This chapter deals with various political, military, and social institutions that were rooted in the Mongols’ steppe tradition, which pre-dated the founding of their world empire. These institutions, which were continuously developed and modified by regional Chinggisid polities, also impacted post-Mongol empires. The chapter explains the formation and the transformation of the key concept of ulus (people, nation), and analyzes the composition and the maintenance of the ordo (mobile court) which was the geopolitical center of the ulus. It also analyzes military institutions, including decimal units, e.g., mingghan (chiliarchy) and tümen (myriarchy); the royal guards (keshig) and the garrisons (tamma); the main civil officials, such as the darughachi (governor) and jarghuchi (judge); and the postal system (jam). These topics only partially represent the wide variety of Mongol imperial institutions that still await extensive research, yet they offer a glimpse of how the Mongols ruled the world.

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.

What (not) to wear? A mirza should never wear brocade or cloth of gold; these are beneath his dignity, intended for adorning domestic spaces, not the body. In winter, a shawl – plain or imprinted with gold and silver leaves – would keep out the cold over garments of Indian material fastened with pearl buttons, ‘for pearl is natural while other jewels have to be cut’. In summer, ‘when he sits on a wooden seat with a white covering, he should wear the silver-threaded cap round the head and ears […] and a silver threaded upper garment (bala-band)’.1 From its initial use as a title for princes or noblemen, mirza had become the watchword of (courtly) refinement, denoting a gentlemanly bearing by the seventeenth century. Flushed with cash through burgeoning trade, the Mughal Empire reached its zenith; home to an increasingly cosmopolitan nobility whose ranks had increased rapidly, an expanding population of theologians and administrators, and a prosperous mercantile elite.

Information about the Mongols in Syriac is found in chronicles, exegetical works, poems, colophons, and marginal notes on manuscripts and inscriptions, from southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, the territories of the Ilkhans, the lands of both the Syrian Orthodox (or West Syrian) Church and the Church of the East (East Syrian). The Mongols are first mentioned in a chronicle referring to 1218/1219 as “Huns” and “Tatars,” as the destroyers of Persia. The chapters on the history of the Mongols in the chronicles of Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) depend directly on Juwaynī’s work; more original insights are found in poetry, colophons, and inscriptions. In general, the Syriac sources inform us about the feelings and attitudes of Syriac people towards the Mongols, and their policy towards religions. In this respect and from the perspective of social and economic history, the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma offers most valuable original data.

Byzantine Greek historiography forms an indispensable group of written sources for Eurasian history, including the history of the Mongol Empire. The sources must be interpreted within the framework of Byzantine civilization (Greek antiquity, Christianity, and the Roman imperial tradition). One of the major difficulties in interpreting Byzantine sources derives from the archaizing character of ethnonyms: one appellation may refer to several ethnic groups, and sometimes the same ethnos is designated by different terms. Another limitation is that the Byzantines’ horizon extended primarily to the western lands of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde, and Ilkhanid Iran. In this chapter the four major histories of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries (Georgios Akropolites, Georgios Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Ioannes Kantakouzenos) are treated. Then Byzantine sources relating to the Mongol period are enumerated and briefly characterized, according to their literary genres: histories, world chronicles, local histories, poems, epistles, geographical works, state and ecclesiastical documents, encomia, and oracles.

The British Constitution possesses many distinctive features: from its uncodified character and lack of entrenchment to the status as ordinary statutes rather than ‘higher’ law of those written rules that comprise it. However, all these features can be regarded as manifestations of its most distinguishing characteristic – its quality as a predominantly ‘political’ rather than a ‘legal’ constitution.1 Whereas codification, and those other features that the British Constitution notoriously lacks, comprise essential elements of a legal form of constitutionalism, their absence has traditionally been deemed necessary for the integrity of the UK’s political constitution.

On the urban streets of Cairo, Tokyo, or Mombasa, around 1900–1930s, clothing in multiple styles coexisted, including varied ‘European styles’, differently categorized in each location as part of local fashion culture: under full- or half-body covering veils, women in Cairo wore European-style dresses; next to groups of women in colourful kanga wrappers in Mombasa or meisen kimono in Tokyo, groups of working men wore uniform-like ‘Western’ business attire or simplified short-sleeved shirts and half-trousers.

Until recently, the adoption and diffusion of European-style clothing has been mainly discussed by region or group, mostly within the framework of national history.

‘Law’ and ‘constitution’, like other concepts we use to make sense of the world, have a history.1 In the case of law, part of that history is the ongoing interplay between two different ideas. One is that law concerns what people should, should not and may do. In other words, law is ‘normative’. Another is that law is a product of human activity. Human beings and institutions can and do make and enforce legal norms.

The chapter reviews the material culture of the Golden Horde and how it evolved from the nomadic culture of Mongolia, reflected, for example, in luxurious warrior belts and drinking cups. It stresses the religious diversity apparent in the Golden Horde burials and among its citizens before and after its Islamization, and how Islamization affected Golden Horde sites. It reviews town building under the Jochids and concludes with the Simferopol treasure, the content of which reflects the sophistication of the Golden Horde’s eclectic culture and its trans-Eurasian commercial connections.

The Ilkhanate was a Mongol-ruled state based in Iran and Mesopotamia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. Established by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, after 1258, it drew on previous decades of Mongol military and administrative intervention in the region. Throughout their eighty years in power, the descendants of Hülegü faced the challenge of governing a society and landscape foreign to Mongol traditional life and heavily scarred from previous waves of Mongol invasion. They met this challenge by employing indigenous administrative elites and adopting local customs. Most notable among these was Islam, which was increasingly becoming the majority religion in the Middle East at the time of the Mongol conquest and which the Ilkhans themselves adopted as part of their ruling ideology. The Mongols’ particular rapprochement with these indigenous practices established important institutions of royal ideology, land tenure, religious practice, and cultural patronage that persisted at Persianate courts in later centuries.

The history of the relationship between the executive and the administration has been largely invisible to lawyers and constitutional law. The provision of the Magna Carta 1215 in which King John promises to ‘[ ] appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well’ is not well known.

The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire studies the Mongol Empire from a holistic point of view in its full Eurasian context, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center. It scrutinizes the Mongol Empire as a multifaceted phenomenon that combined elements from various Asian imperial traditions (steppe, Islamic, Iranian, and Sinitic empires) and created a common imperial culture – political, material, institutional – that has had a broad and enduring impact on world history. The two-volume set comprises a volume about history – political, thematic, regional, and external – and a volume devoted to sources on the empire – literary (in sixteen languages), archaeological, and visual.

The Introduction reviews the raison d’être behind this Cambridge History, its structure, and the state of the field in the study of the Mongol Empire. Finally, it commemorates two contributors, both leading Mongolists, who passed away in 2019, Thomas T. Allsen and David O. Morgan.