Introduction

                                                                    Introduction


The goals and themes of this work have undergone substantial change in the
course of the basic research. As originally conceived, this monograph was to
explore the political and diplomatic relationship between the Mongolian
courts of China, the Yuan, and Iran, the Il-qans/Il-khans. I was particularly
interested in their joint efforts to stave off the military challenge of their rivals
and cousins in central Asia, the lines of Chaghadai and Ögödei, and the
western steppe, the line of Jochi, in the last half of the thirteenth century and
the early decades of the fourteenth century. To sustain one another against
their mutual enemies, the regimes in China and Iran shared economic
resources, troops, and war matériel. As time passed, I became increasingly
aware that this exchange was far more wide-ranging and diverse, embracing as
it did an extensive traffic in specialist personnel, scholarly works, material
culture, and technology. My interest in these issues grew and I soon came to
the conclusion that these cultural exchanges were perhaps the most consequential
facet of their relationship.
This, however, was only the first phase of the work’s transformation. Having
settled on the issue of cultural exchange as the central theme, I naively
assumed that I would proceed by identifying specific exchanges and then
assess their “influence”: for example, the impact of Chinese physicians in Iran
on Islamic medicine. This, I quickly discovered, posed formidable problems of
method, interpretation, and evidence. The most obvious difficulty is that any
attempt to establish such influence requires a detailed knowledge of Chinese
and Islamic medicine before, during, and after the Mongolian conquests. The
same stricture, of course, applies to all other areas of contact, such as agronomy,
astronomy, etc. And, beyond the intimidating range of topics, I came to
realize that I simply lacked the formal training and experience to make meaningful
evaluations of these complex issues, most of which are highly technical.
This realization led to one further modification of the goals and themes of
the work: in this monograph I will speak primarily to the question of the
nature and conditions of the transmission of cultural wares between China
and Iran, not the vexed issues of receptivity or rejection of new elements on
the part of subject peoples. In other words, I am mainly concerned with how
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