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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2024
This article analyses the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid- to late fourteenth century (1330s to 1390s) across Eurasia, looking at three facets of the Crisis: environmental—focusing on climate change; epidemiological—exploring the Black Death's impact on the fall of the Chinggisids; and political—mainly the dilution of the Chinggisid charisma due to the halt of expansion. We argue that the main facet of the Crisis was political, and that it derived from the nomadic culture of the Mongols. This was the same political culture that enabled them to establish their huge empire. However, an integral part of this political culture was the need to secure the support of the nomadic elites who were also the backbone of the Mongol army. This proved to be much harder in a reality of excessive natural disasters on the one hand and the erosion of the Chinggisid charisma due to the renunciation of the ideal of world conquest on the other. The result was a growing number of elite groups who contested for power while nominally retaining the framework of the Chinggisid principle, among whom the imperial sons-in-law played a significant part, as well as the shrink and fragmentation of the Chinggisid polities that survived the Crisis.
1 Biran, M. and Kim, H., ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, (eds.) Biran, M. and Kim, H. (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 1–4Google Scholar.
2 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisis (accessed 9 December 2023).
3 J. Bemmann, ‘Chinggisid rule over the Mongolian plateau and the archaeological evidence’, paper presented at the conference ‘Great Chinggisid Crisis: History, Context, Aftermath’, Bonn, 11–13 May 2023.
4 Pederson, N. et al., ‘Pluvials, droughts, the Mongol empire, and modern Mongolia’, PNAS CXI.12 (2014), pp. 4375–4379Google Scholar. Although there had been wetter years in the past 2,000 years of Mongolian history on both an annual and a centenarian scale, the years 1220–1229 were unique because they were ‘an exceptionally sustained period of moisture’ that lasted for over 15 years (ibid, p. 4378, further p. 4376).
5 Brooke, J. L., Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 369–370CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 A selection of recent studies includes: Pederson et al. ‘Pluvials, droughts’; Di Cosmo, N., Wagner, S., and Büntgen, U., ‘Climate and environmental context of the Mongol invasion of Syria and defeat at ʿAyn Jālūt (1258–1260 CE)’, Erdkunde LXXV.2 (2021), pp. 87–104Google Scholar; Slavin, P., ‘The birth of the Black Death: biology, climate, environment, and the beginnings of the second plague pandemic in early fourteenth-century Central Asia’, Environmental History XXVIII.2 (2023), pp. 300–334CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and see below.
7 For collating European sources with climatic proxies, see Campbell, B. M. C., The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (New York, 2016), esp. pp. 269–329Google Scholar; Slavin, P., Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Turnout, 2019)Google Scholar; Preiser-Kapeller, J., Der Lange Sommer und die Kleine Eiszeit. Klima, Pandemien und der Wandel der Alten Welt von 500 bis 1500 n. Chr. (Vienna, 2021), esp. pp. 283–303Google Scholar.
8 The Chinese concept, according to which natural disasters reflect Heaven's dissatisfaction with the rulers, can lead to the invention of extreme weather events (e.g. snow in June) to express the dynasty's loss of legitimation. More practically, Mongol princes, aware of the court's initially generous relief system, sometimes reported famine for getting relief (C. P. Atwood, ‘The empire of the Great Khan: The Yuan Ulus, 1260–1368’, in Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, (eds.) Biran and Kim, p. 160).
9 In order to avoid anachronism and following Matthews, we prefer to denote the language of the Rus’ chronicles as ‘Old East Slavic’ and not ‘Old Russian’ (e.g. Matthews, D., ‘Preterites in direct discourse in three Old East Slavic chronicles’, Russian Linguistics XIX.3 (1995), pp. 299–317Google Scholar).
10 Landa, I., ‘Famines, state, and the stability of Mongol Eurasia: preliminary remarks’, Central Asiatic Journal LXVI.1–2 (2023), pp. 125–126Google Scholar.
11 For a broader discussion, see Brooke, Climate Change, pp. 352–382.
12 Preiser-Kapeller, Der Lange Sommer, pp. 289–297; cf. Brooke, Climate Change, p. 382, for a different time range. For a discussion of the possible relationship between the solar irradiance and the climatic changes, specifically droughts, see e.g. Kushnir, Y. and Stein, M., ‘Medieval climate in the Eastern Mediterranean: instability and evidence of solar forcing’, Atmosphere X.29 (2019), pp. 1–24, doi: 10.3390/atmos10010029Google Scholar; Schmutz, W. K., ‘Changes in the total solar irradiance and climatic effects’, Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate XI.40 (2021), pp. 1–13, doi: 10.1051/swsc/2021016Google Scholar).
13 Campbell, B. M. S., ‘Global climates, the 1257 mega-eruption of Samalas volcano, Indonesia, and the English food crisis of 1258’, Transactions of RHS XXVII (2017), pp. 87–121Google Scholar; Guillet, S. et al., ‘Climate response to the Samalas volcanic eruption in 1257 revealed by proxy records’, Nature Geoscience X (2017), pp. 1–7, doi: 10.1038/ngeo2875Google Scholar; Liu, B. et al., ‘The role of Samalas mega volcanic eruption in European summer hydroclimate change’, Atmosphere XI (2020), pp. 1–17, doi: 10.3390/atmos11111182Google Scholar; M. Bauch, ‘Chronology and impact of a global moment in the 13th century: the Samalas eruption revisited’, in The Dance of Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Environmental Stress, Mortality and Social Response, (eds.) A. Kiss and K. Pribyl (London, 2019), pp. 214–232. For further eruptions of the second half of the thirteenth century, see Preiser-Kapeller, Der Lange Sommer, p. 288. Note that the exact location of the three eruptions mentioned under the years 1269, 1276, and 1286 is unknown, as the information about them comes from analysis of the so-called ‘Dome C’ ice core from Antarctica: M. Baroni et al., ‘Persistent draining of the stratospheric 10Be reservoir after the Samalas volcanic eruption (1257 CE)’, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres CXXIV (2019), pp. 7083, 7085.
14 Note, however, that some scholars set the beginnings of the LIA to 1400, while the periods from 1150 to 1400 are seen as a transition from the MCA to the LIA (Brooke, Climate Change, p. 383).
15 S. Lian, Yuan shi [元史, Official History of the Yuan] (Beijing, 1976), chapter 22, pp. 496–497; T. Li, ‘The Mongol Yuan Dynasty and the climate, 1260–1360’, in The Crisis of the 14th Century: Teleconnections Between Environmental and Societal Change?, (eds.) M. Bauch and G. J. Schenk (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 157–159; Landa, ‘Famines’, pp. 136–137. For the ‘Great Famine’, see I. Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315–1322’, Past & Present LIX:1 (1973), pp. 3–50; P. Slavin, ‘Market failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315–1317)’, Past & Present DDXXII (2014), pp. 9–49; Slavin, Experiencing Famine.
16 Hao, Z. et al., ‘Multi-scale temperature variations and their regional differences in China during the medieval climate anomaly’, Journal of Geographical Science XXX.1 (2020), esp. p. 122Google Scholar, Fig. 1.
17 For the tree-ring analysis from the Pamir-Alay, see M. Opała-Owczarek and T. Niedźwiedź, ‘Last 1100 yr of precipitation variability in western Central Asia as revealed by tree-ring data from the Pamir-Alay’, Quarternary Research XCI.1 (2019), pp. 89, 88–89; see further M. Opała-Owczarek and P. Owczarek, ‘Dry and humid periods reconstructed from tree rings in the former territory of Sogdiana (Central Asia) and their socio-economic consequences over the last millennium’, in Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road, (eds.) L. E. Yang et al. (Cham, 2019), esp. p. 208. For the exact location in the western Pamir-Alay area, see Opała-Owczarek and Niedźwiedź, ‘Last 1100 yr’, pp. 82–83.
18 Slavin, P., ‘From the Tian Shan to Crimea: dynamics of plague spread during the early stages of the Black Death, 1338–46’, JESHO LXVI (2023), pp. 555–557Google Scholar, esp. 557, Fig. 6.
19 Y. Cui et al., ‘Historical variations in mutation rate in an epidemic pathogen, Yersinia pestis’, PNAS LX.2 2 (2013), pp. 577–582, esp. p. 48; for a statistical analysis of the precipitation extremes in the Chinese sources during the first half of the fourteenth century, see G. Chen and G. Zhang, Yuandai zaihuang shi [元代災荒史, History of the Famines of the Yuan Period] (Guangzhou, 2020), pp. 90–91, esp. p. 91, Fig. 2–2.
20 M. Kehl, ‘Quaternary climate change in Iran: the state of knowledge’, Erdkunde LXIII.1 (2009), pp. 1–17.
21 V. Bayramzadeh et al., ‘Temperature variability in northern Iran during the past 700 years’, Science Bulletin LXIII (2018), p. 463, esp. Fig. 1; E. Darabad, M. Maghsoudi, and O. Rahimi, ‘Bat Guano and historical evidence of climate changes in the west of Iran during the Late Holocene (Meghalayan stage)’, Acta Carsologica XLVIII.2 (2018), esp. p. 244, Fig. 10–11.
22 Ibid.
23 E.g. Brook, T., ‘Nine sloughs: profiling the climate history of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, 1260–1644’, Journal of Chinese History I (2017)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 39–40, 43–44.
24 For the specific years, see Chen and Zhang, Yuandai zaihuang shi, pp. 193–207.
25 E.g. Atwood, ‘Empire of the Great Khan’, p. 137, Fig. 2.4; Landa, ‘Famines’, p. 146, fn. 151.
26 D. W. Pankenier, ‘The cosmo-political background of Heaven's mandate’, Early China XX (1995), pp. 121–176.
27 See Li, ‘Yuan Dynasty and the Climate’, p. 166, 161–164, for further relief measures; Landa, ‘Famines’, pp. 133–137.
28 Atwood, ‘Empire of the Great Khan’, pp. 165–166. Cannibalism is mainly a topos, yet it reflects the authors’ evaluation of the severity of the famine.
29 Brook, ‘Nine sloughs’, p. 38, esp. chart 2; for the locust attacks, see Chen and Zhang, Yuandai zaihuang shi, pp. 208–209; for the droughts, see ibid, pp. 135–139; cf. Atwood, ‘Empire of the Great Khan’, p. 170. It remains unclear, however, whether the less-full records of the late Yuan decades present a distorted picture of the real situation in the 1350s to 1360s.
30 al-Qāsim b. Muḥammad al-Birzālī, Taʾrīkh al-Birzālī (al-Muqtafī ʿala kitāb al-rawḍatayn) (Beirut, 1327/2006), vol. 4, pp. 303–304, 475–476; Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Dhahabī, Taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa al-aʿlām, (ed.) ʿU. ʿA. Tadmurī (Beirut, 1987), vol. 61, pp. 235–236; H. A. R. Gibb (trans.), The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (New Delhi, 1999), vol. 2, p. 276. For an evaluation of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's information on the Mongols, see D. O. Morgan, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūta and the Mongols’, JRAS XI.1 (2001), pp. 1–11.
31 H. Wang et al., ‘Comparison of drought-sensitive tree-ring records from the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang (China) during the last six centuries’, Advances in Climate Change Research VIII.1 (2017), pp. 18–25; Slavin, ‘Birth of the Black Death’, pp. 315–321.
32 Opała-Owczarek and Owczarek, ‘Dry and humid periods’.
33 Gibb, Travels, vol. 3, pp. 542, 550, 569. He stresses the ruins in Bukhara and Samarqand but was impressed by the region's thriving agriculture. M. Biran, ‘Mongol Central Asia: the Chaghadaids and the Ögödeids, 1260–1370’, in Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, (eds.) Biran and Kim, p. 374. Al-ʿUmarī mentions multiple flourishing cities and stresses the role of the developed irrigation system in coping with the drought periods at more or less the same time, but he seems to cite pre-Mongol sources in this part (K. Lech (trans. and ed.), Das Mongolische Weltreich: al-ʿUmarī's Darstellung der mongolischen Reiche in seinem Werk Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp. 129 (transl.), 57 (Ar.)).
34 Sharaf al-Dīn al-Yazdī, Ẓafarnāma, (ed.) M. ʿAbbāsī (Teheran, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 21–22. For the dzud, cold-caused disasters with high death causality among the livestock in the steppe, see B. Nandintsetseg et al., ‘Cold-season disasters on the Eurasian steppes: climate-driven or man-made’, Nature Scientific Reports VIII.14769 (2018), pp. 1–3.
35 al-Yazdī, Ẓafarnāma, pp. 85–86; Niẓām al-Dīn Shāmī, Ẓafarnāma, (ed.) F. Tauer (Prague, 1937), vol. 1, p. 32, vol. 2, p. 22; Muʿīn al-Dīn Naṭanzī, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh-i Muʿīnī (Teheran, 1957), pp. 222–232; B. Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge, 1989), p. 51; Biran, ‘Mongol Central Asia’, p. 364.
36 E.g. M. Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 206–246; L. F. Nedashkovskij, Zolotoordynskie goroda Nizhnego Povolzh'ja i ikh okruga (Moscow, 2010), pp. 225–234.
37 Favereau, The Horde, p. 287; Nedashkovskij, Goroda, pp. 209–210.
38 R. Shakhmatov, ‘The effects of key climate and historical events on Rus’ principalities in 14th century: a comparison of historical records and climate proxies’, paper presented at the conference ‘The Phase of a Catastrophe: The Crisis of the 14th Century in Afro-Eurasian Context’, Sapporo, 13–14 July 2023.
39 Berg, L. S., ‘Uroven’ Kaspijskogo morja za istoricheskoje vremja’, Problemy fizicheskoj geografii VI (1934), pp. 11–64Google Scholar; Khajdarov, T. F., ‘Rubikon Zolotoj Ordy’, Golden Horde Review IV.2 (2016), pp. 314–335Google Scholar; U. Schamiloglu, ‘Climate change in central Eurasia and the Golden Horde’, Golden Horde Review I (2016), pp. 15–16; but cf. P. Che and J. Lan, ‘Climate change along the Silk Road and its influence on Scythian cultural expansion and rise of the Mongol empire’, Sustainability XIII.2530 (2021), p. 9.
40 E. P. Borisenkov and V. M. Pasetskij, Ėkstremal'nye prirodnye javlenija v russkikh letopisjakh XI-XVII vv. (Leningrad, 1983), pp. 88–89.
41 In the recent edition of Ole Benedictow's book on the Black Death, it is clearly shown that the mortality rates in many of the European countries reached 60–65 per cent of the whole population (e.g. O. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 2021), p. 696 for Spain (up to 65%), p. 729 for Italy (circa 60%), p. 767 for France (circa 58%), p. 862 for England (circa 65%)). Unfortunately, comparable counts for North Africa and Western or Central Asia do not exist.
42 Barker, H., ‘Laying the corpses to rest: grain, embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–1348’, Speculum XCVI.1 (2021), pp. 97–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 K. I. Bos et al., ‘A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death’, Nature CDLXXVIII (2011), pp. 506–510.
44 Cui et al., ‘Historical variations’; Slavin, ‘From the Tian Shan to Crimea’, pp. 514–515.
45 Spyrou, M. A. et al., ‘A phylogeography of the second plague pandemic revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes’, Nature Communications X.11 (2019), pp. 1–13Google Scholar.
46 Hymes, R., ‘A hypothesis on the East Asian beginnings of the Yersinia pestis polytomy’, The Medieval Globe I (2014), pp. 285–308Google Scholar; R. Hymes, ‘Buboes in thirteenth-century China: evidence from Chinese medical writings’, The Medieval Globe VIII (2022), pp. 3–59; M. H. Green, ‘Four Black Deaths’, American Historical Review CXXV (2020), pp. 1601–1631; N. Fancy and M. H. Green, ‘Plague and the fall of Baghdad (1258)’, Medical History LXV (2021), pp. 157–177. For the Baghdad case, see also Brack, J., Biran, M., and Amitai, R., ‘Plague and the Mongol conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A re-evaluation of the sources’, Medical History, First View (2024), pp. 1–19, doi: 10.1017/mdh.2023.38Google Scholar. The thirteenth-century hypothesis of the plague was adopted by others (e.g. Favereau, The Horde, pp. 250–252; see also the more balanced treatment in Jackson, P., From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia (New Haven and London, 2023), pp. 148–161Google Scholar).
47 M. A. Spyrou et al., ‘The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia’, Nature DCVI.7915 (2022), pp. 718–724, doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3, and see also the supplementary materials on pp. 9–19; the study also examined tombstones from a smaller cemetery in nearby Burana, which contributed another four dated headstones (ibid, pp. 19–22).
48 Slavin, ‘From the Tian Shan’, p. 517; Slavin, ‘Birth of the Black Death’, pp. 300–334; cf. Green, who still opts for a thirteenth-century dating: M. H. Green, ‘Putting Asia on the Black Death map’, The Medieval Globe VIII (2022), pp. 61–89; M. H. Green, ‘A new definition of the Black Death: genetic findings and historical interpretations’, De Medio Aevo XI (2022), pp. 139–155.
49 For the Black Death in Europe, see Benedictow, Black Death; for the Middle East, see M. W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ, 1977). Historical sources on the plague in the Chaghadaid realm are mainly limited to sporadic mentions in Mamluk sources. Frustratingly, the most detailed reference, by the Mamluk historian Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī (d. 1363), which actually suggests a plausible route for the expansion of the plague, turned out to be a citation of a description of an eleventh-century plague eruption (Slavin, ‘From the Tian Shan’, pp. 520–522).
50 Ibid, pp. 556, 564–566.
51 Ibid, pp. 556, 566–570, 573.
52 Atwood, ‘Empire of the Great Khan’, pp. 166–167; see also T. Brook, Great State: China and the World (New York, 2020), pp. 63–75. The assumption that the plague stemmed from China (i.e. Khitay, khaṭā) and originated in the Mamluk sources might have derived from a confusion in the meaning of the word Khitay. Originating from the ethnonym ‘Khitan’ (qidan), this term may indeed refer to north China or the whole of China, but it also denotes the realm of the Qara Khitai (1124–1218)—a Khitan Dynasty that ruled in Central Asia with its capital in Balasaghun (today's Burana) in Kyrgyzstan, close to the Kara-Djirach cemetery. See further M. Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Muslim World (Cambridge, 2005), esp. pp. 90, 215–217.
53 Slavin, ‘From the Tian Shan’, pp. 561–563; see also Vér's article in this Special Issue.
54 See Belich, J., The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2022), pp. 41–2, 79Google Scholar, cited in P. Jackson, ‘The crisis of the Mongol world’, keynote lecture read at the conference ‘Great Chinggisid Crisis: History, Context, Aftermath’, Bonn, 11–13 May 2023, p. 9.
55 Jackson, ‘Crisis of the Mongol world’, pp. 9–10. For impressive descriptions of the Mongol ordos, see e.g. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 342–344 (the ordo of Abū Saʿīd), pp. 482ff. (the ordo of Özbeg).
56 Zayn al-Dīn b. Ḥamd Allāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī, Ẕayl-i Tārīkh-i guzīda (Teheran, 1372/1993), p. 86; Ḥāfiẓ Abrū, Zubdat al-tavārīkh, (ed.) K. Ḥ. S. Javādī (Tehran, 2001), p. 197; A. Fazlinejad and F. Ahmadi, ‘The Black Death in Iran, according to Iranian historical accounts from the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries’, Journal of Persianate Studies XI (2018), p. 65 (translating wabā’ as cholera, and providing a wrong page of Qazvīnī's Zayl).
57 Fazlinejad and Ahmadi, ‘Black Death in Iran’, pp. 65–66; Jackson, ‘Crisis of the Mongol world’.
58 Qazvīnī, Ẕayl-i Tārīkh-i guzīda, p. 86; Ḥāfiẓ Abrū, Zubdat al-tavārīkh, vol. 1, p. 449; P. Wing, The Jalayirids (Edinburgh, 2016), p. 117; Fazlinejad and Ahmadi, ‘Black Death in Iran’, pp. 66–67.
59 Slavin, P., ‘A rise and fall of a Chaghadaid community: demographic growth and crisis in “late-medieval” Semirech'ye (Zhetysu), circa 1248–1345’, JRAS XXX.2 (2022), pp. 514–544Google Scholar; Fazlinejad and Ahmadi, ‘Black Death in Iran’, pp. 66–67; Dols, Black Death, p. 32.
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63 Knoll, P. W., The Rise of the Polish Monarchy: Piast Poland in East Central Europe, 1320–1370 (Chicago, 1972), pp. 138, 140Google Scholar, cited in Jackson, ‘Crisis of the Mongol world’, p. 5.
64 M. Grinberg, ‘The Foreign Policies of Janibeg, Khan of the Golden Horde (1342–1357)’ (unpublished MA thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017), pp. 63ff.
65 Also note Slavin's important remark on the possible connection between the raids of the Novgorodian ushkujniks in this period and the spread of the plague from the Volga areas into the Rus’ principalities in 1365–1365 (P. Slavin, ‘Reply: Out of the west – and neither east, nor north, nor south’, Past and Present CCLVI (2022), p. 342). For more on the Novgorodian ushkujniks, the Rus’ pirates, see Landa's article in this Special Issue.
66 Nikonovskaja letopis’ (Polnoe Sobranie Russkikh Letopisej) (Saint-Petersburg, 1897), vol. 11, p. 21; see also T. F. Khajdarov and D. A. Dolbin, ‘Vtoraja pandemija chumy v Zolotoj Orde i eë posledstvija’, Zolotoordynskoe obozrenie II.6 (2014), p. 106.
67 U. Schamiloglu, ‘The impact of the Black Death on the Golden Horde: politics, economy, society, civilization’, Golden Horde Review V.2 (2017), p. 329; Jackson, ‘Crisis of the Mongol world’; cf. Favereau, The Horde, pp. 252, 256–257.
68 Note, however, that the activity of the trade in Bulghar can be seen in the sources until the early 1380s (Polubojarinova, M. D., ‘Torgovlja Bolgara’, in Gorod Bolgar: Kultura, iskusstvo, torgovlja, (eds.) Starostin, P. N., Polubojarinova, M. D., and Sharifullin, R. F. (Moscow, 2008), p. 36Google Scholar).
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73 Qubilai's successor, Temur Öljeitü (1265–1307; r. 1295–1307), lived to 42 years old.
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76 For the various functions and manifestations of charisma, see T. T. Allsen, ‘Imperial ideology’, in Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, (eds.) Biran and Kim, pp. 451–455.
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78 Biran, ‘Mongol imperial space’, p. 240.
79 R. Amitai, ‘The resolution of the Mongol-Mamluk war’, in Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, (eds.) R. Amitai and M. Biran (Leiden, 2005), pp. 359–390.
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82 E.g. Biran, ‘Mongol Central Asia’, p. 359.
83 Biran, ‘Mongol imperial space’, pp. 240–248; Biran, M., ‘Religions in the Mongol empire revisited: exchanges, conversion, consequences’, in Empires and Gods—the Role of Religions in Imperial History, (eds.) Rupke, J., Biran, M., and Pines, Y. (Berlin and Boston, 2024), pp. 231–262Google Scholar.
84 Landa, I., ‘The Islamization of the Mongols’, in The Mongol World, (eds.) May, T. and Hope, M. (London and New York, 2022), pp. 644–646Google Scholar, 649–650.
85 Hope, M., Power, Politics, and Tradition in the Mongol Empire and the Īlkhānate of Iran (Oxford, 2016), p. 118Google Scholar and passim; T. May, The Mongol Empire (Edinburgh, 2018), esp. pp. 338–347; see also Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane, pp. 113–114.
86 This hierarchical order is obvious in Yuan sources; it is less explicit in Ilkhanid chronicles. For the sons-in-law, see Landa, I., Marriage and Power in Mongol Eurasia: A History of the Chinggisid Sons-in-Law (Wiesbaden, 2023)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 64–66.
87 For a detailed discussion on the Yuan güregens, see ibid, pp. 67–129; for the Ilkhanid case study, see ibid, pp. 130–199; for Landa's criticism of Hope's and May's approach, see ibid, pp. 197–199.
88 Ibid, pp. 254–261.
89 Ibid, pp. 276, 279–281 for the Jochids; for the Chaghadaids, see Biran, ‘Mongol Central Asia’, pp. 359–360; see further Landa, Marriage and Power, pp. 262–273.
90 Atwood, ‘Empire of the Great Khan’, p. 159.
91 On the Northern Yuan, see C. Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (New York, 2004), pp. 407–411; V. Veit, ‘The Eastern Steppe: Mongol regimes after the Yuan (1368–1636)’, in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, (eds.) N. Di Cosmo, A. J. Frank, and P. B. Golden (Cambridge 2009), pp. 157–181; Ch. Dalay, Mongolija v XIII-XIV vv. (Moscow, 1983), pp. 132–139.
92 E.g. Wakeman, F., ‘Rebellion and revolution: the study of popular movements in Chinese history’, The Journal of Asian Studies XXXVI.2 (1977), pp. 201–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
93 J. M. Smith, The History of the Sarbadār Dynasty 1336–1381 A.D. and Its Sources (The Hague and Paris, 1970), pp. 111–112.
94 Manz, Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, p. 51.
95 On the late Yuan rebellions, see e.g. Mote, F. W., Imperial China 900–1800 (Cambridge MA and London, 1998), pp. 517–534Google Scholar; Robinson, D. M., Empire's Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols (Cambridge, MA and London, 2009), esp. pp. 130–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Popular rebellions as a pattern of dynastic change were extremely rare in the premodern Muslim world, whereas military mutinies or external invasions were the norm.
96 Note e.g. the powerful Qonggirad in-law family under the Yuan in Landa, I., ‘“Loyal and martial” until the end: the Qonggirad princes of Lu 鲁 in Yuan political architecture’, Monumenta Serica LXVIII.1 (2020), pp. 138–167Google Scholar, esp. pp. 147–150.
97 Landa, Marriage and Power, pp. 282–287; for the Korean king and his role in the Yuan army during the Crisis, see e.g. Robinson, Empire's Twilight, pp. 57–58; Robinson, D. M., Korea and the Fall of the Mongols (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 111–175Google Scholar.
98 Landa, Marriage and Power, pp. 294–295.
99 On Esen, see e.g. Atwood, Encyclopedia, pp. 170–171.
100 Campbell, Great Transition, esp. pp. 395–401.
101 For Temür and his debt to the Chinggisids, see e.g. Manz, Rise and Rule of Tamerlane; Manz, B. F., ‘The empire of Tamerlane as an adaptation of the Mongol empire: an answer to David Morgan, “The empire of Tamerlane: an unsuccessful re-run of the Mongol state?”’, JRAS XXVI.1–2 (2016), pp. 281–291Google Scholar; Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane, esp. pp. 388–414.
102 This is the title of Robinson's book dedicated to Ming's rise (Robinson, D. M., In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire (Cambridge, 2019)Google Scholar).
103 For the Chinggisid legacy, see e.g. Biran, M. and Kim, H., ‘Epilogue’, in Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, (eds.) Biran and Kim, pp. 866–873Google Scholar.