Final Report Summary - MONGOL (Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia)
The project has studied the impact of the Mongol Empire (1206-1368) on world history through the prism of mobility: It aimed to explain why, how, when, and to where people ideas and artifacts moved across Eurasia and what were the outcomes of these population movements.
Guided by "the humanistic approach to world history", namely combining world history perspective with close reading of primary sources in multiple languages (mainly Arabic, Persian and Chinese), as well as by insights of the social and life sciences, the project has created a sophisticated multi-lingual database for studying these movements. The database records information about people who were active in Mongol Eurasia, currently indexing 13,586 persons. This unique resource enables it to reconstruct various modes of pre-modern migrations (of captives, tribes, experts, missionaries etc) in/to various arenas (cities, regions, polities); aspects of economic and cultural transfers in various fields (astronomy, trade, religion), and the Empire's institutions (e.g. the army, guards, imperial sons in laws). Looking at the Empire in its full Eurasian context and underscoring the effects of the Mongols’ indigenous culture on the proto-global world of the 13th and 14th centuries, the project enables far deeper understanding of the social and cultural realities of Mongol Eurasia, of mechanisms of cross-cultural connections and transmission of knowledge, thereby illuminating the transition from the medieval to the early modern instigated by the Mongols' imperial enterprise.
The project was conducted by an international team- employing people from China, Japan, Korea, the US, the UK, Germany, Italy and Israel. It conducted two major conferences and seven smaller workshop, each including both established and emerging scholars as well as researchers from both East and West, thereby creating an international community of scholars of the Mongol Empire. It has resulted so far in more than 80 publications, mainly in English but also in Mongolian, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian and Hebrew. Notable among them is the collection In the Service of the Khans: Elites in Transition in Mongol Eurasia (Asiatische Studien 71.4 December 2017). Moreover, quite a few volumes, books, as well as six dissertations are in the making. Training and grooming a considerable part of the next generation of the Mongol Empire’s scholars, and significantly contributing to the globalization of Mongolian studies worldwide, the project’s main legacy has been the study of the Mongol Empire in its own terms and full Eurasian context.