Primary Sources: Mongolia

Primary Documents
The Mongols are often associated with the arts of warfare and annals of horror, but a more realistic association would be their contribution to international trade and cultural exchange during the medieval age. Thematic chapters, biographical sketches, a glossary, maps, illustrations, and selected primary documents provide fresh insight on a regretfully under examined period.

Primary sources start on page 215 in Volume 2

Primary Documents
The book's introductory essay gives a historical and interpretive overview of the Mongols and charts their invasions and subsequent rule over the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Following is a rich collection of primary sources translated into English from Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Franco-Italian, Italian, Korean, Latin, Persian, Russian, Syriac, and Tibetan that will give students a clear sense of the extraordinary geographic and linguistic range of the Mongol Empire as well as insight into the empire's rise, how it governed, and how it fell. Each primary source includes a headnote and study questions. The volume ends with a list of further readings.

Primary Document
Sima Qian (145?-90? BCE) was the first major Chinese historian. His "Shiji," or "Records of the Grand Historian," documents the history of China and its neighboring countries from the ancient past to his own time.

The oldest surviving Mongolian-language literary work. Like other texts from this era, The Secret History contains elements of folklore and poetry and is not as factual or consistent as historians would like. It is nevertheless entirely fundamental, both as a historical source and as one of the first recorded samples of Mongolian poetry.

The Pope put together a team of missionaries to go to China with the secret mission of gathering appropriate intelligence to bring back. Friar Giovanni Carpini did exactly that. He went to China, gathered the information, wrote them down in Latin, and presented them to the Pope. His extensive report, however, was never published. This English translation by Hildinger is the first ever to be published in English, and may still be one of a kind in the world.