Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.

Chapter 4 deals with the encounter of Buddhism and the West during the period of the Mongol Empire. It locates any mention of the Buddha and his religion within a general view of the mediaeval East as a place of wonders – of unicorns, of dog-headed men, and of the mythical kingdom of Prester John. It demonstrates how the West came to see the Buddha as chief among idols. This chapter explores the encounter between Mongols and Franciscan missionaries sent by the West to explore the intentions of the Mongols: of John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck and of other travellers – Marco Polo, Andrew of Perugia, and King Hethum of Cilicia. It focuses not only on their often inchoate awareness of Buddhism, but also on Marco Polo’s first account in the West of the life of the Buddha, of the relics of the Buddha in Sri Lanka, and of various hints of Buddhist doctrines.

The Mongols embarked on an explorative incursion in the Caucasus in 1220 before fully invading the area in 1235–1236. Due to their organized and well-thought-out campaign, in a few years they managed to subdue the region from present-day Armenia to Ossetia. From the beginning of their rule, the Mongols relied upon an indirect administrative model, without replacing the pre-existing institutions of the area. The formation of the Ilkhanate in the 1250s moved the focal point of power southward and the political conduct of Caucasia became more indirect and relied on the local aristocracy. The decline of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s opened a process of political readaptation whose more immediate result was the fragmentation of power and the disappearance of a hegemonic center. This chapter discusses the phases of the Mongol conquest, as well as the huge consequences it had for Caucasia.

Prior to the Opium War China was central to Pacific Asia, but it was not in control of its neighborhood. The mobility of the various nomadic groups threatened China’s northern and western frontiers, and Vietnam’s successful resistance to Ming annexation set a southern boundary-stone. While China’s centrality was not hegemonic, its location, demographic preponderance, and artisanal production made China the center of regional attention. Conversely, because of China’s demographic and production centrality, China was more interested in defending what it had than in imperial adventures abroad. Its foreign policy was one of controlling exposure in relationships—thin connectivity. By the Ming Dynasty this evolved into the tribute system, whose core was a ritualized exchange of deference by the neighbor for acknowledgement of autonomy by China.

The twelfth–thirteenth centuries formed one of the richest periods in Armenian historiography. Armenian sources of that period can be classified as general histories, chronicles, hagiographic sources, colophons, epigraphic sources or inscriptions, and poetry. They are essential for understanding the patterns of thought of medieval Armenians as well as of the Mongols. The Armenian sources differ in their attitudes toward the Mongols, expressing both neutral and personal views, and depending on where they were written, in Greater Armenia or in Cilician Armenia. The information of these historians varies according to their views of certain historical events, which are based on their culture, locality, and time and style of writing, as well as the character of the sources, whether chronicles or historical compilations.

Attempts to re-write recent world history as a long series of struggles against European imperialism are inherently self-defeating, for the effect is exactly what it is purportedly trying to avoid. By making struggle against Europe the sine qua non of the past two hundred years of overall human experience, such an approach privileges Europe, and so is by definition Eurocentric. Furthermore, it would be wrong to assume that only European imperial pasts are present in the contemporary international system. Other imperial systems have also left their marks on historical polities that are kept up by today’s polities. In this chapter, we discuss ho what we have elsewhere baptised the steppe tradition is still alive in parts of Central Asia. It has also left a solid legacy in Turkey, as well as remnants in Russia. The difference between these polities and European ones are often observed. The debt they owe to the Eurasian imperial steppe tradition takes us one step closer to accounting for these differences.

Postclassical Muslim just war developments focused upon dealing with the twin challenges of the Crusades and the Mongols, both of which occupied substantial sections of the Muslim world as well as constituting religious challenges to Islam. These challenges were overcome by moving away from the earlier heroic manner of Muslim sacral warfare and adopting a more professional, technology-based military that at least attempted to assimilate standard Sunni Muslim norms (in terms of personal morality) into the military methodology. The expansion of Islam from the 13th to the 17th centuries demonstrated that this formula was a success.

The term genocide has often been applied to the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century, as well as many other pre-modern groups. Legally, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide can only be applied anachronistically to the Mongols, but the Mongols have been accused of genocide of the Tatars (1202) as well as the Tangut (1227). Yet, these accusations often misunderstand the events themselves, not to mention the motives of not only the Mongols, but also the purpose of those actions. This is not to say that the Mongols did not employ massacres and other actions of mass destruction. Indeed, massacres were used widely, but often more judiciously that one might expect. Indeed, rape, pillage and plunder was standard not only for the Mongols but virtually all military organizations of the era.

While the legal application of the UN Convention definition may be impractical, nonetheless, investigating its attribution to the Mongols can be a useful exercise as it can help us understand not only the era and methods of violence employed, but also how the Mongols understood and rationalized their actions. Of greater significance is the employment of Leo Kuper’s concept of “genocidal massacres”. This concept cannot be considered anachronistic in any sense. Furthermore, it lends itself to a broader understanding of whether these “genocidal massacres” lead to a broader pattern of actions that might properly fall under the umbrella of genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the basic principle described by Douglas Adams, “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands”.

Additionally, this study cannot be confined strictly to episodes of violence. In order to properly understand genocide in the context of the Mongol Empire, or any entity, one must understand other policies (both direct and indirect) that may be connected to the genocidal act. This is all the more important as the Mongol Empire emerged from the steppes which in the 12th century had numerous tribal entities into a single polity known as the Yeke Monggol Ulus. The use of the term ulus is particularly important. While it eventually acquired the meaning of “patrimony” and then later “nation or country” as it does today (Mongolia’s name in Mongolian is Mongol Uls), in the thirteenth century it was only used by the Mongols to refer to the various Mongol lineages. Other non-Mongol groups were considered irgen or people. There was a clear identification of the other. Thus, we must also consider whether the establishment of the Yeke Monggol Ulus was simply the melding of diverse groups, whether through voluntary or coercive actions, or perhaps something a bit different and did this Mongols apply massacres, deportations, and others aspects related to genocide and extermination as instruments of state creation in the creation of the Yeke Monggol Ulus.

Chapter 2 offers an introduction to the history of Islam and Muslims with a focus on events and processes that influenced and remained important for the origin and development of the Muslim firaq. It examines the period of late antiquity, what the Qurʾan has to say about sectarian splintering, the Prophetic era, and the period after the death of the Prophet. It focuses in particular on the events of the Saqīfa, the first Muslim fitna (civil war), and the establishment of the early Muslim dynasties. The shift from the Umayyad to the ʿAbbāsid eras offers an introduction to the idea of a Muslim school of thought, while the notion of caliphal power is examined using the examples of Umayyad persecution of “heretics,” as well as the miḥna. The Turkic invasions, including the Mongols, offers an opportunity to examine the nature of political and military power, and to see how such configurations change with the introduction of gunpowder and the establishment of the “gunpowder empires.”

The Black Sea, Russia, and eastern Europe exported slaves throughout the medieval period. Most had been born free but were enslaved through capture or occasionally through sale by relatives. During the eighth through tenth centuries, slaves were traded from eastern Europe and the Baltic to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dniepr and Volga river systems, the Carolingian empire, and Venice. In the thirteenth century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. People enslaved in the Baltic now tended to be traded westward rather than eastward; people enslaved in eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into Italian, Mamluk, or Ottoman hands; and people enslaved in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans. Many aspects of this trade deserve further study, however, such as political marginality and decentralization as factors that enabled slaving; violations of the principle that slaves should come from a different religious background than their owners; and the logistics of local slave trades.

General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The Islamic conquests and the Mongol expansions generated large numbers of captives, but in fact no society in the Medieval millennium was without enslaved people. While no consensus on the definition of slavery is possible – in this era it assumed a wide spectrum of dependencies - the existence of slave markets across the known world indicates that buyers and sellers shared enough of a common understanding of the practice to sustain a vibrant slave trade. Despite this traffic and major military disruptions, many enslaved people derived their status via birth even though the sources suggest that probably most slaves were female. They also exercised some agency. Prejudice against black people is apparent but the ebb and flow of empires ensured that any group could be a slave, just as any could be a slave owner.

The reign of al-Mustansir represents a continuum to al-Nasir's in terms of the stability of a caliphal state centered on the region of Iraq and Khuzistan. With the primary focus of Mongol invasions on Russia and Eastern Europe, the Abbasids thrive with affinity to the Ayyubids and Rum Seljuks. The Abbasid construction of the Mustansiriyya madrasa marks a new type of patronage for a project that diverged from previously endowed structures, such as caravanserais and Sufi lodges. The inclusion of all four Sunni sects of jurisprudence changed the idea of the madrasa while the generous support for students indicated Abbasid affluence. New wavesin the arts (the Baghdad school of manuscript painting) and architectural decorative forms (the girih and the muqarnas) flourish alongside developments in Arabic calligraphy with the famous Yaqut al-Musta'simi. A situation of Mongol belligerence and Abbasid disarray in the reign of the last caliph, al-Musta'sim, accelerates the pace to the conquest of Baghdad in 1258. A shadow Abbasid caliphate lives on in Mamluk Egypt until the Ottoman conquest in 1517.

This chapter describes and analyzes the medieval Mongol origins of the dynasty of the Great Mughals that ruled much of the subcontinent in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It was the successful development of the institution of the corporate Turko-Mongol clan and the Mongol imperial heritage that went with it that allowed the Great Mughals to overcome the normal limitations of nomad tribes in a way their Afghan opponents and medieval predecessors could not.

In the medieval period, the twofold frontier of mobile wealth, nomadic and maritime, largely developed under the aegis of Islam. This chapter analyses the establishment of Indo-Islamic conquest states by post-nomadic Turks, Mongols, Afghans, and others. Mass conversion to Islam only occurred in the Indus borderlands under the impact of widespread nomadic destruction over extended periods of time. In the post-nomadic states of the subcontinent there was no nomadic destruction but instead a fusion of frontier and settled society and little or no conversion to Islam. In the same centuries, the rise of Islam in the littoral regions and island archipelagos of the Indian Ocean took place in the context of the steadily expanding trade and increased dynamism of the medieval centuries – largely beyond the pale of settled Hindu society.

Islam travelled across the Asian expanse along land and maritime routes, as Muslims engaged in trade, proselytism, and conquest. While the territory and influence of Islamic political authority expanded, collapsed, and reached further once again, between the seventh and sixteenth centuries the realities and attributes of any given Islamic society varied greatly. This chapter provides a bird's-eye view of the expansive movement of Muslims out of Arabia and into Asia, as Islam crossed the Oxus/Amu Darya river (Uzbekistan), following two main paths. First was the military expansion of the Arab Muslim Empire, which reached its territorial apogee under the Abbasid, spreading as far as Transoxiana and Northwest India. Second was the movement of pilgrims, scholars, soldiers, and mystics – whose identities melted one into the other – across continental and maritime Asia, along the centuries-old Silk Road and the Indian Ocean networks. These trajectories allow us to see Asia as a historically cohesive space of Islamized interaction, where Muslims imagined themselves as part of a religious community, the umma.