This chapter surveys the extant examples of Islamic literature in Turkic produced in the western parts of the Mongol-ruled world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as evidence for the process of Islamization and cultural assimilation occurring under Mongol rule. A brief note on the production, in the Mongol era, of most of the surviving manuscripts of pre-Mongol Islamic Turkic works is followed by discussion of the questions of authorship, content, and patronage for the major Turkic literary products from the ulus of Jochi – the Muʿīn al-murīd, the Khusraw va Shīrīn of Quṭb, the Maḥabbat-nāma of Khwārazmī, and the Nahj al-farādīs of Maḥmūd b. ʻAlī – and for those from the Chaghadaid realm – Rabghūzī’s Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā and the work of Isḥāq Khwāja b. Ismāʻīl Ata.

Sources that contain testimonies regarding the part of the Mongol Empire known to the Rus′ can be divided into three broad genre categories: chronicles, tales and saints’ lives, and documents. Rus′ sources from the first encounter of the Rus′ with the Mongols in 1223 through the seventeenth century concerning the Ulus of Jochi and its successor khanates can be divided into three chronological phases: 1223−1252, 1252−1448, and post-1448. Those written during the first phase, 1223−1252, initially express bewilderment about who the Mongols are and simply explain their presence as God’s punishment for the sins of the Rus′. Soon, however, they begin to disparage the Mongols and their Tatar subjects. Between 1252 and 1448, the Tatars are presented in neutral (non-disparaging) terms. After 1448, church writings revert to the pre-1252 pejorative terminology about the Mongol–Tatars and expand on the slurs and denigrations. State documents, in contrast, maintain neutral verbiage.

Byzantine Greek historiography forms an indispensable group of written sources for Eurasian history, including the history of the Mongol Empire. The sources must be interpreted within the framework of Byzantine civilization (Greek antiquity, Christianity, and the Roman imperial tradition). One of the major difficulties in interpreting Byzantine sources derives from the archaizing character of ethnonyms: one appellation may refer to several ethnic groups, and sometimes the same ethnos is designated by different terms. Another limitation is that the Byzantines’ horizon extended primarily to the western lands of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde, and Ilkhanid Iran. In this chapter the four major histories of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries (Georgios Akropolites, Georgios Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Ioannes Kantakouzenos) are treated. Then Byzantine sources relating to the Mongol period are enumerated and briefly characterized, according to their literary genres: histories, world chronicles, local histories, poems, epistles, geographical works, state and ecclesiastical documents, encomia, and oracles.