peradaban yunani

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This assessment, though certainly effusive, was very probably the opinion held
by most contemporaries, including Ghazan, the sitting monarch, who prided
himself on his extensive knowledge of tribal history and genealogy. He, too,
praised Bolad, who instructed his sovereign on the finer points of early
Mongolian history.11
This reliance on native sources and informants meant, of course, that the
Collected Chronicles are best seen as a composite work, the by-product of a
large and diverse research team coordinated by Rashıd al-Dın. Moreover,
since he was a very busy minister of state, and because he did not command
all the foreign languages involved, the basic compilation of raw data was frequently
delegated to others. Bolad, naturally, made the preliminary reconnaissance
in the Mongolian sources and then provided Rashıd with Persian
renderings or summaries. And if we are to believe a later tradition, preserved
in Abu’l Ghazı, a seventeenth-century historian, Bolad’s own busy schedule
was such that he, too, needed assistants: “five or six persons who knew the Old
Mongolian language” to help run down data for the project.12
Thus, this vast historiographical enterprise was undertaken and executed by
Rashıd al-Dın with the aid of a hierarchy of research assistants and committees
who provided access to the literary traditions of the principal cultures and
civilizations of Eurasia, from China to Latin Europe. This method of compilation
also explains why in the years after Rashıd al-Dın’s death, one former
committee member, Qashanı, advanced a very unconvincing claim that he was
the real author of the Collected Chronicles and that the deceased minister
falsely took credit and reaped the financial rewards for another’s work.13
According to Rashıd al-Dın’s testimony, it was Ghazan who initiated and
patronized this remarkable enterprise; fearful that the Mongols in Iran were
forgetting their glorious past, he commissioned Rashıd to provide a detailed
summary of the rise and expansion of the Mongolian Empire. This, the core
of the Collected Chronicles, is organized into four long sections: the first treats
the Mongolian and Turkic tribes; the second, the life and times of Chinggis
Qan; the third, his successors from Ögödei to Temür Qaghan; and the last, the
Hülegüids in Iran. These volumes, particularly the first three, together with the
separately produced History of China, contain a vast amount of data on East
Asia and constitute a quantum leap in Muslim knowledge of the region. They
also reveal very clearly the character and extent of Rashıd al-Dın’s intellectual
partnership with, and indebtedness to, Bolad.
In many ways the section on the tribes is the most remarkable in the
Collected Chronicles. It covers all of the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia from
the Oyirad in southern Siberia to the Qipchaqs in the western steppe. For most
Historiography 85
11 Rashıd/Jahn II, pp. 142 and 172.
12 Aboul Ghazı Behadour Khan, Histoire des Mongols et des Tatares, trans. by Petr I.
Desmaisons, repr. (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1970), p. 35. There is no contemporary confirmation
of Bolad’s research assistants, but Abu’l Ghazı’s data are quite plausible.
13 Qashanı/Hambly, pp. 54 and 240. For further comments see David O. Morgan, “Rashıd al-Dın
and Ghazan Khan,” in Aigle, Iran, pp. 182–84.