Shrine and cult survived the Mongols. The saint cult blossomed politically and financially under the Ilkhanids and Kartids. Qutb al-Din Muhammad Jami, and his son, Shihab al-Din Ismaʿil, were the first accumulators of wealth and power. Qutb al-Din had opaque connections to a wealthy Indian benefactor, and hosted Shams al-Din Muhammad Kart, instituting a bond between the families. Shihab al-Din married a son to a Kartid princess, and accepted a Kart king (malik) as his acolyte, thereby garnering tangible and intangible benefits for shrine and cult. The apogee of the shrine’s affluence and influence was under the Timurids.

The Ottoman empire is named after Osman(d.1324), the eponymous founder of the dynasty, whose name came to be rendered in English as Ottoman. Osman was a Turkish frontier lord – beg in Turkish – who commanded a band of semi-nomadic fighters at the beginning of the fourteenth century in northwestern Asia Minor (Anatolia), known at the time to Turks, Persians, and Arabs as the land of Rum (Rome); that is, the land of the Eastern Roman Empire. Osman Beg was but one of many Turkish lords who carved out their respective principalities in western and central Asia Minor, profiting from the power vacuum caused by the Mongols’ destruction of the Seljuq sultanate of Rum in 1243.

Chapter 1, “Eurasia after the Fall,” provides a synthetic analysis of the Mongol legacy in eastern Eurasia during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It focuses on two related issues: (a) the Mongolian diaspora of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and (b) fourteenth-century evocations of the Mongols in the rhetoric of rulership.

Chapter 9, “The Chinggisid Fold,” explores Zhu Yuanzhang’s correspondence with two other groups with deep ties to the Chinggisid imperial enterprise.The first were senior Great Yuan military commanders and Mongol nobles, primarily those based in today’s Liaoning and Jilin provinces to the northeast, the southern Mongolian steppe, and in Gansu and eastern Xinjiang.The second group consists of the Moghul khanate and the Timurid dynasty in Central Asia.Memory of Chinggis Khan and the institutional arrangements of the Mongol empire (including hereditary relations of leadership) were defining elements of both groups. This chapter argues that Zhu Yuanzhang worked hard to win the first group’s allegiance through a combination of military pressure, economic incentives, and argumentation. If he failed to sway the Great Khans and the Prince of Liang, the Ming founder did have some success among this critical group of Chinggisid supporters. Zhu Yuanzhang and his advisors invoked the Mongol empire’s inheritance in communications with the Timurid and Moghul polities. However, the early Ming court’s Chinggisid narrative was not compelling to them.

The conclusion reviews the book’s primary arguments and offers a few observations about what the early Ming court’s Chinggisid narrative tells us about enduring issues of history and its uses: the legacy of empire, historical memory, and rising powers’attempts to create compelling narratives that justify their new place in the world.