen, “Biography of a Cultural Broker,” 15–18. 66. Lambton, “The Äthär wa ahyä’ of Rashid al-Din,” 129–131. 67. Lambton, “The Äthär wa ahyä’ of Rashid al-Din,” 136–140. 68. Lambton, “The Äthär wa ahyä’ of Rashid al-Din,” 137. 69. Cutler, “Gifts and Gift Exchange,” 276n163. 70. Finlay, Color, 274–275. 71. Cleaves, “Mongolian Documents in the Musée de Téhéran,” 7–8, 25. 72. Lo and Wang, “Blood or Qi Circulation?” 35–38. 73. Lo and Wang, “Blood or Qi Circulation?” 127. 74. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 668. See also Mosaffari and Zotti, “Ghāzān Khān’s Astronomical Innovations,” 423. 75. Sayili, The Observatory in Islam, 193–194. 76. Saliba, “The Role of Marāgha in the Development of Islamic Astronomy,” 256. 77. Sayill, The Observatory in Islam, 207. 78. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, 29–30. 79. Vardjavanda, “La découverte archéologique du complexe scientifique de L’Observatoire de Marāqé,” 1366. 80. Dorce, “The Tāj al-azyāj of Muhyī al-Din al-Maghribī, 195–196. This work also includes references to the Christian and Jewish calendars. 81. Nha and Nha, “Two Historical Observatories before Galileo,” 113. 82. Tabatabaie and Ajabshirizadeh, “Observatories from Marāgha Observatory until Galileo’s Observations,” 151. 83. Boyle, “The Il-Khans of Persia and the Princes of Europe,” 25–40. 84. Comes, “The Possible Scientific Exchanges between the Courts of Hulagu and Alfonso X,” 33. 85. Fordham University Medieval Source Book, 316. 86. Bacon, Opus Majus, 1:324. 87. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 69. 88. Heller, “Visualizing Pilgrimage and Mapping Experience,” 40–48. 89. Muhanna, Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period, 44.

Notes to Pages 42–52 235

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90. Amitai, “Al-Nuwayri as a historian of the Mongols,” 23–36. 91. Berkey, “Tradition, Innovation and the Social Construction of Knowledge,” 48–49. 92. Muhanna, Encyclopaedism, 5–6, 47. 93. Ebn K - aldūn, Aldūn, Abū Zayd Abd-al-Rahmahmān. http://www.iranicaonline .org/articles/ebn-kaldun; print version vol. 8, fasc.1, 32–35 (accessed February 20, 2014). 94. Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, 4–11. (

CHAPTER 2: CONSTANTINOPLE IN RUM (BYZANTIUM) 1. Saint Mary of the Mongols Church and Nunnery was also known as Mouchliotissa (Greek for “of the Mongols”) and Kanli Kilise (Turkish for “Church of Blood,” after the Greek resistance in the local community to Ottoman conquest in 1453). Ottoman authorities were persuaded at different junctures to allow this church to remain one of the few Byzantine churches to function as a Greek Orthodox Church. 2. Laiou, “Observations on the Life and Ideology of Byzantine Women,” 70, 73. 3. Spatharakis, “Typica: Lincoln Typicon” 190–207, figs. 143–154. 4. Runciman, “The Lady of the Mongols,” 53, 50. 5. “Despina” from the Greek for “Lady”; and “Khatun,” the Mongol equivalent of “Queen.” 6. Majeska, Russian Travelers to Constantinople, 178–179. 7. Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade, 242. 8. Di Cosmo, “Black Sea Emporia,” 93. 9. Jacoby, “Mediterranean Food and Wine for Constantinople,” 128. 10. Di Cosmo, “Black Sea Emporia,” 101, 103, 104. 11. Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade, 119–120. 12. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 173–174. 13. Harbraeus, Chronography of Gregory Abu’l Faraj, 486. 14. Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 244. 15. Runciman, “The Lady of the Mongols,” 49. 16. Simpson, “Manuscripts and Mongols,” 374. 17. Laiou, “Observations on the Life and Ideology of Byzantine Women,” 62, 82, 96. 18. Arewelc’i, Historical Compilation, 139, 222. 19. Togan, “A Document concerning Cultural Relations between the Ilkhanide and Byzantiens,” 9. 20. Harbraeus, Chronography of Gregory Abu’l Faraj, xxvii. 21. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 83. 22. Arewelc’i, Historical Compilation, 222. 23. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 3:515. 24. De Nicola, Unveiling the Khatuns, 129–130. 25. Runciman, “The Lady of the Mongols,” 50; Ryder, “The Despoina of the Mon­ gols,” 77. 26. Bar Harbraeus, Chronography, 505. 27. De Nicola, Unveiling the Khatuns, 425, on the Jacobites. 28. Ryan, “Christian Wives of Mongol Khans,” 416n32. 29. De Nicola, Unveiling the Khatuns, 207, 231. 30. Ryan, “Christian Wives of Mongol Khans,” 420. 31. Carpini, The Tartar Relation, 94, 96. 236

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32. Polo, The Travels, 98. 33. Polo, The Travels, 197. 34. De Nicola, Unveiling the Khatuns, 62. 35. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 3:401. 36. Brack, “A Mongol Princess Making hajj,” 335n21. 37. Brack, “A Mongol Princess Making hajj,” 357n136. 38. Brack, “A Mongol Princess Making hajj,” 341, 347. 39. Brack, “A Mongol Princess Making hajj,” 333. 40. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 3:479. 41. Amitai, “Hülegü and the Ayyûbid Lord of Transjordan,” 12–13. 42. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 3:401. 43. Aigle, “The Letters of Eljigidei, Hülegü, and Abaqa,” 157. 44. De Nicola, Unveiling the Khatuns, 220. 45. Ryan, “Christian Wives of Mongol Khans,” 417. 46. Allen, “Byzantine Sources for the Jami‘ al-tawarikh of Rashid al-Din,” 128. 47. Arewelc’i, Historical Compilation, 219. 48. Der Nersessian,“Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 413–414. 49. Der Nersessian, “Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 415. 50. Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline, 3. 51. Reinhard, “The Role of Christian Spirituality in Thirteenth Century Interpreta­ tions of the Fall of Constantinople,” 38. 52. Laiou, “Observations on the Life and Ideology of Byzantine Women,” 64. 53. Nelson, “Byzantine Icons in Genoa,” 79. 54. Runciman, “The Lady of the Mongols,” 50. 55. Runciman, “The Lady of the Mongols,” 51. 56. Kashani, Tarikh-i Oljeitu, 8. I thank Professor Allsen for directing me to apply my elementary Persian to this passage. 57. Nelson, “Taxation with Representation,” 77. 58. Shawcross, “Do Thou Nothing without Counsel,” 106–107. 59. Shawcross, “Do Thou Nothing without Counsel,” 107–108. 60. Hindu-Buddhist windstar (swastika) border patterns frame the Deesis and other panels. The Byzantine Church of Christ Pantocrator in Nesebar, Bulgaria, offers striking examples of this thirteenth/fourteenth-century popularity of the windstar. Its associa­ tion with the lands to the east is possibly a nod to the Buddhism of the Ilkhanate more than a revival of motifs from Mediterranean antiquities introduced during earlier con­ tacts with Hindu-Buddhist culture. The windstar motif that surrounds the Chora Deesis mosaic containing Maria’s portrait also traveled on Armenian rug designs into the cloth of honor at the foot of the Mary and Christ Child created by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for a prelate in Rome, who possibly acquired such an actual rug during his tour of duty in the Ilkhanate where the Latin Church had bishoprics in Sultaniyya and contact with Arme­ nian Christians. 60. Bettini, “Un inedito mosaico del periodo paleologo a Constantinopoli,” 31. 61. Bettini, “Un inedito mosaico del periodo paleologo a Constantinopoli,” 35. 62. Teteriatnikov, “The Place of the Nun Melania,” 167. 63. Teteriatnikov, “The Place of the Nun Melania,” 77. 64. Carpini, The Tartar Relation, 96. 65. Ignatius of Smolensk, “The Journey of Ignatius of Smolensk,” 92. 66. Ignatius of Smolensk, “The Journey of Ignatius of Smolensk,” 96, 290, 335, 457. Notes to Pages 64–75 237

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67. Nelson, “The Chora and the Great Church,” 86. 68. Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 167. 69. Cutler, “Gifts and Gift Exchange,” 258; on gift example, 255 and 270. 70. Jacoby, “Silk Economies and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction,” 239. 71. Nelson, “Byzantine Icons in Genoa,” 79. 72. Nelson, “Byzantine Icons in Genoa,” 79–92. 73. Behrens-Abouseif, Practicing Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate, 63–64. 74. Behrens-Abouseif, Practicing Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate, 160.

CHAPTER 3: SIENA IN TUSCANY (LAND OF THE FRANKS) 1. Prazniak, “Siena on the Silk Roads,” 177–217. 2. Mack, “Oriental Script in Italian Paintings,” 51–71. For earlier discussions of this script, see Tanaka, “Fourteenth Century Sienese Painting and Mongolian and Chinese Influences,”1–57. 3. Tanaka, “Giotto and the Influences of the Mongols and the Chinese on His Art,” 188–151. 4. Schulz, “From Letter to Line,” 151–152. 5. Bowsky, The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–1355, 1–15. 6. Jacoby, “Oriental Silks at the Time of the Mongols,” 111 and 120. 7. S. A. M. Adshead, Material Culture in Europe and China, 82. 8. Cantelli, Storia dell’oreficeria e dell’arte tessile in Toscana, especially plates 32–42. I am grateful to Professor Piergiacomo Petrioli for bringing this text to my attention. See also Lopez, “China Silk in Europe in the Yuan Period,” 72–76, and Mack, “Patterned Silks,” 27–48. 9. Bussagli, Culture e civilità dell’Asia Centrale, 257–259. See also Lockhart, “The Rela­ tions between Edward I and Edward II of England and the Mongol Ilkhans of Persia,” 29. 10. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 315. 11. Gosman, “Marco Polo’s Voyages,” 72n2. 12. Yule and Cordier, eds., Cathay and the Way Thither, 1:258. See comments by Hayton of Armenia made in 1307. 13. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road, 122. 14. Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran, 48–55. See also Richard, “The Mongols and the Franks,” 45–57. 15. Monti, “I tre primi Sovrani Angioni e i Tartari,” 216–217. 16. De Weese, “The Influence of the Mongols on the Religious Consciousness of Thirteenth Century Europe,” 58. 17. Blair, “Religious Art of the Ilkhanids,” 112. 18. Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy, 196. 19. Kleinhenz, Medieval Italy, 407. 20. Rossabi, Voyager from Xanadu, 68–69, 102; Petech, “Les marchands italiens dans l’empire mongol,” 560. 21. Armour, “The Twelve Ambassadors and Ugolino’s Jubilee Inscription,” 7, 14. 22. “The Letter of Andrew of Perugia,” 237. 23. Llull, A Contemporary Life, 67; Schein, “Gests Dei per Mongolos 1300,” 805. 24. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 209n7. There are also representations of

238 Notes to Pages 75–86

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Prester John, the fabled Christian ruler of the Far East, with bright-red pointed shoes. See Kenneth Nebenzahl, Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond, 8, 52, 76. 25. Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, 28–29. I thank Lauren Arnold for early discussions on this topic. 26. Monti, “I tre primi Sovrani Angioni e i Tartari,” 231. 27. King, “The Trecento: New Ideas, New Evidence,” 228–229. 28. I thank Professor Piergiacomo Petrioli for informative conversation on the Piccolo Maestà and the Genoa Coccarelli manuscript in fall of 2014. 29. Robert Gibbs, “The Dating of the Coccarelli leaves,” 232–233. 30. Dunlop, “European Art and the Mongol Middle Ages,” 1–10. 31. Dunlop, “European Art and the Mongol Middle Ages,” 6–7. 32. Polo, The Travels, 136. 33. Carpini, The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars, 52. 34. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 652. 35. Carpini, The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars, 51, 52–53. 36. Origo, “The Domestic Enemy,” 328, 347–348. By the mid-1300s, Tuscany was part of an extensive slave trade that brought groups of Mongol descent described as “Tar­ tars” from central Eurasia into Florence and surrounding city-states. Artisans by law could own persons with slave status. 37. Norman, “The Three Cities Compared,” 24–25. 38. Burke, “The Martyrdom of the Franciscans,” 491. 39. Ratté, “Re-presenting the Common Place,” 106. 40. Ilg, “La scoperta della natura in pittura,” 181. 41. Hoeniger, “Cloth of Gold and Silver: Simone Martini’s Techniques for Represent­ ing Luxury Textiles,” 154–162. 42. De Weese, “The Influence of the Mongols on the Religious Consciousness of Thirteenth Century Europe,” 56–59. 43. Blair, “Religious Art of the Ilkhanids,” 112. 44. Hillenbrand, “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran,” 65. 45. Rice, The Illustrations to the “World History” of Rashid al-Din, 131, illustration no. 46. 46. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 75, fig. 39. 47. Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, 79. 48. The Legacy of Genghis Khan, 246. 49. Okada, “China as a Successor State to the Mongol Empire,” 263. 50. Burke, “The Martyrdom of the Franciscans,” 469. 51. For details, see Burke, “The Martyrdom of the Franciscans,” 463, 480, 482, 491. 52. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, 76–77. 53. Havely, “The Blood of the Apostles,” 43 and 48. 54. Burke, “The Martyrdom of the Franciscans,” 465. 55. Gibbs, “‘Sober as a Judge,’” 121–138. 56. House, Francis of Assisi, 218. 57. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 247–248. 58. Olschki, Polo’s Asia, 398. 59. Muldoon, Travellers, Intellectuals, and the World beyond Medieval Europe, 321, 323–329. 60. Hyman, Sienese Painting, 120.

Notes to Pages 86–99 239

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61. Simpson, “Manuscripts and Mongols,” 387–393. 62. Bacon, Opus Majus, 1:324. 63. For a detailed discussion of textile motifs from Tabriz workshops in the art of Simone Martini, see Rosati, “In qual modo si contraffa il velluto, o panno di lana, e così la seta, in muro e in tavola,” 91–132. 64. Lynch, “Introduction,” 5. 65. Dimarco, “The Historical Basis of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” 62–66.

CHAPTER 4: CAIRO IN EGYPT (MAMLUK SULTANATE) 1. Weitzmann and Folda both assume that the papacy and Louis IX were equally interested in a Mongol alliance. Though they were parties to a conversation on the subject, they never embraced the partnership envisioned in the iconostasis Nativity/Adoration. 2. Mandeville, The Travels, 70–71. 3. Weitzmann, The Icon, 201–207. 4. Folda, “Crusader Artistic Interactions with the Mongols in the Thirteenth Cen­ tury,” 149. 5. Derbes, “Siena and the Levant in the Later Dugento,” 195, 192. 6. Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting, 189. 7. Porter, “The Science of Color,” 218. 8. Porter, “The Science of Color,” 218–219. 9. Fierro, “Red and Yellow,” 82–83. 10. Rogers and Jomier, “al-Kahira.” 11. Pellat, “al-Radhaniyya.” 12. Jettmar, “Hebrew Inscriptions in the Western Himalayas,” 667–670. 13. Labib, “Karimi.” 14. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages, 29–30. 15. Kleinhenz, Medieval Italy, 1:407. 16. Brentjes, “Revisiting Catalan Portolan Charts,” 181–201. 17. Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule, 213–232. 18. Bruce, “Commercial Conflict Resolution across the Religious Divide,” 21. 19. Bruce, “Commercial Conflict Resolution across the Religious Divide,” 19. 20. Mandeville, The Travels, 69. 21. Mack, “Oriental Script in Italian Paintings,” 51–71. For earlier discussions of this script, see Tanaka, “Fourteenth Century Sienese Painting and Mongolian and Chinese Influences.” 22. Tanaka, “Giotto and the Influences of the Mongols and the Chinese on His Art,” 151–155. 23. King, “The Trecento,” 228–9. 24. di Buonaventura, “Siena 1298–1327.” The single-nail motif also appears in this work. 25. Amer, Crossing Borders, 149–150. 26. Simpson, “Manuscripts and Mongols,” 354–355. 27. Humphreys, “Ayyubids, Mamluks, and the Latin East in the Thirteenth Cen­ tury,” 14–15. 28. Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds, 51.

240

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29. Amitai-Preiss, “Mongol Imperial Ideology and the Ilkhanid War against the Mamluks,” 57–72. 30. Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds, 55. 31. Humphreys, “Ayyubids, Mamluks, and the Latin East,” 11. 32. Amitai, “An Arabic Biographical Notice of Kitbugha,” 225, 229. For discussion of the “metaphor of purification,” see Humphreys, “Ayyubids, Mamluks, and the Latin East,” 13. 33. Amitai, “The Impact of the Mongols on the History of Syria,” 231. 34. Broadbridge, Kinship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds, 13. 35. Dimarco, “The Historical Basis of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” 65–66. 36. Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo, xxi. 37. Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo, 77–81, 312–325. 38. Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo, 315, 270–71. 39. Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo, 324. 40. Kouymjian, “ Chinese Motifs in Thirteenth-Century Armenian Art,” 303– 324. 41. Hunt, “Artistic Interchange in Old Cairo,” 58. 42. Katzenstein and Lowry, “Christian Themes in Thirteenth-Century Islamic Met­ alwork,” 53–68. 43. Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), philosopher and theologian of Islam, held that the nature of the universe was unchanging. 44. Grabar and Natif, “The Story of Portraits of the Prophet Muhammad,” 20–21. 45. Thompson, “The Historical Compilation of Vardan Arewelc’ I,” 219. 46. Der Nersessian, “Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 414. 47. Der Nersessian, “Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,” 410. 48. Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting, xxi. 49. Amitai, “An Arabic Biographical Notice of Kitbugha,” 225. 50. Hunt, “Artistic Interchange in Old Cairo,” 60. 51. Weitzmann, “Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom,” 64. 52. Pogossian, “Armenians, Mongols and the End of Times,” 178. 53. Hunt, “Artistic Interchange in Old Cairo,” 58, 59. 54. Weitzmann, “Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom,” 75. 55. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 458, 479, 481–484, 492–497. 56. Osipian, “Armenian Involvement in the Latin-Mongol Crusade,” 66–100. 57. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 502–506, quotation 503. 58. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 504. 59. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 505. 60. Abu’l-Fida, Memoirs of a Syrian Prince, 37. 61. Abu’l-Fida, Memoirs of a Syrian Prince, 38. 62. Little, “Conversion to Islam under the Bahrī Mamlūks,” 560. 63. Little, “Conversion to Islam under the Bahrī Mamlūks,” 553, 555, 562, 567. 64. Little, “Conversion to Islam under the Bahrī Mamlūks,” 554/560 and 557/ 558/566. 65. Abu’l-Fida, Memoirs of a Syrian Prince, 39. 66. Chaffee, “Diasporic Identities,” 415. 67. Grabar, “Reflections on Mamluk Art,” 2. 68. Grabar, “Reflections on Mamluk Art,” 6.

Notes to Pages 114–128 241

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69. O’Kane, “Monumentality in Mamluk and Mongol Art and Architecture,” 513. 70. Nelson, “Byzantine Icons in Genoa,” 81.

CHAPTER 5: ALCHI IN LADAKH (GREATER HIMALAYAN REGION) 1. Goswamy, Kashmiri Painting, 5. 2. Goepper and Poncar, Alchi, 16. 3. Singh, Himalayan Art, 8. 4. Singer, “Early Portrait Painting in Tibet,” 81.

5. Denwood, “The Dating of the Sumtsek Temple at Alchi,” 65.

6. Luczanits, “The Early Buddhist Heritage of Ladakh Reconsidered,” 7. 7. Goepper and Poncar, Alchi, 18. 8. Soyoung Choi/Mongol@Hebrew University of Jerusalem. People, Mobility, Empire and Cross Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia. Project: The Ilkhanate and Tibet. http://mongol.huji.ac.il/people/soyoung-choi. 9. Labeled “The Mountains between India and Tibet,” and “The Mountain of India” by Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 76. 10. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 10. 11. On Mustang tribute to Ladakhi court, see Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 16– 17, 18. 12. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 156. 13. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 154. 14. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 12.

15. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 158–159.

16. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 162. 17. Sections of this chapter draw on material from Prazniak, “Ilkhanid Buddhism.” 18. Stavisky, “Buddha-Mazda,” 80, 89–91. For Russian scholarship on Buddhism, see Foltz, “Buddhism in the Iranian World,” 206. 19. Tigran, “Buddhism and Features of the Buddhist Art of Bactria-Tokharistan,” 475, 482–483. 20. Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 69. 21. Bulliet, “Naw Bahar and the Survival of Iranian Buddhism,” 144, 145. 22. Melikian-Chirvani, “Iran to Tibet,” 108n84. 23. Muhammad Ibn Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, 24–25. See n. 481 on the varied meanings of la—as “I,” as in “self,” or “No,” as in refusing to give alms. 24. Imtiyaz Yusuf, “Dialogue between Islam and Buddhism,” 370. 25. Berzin, “Historical Survey of the Buddhist and Muslim Worlds’ Knowledge of Each Other’s Customs and Teachings,” 188–189. 26. Wylie, “The First Mongol Conquest of Tibet Reinterpreted,” 325–327. 27. Petech, Central Tibet and the Mongols, 17. 28. Davidson, “Hidden Realms and Pure Abodes,” especially 161, 164, and 167. 29. Jan Yün-hua, “Chinese Buddhism in Ta-tu,” 386, 388–389.

30. Chag Lo-tsa-ba, Biography of Dharmasvamin, iv–v, 56.

31. Dunnell, “The Hsia Origins of the Yuan Institution of Imperial Preceptor,” 106, 109–110. 32. Marvazi, China, the Turks and India, 28.

242 Notes to Pages 128–138

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33. Petech, Central Tibet and the Mongols, 38, 52, 56, 88–90. 34. Bar Hebraeus, Chronography of Gregory Abu’l Faraj: Part I; Bertozzi, “Precisazioni intorno a una regola alimentare buddhista nella Cronografia di Barhebraeus” (Clarification about a Buddhist food rule in the Chronicle of Bar Hebraeus). 35. Azad, “Three Rock-Cut Cave Sites in Iran,” 212, 223. 36. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, part 3, 574. 37. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, part 3, 620. 38. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, part 3, 664. 39. Grupper, “The Buddhist Sanctuary-Vihara of Labnasagut and the Il-Qan Hül­ egü,” 20n47. 40. Hasan, “Historical Writing in Medieval Kashmir,” 53. For a historical geography of this period, see Bhutani, “Historical Geography of Kashmir.” 41. Marco Polo, The Travels, 58. See also Stein, “Marco Polo’s Account of a Mongol Inroad into Kashmir.” 42. Tucci, “Translation of the Itinerary of Orgyan pa,” 46–47. Also see Sperling, “Hülegü and Tibet,” 152n26. 43. Jahn, “A Note on Kashmir and the Mongols,” 179. 44. Jan Yün-hua, “Chinese Buddhism in Ta-tu,” 393–394. 45. Choi, “Tibet and the Hülegü Ulus,” 1–2. 46. Samten and Martin, “Letters to the Khans,” 309–310. 47. Samten and Martin, “Letters to the Khans,” 322–323. 48. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 22. 49. Petech, Central Tibet and the Mongols, 88. 50. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, 157. 51. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 77. 52. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘ u’t-tawarikh, 314. 53. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 77. 54. Gabain, Das Uigurische Königreich von Chotscho, 63, fig. 37. She also describes another Qocho house design: “On festive occasions, red-brown curtains were placed on the outside of the four corners of the houses, which were gathered on the edge of the wall like a knot (fig. 36). The heavy tile roof is similar to that of the Chinese houses: the two ends of the ridge beams are each a bird, perhaps a phoenix, while in China they have recently been dragon heads. As in China, the middle of the ridge was often interrupted by a flam­ ing desire bead. The rooftop was adorned and red in color, but its construction has not yet been loaded as in China decorative style” (p. 63, fig. 43); “House with round windows. From Qocho 17 older, Western-influenced style. The gate, the wooden structure under the blue of the house gate, and the window-frames are red, the brick foundation of the wall is bluegreen; the wall is golden yellow with slightly lighter tendrils. The crowning of the wall over the oblique trenches is not green” (p. 60); “House with angular window from Qocho: Ch 18 right above. A younger, Chinese-influenced style. Colors like Fig 34, but also the slanting tiles of the wall coronation, a narrow edge at the foot of the inside of the wall and the roof ridge light-green. The podium, the framing, and the grille of the window as well as the cur­ tains are rusty red” (p. 61, fig. 35). My translation. 55. Alafouzo, “The Iconography and the Historical Context of the Drinking Scene in the Dukhang at Alchi, Ladakh,” 188. 56. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles, 77. 57. Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks, 276, 271.

Notes to Pages 138–143 243

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58. Sperling, “Hülegü and Tibet,” 145, 147, 156. Hülegü’s name appears in Tibetan sources as both Hu-la-hu and Hu-la, and he is referred to as the patron of the Phag-mo gru­ pa subsect or as the “Stod-Hor king.” 59. Siddiqui, “The Qarlugh Kingdom in the North-Western India,” 77, 80, 82. 60. Mustawfi al-Qazwin, The Geographic Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 267. 61. Mustawfi al-Qazwin, The Geographic Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 222. 62. Zeisler, “East of the Moon and West of the Sun?” 407. 63. Zeisler, “East of the Moon and West of the Sun?” 408. 64. Esin, “The Cup Rites in Inner-Asian and Turkish Art,” 250–252. 65. Alafouzo, “The Iconography and the Historical Context of the Drinking Scene in the Dukhang at Alchi,” 170. 66. Flood, “A Royal Drinking Scene from Alchi,” 77, 81, 85, 88. 67. Alafouzo, “ Iconography and the Historical Context of the Drinking Scene in the Dukhang at Alchi,” 178. 68. Gasparini, whom I recently met at a conference at UC Berkeley (“Thunder from the Steppes,” September 29–30, 2016), is also rethinking the meaning of the Dukhang Royal Drinking Scene. We exchanged thoughts, and I look forward to seeing her published work on this very intriguing topic. 69. Note on Ladakhi nunneries and dress of Tibetan women in mural at Tabo; Ala­ fouzo, “Iconography and the Historical Context of the Drinking Scene in the Dukhang at Alchi,” 177. 70. Zeisler, “East of the Moon and West of the Sun?” 411–412. 71. Melville, “The Royal Image in Mongol Iran,” 365. 72. De Nicola, “Unveiling the Khatuns,” 220. 73. Flood, “Mobility and Mutation,” 29. 74. Singh, Himalayan Art, 95–96. 75. Papa-Kalantari, “The Ceiling Paintings of the Alchi Gsum Brtsegs,” 110. 76. Singh, Himalayan Art, 91–92. 77. Goepper, Alchi, 83. 78. Goepper, “Early Kashmiri Textiles? Painted Ceilings in Alchi,” 70. 79. Singh, Himalayan Art, 86. 80. Flood, “Mobility and Mutation,” 32.

CHAPTER 6: TURFAN IN UIGHURSTAN (TARIM BASIN) 1. “Biography of Mengsuz,” Yuanshi, vol. 10.3058, juan 124. 2. Gabain, “Ein Chinesisch-Uigurischer Blockdruck,” 8–10. Also Franke, “A SinoUighur Family Portrait,” 39. 3. Oh, “Islamicised Pseudo-Buddhist Iconography in Ilkhanid Royal Manu­ scripts,” 107. Also Diez, “Sino-Mongolian Temple Painting and Its Influence on Persian Illumination.” 4. Hitch, “The Special Status of Turfan,” 46. Also Yang and Wang, “Yuan dai huihu Zang chuan Fojiao wenxian yanjiu gaikuang,” 6–7. 5. Hitch, “The Special Status of Turfan,” 51. 6. See also Ao Te-gen, “Meng Yuan Shidai de Dunhuang Shining Wang Sulaiman,” 35. 7. Golden, Central Asia in World History, 47–50. 8. Luo Xianyou, “Yuyier wenhua yu Menggu Kanguo,” 281. 9. Gulácsi, Mediaeval Manichaean Book Art, 128. 244

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10. Oh, “Islamicised Pseudo-Buddhist Iconography in Ilkhanid Royal Manuscripts,” 107. Oh draws connections between imagery in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang and those in the Great Mongol Shahnama. Robin O’Bryan in conversation drew my attention to the raised arms motif in Simone Martini’s Lamentation scene. 11. Jackson, “On Turfan Pahlavi Miyazdagtacih.” Bema Scene, full-page book paint­ ing shown from picture-viewing direction (H: 12.4 cm, W: 25.2 cm), 35. 12. Klimkeit, Manichaean Art and Calligraphy, 20. 13. Gulacsi, “Searching for Mani’s Picture-Book,” map 1. 14. Jacobson, The Art of the Scythians, 98–99. Jacobson notes three female figures, ancient bird women, with raised hands. Found at Chuyluutyn Gol, Mongolia, from Novgor­ dodova 1989. 15. Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 570–575. 16. Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai, 175–176. 17. Marvazi, China, the Turks and India, 15. 18. Diez, “Sino-Mongolian Temple Painting and Its Influence on Persian Illumina­ tion,” 170. 19. Gabain, Das Uigurische Königreich von Chotscho, 49. 20. Gabain, Das Uigurische Königreich von Chotscho, 27. See also Zieme, Religion und Gesellschaft im Uigurischen Konigreich von Qoco; Pinks, Die Uiguren von Kan-chou in der Fruhen Sung-zeit; and, Mackerras, “Sino-Uighur Diplomatic and Trade Contacts.” 21. Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting,” 9. 22. Gulacsi, “Searching for Mani’s Picture-Book in Textual and Pictorial Sources,” 3 plus illustration of sun, moon, and pearls, 9, figure 3b. 23. Klimkeit, Manichaean Art and Calligraphy, 15. 24. Klimkeit, Manichaean Art and Calligraphy, 16–17. 25. Brown, “The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire,” 93, 96. 26. Brown, “The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire,” 92–103. 27. Manichaean Chronology, Timeline by Abba Yesai Nasrai. http://www.mindserpent .com/American_History/religion/manichaean/manichrono.html (accessed Feb. 15, 2016). 28. Four of Mani’s books were known in Bagdad. See Giants, Mysteries, Treasure and Shapur-aqan. 29. Hazine 2153 and Hazine 2160 of the Topkapi Sarayi Library, Istanbul, contain two files that are the primary body of work with the Siyah Kalem signature. These two files are included along with Hazine 2152 and Hazine 2154 in a collection referred to as the Fatih Album. As Nancy Steinhardt has noted, “more than one thousand paintings and drawings in these albums are simply lumped together with a vast body of other material intriguingly labeled ‘Central Asian,’ and sometimes ‘Mongol(?).’” Steinhardt, “Siyah Qalem and Gong Kai,” 70. 30. I am using Siyah Kalem (Siāh Qalam) here to designate a collection of images attributed in scholarship sometimes to one artist and sometimes to a school of painting. 31. Erginer, “Siyah Kalem Minyatürlerine Farkli Yorumlar,” 121. I am grateful to Osman Gazi Özgüdenli for this difficult to locate collection of essays. 32. Roxburgh, “Saçaklardaki Tasvirler,” 99. 33. Hillenbrand, “Islamic Art.” 34. Maqamet Al-Hariri, illustrated Arabic manuscript from the thirteenth century. http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/maq.html (accessed July 24, 2016). 35. Erginer, “Siyah Kalem Minyatürlerine Farkli Yorumlar,” 121. 36. Nobuyoshi Yamabe, “Practice of Visualization and the Visualization Sutra,” 133. Notes to Pages 160–167 245

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37. İpşiroğlu, Painting and Culture of the Mongols, 81. 38. Parman, “Insanin Esi Olarak Demon,” 133. 39. Roxburgh, “Saçaklardaki Tasvirler,” 102. 40. White, “Satire in the Paintings of ‘Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam’,” 235. 41. White, “Satire in the Paintings of ‘Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam’,” 243. 42. Esin, “Muhammed Siyah Kalem ve Iç Asya Türk Gelenegi,” 64. 43. İpşiroğlu, Painting and Culture of the Mongols, 87. 44. Erginer, “Siyah Kalem Minyatürlerine Farkli Yorumlar,” 119. 45. Franke, “A Sino-Uighur Family Portrait,” 36–37. See also Rossabi, “Chinese Myths about the National Minorities,” 316. 46. Steinhardt, “Siyah Qalem and Gong Kai,” 59–60. 47. Esin, “Muhammed Siyah Kalem ve Iç Asya Türk Gelenegi,” 64–65. 48. Brend, “Siyah Kalem: Sorunlu Bir Terim,” 61. 49. Rice, The Illustrations to the “World History” of Rashid al-Din, 9, n 11. 50. Oh, “Islamicised Pseudo-Buddhist Iconography in Ilkhanid Royal Manu­ scripts,” 107. 51. Watt, “Introduction,” 280. 52. Lee and Ho, Chinese Art under the Mongols, 277–281. 53. Franke, “A Sino-Uighur Family Portrait,” 39. 54. Franke, “A Sino-Uighur Family Portrait,” 40. 55. Gasparini, “A Mathematical Expression of Art,” 134.

CHAPTER 7: DADU IN KHITAI (GREAT YUAN) 1. Yuanshi, 15.4546, juan 203. 2. For Anige’s official biography, see Yuanshi, 15.4545, juan 203. 3. Jing, “Anige, Himalayan Artist in Khubilai Khan’s Court.” https://msu.edu/course /ha/121/jinganige.htm. 4. Lee and Ho, Chinese Art under the Mongols, 26. 5. Jing, “Anige, Himalayan Artist in Khubilai Khan’s Court.” 6. While this attribution cannot be made with 100 percent certainty, Anning Jing’s case for Anige’s authorship remains sound. 7. Jing, “The Portraits of Khubilai Khan and Chabi by Anige,” 53–54. 8. Kim, “Was ‘Da Yuan’ a Chinese Dynasty?” 288–289. 9. This is a point of some debate among art historians, to be taken up later in this chapter. 10. Vinograd, “De-centering Yuan painting,” 208; and Silbergeld, “The Yuan ‘Revo­ lutionary’ Picnic,” 18. 11. Known in Chinese historiography as the Yuan dynasty, the Great Yuan (Da Yuan) as part of the Mongol Empire was, in Mongolian, the Yehe Yuan Ulus or Dai Ön Ulus. 12. Rossabi, Khubilai Khan. 13. Liu, “War and Peace between the Yuan Dynasty and the Chaghadaid Khanate,” 339–358. 14. Allsen, “Technician Transfers in the Mongolian Empire,” 24. 15. Yokkaichi, “The Eurasian Empire or Chinese Empire?” 23–34. 16. Kublai Khan was thought of in his lifetime as a reincarnation of Manjusri. 17. Casey, “Buddhist Initiation Painting from the Yuan Court.” http://asianart.com /articles/tsakli-casey, figure 54, footnote 51. I thank Robert Tevis for this reference. 246

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18. Dunnell, “The Hsia Origins of the Yuan Institution of Imperial Preceptor,” 106, 109–110. 19. “Anige, Himalayan Artist in Khubilai Khan’s Court” by Anning Jing. https://msu .edu/course/ha/121/jinganige.htm (accessed Nov. 15, 2016). 20. Jing, “Portraits of Kublai Khan and Chabi by Anige,” 49. 21. “Anige, Himalayan Artist in Khubilai Khan’s Court” by Anning Jing. https://msu .edu/course/ha/121/jinganige.htm (accessed Nov. 15, 2016). 22. Casey, “Buddhist Initiation Painting,” n. 47. 23. McCausland, The Mongol Century, 64–68. 24. Weitz, “Notes on the Early Yuan Antique Art Market in Hangzhou,” 28. 25. For the art history of these periods, see Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting. 26. Chen Shih-hsiang, Biography of Ku K’ai-chih, 14–15. 27. Seckel, “The Rise of Portraiture in Chinese Art,” 16. 28. McCausland, “’Like the Gossamer Thread of a Spring Silkworm,’” 171. 29. Ruitenbeek, “Mazu,” 282. Also known as Tianfei (heavenly princess) Tianhou (heavenly empress; 281). 30. Franke, “Two Yuan Treatises,” 29–30. 31. Anning Jing, “Anige,” 6–7. 32. Cleaves, “Biography of the Empress Ćabi,” 142. 33. Cleaves, “Biography of the Empress Ćabi,” 143–144. 34. Cleaves, “Biography of the Empress Ćabi,” 145. 35. Rossabi, “Khubilai Khan and the Women in His Family,” 349–350. 36. Rossabi, “Khubilai Khan and the Women in His Family,” 351. 37. Di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodization,” 34. 38. Rossabi, “Chinese Myths about the National Minorities,” 316. 39. Rossabi, “Chinese Myths about the National Minorities,” 313–314. 40. Anning Jing, “Anige,” 24. 41. Rossabi, “Chinese Myths about the National Minorities,” 324. 42. Silbergeld, “The Yuan ‘Revolutionary’ Picnic,” 18. 43. Lee and Ho, Chinese Art under the Mongols, 52. 44. Yuanshi, 125/3074–8. 45. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, 68. 46. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, 72–80. 47. Anning Jing, “Financial and Material Aspects of Tibetan Art under the Yuan Dynasty,” 239. 48. Kossak, “Lineage Painting and Nascent Monasticism in Medieval Tibet,” 49–57. 49. Prazniak, “Ilkhanid Buddhism,” 671.

CHAPTER 8: QUANZHOU IN MANZI (GREAT YUAN) 1. Lee and Ho count six extant versions of the Dragon Boat Regatta. Biographical details of Wang Zhenpeng’s life appear in translation in Lee and Ho, Chinese Art under the Mongols, 201–202. 2. Schneider, The Madman of Ch’u. 3. (Huguo Mingzhu Tianfei). This is the same “Heavenly Empress” (Tian Hou) of the Qing dynasty. 4. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 270. 5. Vinograd, “De-centering Yuan Painting,” 205. Notes to Pages 183–200 247

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6. Yuanshi, vol. 5.1505, juan 62. 7. Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 441, 445. 8. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 250. 9. Mustawfi of Qazwin, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, 254. 10. Sen, “The Yuan Khanate and India,” 324. 11. Li Guo-Qing, “Archaeological Evidence for the Use of ‘Chu-nam,’” 281, 283. 12. Vu, “The Mongol Navy,”24–25. 13. On rivalry during this period between Kish and Hormuz, see Kauz, “The Mari­ time Trade of Kish during the Mongol Period,” 51–67. 14. Cleaves, “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia,” 181. 15. Shen C. Y. Fu, “Princess Sengge Ragi Collector of Painting and Calligraphy,” 74. 16. Virgil Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade, 128. 17. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks, 178. 18. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 184. 19. Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds, 72–73. 20. Herrmann, An Historical Atlas of China, 42–43. 21. Chau Ju-kua, The Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, 167. 22. Tolmacheva, “The Indian Ocean in Arab Geography,” 8. 23. Marvazi, China, the Turks and India, 14. 24. Marvazi, China, the Turks and India, 13. 25. Risso, Merchants and Faith, 19. 26. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 364–369. 27. Wang Gungwu, “The China Seas,” 7–22. Wang sets out an overview of the history of continental and maritime relations in terms of Indic, Sinic, and Mediterranean zones of contact. Hugh R. Clark uses the term “South Seas” for the collective lands of this littoral region, as it appears in Chinese sources; see Clark, “Muslims and Hindus,” 50, 54. Janet Abu-Lughod argued earlier for the centrality of thirteenth-century maritime trade in the making of a global economy. 28. Bruce, “Commercial Conflict Resolution across the Religious Divide in the Thir­ teenth-century Mediterranean,” 19–25. 29. Wang, Empire and Local Worlds, 96. 30. Wang, Empire and Local Worlds, 97 31. Wang, Empire and Local Worlds, 103. 32. Ruitenbeek, “Mazu,” 282, 287–88, figs. 1 and 2. 33. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 64, 65, 97. 34. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 140. 35. Sen, “The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks,” 421–453. See also Acri, “Esoteric Buddhist Networks,” 46. 36. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 97. 37. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks,” 142. 38. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks,” 62, and Tsugitaka, “Sugar in the Eco­ nomic Life of Mamluk Egypt.” 39. Yokkaichi, “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas,” 82. 40. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions, 103. 41. Chaffee, “At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade,” 114. 42. Yokkaichi, “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas,” 77–79.

248 Notes to Pages 201–209

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43. Liu Yingsheng, “Muslim Merchants in Mongol Yuan China,” 135n7. See Allsen on the significance of the pearl trade in commerce during the Mongol era; Mongols and Pearls (forthcoming). Yuanshi, 93:9b–10a and 12:12b, notes the use of the shih (66.41 liters) during the Southern Song and Yuan. 44. Liu, “Muslim Merchants in Mongol Yuan China,” 135–136. 45. Yokkaichi, “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas,” 89. 46. Sen, “The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks,” 422. 47. Wang, “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates,” 83–84. Wang discusses the rise of piracy in the late Qing in relationship to the history of continental and maritime trade in the Sinic, Mediterranean, and Indic zones. 48. Chaffee, “Diasporic Identities,” 403–405, 410. 49. Rossabi, The Muslims in the Early Yuan Dynasty (1981), 275. 50. Chaffee, “Diasporic Identities,” 397 and 417. 51. McCausland, The Mongol Century, 54–55, 56–57. 52. Rossabi, “Kuan Tao-sheng,” 377. 53. Weitz, “Notes on the Early Yuan Antique Art Market in Hangzhou,” 28. 54. Borbone and Orengo, “The Church at the Court of Arghun.” See also Simpson, “Manuscripts and Mongols,” 374. 55. Eljigidei, Letter (1248). On Mongol terminology, see Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 173. Erke’ün is translated as “priest.” 56. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent. See also Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, 142–143. 57. Eccles and Lieu, “Inscriptions in Syro-Turkic from Quanzhou,” 151–169. 58. “The Letter of Andrew of Perugia,” 236. For further discussion, see Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade, 126. 59. “The Letter of Brother Peregrine, Bishop of Zaytun,” 232–233. 60. Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, 149–151. 61. Eccles and Lieu, “Inscriptions in Latin, Chinese, Uighur and Phagspa.” 62. McCausland, The Mongol Century, 137–138. 63. Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China. 64. Cleaves, “The Sino-Mongolian Inscription of 1338, 17. 65. Murray, “The Evolution of Buddhist Narrative Illustration in China after 850,” 139. 66. Hearn, “Painting and Calligraphy under the Mongols,” 220. 67. Miless and Lyon, A Complete Delight. The Marion tradition in Christianity that gained prominence after the 451 CE Council of Ephesus declared Mary Theotokos (God­ bearer) evolved iconography for the depiction of Mary and the Christ child. The trope of the nursing Madonna appeared first in art associated with Greek Orthodox sponsorship, such as the monasteries of the Sinai region, and did not become popular in the Latin world until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An early image of the nursing Madonna can be found in the Catacomb of Priscilla (Rome) 250 CE. 68. Gabain, Das Uigurische Königreich von Chotscho, 850–1250. See also Zhang Wei, “Lun Wang Zhenpeng ‘yimu yu fu tu’ fei ‘yimu yufu.’” 69. Gibson, “The Enigmatic Figure,” lecture (January 13, 2009), 39–50, 45–46, and 41, fig. 4. 70. Eugene Y. Wang, “Why Was There No Painting of Marco Polo?” 85–105. 71. Eugene Y. Wang, “Why Was There No Painting of Marco Polo?” 97, 100. 72. Silbergeld, “In Praise of Government,” 190.

Notes to Pages 209–217 249

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73. Watt, “Introduction,” 17–18, 30. 74. Shen C. Y. Fu, “Princess Sengge Ragi Collector of Painting and Calligraphy,” 55–80. See also, Weidner et al., Views from Jade Terrace, Check 14, 66, 59, 104. 75. Purtle, “The Icon of the Woman Artist,” 302. 76. Purtle, “The Icon of the Woman Artist,” 295. 77. McCausland, Zhao Meng fu, 40. 78. Fu, “Princess Sengge Ragi Collector of Painting and Calligraphy,” 64. 79. See above, n. 1. 80. Hearn, “Painting and Calligraphy under the Mongols,” 219 and n. 102. 81. Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China. 82. Ptak, “Images of Maritime Asia in Two Yuan Texts,” 55–56. 83. Thomas T. Allsen, Mongols and Pearls (forthcoming). 84. Yokkaichi Yasuhiro, “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas,” 73. 85. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Black Sea Emporia and the Mongol Empire,” 93.

CONCLUSION 1. Anievas and Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule, 73–78. 2. Roxburgh, “Art and Literature in Timurid Herat,” 119. 3. Seyller, “A Mughal Code of Connoisseurship,” 197. I would question Seyller’s flat characterization of these qualities as “Western visual values incorporated into Mughal paint­ ing practically from its inception.” 4. Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice,” figs. 1 and 4. Ramaswamy’s postcolonial reading of these images assumes a 1580 Jesuit source for repre­ sentations of the terrestrial globe. However, the location of the Mughal court in the context of Mongol and post-Mongol history also brings to mind literary evidence of the presenta­ tion of a terrestrial globe by Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din to the Mongol court at Dadu in 1267. These historical layers are essential at the very least to understanding the receptiv­ ity of this imagery in later centuries as well as the interpretive framework of the reception. Alexander the Great, frequently depicted in Ilkhanid illustrations and part of Persian lit­ erature on ideal kingship, was no doubt of greater political merit than anyone associated at the time with the Jesuits. See Persian verses that suggest confirmation of this viewpoint in Ramaswamy, 773. 5. We might remember here that it was Roger Bacon and his patron Pope Clement IV who in the thirteenth century set a possible trajectory for subsequent centuries. They were keen on mapping the world with more accurate longitudes and latitudes that would provide knowledge “necessary to the domain of the faithful, and for the conversion of unbe­ lievers and for opposing unbelievers and the Antichrist and others”; see Opus Maius, 320. Roger Bacon, we may recall, was also a keen observer of Mongol military and intellectual accomplishments. 6. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, 288. 7. Rice, “The Oldest Illustrated Arabic Manuscript,” 207–209. The earliest extant illustrated copies of this work are from the thirteenth century. Earlier literary references to illustrated versions of these stories lead us reasonably to conclude that the Mongol period produced significantly more illustrated volumes, thus ensuring a better survival rate. This was made possible by increased paper production and marketing. 8. Sullivan, An Introduction to Chinese Art, 175.

250

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9. Zhu Xuchu, “The Songjiang School of Painting and the Period Style of the Late Ming,” 52–55. 10. Murray, “Illustrations of the Life of Confucius,” 73. 11. Wang, “The Arts of Ming Woodblock-printed Images and Decorated Paper Albums,” 56–60. 12. Bacci, “Sacred Narratives, Holy Objects and the Visionary Experience in Late Medieval Italy,” 95. 13. Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller, in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1997), advanced tutorial. http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/advancedtutorial /tutorial_advanced_boh.html (accessed Nov. 10, 2015). 14. Perkinson, “Likeness, Loyalty, and the Life of the Court Artist,” 42. 15. Uluç, “Selling to the Court,” 77–78.

Notes to Pages 225–227 251

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gaikuang” [Research on the Tibetan Buddhist Documents of the Uighurs during the Yuan]. Lanzhou daxue xuebao [Journal of Lanzhou University] 29.1 (2001): 1–7. Yang, Lien-sheng. “Buddhist Monasteries and Four Money-Raising Institutions in Chinese History.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 13 (1950): 174–191. Yasuhiro, Yokkaichi. “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas and the Indian Ocean Trade Network under Mongol Hegemony.” In The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration, edited by Angel Schottenhammer. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008. ———. “The Eurasian Empire or Chinese Empire? The Mongol Impact and the Chinese Centripetal System in Maritime Asia.” In Empires, Systems, and Maritime Networks: Asian Empires and Maritime Contact before the Age of Commerce. Beppu, Oita: Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, 2011. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Yuanshi [Yuan Dynastic History]. 15 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua Publishing House, 2013. Yule, Henry, and Henri Cordier, eds. Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1915. Yusuf, Imtiyaz. “Dialogue between Islam and Buddhism through the Concepts of Ummatan Wasatan (The Middle Nation) and Majihima-Patipada (The Middle Way).” Islamic Studies 48.3 (2009): 367–394. Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba. “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1991. Zeisler, Bettina. “East of the Moon and West of the Sun? Approaches to a Land with Many Names, North of Ancient Indi and South of Khotan.” The Tibet Journal 34.3–4/35.1–2 (2009/2010): 371–464. Zhang Wei. “Lün Wang Zhenpeng ‘yimu yu fu tu’ fei ‘yimu yufu’ [On Wang Zhenpeng’s ‘Mahaprajapati Nursing the Infant Buddha” Is Not ‘Mahaprajapati’].” MFA Thesis, School of Peking University, 1988. Zhao Rugua [Chao Ju-kua]. Record of Foreign Lands: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chi. Translated and annotated by Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill. Taipei: Ch’eng-wen Publishing Company, 1970. Zhu Xuchu. “The Songjiang School of Painting and the Period Style of the Late Ming.” In The Chinese Scholar’s Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period, edited by Chu-Tsing Li and James C. Y. Watt. New York: The Asia Society Galleries, 1987. Zieme, Peter. Religion und Gesellschaft im Uigurischen Konigreich von Qoco [Religion and Society in the Uighur Kingdom of Qoco]. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992.

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Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. Abaqa Ilkhan, 25, 26, 30, 33, 35, 37, 50, 61–63, 67, 69, 84, 209 Abbasid caliphate, 20; and Tang dynasty, 158 Achaemenid Empire, 18 Ahmad Musa, 171 Ahura Mazda, 18, 20, 135 Alamut, 21, 48, 106 Albigensian Crusades, 17, 110 al-Biruni, 43, 165 Alexander the Great, 11, 18, 106, 125, 144, 160, 162, 197 Alexandria, 36, 57, 70, 107, 109, 111, 117, 127, 208 al-Ghazali, 154, 188 allegories of good government: comparisons, 206, 217; and France, 102; and grain, 189; and Lorenzetti, 41, 80, 91–93, 96, 206; and Metochites, 99; and Wang Zhenpeng, 219; and Zhao Mengfu and Wang Zhenpeng, 99, 189, 217 Allsen, Thomas T., 1, 16 al-Magribi, 50 Almaliq, 14, 80, 93 al-Maqamat (Assemblies), 166 al-Nuwayri, 53 Alphonsine Chronicles, 50 Alphonso X, 50 al-Tabari, 43 al-Tusi, 48 al-Urdi, 49 al-Yunini, 115, 122 Amir Daularyar, 171 Andrew of Perugia, 9, 85 Andronikos II Palaiologos, 69

Anfossi, Thomas of, 85 Anievas, A., 2 Anige, 15, 176, 191 Antioch, 14, 61, 103, 107, 110 Aquinas, Thomas, 24 Arghun Ilkhan, 25, 29–32, 37, 50, 60, 67, 71, 73, 83, 85, 101, 138, 139, 143, 172, 197, 202, 209 Armenia: communities near Labnasagut, 68 artistic innovation: across Eurasia, 3; material culture and, 4–5; propaganda and, 6; and technology, 8 Ayubarwada. See Renzong Ayyubid dynasty, 106 Azerbaijan, 11, 14, 25, 26, 29, 37, 53, 61, 197 Bacon, Roger, 30, 49, 51, 54, 91, 93, 101, 220 Baghdad, 31, 36, 40; Church of the East, 123; and fall of, 11, 27 Baghdad Khatun, 64, 65 bakhshi, 138, 139 Barasch, M., 5 Barcelona, 111 Bar Hebraeus, 138 Barocci, Baroccino, 97 Batu Khan, 4 Baybars (Sultan of Mamluke Egypt), 113 Beauvais, Vincent of, 53 beguins, 97 beliefs: materiality and, 22; sudden information overload and, 53 Benuccio di Giovanni, 14, 82 Bentley, Jerry H., 16, 17 281

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Berke Khan, 57, 113, 114

Berrie, Barbara, 7

Beshbalik, 159, 170

Bezeklik, 8, 157, 158, 160

Bilawhar wa Budhasaf, 135

Birth of Mohammad, 72, 129, 217

Black Sea emporia, 32, 36, 56–59, 72, 75,

80, 84, 101, 109

Blair, Sheila, ix, 43, 45, 94, 141

Blanche of Burgundy, 226

Bohemond VI, Prince of Antioch, 14, 103

Bolad, 42, 45–47, 172, 196

Book of Hours, 226

books, transmission of, 60–61 bricolage, 5

Budashri, 177

Buddhism: and commercial activity,

37; and the Ilkhanate, 30; and

vegetarianism, 138

Byzantium period of the Latin Empire, 58

Cangrande (Grand Khan) della Scala, 32,

99

cao (paper currency), 180

Carlos I, king of Sicily, 84

Casey, Jane, 186

Cathars, 9, 164

Cennino Cennini, 7

Chabi Khatun, 15, 170, 177, 185, 191

Chaffee, John, 209, 212

Chaghadaid region of Mongol Empire, 6

Chan Buddhism, 137, 212

Chinggis Khan and nomadic

reorganization, 12

Choi, Soyoung, 140

Chora Church (Kariye Camii), 55, 72–73;

Deeis portrait of Maria of the

Mongols, 74

Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols, 55

Church of the East, 31; and Buddhist/ Christian imagery, 42; and Mongol women, 66–67 church tents, 60

chrysography, 105, 121

Coccarelli, 88

Codex Cumanicus, 32

commercialization of art, 213

concept of “China,” 11

Constantinople and Christian authority,

33

contact zone, 6, 31, 149, 153, 154

Coptic Christianity, 70

Council of Lyon (1274), 33, 69

Crusades: First Crusade, 57, 58; Fourth

Crusade, 58, 70, 109–110

cupbearing, 91, 145

Cutler, Anthony, 5, 76

Cyrus the Great, 18

Dadu (Khanbalïq), 9, 11, 15, 32, 37, 42,

93, 99, 111, 128, 139, 154, 170, 176,

179, 180

Dafartir-i divan (Archives of the Court),

42

Da Huguo Renwangsi Temple, 177

Damascus, 14, 50, 52, 85, 101, 103, 119,

122, 124–126

Dante Alighieri, 32, 99

Daoism, 47, 191, 217

Daoyi zhilu (Records of Island Peoples), 29

Da Qingshou Temple, 137

Darius III, 18

Da Viet, 201, 202

Da Yuan (Great Yuan/ Great Origins), 7,

178

Delhi Sultanate, x, 20, 182

Dervishes, 50

Despina Khatun. See Palaiologina, Maria Doquz Khatun, 31, 65–66, 114

Duccio di Buoninsegna, 81

Dunhuang Dunlop, Anne, 7

Effects of Good Government fresco:

compared to Chora mosaics, 72;

compared with vision of the Rab’-i

Rashidi, 41

empire of exchange, 1

Enrollment for Taxation compared with The

Birth of Mohammad, 72

ethnicity and political hierarchy, 200

Eurasian context, 3, 141, 200

Fao Munji, 50

Fatimid Caliphate, 106

Fayam, 70

282 Bibliography

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Francis of Assisi, 94, 98, 110 Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor) Gabain, Annemarie von, 142, 156, 161 Gandhara, 23 Gaochang Kingdom, 158, 159 Genoese: and Black Sea emporia, 59; and al-Hind emporia, 202, 205; and Quanzhou, 214 geographic narratives: imagined histories and, 24; wandering geographies and, 24 Ghazaniyya, 39 Ghaznavid Empire, 20 Ghibelline, 20, 32; factions among Genoese merchants, 80 Giotto, 7 Göktürk (Türük), 158 Golden Light Sutra, 137, 183 Gong Kai, 171 Goryeo, 203, 204 Granada, 50 Great Mongol Shāhnāma (Book of Kings), 94, 95, 197; and revisualizing history, 38 Gregory the Illuminator, 68, 71 Gu Kaizhi, 188 Guan Daosheng, 170, 218 Guanyin, 190, 214, 216 Guelph, 20, 32; factions at the Mamluk court, 113 Guo Xi, 188 Guo Shoujing, 50 Haft Paykar (The Seven Portraits), 154, 224 Hagia Sophia, 74–75 Haiyun, 137 Han dynasty, 19 Hangzhou, 180, 187, 200 Hanlin Academy, 42 Heraclius (emperor of Byzantium), 21 Hereford mappi mundi, 7, 12 Hetoum I, king of Armenia, 14, 103, 116, 119, 125 Hind/Sind, 11, 20; classical art of, 23; and trade with Latin West, 36; and travelers to Granada, 50

Hindu Kush, 19, 20, 151, 156 Hisham, story of, 21–22, 119–120 Hohenstaufen, 113 Holy Family with Mary Knitting, 88, 105, 217, 226, 227 Hormuz, 209, 211, 225 Hsieh Hsiang Mi Chieh (The Secrets of Portrait Painting), 190 Huihui, 210 Huizong (Yuan emperor), 177 Hülegü Ilkhan, 26, 30–33, 48, 50, 57–59, 61, 64, 66, 74, 83, 113–116, 123–125, 131, 137, 140–143, 146, 148, 177, 178, 201 Ibn al-Athir, 43 Ibn al-Nadim, 135 Ibn Battuta: on Granada, 50; on Quanzhou, 208, 220; on Tabriz, 34, 40 Ibn Khaldün, 53, 117 icons, 70, 75, 119, 120, 121; and Anige’s portraits, 191 Ignatius of Smolensk, 75 Imperial Highways, Ilkhanate, 29 India. See Hind/Sind indigo, 8, 191 Indus River, 8, 18, 20, 107, 130, 138, 143, 144, 146 intervisuality, 3; and the Hagia Sophia, 75; and portraiture, 189; and Yuan art, 178 Ismal‘ili Shi’a Islamic caliphate, 106 Italians in the Ilkhanate: Sanuto, Marino the Elder of Torcello, 85, 109; Uzi, Tomasso, 32, 50, 80, 83; Vassalli, Giovanni and Giacomo, 84; Veglione (or Vilione), Pietro, in Tabriz, 36, 84 Jacoby, David, 76, 82 Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh, 13, 141, 155, 171, 174, 187, 196–198, 217, 220, 223; and The Birth of Mohammad, 14; origins of, 42–43 Jaume I of Aragon and Catalonia, 50 Jerusalem, Kingdom of, 84, 106 Jews: in Egypt, 118, 126–127; in Ilkhanid politics, 31; in Quanzhou, 210 Bibliography 283

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Jingdezhen, 185 Jinling (Nanjing), 189 Jubilee Year of 1300, 85 Juneja, M., 11 Juvaini, Ata-Malik at Mongol court, 6, 43 Kamakura Shogunate, 201, 203 Kamalashri, 42, 138 Kanishka, 19, 23, 157 Karakorum, 6, 113, 137, 183, 198, 213 karez irrigation, 156 Karimi, 107–108 Kashani, 43, 71 Kashmir, greater Himalayan region and, 17, 182 Khaidu Khan, 65, 136 Khwarazmian Empire, 21 Kitbuqa, 14, 103, 115 Kiyat, 3 Kereyit, 3, 218 Khanbuliq, 15, 21, 180 Khanfu (Guangzhou), 189 Khurasan, 37, 50, 123, 135, 138, 139 Kim, Hodong, 178 Kipchak region of Mongol Empire, 6 Kirakos, 123 Kitab al-Budd, 135 Kizil, 8, 157, 158, 160–162 Köse Dağ, Battle of, 57 Kublai Khan, 21, 32, 42, 64, 67, 99, 139, 140, 170, 176–177, 180–181, 184–185, 188, 190–198, 201–202, 208–211 Kushan, 3, 157, 197 Kyrgyz, 159 Labnasagut, 15, 30, 47, 67, 68, 86, 198 Ladakh, 30, 148, 160, 194, 196 Lake Van, 30, 67 Land of Women (Nüguo), 143–146, 1948 lapis lazuli, 7–8, 44, 46, 121, 130, 151 Levi-Strauss, C., 5 Liao, 42, 62, 95, 160 Liber secretorum fidelium Crucis super Terrae Sancta (Book of Secrets for Followers for the Cross), 85, 109 284

6838_Book.indd 284

linguistic pluralism, 31–32 Livre de l’Estat du Grand Caan, by John de Cora, 36, 85 Llull, Ramon, 85, 93 long thirteenth century, 1, 5, 7, 10, 25, 37, 128, 129, 174, 177, 201, 213, 220, 221, 226 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 112, 175, 206, 220, 226; Piccola Maestà, 86, 87; and good government, 92–97, 101 Lotus Sutra, 30, 86 Louis IX, king of France, 58, 100, 100, 109, 112, 113, 214, 226 Louis of Toulouse, 9, 93, 149, 150 Lucca, 81, 83, 111, 121 Mahakala, 176, 185, 192 Mahaprajapati Holding the Infant Buddha, 15 Malot, 30, 139 Mamluks, 14; alliances against, 33; and Ilkhanid maritime strategy, 181 Mandeville, John, 104, 111 Mani, 23, 151, 155, 160, 162–164, 201 Manichaeism, 23, 153; in Alchi and Quanzhou, 160–164; and neoManichaeism, 96–97; in Turfan, 197 Manjusru, 181 Manzi, 17, 125, 199 Manzikert, Battle of, 57 mappa mundi, Hereford, 7, 12 Marāgha: Bartolomeo of Poggio, archbishop of, 32; observatory at, 47–50; and Christian communities, 66 Marco Polo, 7, 21, 29–32, 51, 59, 64, 80, 89, 122, 138–139, 154, 180; and Buddhism, 198, 202, 220 Maria of the Mongols, 34, 73, 76, 103, 218. See also Maria Palaiologina maritime strategies, 15, 58, 111, 114, 181, 201, 202 Maritime Trade Superintendencies, 211 Martini, Simone: and Mongol najis, 5, 51; at Avignon, 80 Marvazi, Sharaf al-Zaman, 11, 138, 162, 163, 204

Bibliography

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Mary (Virgin Mary; Madonna): and the Qur’an, 119; and Armenian icons, 120; as Queen of Heaven, 122, 129 Master Arabesque, 35, 37 Mazu, 189, 200 Mergits, 3 Metochites, Theodore, 14; compared with Rashid al-Din, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 99, 200 Michael VIII Palaiologos, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 69, 70, 72, 76, 113, 114 Möngke Khan, 48, 64, 66, 123, 125, 137, 140, 183, 192 Mongols: names popular in Italian, 32, 83; use of term, 3 motifs, 185; Bodhi-leaf, 93; clouds, 155, 171; fleur-de-lis, 9; lion, 88, 130; lotus flower, 55, 185; Parthian shot horseman, 149; signifiers and, 8–9; spindly tresses, 93, 216; spotted feline, 86; twisting garment; windstar (swastika), 9–10, 86 Mount Wutai, 52 Muhammad, image of, 22 Mungsuz, 15, 154–156, 155, 156, 165, 167, 170–174, 193 Mustawfi (Hamd-Allah Mustawfi of Qazwin): on the City of Women, 143; on geography, 29, 51; on trade, 38 Naimans, 3, 123 najis: and Mongol textiles, 14, 121, 151; and Simoni Martini, 5, 51, 82 Nalanda, 182 narrative of circulation, 3. See also Juneja, M. Naw Bahar (Nava Vihara) Monastery, 29, 135, 136 Nelson, Robert, 3, 72, 75 Nestorianism. See Church of the East Newar lineages, 177, 182–186 Nicholas IV (Pope), 25, 32, 36, 67, 84 Nihäya of al-Nuwayri, 52–53 Nizami, 154, 224 Nogai Khan, 59 nomads, empire building and, 11–12 Nongshu (Book of Agriculture), 172, 225

Öljeitü Ilkhan, 32, 71 Om mani padme hum, 151, 198, 211 Onggirat, 3, 218 ordos, 27, 62–63 Orgyan pa, 139 ortuy (merchants), 180, 209, 210 Pachymeres, George, 60 Palaeologus, Theodore, debate with Metochites, 72 Pala style, 131, 182 Palaiologina, Maria, 31, 54–56, 61, 63–69, 74–76 paper, 7, 135 Parthian Empire, 19 pashm, 134 pearls, 88, 130, 142, 149, 164, 194, 207, 209 ‘Phags-pa, 136, 137, 176, 184, 185 Piccola Maestà, 86–88, 87, 122 Picture Book (Ardahang), 164 pigments: and apothecaries, 46; artistic materials and, 7, 47, 130, 182; signifiers and, 9, 105; techniques, 151 periodization, 2 Philes, Manuel, 74, 76 Philip IV, king of France, 32, 83 Pisa, 81, 85, 105, 108, 110–116, 205 portraiture, 187, 187–188; and animals, 188; and narrative, 196–197 Pu Shougeng, 208, 209 pujing system, 205 Qin dynasty, 19 Qocho, 15, 142, 157, 159 Qonqor Ölöng, 138 Qu Yuan, 199 Qur’an, 105, 119, 128, 224 Qutlugh Khatun, 65 Qutlulun Khatun, 65 Rabban Sauma, 32; in Constantinople, 70–71; and Siena, 85 Rab’i Rashidi, 13, 37–41 Radhanites, 107, 108 Rashid al-Din (Rashid al-Tabib), 13, 43, 138 Ravenna, 111 Bibliography 285

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relics, 56, 60, 70, 75, 104

Renzong (Yuan emperor), 189, 199

repurposing imagery, 16, 131, 169, 187,

222, 226

Roman Empire, 20

Rouran Khaganate, 158

Rucellai Madonna, 81, 111

Rum, 11, 114, 204

Rumi, 154, 188

rural-urban interdependence, 206

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, 103, 104,

119, 126, 127

Saladin, 106, 107

Salimbeni, 14, 82

Sanuto, Marino the Elder of Torcello, 85,

109

Sasanid Empire, 19

Sa-skya sect, 136, 184–185 Seleucid, 20

Seljuk Empire, 20, 57

Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, 20, 57

semiosphere, 8

Sengge Ragi, 170, 177, 190

sgrafitto, 93

Shajarrat al-Durr (Ayyubid Sultana), 112

Shitiantai Observatory, 50

Simone Martini, 44, 51, 80, 82, 93–94,

97, 101, 121, 149, 160, 186

Sind, 11, 36–38, 42, 132, 134, 143, 198,

204

Sino-Himalayan art, 8, 15, 181, 185, 195,

224

Siyah Kalem (Black Pen), 89, 165–171,

168, 174

Sorghaghtani, 64, 67

Speculum Maius (Great Mirror), by

Beauvais, 53

spezie, 4

Spiritual Franciscans, 92, 96, 97

structure of feeling, 5, 181, 193

Sufis, 63, 165, 169, 198; in Cairo, 118;

hostels (khanaqah) for in Tabriz, 40;

and Quanzhou, 208

Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Baybars, 57

Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kaykawuz, 57

Sultan Malik el-Kamil of Egypt, 98

286

6838_Book.indd 286

Sultaniyya, 29; archbishop of, 32; and

Buddhism, 138

Sunni Islam, legal schools of, 117

Tabriz: as political center, 11; bazaar at,

34; and monetary reform, 35

Taj al-azyäj (Methods of Computation),

50

Tangut, 136–138, 147, 183, 184

Tānksūqnāma (The Treasure Book of

Khitai Science), 47

Tartar Road, 56

Tartars (Mongols), 3, 49

tent church, 60, 62, 63, 66, 90, 105, 213

Teteriantnikov, Natalia, 74

tiraz, 44, 77, 81, 182

Togdugpa, 140

Togon Temür. See Huizong transculturation, 6, 8

Treatise on Reason and Science, by Rashid

al-Din, 39

Treaty of Nymphaeum, 58

trebuchet, 180

Tugh Temür. See Wenzong Turkestan, 142, 148, 153–155, 169

Ughetto, 85

Uighurs, 124, 153–160, 197

ulus: and divisions of the Yeke Mongyol

Ulus, 178; and khanates, 4

Umar ibn al-Azraq al-Kirmani, 136

Umayyad caliphate, 20

Uttarakuru, 144

Uzi, Tomasso, 32, 50, 80, 83

Vardan, 21, 22, 61, 68, 120

Vassalli, Giovanni and Giacomo, 84

Veglione (or Vilione), Pietro, in Tabriz,

36, 84

Vesconte and map of Persia, 36, 85, 109

Via Francigena, 81, 85, 111

Vices, 88

visualization, 38, 72, 92, 146, 162, 167,

191, 224–127

Wang Dayuan, 29, 220

Wang I, 190

Bibliography

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Wang Zhenpeng, 15, 170, 199

waqf (charitable endowment), 34, 39, 40,

49

Waqf-nāmah (Endowment Deed), 41

Wasil ibn Ata, 136

ways of seeing, 6

Wenzong (Yuan emperor), 177; and gifts

from Avignon pope Benedict XII,

178

William, Raymond, 5

William of Rubruck, 51, 113, 198

women: and marriage politics, 59; status

among the Mongols, 63–64

Wu Daozi, 188, 195

Xingxiu, 137, 184

Xiongnu, 3, 158

Xixia, 3, 136

Yamantaka Mandala, 177, 182

yasa (Mongol legal code), 30, 66

Yeke Mongyol Ulus (Mongol Empire),

178

Yovhannes, story of, 21, 68, 119–120

Yuan: compared with the Ilkhanate, 45,

48; use of art for empire-building, 6

Zhao Mengfu, 170, 188

Zhou Fang, 190

Bibliography 287

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About the Author

Roxann Prazniak is professor of history at the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. She attained her PhD in history from the University of California, Davis, where she studied with profes­ sors Liu Kwang-ching and Don C. Price. She is the author of Dialogues across Civilizations: Sketches in World History from the Chinese and European Experiences (1996) and Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in Late Imperial China (1999). Prazniak has published numerous articles, including “Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History” in Comparative Studies in Society and History (2014) and “Artistic Exchange and the Mongol Empire” for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2019).

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Perspectives on the Global Past Anand A. Yang and Kieko Matteson SERIES EDITORS

Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History Edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World Edited by Victor H. Mair Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges Edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1935 Rainer F. Buschmann Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities Yinghong Cheng Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific Fiona Paisley The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–1757 Gang Zhao Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors Edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700 Edited by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang

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Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration Edited by Ronit Ricci Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East Jon K. Chang Encounters Old and New in World History: Essays Inspired by Jerry H. Bentley Edited by Alan Karras and Laura J. Mitchell Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee Nancy Um At the Edge of the Nation: The Southern Kurils and the Search for Russia’s National Identity Paul B. Richardson Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border Crossings from Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan Hiroko Matsuda Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art Roxann Prazniak

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