From his post in Keele, Peter Jackson has been able to produce a steady output of major scholarly works which have shaped the way the Mongol Empire has been viewed over the past three decades. Where Thomas Allsen has shifted the boundaries and the vision, Peter Jackson has been able to strengthen the evidence and pack in the detail. Those irritating doubts and questions which delight the sceptics are the appetizers for a Jackson feast. The present volume brings together Jackson's major scholarly contributions on Mongol matters and Islamic India under one title.
The collection opens with Jackson's seminal article. “The dissolution of the Mongol Empire”, which remains a key text for any Mongol history course reading list and shows the characteristic traits of Jackson's writing at its best. There is the detail and painstaking references to and citations of the original sources and manuscripts. Every lead is followed through and every player is investigated and placed in context. The footnotes are often more revealing than the text and frequently dominate the page. They also show Jackson's versatility with languages, eastern and western, dead and alive, and his passion for the minutiae of semantics and linguistics.
The third paper, originally published in 2003 in P. Edbury and J. Philips' The Experience of Crusading 2, is also typical Jackson, as it exhaustively explores the reality of Hulegu Khan's Christian sympathies. All popular assumptions and even the wilder claims are considered and the conclusion is neatly tied into the wider context and used to support theories Jackson has argued elsewhere. The following paper, The Mongols and the Faith of the Conquered, published in 2005, deals with the broader issues and concludes that the Mongols remained staunch pragmatists when it came to matters spiritual and were more than happy to exploit and manipulate the religious prejudices, weaknesses, and self-delusions of their subjects.
The thorny issue of in what exactly the Mongols believed is not ignored: in his 2006 article Jackson tackles the issue of the Mongols' belief in their mandate from Tenggeri, but again he ties it into the theme he had been exploring for the past few years. Questioning assumptions about the Mongols' belief in their right to world domination, Jackson reveals a far more subtle approach and attitude to their “mandate from heaven”. Though they possessed the military clout to dictate terms of surrender, the Mongol leadership chose to follow a far more variegated and diplomatic process to win friends and defeat enemies.
This collection of papers has been divided into three parts: the first deals directly with the Mongol empire, the second examines the formation of Islamic India, and the final three papers deal with the Delhi Sultanate and its interaction with its Mongol neighbours.
The section on Islam's penetration of India opens with a study of the often neglected Ghurs, seeking a balance between the accounts of Juwaynī and Jūzjānī, as Jackson traces the dynasty's fall to the ambitions of the Khwārazmshāh. The next two studies consider the nature of the mamlūk institution in India, the first article being a draft of the second, and the very limited role mamlūks played in extending the borders of the Dār al-Islām. In the final article, Sultan Raḍiyya bint Iltutmish (1236–40), one of the few female rulers in the medieval Muslim world, is the subject of Jackson's scrutiny. He brings to bear his hallmark thoroughness on an examination of the sources and provides a fascinating snapshot of one of the area's neglected if short-reigning rulers.
The Delhi Sultanate is a subject Jackson has spent a great deal of time and thought unravelling and explaining. It is right therefore that the final section of three papers should be devoted to aspects of the relationship between the new rulers of Muslim India and the superpower of the day, the Mongols.
The opening essay concerns the troubling figure of Jalāl al-Dīn Khwārazmshāh and his “invasion” of Punjab and Sind. Though apparently a heroic figure to Juwaynī, to most who were unfortunate enough to encounter the fugitive king, Jalāl al-Dīn was a cruel, devious yet undoubtedly brave, ineffective leader who, forced to flee India, resumed his blood-thirsty career “leaping all around” Iran, in the words of Bar Hebraeus (p. 459), before his mysterious assassination at the hands of Kurdish bandits. Jackson, however, is concerned solely with events in the Punjab and Sind and does not touch on these later events. Once again, Jackson's investigation of the repercussions of Jalāl al-Dīn's arrival and stormy stay in the area is primary source driven and the footnotes attest to his characteristic thoroughness. The essay ends with a 2009 addition commenting on a minor controversy surrounding the fugitive rebel's name, Jalāl al-Dīn “Mingīrnī”, a subject to which Jackson will doubtless return, authoritatively armed with his usual array of multi-lingual sources. Like the opening paper, his classic on the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, the penultimate essay on the reign of Mohammmad Tughluq (1325–51) originally appeared as part of Jackson's PhD thesis, “The Mongols and India” (1977) and its continued relevance is testament to his academic judgement. The final paper first appeared in 1986 and tackles an important issue frequently overlooked: the maintenance of a large standing army on the outskirts of a major urban centre and its impact on the civilian population. The problems encountered by Delhi in paying the military personnel, occupying the troops, and feeding the soldiers were just the immediate concerns of the Sultan, but Jackson commands an array of source material to throw light on these and related issues and assess the political dimensions that consequently developed.
Variorum's timely publication of some of Peter Jackson's key papers places information spanning many enduring issues conveniently between the same covers. Many of these papers have maintained their relevance and importance over the decades and the reissuing of these reflections and studies from Jackson's valued career is very welcome.
