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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2016
In the aftermath of the Mongol occupations of the largest and most populous societies of Eurasia, greater visibility of popular religion, more widespread vernacular language use, rising literacy, and fundamental shifts in the structure of rulership and the relationship of state and society could all be observed. Many historians have related these changes to a broader chronology of early modernity. This has been problematic in the case of Iran, whose eighteenth-century passage has not been adequately explored in recent scholarship. Our comparative review of ‘post-Mongol’ Iran and China suggests that this period marks as meaningful a break between a schematic medieval and schematic early modern history in Iran as it does in China. Here, we first consider both societies in the post-Mongol period as empires with secular rulerships and increasingly popular cultural trends, and look at the role of what Crossley has called “simultaneous rulership”—rulership in which the codes of legitimacy of civilisations recognised by the conquest authority are given distinct representation in the rulership — in marking the transition away from religious-endorsed rule to self-legitimating rule as a mark of comparative early modernity.
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25 The relationship between čakravartinism and patronage of the Tibetan hierarchs was itself a simultaneity. The čakravartin ideal was old, and usually linked to Mauryan king Asoka. In his own time he expressed himself in terms of solidarity with Buddhist community, but never characterised himself as their instrument, or as a monarch devoted— in his political person— to any individual religion. See Thapar, R., A History of India , Vol. 1. (London, 1966), pp. 70–75 Google Scholar. The lineage of Dalai Lamas was a novelty dating to 1588, when a ruler of eastern Mongolia instituted patronage of the Dalai Lamas as a fundament of his legitimacy as khaghan.
26 Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, p. 31.
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