SUGGESTED READING

David Morgan’s The Mongols (1986) affords an accessible introduction to the Mongol Empire. Morgan and Reuven Amitai Preiss have also edited a valuable collection of essays, The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy (2000). Thomas T. AUsen has written more specialized studies: Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Mongke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251-1259 (1987); Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (2002); and Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (2001). Larry Moses and Stephen A. Halkovic, Jr., Introduction to Mongolian History and Culture (1985), links early and modern Mongol history and culture. Tim Severin, In Search of Chinggis Khan (1992), revisits the paths of Genghis’s conquests.

William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976) outlines the demographic effects of the Mongol conquests, and Joel Mokyr discusses their technological impact in The Lever ofRiches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). Connections between commercial development in Europe and Eurasian trade routes of the Mongol era within a broad theoretical framework inform Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250-1350 (1989).

The only “primary” document relating to Genghis Khan, Secret History of the Mongols, has been reconstructed in Mongolian from Chinese script and has been variously produced in scholarly editions by Igor de Rachewilz and Francis Woodman

Cleaves, among others. Paul Kahn produced a readable prose English paraphrase of the work in 1984. Biographies of Genghis Khan include Leo de Hartog, Genghis Khan, Conqueror of the World (1989); Michel Hoang, Genghis Khan, trans. Ingrid Canfield (1991); and Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, trans. and ed. Thomas Nivison Haining (1992), which is most detailed on Genghis’s childhood and youth.

On Central Asia after the conquests see S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History (1993). The most recent scholarly study of Timur is Beatrice Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (1989).

David Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia (1998), and Charles Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1987), provide one-volume accounts of the Mongols in Russia. A more detailed study is John Lister Illingworth Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200-1304 (1983). See also Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier (1998). Religion forms the topic of Devin De Weese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (1994). The Cambridge History of Iran: vol. 5, The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed. J. A. Boyle (1968), and vol. 6, The Timurid and Safavid Periods, ed. Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (reprint, 2001), contain detailed scholarly articles covering the period in Iran and Central Asia.

Translations from the great historians of the Il-khan period include Juvaini, ’Ala al-Din ’Ata Malek, The History of the World Conqueror, trans. John Andrew Boyle (1958), and Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle (1971). The greatest traveler of the time was Ibn Battuta; see C. Defremery and B. R. Sanguinetti, eds., The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A. D. 1325-1354, translated with revisions and notes from the Arabic text by H. A. R. Gibb (1994), and Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (1986).

On Europe’s Mongol encounter see James Chambers, The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe (1979). Christopher Dawson, ed., Mission to Asia (1955; reprint, 1981), assembles some of the best-known European travel accounts. See also Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (many editions), and the controversial skeptical appraisal of his account in Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Really Go to China? (1995). Morris Rossabi’s Visitor from Xanadu (1992) deals with the European travels of Rabban Sauma, a Christian Turk.

For China under the Mongols see Morris Rossabi’s Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (1988). On the Mongol impact on economy and technology in Yuan and Ming China see Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (1973); and Joseph Needham, Science in Traditional China (1981). Also see the important interpretation of Ming economic achievement in Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998).

The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644, part 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (1998), provides scholarly essays about a little-studied period. See also Albert Chan, The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty (1982), and Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals (1976).

On early Ming literature see Lo Kuan-chung, Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel Attributed to Luo Guanzhong, translated and annotated by Moss Roberts (1991); Pearl Buck’s translation of Water Margin, entitled All Men Are Brothers, 2 vols. (1933), and a later translation by J. H. Jackson, Water Margin, Written by Shih Nai-an (1937); and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, History and Legend: Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels (1990).

Joseph R. Levenson, ed., European Expansion and the Counter Example of Asia, 1300-1600 (1967), recounts the Zheng He expeditions. Philip Snow’s The Star Raft (1988) contains more recent scholarship, while Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (1993), makes for lively reading.

For a general history of Korea in this period see Andrew C. Nahm, Introduction to Korean History and Culture (1993); Ki Baik Lee, A New History of Korea (1984); and William E. Henthorn, Korea: The Mongol Invasions (1963). On a more specialized topic see Joseph Needham et al., The Hall of Heavenly Records: Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks, 1380-1780 (1986).

For a collection of up-to-date scholarly essays on Japan, see Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 3, Medieval Japan (1990). See also John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in theMuromachiAge (1977); H. Paul Var-ley, trans., The Onin War: History of Its Origins and Background with a Selective Translation of the Chronicle of Onin (1967); Yamada Nakaba, Ghenko, the Mongol Invasion of Japan, with an Introduction by Lord Armstrong (1916); and the novel Futo by Inoue Yasushi, translated by James T. Araki as Wind and Waves (1989). Donald Keene, Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (2003), gives a delightful introduction to the cultural changes of the fourteenth century. For economic matters see S. Gay, The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto (2001).