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Perspectives on the Global Past
Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art
An era rich in artistic creations and political transformations, the Mongol period across Eurasia brought forth a new historical consciousness visible in the artistic legacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Historicity of the present, cultivation of the secular within received cosmologies, human agency in history, and naturalism in the representation of social and organic environments all appear with consistency across diverse venues. Common themes, styles, motifs, and pigments circulated to an unprecedented extent during this era creating an equally unprecedented field of artistic exchange. Exploring art’s relationship to the unique commercial and political circumstances of Mongol Eurasia, Sudden Appearances rethinks many art historical puzzles including the mystery of the Siyah Kalem paintings, the female cup-bearer in the Royal Drinking Scene at Alchi, and the Mongol figures who appear in a Sienese mural.
Drawing on primary sources both visual and literary as well as scholarship that has only recently achieved critical mass in the areas of Mongolian studies and Eurasian histories, Roxann Prazniak orchestrates an inquiry into a critical passage in world history, a prelude to the spin-off to modernity. Sudden Appearances highlights the visual and emotional prompts that motivated innovative repurposing of existing cultural perspectives and their adjustment to expanding geographic and social worlds. While early twentieth-century scholarship searched for a catholic universalism in shared European and Chinese art motifs, this inquiry looks to the relationships among societies of central, western, and eastern Asia during the Mongol era as a core site of social and political discourse that defined a globalizing era in Eurasian artistic exchange. The materiality of artistic creativity, primarily access to pigments, techniques, and textiles, provides a path through the interconnected commercial and intellectual byways of the long thirteenth century.
Tabriz of the Ilkhanate with its proximity to the Mediterranean and al-Hind seas and relations to the Yuan imperial center establishes the geographic and organizational hub for this study of eight interconnected cities nested in their regional domains. Avoiding the use of modern geographic markers such as China, Europe, Middle East, India, Sudden Appearances shifts analysis away from the limits of nation-state claims toward a borderless world of creative commerce.
Drawing on primary sources both visual and literary as well as scholarship that has only recently achieved critical mass in the areas of Mongolian studies and Eurasian histories, Roxann Prazniak orchestrates an inquiry into a critical passage in world history, a prelude to the spin-off to modernity. Sudden Appearances highlights the visual and emotional prompts that motivated innovative repurposing of existing cultural perspectives and their adjustment to expanding geographic and social worlds. While early twentieth-century scholarship searched for a catholic universalism in shared European and Chinese art motifs, this inquiry looks to the relationships among societies of central, western, and eastern Asia during the Mongol era as a core site of social and political discourse that defined a globalizing era in Eurasian artistic exchange. The materiality of artistic creativity, primarily access to pigments, techniques, and textiles, provides a path through the interconnected commercial and intellectual byways of the long thirteenth century.
Tabriz of the Ilkhanate with its proximity to the Mediterranean and al-Hind seas and relations to the Yuan imperial center establishes the geographic and organizational hub for this study of eight interconnected cities nested in their regional domains. Avoiding the use of modern geographic markers such as China, Europe, Middle East, India, Sudden Appearances shifts analysis away from the limits of nation-state claims toward a borderless world of creative commerce.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
304 pages, Paperback
Published April 30, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 14, 2020
I understand for surviving archaeology reasons why there wasn't a chapter on Sarai in the Golden Horde...but man I really wanted that. Still, no complaining here. Like Mongol history? Like art history? Like materialist philosophy? Its all here for you.
For further insights check my post here, though its not primarily a review of the book itself per se:
https://geotrickster.com/2020/06/14/s...
For further insights check my post here, though its not primarily a review of the book itself per se:
https://geotrickster.com/2020/06/14/s...
October 29, 2019
For anyone interested in the Mongol era and the widespread effects of the Mongol Empire on the rest of Eurasia, this is an excellent source. Jack Weatherford's books ("Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World," etc) offer a great popular perspective on the the global reach of the Mongols' innovations in governance, religious pluralism, and approaches to law-making, but often his work makes a number of broad assertions without much detail or sourcing. Prazniak, on the other hand, minutely details the tendrils of Mongol artistic and commercial reach across the Ilkhanate, Yuan China, and beyond, exploring everything from textile manufacture processes to new historical awarenesses to the way that gestures in western art were transformed through Mongol-mediated contact with eastern traditions.
In ecology, we talk about non-analog plant communities - plant communities that existed in the past, under very different climatic conditions, for which we have no present comparison. Throughout Prazniak's book, Mongol-governed regions emerge as a spectacular experiment in a kind of pluralistic, cosmopolitan, diverse, highly sophisticated society that seems utterly non-analog to most of what western audiences understand about how culture and history work. This is especially true when it comes to current popular ideas about religion and religious history. The book centers various forms of Eastern Christianity, leaving Catholicism on the periphery; delves into the vast influence of Manichaeism on the Middle East and Central Asia; and illuminates the significance of the 13th century Buddhist revival, in which the Ilkhanate built and patronized Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist monasteries in Armenia and other parts of the Middle East. The port city of Quanzhou under the Yuan also emerges as a non-analog community, where Manichaeism-influenced Buddhists controlled quantities of goods for trade, Muslim merchants ran the shipping networks for Hindu and Jewish merchants as well as other Muslims, and the occasional Catholic priest was granted a state salary by the Buddhist emperor. Perhaps in some parts of the world people are used to thinking of history through this lens, but for those schooled in any narrative that centers Europe (and sort of vaguely touches on the Middle East, but only to discuss the Crusades), this book offers a delightful and surprising rendering of the world between 1200 and 1350.
Prazniak also highlights the role of women in promoting the arts at the various Mongol courts. From Yuan princess Sengge Ragi, granddaughter of Kublai Khan, to Byzantine princess Maria Palaiologina, who married into the Ilkhanate and took on a significant diplomatic role advocating for Christians in Tabriz and Mongolians when she returned to Constantinople, the women of the Mongol courts emerge as powerful decision-makers deploying imagery and language to engage with a new vision of a wider, more integrated, and more pluralistic and secular world.
The book spends no time on the heart of the early Mongol Empire, on Chinggis Khaan, or on modern Mongolia. And yet it still conveys values that are essentially Mongolian, demonstrating the way in which steppe nomads brought a new and very different set of expectations and standards to governance during what Prazniak refers to as "the long 13th century" - a 150 year period that was perhaps too short to fully realize all the potential of Mongol innovation, but long enough to change the world nevertheless.
(I read the kindle version; four stars instead of five simply because there are no pictures of any of the artworks that are discussed in the book, which - if you're reading it, say, in remote parts of northern Mongolia with no internet connection - is enough to drive you crazy because you really want to take a look at the works she's discussing.)
In ecology, we talk about non-analog plant communities - plant communities that existed in the past, under very different climatic conditions, for which we have no present comparison. Throughout Prazniak's book, Mongol-governed regions emerge as a spectacular experiment in a kind of pluralistic, cosmopolitan, diverse, highly sophisticated society that seems utterly non-analog to most of what western audiences understand about how culture and history work. This is especially true when it comes to current popular ideas about religion and religious history. The book centers various forms of Eastern Christianity, leaving Catholicism on the periphery; delves into the vast influence of Manichaeism on the Middle East and Central Asia; and illuminates the significance of the 13th century Buddhist revival, in which the Ilkhanate built and patronized Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist monasteries in Armenia and other parts of the Middle East. The port city of Quanzhou under the Yuan also emerges as a non-analog community, where Manichaeism-influenced Buddhists controlled quantities of goods for trade, Muslim merchants ran the shipping networks for Hindu and Jewish merchants as well as other Muslims, and the occasional Catholic priest was granted a state salary by the Buddhist emperor. Perhaps in some parts of the world people are used to thinking of history through this lens, but for those schooled in any narrative that centers Europe (and sort of vaguely touches on the Middle East, but only to discuss the Crusades), this book offers a delightful and surprising rendering of the world between 1200 and 1350.
Prazniak also highlights the role of women in promoting the arts at the various Mongol courts. From Yuan princess Sengge Ragi, granddaughter of Kublai Khan, to Byzantine princess Maria Palaiologina, who married into the Ilkhanate and took on a significant diplomatic role advocating for Christians in Tabriz and Mongolians when she returned to Constantinople, the women of the Mongol courts emerge as powerful decision-makers deploying imagery and language to engage with a new vision of a wider, more integrated, and more pluralistic and secular world.
The book spends no time on the heart of the early Mongol Empire, on Chinggis Khaan, or on modern Mongolia. And yet it still conveys values that are essentially Mongolian, demonstrating the way in which steppe nomads brought a new and very different set of expectations and standards to governance during what Prazniak refers to as "the long 13th century" - a 150 year period that was perhaps too short to fully realize all the potential of Mongol innovation, but long enough to change the world nevertheless.
(I read the kindle version; four stars instead of five simply because there are no pictures of any of the artworks that are discussed in the book, which - if you're reading it, say, in remote parts of northern Mongolia with no internet connection - is enough to drive you crazy because you really want to take a look at the works she's discussing.)
August 15, 2021
15 years after The Birth of the Modern World and 7 after After Tamerlane, Roxann Prazniak brings a simple yet profound flavour to the 'Mongol turn' in Eurasian historiography - that Pax Mongolica brought with it not just commercial and political interconnectedness but also cultural ones.
Her thesis in tl;dr form is as such: the Great Mongol State drew its political strength and legitimacy through a policy of multi-cultural/ethnic/religious patronage (not 'tolerance'). Out of this diversity arose an intense sense of humanism, wrought from the cultural ruptures felt throughout Eurasia, where previous sacred worldviews and narratives were rendered asunder by the novel idea of plurality. Art affected by the 'sudden appearance' of the Mongol ulus were therefore much more introspective than before - artists and patrons had a strong sense of identity of their place in the fabric of space and time, a greater emphasis on the emotional and psychological depth of the depicted characters, and a direct comparison between sacred/historical narratives and the everyday experience. There was also shared emphasis on icons and materialities that travelled within the Mongol ulus - the form of an infant-carrying mother and Phagspa script as a decorative form appeared in art from Sienna to Quanzhou,
As such, the dramatis personae of the Mongol cultural world was astonishingly vast, and its cultural products astonishingly diverse - from Franciscans evangelising in the Ilkhanate; Mamluks negotiating the balance of powers between Byzantium, the Ilkhanate, and the Golden Horde; Ladakh kingship in the wake of renewed patronage of Tibetan Buddhism; down to Manichaen artists in the maritime world of Yuan Quanzhou. The range of the book does not make it easy to read, especially to those who are not used to reading world histories, but is productively diverse and drives in the point on the unique social conditions of the Mongol ulus.
Prazniak's writing is commendable, no least because of the immense breadth of this narrative. One does not get the feeling that she was out of her comfort zone despite the range of cultures featured, and the same cannot be said about much more venerable world historians. However, at some points her narrative seemed tangled in the intricacies of the local cultural system, which resulted in unclear writing and/or a break from the general narrative and argument of the chapter. Given the complexity and depth of the argument she was making, these small blemishes were perhaps unavoidable, and I certainly could not have given a better attempt.
The only real negative point I can raise is in the lack of images - for a book about art, there are bizarrely few images for us to work with. This is especially since the narrative makes constant references to art before, during, and after the Mongol ulus. I found myself going on long google image searches to have a large enough visual bank to fully understand the narrative. Perhaps a book such as this would have benefitted from incorporating elements of the visual essay. I would also have liked more pieces of art to have been included to bolster her arguments, but that would probably have resulted in a massive and unwieldy tome.
In all, this was a refreshing take on the global history of art, one that was at once intensely local but also universal. It subverts many (if not most) art historical narratives in museums, and provides the reader with an entirely novel base in understanding the pre-modern roots of globalism.
Her thesis in tl;dr form is as such: the Great Mongol State drew its political strength and legitimacy through a policy of multi-cultural/ethnic/religious patronage (not 'tolerance'). Out of this diversity arose an intense sense of humanism, wrought from the cultural ruptures felt throughout Eurasia, where previous sacred worldviews and narratives were rendered asunder by the novel idea of plurality. Art affected by the 'sudden appearance' of the Mongol ulus were therefore much more introspective than before - artists and patrons had a strong sense of identity of their place in the fabric of space and time, a greater emphasis on the emotional and psychological depth of the depicted characters, and a direct comparison between sacred/historical narratives and the everyday experience. There was also shared emphasis on icons and materialities that travelled within the Mongol ulus - the form of an infant-carrying mother and Phagspa script as a decorative form appeared in art from Sienna to Quanzhou,
As such, the dramatis personae of the Mongol cultural world was astonishingly vast, and its cultural products astonishingly diverse - from Franciscans evangelising in the Ilkhanate; Mamluks negotiating the balance of powers between Byzantium, the Ilkhanate, and the Golden Horde; Ladakh kingship in the wake of renewed patronage of Tibetan Buddhism; down to Manichaen artists in the maritime world of Yuan Quanzhou. The range of the book does not make it easy to read, especially to those who are not used to reading world histories, but is productively diverse and drives in the point on the unique social conditions of the Mongol ulus.
Prazniak's writing is commendable, no least because of the immense breadth of this narrative. One does not get the feeling that she was out of her comfort zone despite the range of cultures featured, and the same cannot be said about much more venerable world historians. However, at some points her narrative seemed tangled in the intricacies of the local cultural system, which resulted in unclear writing and/or a break from the general narrative and argument of the chapter. Given the complexity and depth of the argument she was making, these small blemishes were perhaps unavoidable, and I certainly could not have given a better attempt.
The only real negative point I can raise is in the lack of images - for a book about art, there are bizarrely few images for us to work with. This is especially since the narrative makes constant references to art before, during, and after the Mongol ulus. I found myself going on long google image searches to have a large enough visual bank to fully understand the narrative. Perhaps a book such as this would have benefitted from incorporating elements of the visual essay. I would also have liked more pieces of art to have been included to bolster her arguments, but that would probably have resulted in a massive and unwieldy tome.
In all, this was a refreshing take on the global history of art, one that was at once intensely local but also universal. It subverts many (if not most) art historical narratives in museums, and provides the reader with an entirely novel base in understanding the pre-modern roots of globalism.
April 25, 2019
I reviewed this for the Asian Review of Books:
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...
In short, I'd rec this book 1st for anyone who wants a wide acquaintance with the Mongol world / a view of the amazing 13thC. Number one on my 'steppe-history' shelf? At the moment, yes...
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...
In short, I'd rec this book 1st for anyone who wants a wide acquaintance with the Mongol world / a view of the amazing 13thC. Number one on my 'steppe-history' shelf? At the moment, yes...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews