Peter Jackson (4)Rezensionen

An introductory lecture with many attached documents in English translation about the Seventh Crusade. As well as the European, documents there are also a good many from the Arabic historians of the time. There is also a concluding essay about the effect of the whole exercise. The text is good but alas, the mapping is economical rather than useful, but if you already have maps covering the period at your disposal, this is a very good collection.

Of Peter Jackson's earlier The Mongols and the West: 1221-1410 (first edition) I wrote:

Informative but cautious. Ideally, a book with this title now would pay attention to cultural interchanges; art history has much to say on the Mongols and Europe.

(There's a second edition as of 2018, which I have invested in but haven't read). In The Mongols and the Islamic World -- in a 'Visual Arts' section of his (cautious) chapter on the Pax Mongolica, Jackson writes: 'This chapter would be lamentably incomplete without reference, lastly, to the arts.' Still, my ideal history would integrate the arts, which have been so important to a re-evaluation of the Mongols in the 21st century. Intellectual history and cultural effects, I'd just like to see more of, and not hived off from the main narrative.

This soberly written history is bound to be the standard work for years to come. For detail, I still wouldn't miss Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance and if at all possible The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353.