Persian sources about the Mongol Tatars
senseless mobile
Changeable, rebellious, superstitious,
Easily empty hope betrayed,
To instant suggestion is obedient,
For the truth is deaf and indifferent,
And she feeds on fables.
A. S. Pushkin, "Boris Godunov"
Contemporaries of the Mongols. Needless to say, our great Alexander Sergeevich was not of a very high opinion about the majority of his contemporaries, for it is clear that with his “Boris Godunov” he first of all addressed them. Much time has passed, radio, telephone, general secondary education appeared, the Internet is available for the mass citizen. But the “food fables” is still thriving and quite popular. Well, there were no Mongols, there were no Tatars, and there was no Mongol conquest either, and if somewhere someone fought with someone there, then these were the Tartars-Russ fighting with the Rus-Slavs. The chronicles are all rewritten by order of Peter the Great, Catherine the Second, or someone from Nikolaev, Rubruk - the papal agent invented everything, Marco Polo is a jester of peas ... In short, there are no sources confirming the very existence of the Mongolian state and its conquest. Not so long ago, one “expert” here, at “VO”, said so directly that why did Genghis Khan go to the West, and did not pay attention to China. And, apparently, he wrote it from ignorance, hurrying, because it was China that the Mongols conquered in the first place.
Learning is light, and unlearned is darkness!
And here we must think about the following, namely: if we do not know something, this does not mean that this does not exist in nature at all. There is, but not everyone knows about it, and often content with information from available, but dubious sources. After all, let's say, water is in the puddle and in the crystal decanter. Moreover, in order to get drunk from the puddle, it is enough just to bend over, and the carafe ... Well, firstly, you need to have it, and secondly, you need to fill it, and not with water from the puddle, but you should have this water!
However, the lack of information for many is not the fault, but the misfortune of their hectic life and the consequence of their lack of systematic professional education in this area. That is why in several consecutive publications we will try to fill this gap. And we will try to acquaint the readers of “VO”, first of all, with primary, rather than secondary sources of stories the Mongols ...
Here, the first article on this topic should be emphasized that one can learn the history of unwritten peoples, firstly, through archaeological excavations, and secondly, by reading about them what is written by those who possessed a written language. Thus, if the people lived quietly, peacefully, then it practically disappeared from the writing of world history. But if the neighbors pestered, everyone wrote about him. We do not know the written language of the Scythians, Huns, Alans, Avars ... But after all, the Greeks and Romans left their written testimonies about all of them to us, and we consider their reports to be reliable sources. As for the Mongols, they had their own writing. From the 13th century, the Mongolian peoples used writing systems around 10 to record their languages. One of the legends reports that when Genghis Khan defeated the Naimans in 1204, the Uygur scribe Tatatung was taken prisoner, who, by his order, adapted the Uygur alphabet to record the Mongolian speech. There are other legends, but what is important is that in this case we have two streams of information at once - internal, this is what the Mongols themselves wrote about themselves, and the external one containing what literate representatives of other nations wrote about them, which very often these same Mongols conquered by the power of the sword.
Ilkhanat - the state of the Mongols on the land of Persia
One of the Eastern states that fell under the blows of the Mongols was ancient Persia. We will not talk about the Mongol campaign of Khanagu Khan (1256 — 1260) here - this is a topic for a separate article. What is important is another thing, namely, that the result of this conquest was the power of the Hulaguids, and their advance to the West was stopped only by the Egyptian Mamluks in the battle of Ain Jalut. Hulaguid Power (and Western historiography - Ilkhanat). This state existed until the 1335 year, and this was largely assisted by the assistance of its governor Ghazan Khan by his vizier, Rashid al-Din. But Rashid ad-Din was also a very educated man of his time and decided to write a voluminous historical work devoted to world history and the history of the Mongols, in particular. And Gazan Khan approved it! Yes, this “story” was written for the winners, but it is precisely by this that it is valuable. The winners do not need to flatter and embellish their actions, because they are winners, it means everything that they did excellently and simply does not need embellishment. They embellish the writings for the vanquished, in order to sweeten the bitterness of defeat, and the rulers of such a great power as the Hulaguid didn’t need it, because they were Chinggisids, their ancestor was the great Chinggis himself!
Labor Gazan Khan and his vizier ...
By the way, Gazan-khan himself knew the history of his own people well, but still he could not help but understand that it was simply beyond his power to bring together all the available information on his history - after all, he is the ruler of the kingdom, and not the historian, and he simply does not. But then he has the power and loyal servants, and among them was Rashid ad-Din, whom he was in 1300 / 1301. ordered to collect all the information relating to the history of the Mongols. So, first, the work “Ta'rikh-i Gazani” (“The Annals of Gazan”) appeared, which was presented to Olgeit Khan in 1307, and the whole work on this work, called “Jami at-tavarih” or “Collection of Chronicles” only completed in 1310 / 1311.
Naturally, not one Rashid ad-Din worked on this handwritten folio. He had two secretaries: the historian Abdullah Kashani, known for writing the Olgeit-Khan Story, and Ahmed Bukhari, who composed the main text. Someone Bolad, who in 1286, came to Persia from China and was involved in the work, participated in this work, because he was considered a connoisseur of the history and customs of the Mongols. Rashid ad-Din and Bolad worked together, like a teacher and a student. In any case, this is how a contemporary describes their work: one told and the other wrote down. Ghazan Khan and other Mongols also complemented the story, telling about who knew what. Information on the history of India was given by the Buddhist monk Kamalashri, in China - by two Chinese scholars, but among the informants were Rashid and Europeans, or rather one European - a Franciscan monk. After all, he also wrote about Europe.
For its time, a very decent source base
In addition to the information received from history experts verbally, for writing “Jami 'at-Tavarih”, the already existing written sources were also involved: “Divan-and-lugat at-Turk” (“Collection of Turkic dialects”) by Mahmud Kashgari, the famous Turkic encyclopedist of the XI century ; "Tarih-i-Jehangush" ("History of the world-conqueror") of the Persian historian Juvayni, who also served the Ilkhan rulers; well, of course, “Altan debter” (“Golden Book”), that is, the official history of Chinggis Khan, all of his ancestors and successors, written in Mongolian and stored in the archives of Ilkhan.
Later, when Rashid ad-Din fell into disgrace and was executed (and the mercies of the rulers are very short-lived!), The rights of authorship to “Ta'rich-i Gazani” were presented by his secretary Abdullah Kashani. But a comparison of the style of the Oljate-Khan Story shows that it does not resemble the style of Rashid ad-Din, who wrote very simply, avoiding the famous Persian eloquence in every possible way.
The first written manifestation of tolerance?
There were two main parts in the annals of Rashid ad-Din. The first described the actual history of the Mongols, including Hulaguid Iran. The second part was devoted to world history. And at first there was the history of the Caliphate and other Muslim states before the Mongol conquest - the Ghaznavids, Seljukids, the state of the Khorezmshahs, Gurids, Ismailis of Alamut; then followed the history of China, ancient Jews, "Franks", popes, "Roman" (that is, Germanic) emperors and India, in accordance with the level of knowledge about these countries. And the fact that all this is exactly so is very important, since it allows one to compare certain historical facts set forth in this work and thus establish their authenticity, checking with other sources.
Civil strife Illustration from the manuscript “Jami at-tavarikh”, XIV century. (State Library, Berlin)
It is interesting that in "Jami 'at-tavarih" it was directly stated that, although many peoples do not profess Islam, they still deserve to have their history written down, for it points to the boundless wisdom of Allah, who allowed them to exist, and for the faithful to convert them with their works into the true faith, but there is the idea of "comparison" of different cultures was already understood by the historians of that time.
The third part of the natural-geographical plan was also conceived for writing, in which all the trade routes of the Mongol Empire should also be described. But Rashid ad-Din either did not have time to write it, or she died after his execution in 1318, during the looting of his library in Tabriz.
The novelty of labor was to try to write a truly world history. Prior to that, none of the Persian historians had ever set such a task. Moreover, the whole pre-Islamic history of the Muslim peoples was considered by them only as a prehistory of Islam and no more, and the history of non-Muslim peoples was considered completely undeserving of any attention. It was Rashid ad-Din who understood that the history of both Persians and Arabs is nothing but one of the many rivers that flow into the sea of world history.
There is a translation into Russian
The work of Rashid ad-Din and his assistants was translated into Russian as far back as 1858 — 1888. Russian orientalist I.P. Berezin, though not entirely, but partially. His work was called “Rashid-Eddin. Collection of Chronicles. The history of the Mongols. The writing of Rashid-Eddin. Introduction: On the Turkish and Mongolian tribes / Trans. from Persian, with introduction and notes by I. P. Berezin // Notes impers. Archeol. of society. 1858. T. 14; Persian text, Russian translation and notes, see: Proceedings of the Eastern Branch of the Russian Archaeological Society. 1858. T. V; 1861. T. VII; 1868. T. VIII; 1888. T. XV. In the USSR, in 1936, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences prepared the complete edition of this work in four volumes. But the work was delayed by the war, and besides it was so complicated that the last two volumes appeared only in 1952 and 1960.
120 pages for 850 thousand pounds!
Interestingly, in 1980, a fragment of 120 pages of one of the illustrated manuscripts “Jami 'at-Tavarih”, written in Arabic, was sold at Sotheby’s auction, where it was passed by the British Royal Asiatic Society. Bought his face, who wished to remain anonymous, for ... 850 thousand pounds sterling. This amount was first paid for the Arabic manuscript.
That is what we have in the end? Excellent source on the history of the Mongols, and correlated with many other sources in other languages. And there is his good translation into Russian, so today any literate person can take it and read it.
References:
1. Rashid ad-Din. Collection of chronicles / Trans. from Persian L. A. Khetagurov, edited and remarks by prof. A. A. Semenov. - M. - L .: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1952. - T. 1, 2, 3.
2. Ata-Melik Juvayni. Genghis Khan. The history of the conqueror of the world (Genghis Khan: the history of the world conqueror) / Translation from the text of Mirza Mohammed Qazvini into English by J. E. Boyle, with a preface and bibliography of D. O. Morgan. Text translation from English to Russian by EE Kharitonova. - M .: Magister-Press Publishing House, 2004.
3. Stephen Turnbull. Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests 1190-1400 (ESSENTIAL HISTORIES 57), Osprey, 2003; Stephen Turnbull. Mongol Warrior 1200-1350 (WARRIOR 84), Osprey, 2003; Stephen Turnbull. The Mongol Invasions of Japan 1274 and 1281 (CAMPAIGN 217), Osprey, 2010; Stephen Turnbull. The Great Wall of China 221 BC – AD 1644 (FORTRESS 57), Osprey, 2007.
To be continued ...
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