The Mental Maps of Mongol Central Asia as Seen from the Mamluk Sultanate

Abstract

This paper deals with mental maps of Mongol Central Asia as they were conceived in the Mamluk Sultanate. That is, it looks at the subjective spatial image of Central Asia under Mongol rule as viewed from Egypt and Syria in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and presents this from two distinct perspectives: a biographical-scholarly perspective and a geographical perspective. Mental maps are maps of the environment within people’s minds, the perceptions and images people have about places, be they places within their own immediate environment or more remote ones.1 By making a list of the places mentioned in Mamluk sources – biographical dictionaries, geographies and encyclopedias – and marking them on real maps, I hope to explore the perceptions that shaped the mental maps of scholars from the Mamluk Sultanate regarding Mongol Central Asia, as well as the historical value of this information for the study of this sparsely documented region. The first part of this study reconstructs the scholarly map of Mongol Central Asia as viewed in the biographical literature of the Mamluk Sultanate: it highlights the places in Central Asia that were known for their scholarly input and compares this mental map with the picture we get from the Khanate’s few indigenous sources. The second part reviews the geographical knowledge on Mongol Central Asia appearing in Mamluk geographies and encyclopedias, and compares these two prisms. Mongol Central Asia is defined in this paper as the region stretching roughly from the river Oxus to Uighuria, from the conquest of the region by Chinggis Khan in 1220 to the rise of Tamerlane in the western part of the region in 1370. For the duration of this period, this