B03: The End of an Era, Seen Through Many Eyes: Eurasian Dimensions of the Great Chinggisid Crisis

Organizer(s)

• 

  Johannes Lotze

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Chair(s)

• QY

  Qiao Yang

  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Paper Presenter(s)

• QY

  Qiao Yang

  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany
• IL

  Ishayahu Landa

  University of Bonn, Germany
• XH

  Xiaobai Hu

  Nanjing University, China
• 

  Johannes Lotze

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Discussant(s)

• ES

  Eiren Shea

  Grinnell College, United States

Session Abstract: The mid-fourteenth century shook Chinggisid rule to the core. This ‘Great Chinggisid Crisis’ (1330s to 1370s) may be seen as a major transition phase in premodern Eurasian history, entailing as it did the end of two Chinggisid khanates (Ilkhanate and Yuan dynasty), while the remaining ones (the Jochid and Chaghadaid domains) went through a series of transformations. The impact of new political actors as well as global pandemics and environmental changes (Black Death and Little Ice Age) coincided with or contributed to the Crisis. New rulers emerged from the ashes, basing their power on legitimacy concepts that would sometimes match Chinggisid principles and sometimes challenge them. These developments were not purely political, but resonated in the social, religious and cultural spheres, influenced all Eurasian mid-fourteenth century societies, and paved the ground for the formative periods of what we are used to call the ‘Early Modern’. The panel looks at this truly transcontinental Eurasian Crisis not through the lens of any ‘centre’ (which would be hard to pin down anyway) but through the eyes of four specific groups of people that can be defined by common expertise: diviners (Yang), military men (Landa), herders (Hu), and language specialists (Lotze).

Presentations:

• Diviners in Dynastic Transitions
  

  Paper Presenter: Qiao Yang – Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• When the Chinggisids Were (Almost) No More: The Yuan and the Ilkhanid Military during the Fourteenth-Century Crisis
  

  Paper Presenter: Ishayahu Landa – University of Bonn
• Taming the Horses in a Non-Mongol Way: Horse Policies and Social Relations at China's Northwest Frontier in the Fourteenth Century
  

  Paper Presenter: Xiaobai Hu – Nanjing University
• Chinggisid Reverberations: Language Contact and Conflict in the Yuan-Ming Transition
  

  Paper Presenter: Johannes S. Lotze – Hebrew University of Jerusalem