Global Middle Ages, Political History, and Democracy

The alienization of Central Asia from European, Chinese, and South Asian familiarity thereafter is both a mark of our 'modernity' and the point at which a sense of an integrated ecumene was lost.-Pamela Crossley 1 Accordingly, we come to the fact that at the heart of what makes history a public discipline, what must distinguish the legitimacy of its research under public sponsorship, in contrast to mere antiquarianism, are the large-scale questions.These questions are often such as historians are hesitant of facing.They cannot necessarily be answered with a completely firsthand control of all the documents involved.Yet they are the questions for whose sakes the historical profession exists.-Marshall Hodgson 2While political history has consumed so much attention of the historian's profession as a whole, it is if anything underrepresented as a topic within global and transregional history, and of the medieval period especially.It need not be so.The validity of a connected global medieval political history is amply demonstrated by the Mongol empire, whose rise certainly constitutes a major discontinuity, but which was also anticipated by centuries of close ties and interaction between an array of Afro-Eurasian states.The bifurcation of the caliphal empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries into the Fatimid and Almoravid states in the west and the Seljuq empire that spanned Iraq and Khorasan in the east coincided with the emergence of a multi-state system in East Asia, including the Song and the Liao dynasties.The Seljuqs' Qarakhanid vassals in Transoxiana would be supplanted in the early twelfth century by the Mongolic-speaking and culturally-Sinicized Qara Khitai.Founded by Yel Dashi, a jinshi (Chinese civil service examination) degree holder, the Qara Khitai was a rump state of the Liao dynasty, which in 1125 was forced out of its domains in Liaodong (northern China), Manchuria, and Mongolia.Thus did two major centers of Islamicate culture, Samarqand and Bukhara, come under the dominion of a ruler recognized in 1.