NOMADIC EMPIRES
1. Why was trade so significant to the Mongols?
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2. Why did Genghis Khan feel the need to fragment the Mongol tribes into new social and military groupings?
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3. How do later Mongol reflections on the yasa bring out the uneasy relationship they had with the memory of Genghis Khan.
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4. ‘If history relies upon written records produced by city-based literati, nomadic societies will always receive a hostile representation.’ Would you agree with this statement? Does it explain the reason why Persian chronicles produced such inflated figures of casualties resulting from Mongol campaigns?
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5. Keeping the nomadic element of the Mongol and Bedouin
societies in mind, how, in your opinion, did their respective
historical experiences differ? What explanations would you
suggest account for these differences?
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6. How does the following account enlarge upon the character of the Pax Mongolica created by the Mongols by the middle of the thirteenth century?
The Franciscan monk, William of Rubruck, was sent by Louis IX of
France on an embassy to the great Khan Mongke’s court. He reached
Karakorum, the capital of Mongke, in 1254 and came upon a woman
from Lorraine (in France) called Paquette, who had been brought
from Hungary and was in the service of one of the prince’s wives who
was a Nestorian Christian. At the court he came across a Parisian
goldsmith named Guillaume Boucher, ‘whose brother dwelt on the
Grand Pont in Paris’. This man was first employed by the Queen
Sorghaqtani and then by Mongke’s younger brother. Rubruck found
that at the great court festivals the Nestorian priests were admitted
first, with their regalia, to bless the Grand Khan’s cup, and were
followed by the Muslim clergy and Buddhist and Taoist monks…
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