From medieval times until today ideas of heredity through lineage and of merit through slave status have jostled for pre-eminence as explanations for transitions of Mamluk royal authority. This article contributes to this debate through an analysis of events in late 1341 marking the transition from the reign of one of the sultanate's most successful rulers, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn, to that of his sons. This is achieved by focusing on the whereabouts of one of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad's most powerful agents, Qūṣūn al-Sāqī al-Nāṣirī, and on how this amir monopolized power in Egypt and Syria in such a way that his accession to the sultanate seemed inevitable. The article then demonstrates how things went wrong for Qūṣūn and how his failed attempt to obtain the sultanate triggered a Qalāwūnid dynastic succession practice that was to remain dominant for many decades.

In 688/1289 Nawrūz Aqa, a leading Mongol magnate, began a rebellion in Khurasan to resist the Ilkhan Arghun's attempts to centralize power and loosen the Mongol aristocracy's grip on provincial government. The rebellion of Nawrūz was significantly different from any Mongol uprising that had occurred in the Ilkhanate to that date: it was distinguished by the successful fusion of Chinggisid and Islamic traditions of political and spiritual authority to support Nawrūz's challenge against the Hülegüid monarchy. This new hybrid political philosophy allowed Nawrūz to mobilize both the sedentary and nomadic populations of Khurasan to overhaul the power structure of the Ilkhanate. The present study of the early career and rebellion of Amīr Nawrūz will reveal how his movement forced the Turco-Mongolian leadership to reconfigure its political, social and religious relationships, among themselves and with the sedentary Muslim population they ruled.

The valley of Dantig in Amdo plays a central role in Tibetan Buddhist historical literature as the place where the monastic code was maintained during the tenth century after the dissolution of the monasteries in central Tibet. This article shows that a manuscript (now kept at the British Library) carried by a Chinese pilgrim monk through this region in the 960s, which mentions Dantig, is the only direct documentary evidence of Tibetan monastic culture in this region at this time. The authors also show how the name Dantig, which has been previously unexplained, derives from the Sudāna Sūtra, a Buddhist narrative of exile and return that is directly relevant to the aspirations of the refugee monks from central Tibet who settled in the region.

The mid-fifteenth-century Taoist Canon (Zhengtong daozang 正統道藏) contains five specimens of a religious artefact called “Great Peace Symbol” (“Taiping fu” 太平符), dispersed between five texts spanning about a millennium. The introduction to this paper discusses the meaning of the Chinese word fu 符 and its most widely used English rendition, “talisman”. The article briefly presents the source of each specimen, attempts a deconstruction of its morphology, and analyses its modus operandi, thus providing a basic methodological model to outline the historical evolution of the category of “fu” artefacts from early medieval portable devices endowed with specific apotropaic functions – like charms and amulets – to multipurpose ritual implements designed for use within the framework of early modern Taoist liturgy. The epilogue introduces a sixth specimen, differently named but morphologically and functionally related to the latest three “Great Peace Symbols”.

This paper investigates the belated formation of the China Bible House, the first national Bible society in China, as a result of the interplay between the politics of foreign Bible societies and the indigenizing Chinese church in relation to rising nationalism during the Republican era. The challenge of Chinese nationalism to Christianity drove foreign Bible societies and Chinese Protestants to work towards the indigenization of Bible work. However, distrust and conflicts hindered foreign Bible societies' co-operation among themselves and also with Chinese Protestants. While Chinese church leaders saw the founding of a Chinese Bible society as a manifestation of the Chineseness of the Protestant church in China, they agreed with foreign Bible societies on the global identity of Bible work, which justified the latter's continuing presence in China. This understanding, together with the need for foreign financial support and expertise, explains why Sino-foreign co-operation existed in Bible work in China.

Many scholars have stressed that regional dynamics led to the outbreak of the Musin Rebellion, the largest rebellion in eighteenth-century Korea. Scholars have examined the economic and political situation leading up to the violence and concluded that political marginalization caused Kyŏngsang Province elites (from the Southerner faction) to launch the rebellion. This paper analyses evidence from official sources about rebel motivations, rebel geographical associations and the court view of the causes. Although post-rebellion government statements acknowledge tensions between the court and many Kyŏngsang Province elites, rebel testimony showed no evidence of any anger about discrimination against elites from a single region. There is also inconsistent evidence of regional concerns in the membership of the rebel organization, which was drawn from three southern provinces and mainly concentrated around the capital. My findings challenge the conclusions of regionalist scholars and place the Musin Rebellion in a trajectory of late Chosŏn rebellion that was attempting to redress factional political discrimination and was not caused by regional concerns.

Almost five decades ago the late Stanislaw Chojnacki, one of the founding fathers of Ethiopian art history, began the task of describing the themes in Christian Ethiopian painting. Since then, others have contributed to the study of different subjects in Ethiopian art. Yet there are still gaps in our understanding of Ethiopian iconography. The aim of this study is to help fill these gaps by offering some remarks on the iconography of the Holy Women at the Tomb in fourteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript illumination.