Mongols and the Silk Roads: an Overview

The volume at hand stands at the intersection of two recently booming fields of research into Central or Inner Eurasian history: the history of the Silk Roads and the Mongol Empire, both of which are enjoying the growing attention of a broader public.1 In order to highlight the scholarly context of this special issue of the Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (AOH), this introduction outlines the reasons behind this growing interest and current trends shaping the development of both fields.2 Central or Inner Eurasia is defined in this volume as the vast area between the lower Danube River region in the west and Manchuria in the east, between Iran and the Himalayas in the south and the taiga forest zone in the north. In this way, the Pontic–Caspian Steppe, West Turkestan (present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan), Southern Central Asia (Afghanistan and north-eastern Iran), East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet, the Eastern Steppe (Mongolia and Inner Mongolia) and Manchuria were all part of Central Eurasia (Beckwith 2009: xx). Many climates, landscapes, lifeways, languages, and religions have existed in these territories, periodically united within single empires, each of which provided the region with an economic-political unit. The rise, flourishing and disappearance of these empires occurred in