Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgements VII List of Figures, Tables and Maps IX List of Contributors x

Introduction: State Formation in the Fifteenth Century and the Western Eurasian Canvas: Problems and Opportunities 1 Jo Van Steenbergen

Maps 21

PART 1 Whither the Fifteenth Century?

1 From Temiir to Selim: Trajectories of Turko-Mongol State Formation in Islamic West-Asia's Long Fifteenth Century 27 Jo Van Steenbergen

2 Studying Rulers and States across Fifteenth-Century Western Eurasia 88 Jan Dumolyn and Jo Van Steenbergen

PART 2 From Cairo to Constantinople: The Construction of West-Asian Centers of Power

3 The Road to the Citadel as a Chain of Opportunity: Mamluks’ Careers between Contingency and Institutionalization 159 Kristof D'hulster

4 The Syro-Egyptian Sultanate in Transformation, 1496-1498: Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qaytbay and the Reformation of mamlük Institutions and Symbols of State Power 201

Albrecht Fuess

VI CONTENTS

5 Tales of Viziers and Wine: Interpreting Early Ottoman Narratives of State Centralization 224 Dimitri Kastritsis

PART 3 From Khwaf to Alexandria: The Accommodation of West-Asian Peripheries of Power

6 Iranian Elites under the Timurids 257 Beatrice F. Manz

7 The Judges of Mecca and Mamluk Hegemony 283 John L. Meloy

8 The Syrian Commercial Elite and Mamluk State-Building in the Fifteenth Century 306 Patrick Wing

9 Settling Accounts with the Sultan: Cortesia, Zemechia and Venetian Fiscality in Fifteenth-Century Alexandria 319 Georg Christ

Index 353

Acknowledgements

This volume on state formation in fifteenth-century West-Asian history was first conceptualized in 2014, and it has been in the making much longer than originally anticipated. Many people and institutions therefore deserve some words of gratitude, not just for their cooperation along this volume’s winding trajectory, but also for their patience in seeing it come to publication. These include first and foremost the eight contributors, whose work, endurance and tolerance of my multiple attempts to maximize the volume’s coherence deserve not just to be mentioned, but also commended and repaid with deep gratitude. I am also grateful to various friends and colleagues who read and commented on one or more opening chapters and showed remarkably constructive kindness for these chapters’ ambitious scopes in both substance and interpretation. Their names are mentioned in the individual chapters below wherever and whenever relevant. I also wish to express my appreciation for the constructive feedback we received from the two anonymous readers who reviewed the volume’s manuscript for Brill. The responsibility for any remaining shortcomings is ours, of course.

This volume and its contributions originate from a collaborative research project on fifteenth-century state formation in the so-called Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo. They have emerged in particular from this project’s concluding international conference, which promoted a transcultural and comparative approach to the question of fifteenth-century state formation (“Whither the Early Modern State? Fifteenth-Century State Formation across Eurasia. Connections, Divergences and Comparisons", Ghent, 10—12 September 2014). I am grateful to my co-organizers, Malika Dekkiche and Kristof D'hulster, and to the conference’s many invited participants for laying the very fertile and inspiring groundwork for the current volume. This conference and the collaborative research project that it concluded had been made possible by a generous grant from the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant project MMs: ‘The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate—Political Traditions and State Formation in 15th century Egypt and Syria’, Ghent University, 2009—2014). This volume has furthermore been finalized in the period 2017-39 within the context of another collaborative research project that was also generously funded by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant ‘The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate 11: Historiography, Political Order and State Formation in Fifteenth-Century Egypt and Syria, Ghent University, 2017-2021). I am extremely grateful to the ERC for making these projects and by consequence also this volume possible, and also for financially supporting its publication in

VIII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Open Access. At my home institution Ghent University, I wish to thank my colleagues, especially those in the history department and in the interdisciplinary Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, for enabling an open collegial working environment that has stimulated my critical engagements with various historiographies of state formation that informed the making of this volume. I also wish to thank this volume's publishers, Brill, and to express my continuing appreciation for the professionalism and personal touch of its staff. I am furthermore very proud and grateful that the board of the series Rulers and Elites accepted to welcome this volume in its ranks. I thank the series' editorJeroen Duindam in particular for offering this opportunity, so that this volume on state formation in fifteenth-century West-Asian history may pursue its comparative purposes by reaching not just the audiences that are traditionally associated with Islamic history publications, but also many others. I hope they may all find here one possible trajectory to familiarize themselves more with a central Eurasian political landscape that is otherwise all too easily marginalized in standard narratives of Eurasia's late medieval endings and early modern beginnings.

Jo Van Steenbergen Antwerp, 30 October 2019

Figures, Tables and Maps

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Figures

Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qaytbay (1496-1498) (Von Harff, Die Pilgerfahrt des Ritters Arnold von Harff, p. 90) 204

Sultan Qansüh al-Ghawrī (r- 1501-1516) wearing the Takhfifa Kabira (Paul Giovio, Vitae Illustrium virorum: tomis duobus comprehensae, & propriis imaginibus illustratae [Basel 1578], p. 221) 214

Mamlük soldiers wearing the red kallawta cap with turban, 1470 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Arabe 282, Ibn Akhi Khuzam, Kitab al-makhzün jami‘ al-funūn, fol. 28.) 216

Tables

Cairo sultans and their atābaks 190

Chief Judges of Mecca from the mid-seventh AH /thirteenth century to the beginning of the ninth AH/fifteenth century with Hijri years of service 288 The Cairo Sultanate's system of unitary government and inclusion of

Venice 340

Charts

Chief judges of Mecca: Kinship 289

Chief judges of Mecca: Student-Teacher relationships and service as deputy judge 289

The first chief judges of Mecca for the four Sunni schools of law 296

Maps

Main regions of Islamic West-Asia 21

Early fifteenth-century political formations in Islamic West-Asia 22 Mid-fifteenth-century political formations in Islamic West-Asia 23

Late fifteenth-century political formations in Islamic West-Asia 24

Contributors

Georg Christ

is Senior Lecturer and teaches Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Before he worked as a Research Group Leader at Universitat Heidelberg, Germany (2008-2012) and for the UN as a military observer and staff officer (2006—2008). His research focuses on the late medieval eastern Mediterranean and Veneto-Mamluk relations. He currently prepares a monograph on Venetian and Mamluk naval and commercial policies in the 14th century.

Kristof D'hulster

is a postdoctoral associate of the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University (Belgium); he was postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation— Flanders (FWO) (2016-19), of the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University (2015-16) and on the ERC project "The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate” at Ghent University (2010—2014). He has a Ph.D. in Central-Asian Turkic linguistics. Working on processes of exchange and interaction within the Medieval Islamic world, he is currently engaged in Mamluk studies first and foremost, with a particular focus on the ethnic and linguistic dimensions to Mamluk identity. His articles have appeared in several international journals, including the Journal of Arabic Literature, the Annales Islamologiques, and History Compass. He has a forthcoming monograph (2020), Browsing through the Sultans Bookshelves. Towards a Reconstruction of the Library of the Mamluk Sultan Qanisawh al-Ghawri (r. 1501-1516).

Jan Dumolyn is Senior Lecturer in medieval history in the Department of History and the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent University. He has published widely on the social, political and cultural history of medieval Flanders and the Burgundian Netherlands, including, together with Andrew Brown and Peter Burke, Medieval Bruges, c. 850-c. 1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Albrecht Fuess is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-University Marburg. He specializes in the history of the Middle East (13th-16th centuries) and the contemporary Muslim presence in Europe. Among his recent publications is, together with Stefan Rohdewald and

CONTRIBUTORS XI

Dimitri J. Kastritsis is Lecturer in Ottoman History at the University of St Andrews. His interests focus on the political, social and intellectual culture of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean world. He is especially interested in historical texts and other narratives of the past. His publications include The Sons of Bayezid (Leiden: Brill, 2007) and An Early Ottoman History: The Oxford Anonymous Chronicle (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).

Beatrice Forbes Manz

is Professor of History at Tufts University. She has published two books, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), along with numerous articles on ideology, historiography and political practice in the Mongol and Timurid periods. She is currently finishing a survey history of nomads in the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present for the Cambridge series, "Themes in Islamic History". The next research project planned is a study of the Mongol conquest of Iran.

John L. Meloy

is Professor of History in the Department of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut. His publications include: Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: Center for Middle Eastern Studies/Middle East Documentation Center), re-issued in 2015 in a revised paperback edition; "Aggression in the Best of Lands’: Mecca in Egyptian-Indian Diplomacy in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century" in Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies, ed. F. Bauden and M. Dekkiche (Leiden: Brill, 2019); and “Mecca Entangled’, in The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History, ed. R. Amitai and S. Conermann (Bonn: Bonn University Press/V&R Unipress, 2019).

Jo Van Steenbergen is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures and the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent University. His publications include Order Out of Chaos. Patronage, Conflict, and Mamluk Socio-Political Culture. 741-784/1341-1382 (Brill, 2006); Caliphate and Kingship in a Fifteenth-Century Literary History of Muslim Leadership and

XII CONTRIBUTORS

Pilgrimage (Brill, 2016); A History of the Islamic World, 600-1800. Empire, Dynastic Formations, and Heterogeneities in Pre-Modern Islamic West-Asia (Routledge, 2020); and chapters and articles on late medieval Syro-Egyptian social and cultural history. He is supervisor and principal investigator of several research projects and digital initiatives related to the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria.

Patrick Wing

is Associate Professor of History at the University of Redlands. His research considers questions of state formation, political ideology and economic change across the regions dominated by the Mongols and the Sultanate of Cairo in the late medieval period. His book, The Jalayirids: Dynastic State Formation in the Mongol Middle East, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016. From 2010 to 2012 Wing was a post-doctoral researcher on the ERC project “The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate’, directed by Jo Van Steenbergen at Ghent University.

Introduction

State Formation in the Fifteenth Century and the Western Eurasian Canvas: Problems and Opportunities

Jo Van Steenbergen

1 Whither Eurasian State Formation? Claims, Pitfalls and Opportunities*

The concept, practice, institution and appearance of ‘the state’ have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship. Over the past century debates over states and statist systems, and around issues of their emergence and transformation throughout human history, have been substantially molded by the visions of towering figures such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and many others. At the same time, they have taken on many different guises along a wide variety of intellectual trajectories. Indeed, research on states and their formation and transformation, already a vast field, continues to expand rapidly. Approaches and concepts have been legion, bringing in more specific if rarely un-problematic analytical or descriptive forms and types, such as the ‘feudal state’, the ‘patrimonial state’, the ‘dynastic state’, the ‘bureaucratic state’ or the ‘(early) modern state’. The scholarly bibliography on these forms and types of state in various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities is obviously colossal. Any attempt to reconstruct these debates in the context of the introduction to this volume on state formation in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asian history therefore inevitably risks remaining at the most superficial level. Nevertheless, at this point we should probably emphasize two points related to these debates. These issues, outlined in the next paragraphs, offer grounds not just for the relevance of thinking carefully about state formation in any fifteenth-century

* This introduction has been finalized within the context of the project The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate 11: Historiography, Political Order and State Formation in Fifteenth- Century Egypt and Syria’ (UGent, 2017-21); this project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Consolidator Grant agreement No 681510). Thanks are due to my colleagues Jan Dumolyn and Frederik Buylaert for contributing to earlier versions of this introduction with most valuable comments and suggestions.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

research context. As this volume will also argue, these two points also combine to make a strong case for the importance of pursuing more ‘entangled’ and connected historical as well as historiographical trajectories to conduct such inquiries.

First of all, for a variety of reasons—some obvious and some less so—the adoption and elaboration of different visions, concepts and types of states and state formations have arguably been largely dominated by Eurocentrist approaches. Indeed, certainly in the Enlightenment and Hegelian traditions which are at the origin of all modern debates on the ‘state’, Eurocentrism is not just a small embarrassing problem that new generations of scholars have to correct. Since the development of the humanities and social sciences from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, Eurocentrist categories of analysis and Eurocentrist empirical research programs have been central to all theories on the origins of the ‘state-—and indeed of ‘modernity’ itself. The ‘state’ is doubtless one of the key conceptual pillars of modernity, along with ‘rationality, ‘capitalism’, ‘freedom, ‘division of labor’ and other such master signifiers. Indeed, descriptions of the past, whether the European idea of the ‘past as a foreign country’ or the Orientalist imaginary of the ‘Other's’ history or lack thereof, have always been a way of talking about the present or about unfulfilled futures. In this respect the ‘state’ and its relationship to ‘society’ have always represented a central stake in the debate.

This presentist or even teleological and Western bias in the classical sociology of modernity has now almost universally been recognized. In fact, in recent decades there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the development of more specific tools and insights for the study of premodern and non-European polities and for gaining a better understanding of premodern and non-European ‘statist’ practices, institutions and discourses of power, distinction, integration, redistribution and order. Nevertheless—and this is the second important point for comparative purposes—, understandings of states and state systems tend to move at greatly differing speeds in different fields of historical research, and these fields themselves often employ extremely divergent epistemological and heuristic parameters. As such, our understandings of states and state systems generally continue to lack proper and nuanced awareness of recent research achievements and advances in cognate contexts, whether European or non-European. The concept of ‘the state’ is widely used in more or less theoretically informed ways across history. However, people working in different regional and chronological fields of specialization hardly ever understand the notion in similar ways, and the complex dynamics of this great divergence are often even less appreciated across such different research traditions. Dominant paradigms within these traditions may be influenced by various diverging, or even incompatible, forms of social theory.

This can complicate valid comparative research, especially when apparently similar categories of analysis—including the very notion of the ‘state’ itself mean different things in different research traditions. This is particularly true when these different meanings are not explained explicitly, are only used in extremely fuzzy ways, or retain an imported, even exogenous or anachronistic, flavor to them. This volume wishes to help build bridges between these multivalent conceptions of state formation, making links between different conceptions of how Eurasian practices, institutions and discourses of legitimate violence, resource redistribution, social differentiation, political integration and order have changed over time and across space. We work on the basis of the simple proposition that, despite the available, perhaps even conflicting, macronarratives, this intellectual process of more ‘entangled’ trans-regional and trans-dynastic writing about history benefits most from starting bottom-up and considering relationships between the specific practices and interpretations of the different socio-cultural formations of the Eurasian zone. Furthermore, we work on the basis of the claim that the particularities and ‘entanglements’ of non-European rulers and elites require much more empirical and interpretive research to shift the balance away from Eurocentrist (or othercentrist) analytical perspectives, and toward more decentered considerations of diverse Eurasian trajectories of state formation. Here we actually encounter another, arguably even more fundamental, caveat that hampers the building of these interpretive bridges in meaningful, stable ways. Within the entire field of late medieval Eurasian political history there are huge differences in how many research traditions have dealt with the rich and often abundant variety of extant source material. Most relevant to consider for this volume and its focus on Western Eurasia is the disparity between the topics that have been studied (and restudied) on the basis of the relatively abundant sources for late medieval and early modern European history and the substantially more modest amount of cases that so far have been the object of any historical analysis for Islamic West-Asian history.! This disparity means that macro-analytical

1 Toillustrate this point, there still exist no simple narrative biographies for many, if not most, of the local and regional rulers and sultans of late medieval and early modern West-Asia. Moreover, most existing biographical studies of the last decades continue to be regarded as having a kind of pioneering and referential status, due to the absence of any other serious studies. Fifteenth-century cases in point are Babinger’s study of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed 11, published in 1959, Darrag’s study of the Egyptian sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay, published in 1961, Woods’ monograph on the Aqquyunlu Turkmen polity, first published in 1976 (and republished in an expanded edition in 1999), Petry’s two monographs on the reigns of the Egyptian sultans Qaytbay and Qansawh, published in 1993 and 1994, and Manz’ biography of the approaches in early modern European history have far more solid empirical grounds than those of Islamic West-Asian history. In the past there have been serious attempts to transcend the specificity and peculiarity of European trajectories and develop more universal models. These certainly include Weber’s 'Herrschaftslegitimitāt' and related ideal types, Marx’s ‘Mode of Production’ and the superstructure or later Marxist reformulations and, more recently, Mann’s ‘power networks’ or Bourdieu's ‘capital étatique’. However, these conceptualizations are all marked not just by a desire to integrate non-European experiences in their analyses, but they are also impeded by the fact that any understanding of the latter is derived from a rather limited number of studies.” Thus, the Eurocentrism mentioned above may also be seen as a function, not of some intentional form of orientalism, but of this uneven empirical situation.

2 Whither the Fifteenth Century: Islamic West-Asia’s Trajectories of State Formation in Context

This volume aims to promote and enable more balanced and more connected interpretations in current understandings of premodern rulers and elites of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia.? This vast space, stretching between the worlds of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and between those of the Hindukush and the Sahara (see map 1), is considered here as representing a central and interrelated Eurasian political landscape. Furthermore, this West-Asian central-Asian ruler Temür, published in 1999 (Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer; Darrag, L'Égypte sous le régne de Barsbay; Woods, The Aqquyunlu; Petry, Twilight of Majesty; Petry, Protectors or Praetorians; Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane).

2 A good example of this point is Bourdieu's “From the King’s House to the Reason of State” (originally published in French in 1997)—aiming “to pinpoint the logic of the historical process which governed the crystallization of this historical reality that is the state’, and “to construct a model of this process". In this work, for non-European history, Bourdieu limited himself to referring to Muzaffar Alam's The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1708-1748 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), to Robert Mantran's L'Histoire de l'empire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), and to Pierre-Etienne Will's "Bureaucratie officielle et bureaucratie réelle. Sur quelques dilemmes de l'administration impériale à l'époque des Qing”, Etudes chinoises 8/1 (1989): 69-141, which is extremely limited in comparison to the list of more than thirty books and articles on late medieval and early modern European history.

3 For the historiographical background, challenges and relationships of comparative, connected and ‘entangled’ history, see Duindam, “Rulers and Elites in Global History: Introductory Observations", pp. 7-18; Conermann, “The Mamluk Empire’, pp. 22-25 ("Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the study of spaces of interaction"); Werner & Zimmermann, "Beyond Comparison".

landscape, itself the object of different research traditions, is considered as in need of far more detailed and ‘entangled’ approaches, especially for the fifteenth century. This introduction therefore does not only wish to make a case for the relevance and importance of our choice to focus on ‘the state’ and on Islamic West-Asia. In addition, we also wish to account here for this volume’s claim that Islamic West-Asian state formation in the fifteenth century represents a coherent subject of study.

In recent decades, interest in the fifteenth century has been gaining momentum in at least some generalizing and globalizing approaches to history writing. A case in point is the impressive volume ‘l’Histoire du monde au xv* siècle’, first published in 2009 and directed by Patrick Boucheron, professor of the “Histories of Power in Western Europe, 13th-16th centuries” (Histoire des pouvoirs en Europe occidentale, x111*—xv1* siècle) at the Collège de France. Boucheron and his team framed the fifteenth century as moving from a Eurasian to a global scale of integration, “from Tamerlane to Magellan" and identified the period not just as the “age of the world's opening up and accomplishment’, but also as “an aggregation of a rich variety of experiments and potentialities"^ Historiographical traditions continue to develop for at least some of these experiments and potentialities albeit in diverse ways. In the Western Eurasian context, this high appreciation of the intrinsic value of studying the fifteenth century is illustrated by the vitality of late medieval and early modern European history writing as well as the relatively intensely studied field of Syro-Egyptian 'Mamluk' history? A similar momentum is arguably picking up in other fields of Western Eurasian history, such as those defined by early Ottoman, Timurid and other fifteenth-century dynasties.®

Despite this momentum within particular research traditions, however, most textbooks and general works on West-Asian, Eurasian and world history have not yet followed suit. Even more recent comparative works of (political) history that try to pursue more globalizing diachronic approaches seem to face

4 Boucheron, “Introduction. Les boucles du monde: contours du xv* siècle”, p. 23 (“Le xv* siècle, āge d'ouverture et d'accomplissement du monde? Sans doute, mais qui ménage également une somme profuse d'expériences et de devenirs possible"; “De Tamerlan à Magellan? Contours du xv* siécle").

5 Formore or less comprehensive overviews of these fields of political history, see Watts, The Making of Polities; Van Steenbergen, Wing, and D'hulster, "The Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate?”.

6 See recent publications such as Binbas, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran; Kastritsis, An Early Ottoman History; Asutay-Effenberger and Rehm, Sultan Mehmet 11; and also, for ‘European’ history beyond traditional notions of the Latin Christian West: Nowakowska, Remembering the Jagiellonians.

a lack of good data, or of easy ways into those data and their interpretations. Too often this “age of the world’s opening up and accomplishment” continues to be narrowed down to one or more specific (and specifically remembered) events such as the “fall” of Constantinople in 1453, the end of the “Hundred Years’ War", the “discovery” of a New World in 1492, or the “re-conquest” of Granada. These events tend to be seen as marking some well-defined moment of new, early modern beginnings, as though starting from a clean slate. In general, such works of history, along with the widely shared historical imaginations that they represent, continue to situate themselves comfortably in the stretched world-historical paradigm of a fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol Eurasian order, and of post-Mongol transitions to the (apparently) more stable and therefore more interesting appearances of early modern states and empires.’ They tend to reduce fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia either to a space in which only the Ottoman imperial formation, with its expanding European presence, really mattered, or to a preparatory stage for the rise of the Islamic world's so-called ‘Gunpowder Empires’ more in general.® There thus remains a mismatch between these general and generalizing imaginations and the diverse historiographical traditions that have developed around particular fifteenth-century “experiments and potentialities”. In fact, these traditions are increasingly exposing the notion of Asia’s early modern ‘Gunpowder Empires’ as a misnomer, which may offer a useful perspective to understand the Ottoman case, but not those of its early modern peers.? Surely it is time to raise awareness of the many similar pars-pro-toto assumptions that continue to reduce appreciations of Islamic West-Asia's fifteenth-century history to equally unhelpful generalizations.

As Boucheron's summarizing phrase "from Tamerlane to Magellan" implies, in many ways a central figure in these "experiments and potentialities" was the Central-Asian Turko-Mongol ruler Temür, or Tamerlane in European parlance.!° Temür passed away after a brief illness in the Central-Asian town of

7 See Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, and the organization along this paradigm of Darwin, After Tamerlane. See for instance also Egger's discussion of fifteenth-century Syro- Egyptian political history, reduced to the simple phrase that “[t]he Circassians dominated Egypt for the next 135 years, until their defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1517”. (Egger, A History of the Muslim World to 1750, p. 296).

8 See Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History; Reinhard, Empires and Encounters. This point is also made in Binbas, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, pp. 290—291.

9 Reinhard, Empires and Encounters, pp. 28—29.

10 Seealso Darwin, After Tamerlane; and Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories" pp. 736—740, where he identifies "the reformulation of Eurasian polities in the context of the great

Otrar in February 1405, on his way to attack and conquer Ming China. Temür died in somewhat anticlimactic circumstances, bedridden rather than on horseback, as might have befitted a long life of local, regional and trans-regional Eurasian empowerment. Temür had a remarkable career indeed, characterized by conquest, plunder and fearsome havoc, but also by accommodation, efflorescence and successful state formation. His accomplishments left a defining mark on the diverse social, cultural, economic and political landscapes of Central-, South- and West-Asia and of Eastern Europe, like that of few individuals either before or after. Throughout these regions, from Samarkand in Transoxiana to Herat in Khurasan, from Delhi in northern India to Cairo in Egypt, and from Muscovy in the North to Hormuz in the South, thanks to Temür's politics of power and conquest, balances of power were recalibrated, social groups and communities were reconfigured, connections were reforged, and elites were redefined.” Many new contingencies, setbacks and opportunities arose from this remarkable, even revolutionary moment of intense Eurasian connectivity at the turn of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. In complex ways many of these changes fed directly or indirectly into the multiple conflicting, overlapping and complementing power relations that, about a century later, crystallized into the early-modern Eurasian imperial formations of Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Uzbeks. How that happened is the story of Turko-Mongol rulers and elites, of Muslim political communities, and of various interrelated trajectories of post-Temür state formation in fifteenth-century Western Eurasia.

enterprise of Amir Timur Gurgan (d. 1405) [...] as the convenient, obviously symbolic, point of departure" He offers here a highly nuanced but yet again typical imagination of the fifteenth century as a mere beginning of (or transition to) the early modern "age of geographical redefinition’, of “a heightening of the long-term structural conflict that resulted in relations between settled agricultural societies on the one hand, and nomadic groups [...] on the other’, of “changes in political theology’, and of “new or intensified forms of hierarchy, domination and separation’.

11 See Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. This Timurid factor, and its different Turko- Mongol legacies, rebooted leadership formations from Cairo to Samarkand and from Edire to Herat, but not in the Maghreb, al-Andalus or Yemen. This is an important reason for not explicitly including these and other complex and fundamentally different Islamic political landscapes within discussions in this volume. The Eurasian steppes between the Black Sea and the Aral sea, dominated since the thirteenth century by the Muslim leaders of the Mongol Golden Horde, represent another very different landscape that is not included here, not least because “the Golden Horde was not able to recover from Timur's onslaught [...,] [b]y the fifteenth century, only the steppe remained, and even it was threatened from the east by a cluster of Mongol-Turkic clans from Siberia [...] [and t]he breakup of the Golden Horde coincided with the rise of Muscovy”. (Egger, A History of the Muslim World to 1750, pp. 384—385).

The European ‘Far West’!? was not at all similarly affected by the changes that were generated by Temiir’s Eurasian campaigns. Western Europe very much followed its own fifteenth-century dynamics of local and regional political change and transformation. In many ways these developments were as distinct within the wider Eurasian world as their cultural umbrella of Latin Christianity was from the Turko-Mongol Muslim identities that dominated politics in West-Asia. Nevertheless, at the turn of the sixteenth century, in Europe too diverse local and regional power relations were crystallizing into a handful of early-modern states and empires. Even though the roots of this process stretch back way beyond the beginning of the fifteenth century, that era certainly also witnessed dynamics of political formation that were highly significant at the eve of early modernity. Over time those European dynamics moreover became more consistently connected than ever before to what happened in Islamic West-Asia. One crucial factor for the growth of this Western Eurasian connectivity in the fifteenth century was the continuation and intensification of resource flows across the Mediterranean, not least in the context of the booming Indo-Mediterranean spice trade. Another factor was the continued westward expansion of the Ottoman Sultanate in the Balkans, in Hungary and in the Eastern Mediterranean, which had a substantial impact on European political imaginations, worldviews and interests. In fact, the latter fact seems to have made the Islamic 'East'—in whatever 'othering' way it was imagined or encountered—more present than ever before at the courts and headquarters of European princes and statesmen.!?