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History: from the Saljuqs to the Aq Qoyunlu (ca. 1000–1500 C.E.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Charles Melville
Charles Melville*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University
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Extract

The Half-Millennium of Persian History Between The Coming of the Saljuqs and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty is one of repeated upheaval and largely alien rule. The arrival of the Ghuzz tribes in the early 11th century was not an entirely peaceful affair—the author of the Tārīkh-i Sīstān regards it as a calamity for that formerly prosperous province—and much worse was to follow, with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and Timur's campaigns in the late 14th, all of which caused enormous destruction, while leaving a profound impression on Persian society, culture, and political life.

This long and eventful period is seldom treated as a whole; volume 2 of Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam is still perhaps the nearest approach to a united vision of the “Middle Periods” of Islamic history, but of course his view is not confined to Iran. Traditionally, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and the end of the Abbasid caliphate is taken as the defining turning point in medieval Persian history, an event that falls almost exactly in the middle of the period under review and which to some extent destroys its unity.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3-4: A Review of the “Encyclopaedia Iranica” , Summer Fall 1998 , pp. 473 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1998

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References

1. See also the recent Etats, sociétés et cultures du monde musulman médiéval Xe- XVe siècle, vol. 1, ed. Garcin, J.-C. (Paris, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, again with a wider perspective. Morgan, D.O. Medieval Persia 1040-1797 (London, 1988)Google Scholar, considers that even the longer period up to 1800 possesses a unity that justifies its treatment in a single book (p. ix), though he doesn't go out of his way to elaborate the point.

2. Miller, I. “Local history in ninth/fifteenth century Yazd: the Tarikh-i Jadid-i Yazd,” Iran 27 (1989): 75-79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4. Ed. ᶜAbbas Iqbal (Tehran 1329/1950).

5. See my article, “The Chinese Uighur animal calendar in Persian historiography of the Mongol period,” Iran 32 (1994): 83-98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Potter's, Lawrence G. Ph.D. thesis, “The Kart dynasty of Herat: religion and politics in medieval Iran” (Columbia, 1992)Google Scholar, makes important progress in this direction.

7. Though Shabankara'i's Majmaᶜ al-ansāb, which contains sections on the rulers of Fars, Luristan, and Yazd, is not cited in the bibliography of any of these articles (see now ed. Mir Hashim Muhaddith, Tehran, 1984).

8. The sea of precious virtues. A medieval Islamic mirror for princes, trans, and ed. Meisami, J. S. (Utah, 1991).Google Scholar

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11. See various articles by J. Masson-Smith cited and discussed by Morgan, D. O. The Mongols (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. 4, and Lambton, op. cit., 20-24.

12. The articles on Balkh were unable to take advantage of McChesney's, R. D. Waqf in Central Asia: Four hundred years in the history of a Muslim shrine, 1480-1889 (Princeton, N.J., 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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14. See Allsen, T. “Notes of Chinese titles in Mongol Iran,” Mongolian Studies 14 (1991): 27-39Google Scholar and idem, “Biography of a cultural broker: Bolad Ch'eng-hsiang in China and Iran,” in Raby, J. and Fitzherbert, T. eds., The Court of the Il-Khans 1290-1340, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 12 (1996), 7-22.Google Scholar