The oxford history of historical writing volume 2 400–1400

Tai Lieu Chat Luong


T H E OX FOR D H IS TORY OF
H IS TOR IC A L W R I T I NG


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with
considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of
comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular
period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflecting both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in
historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford
History of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of
historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.
Volume 1: Beginnings to ad 600
Volume 2: 400–1400
Volume 3: 1400–1800
Volume 4: 1800–1945
Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
Daniel Woolf
general editor

The Oxford History of
Historical Writing
volume 2: 400–1400

Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson

volume editors

Ian Hesketh
assistant editor

1


1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Oxford University Press 2012
Editorial matter © Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson 2012
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First published 2012
Impression: 1
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The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible by the
generous financial support provided by the Offices of the Vice-President
(Research) and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the
University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario.


General Editor’s Acknowledgements
The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several
years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to
acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost, to the volume editors,
without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their
willingness to sign on, and for their flexibility in pursuing their own vision for
their piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals
and unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members
were subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely
of their time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning
editor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through
the readership and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and
I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial
level and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and

Stephanie Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol
Carnegie in particular.
The series would not have been possible without the considerable financial
support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the
University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was
generously funded by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost
and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and
Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the project’s potential.
The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of project assistants, to
involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of the costs of publication such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition of computer equipment and also of a significant number of books to supplement the fine library
resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the crucial Edmonton
conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where I moved
into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was provided to push the project
over the ‘finish-line’, to transfer the research library, and in particular to retain
the services of an outstanding research associate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh.
I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulous attention to detail, and his ability
ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (including on occasion my own) in order
to ensure that volumes maintained editorial uniformity internally and together
with other volumes, not least because the volumes are not all being published at
once. A series of able graduate students have served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson, Matthew Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa
Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last of whom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the Edmonton conference. Among the others on


General Editor’s Acknowledgements

vii

whom the project has depended I have to thank the Office of the Dean of Arts
and Science for providing project space at Queen’s University, and the Department
of History and Classics at Alberta. Melanie Marvin at Alberta and Christine

Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the management of the research accounts, as has
Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (and herself a former research administrator),
whose advice on this front is only a small part of the support she has provided.


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Foreword
Daniel Woolf, General Editor
Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled
Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia. Consisting of four volumes devoted to
East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on conferences held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
in the late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual
essays are still being cited in our own day. The books were also remarkably ahead
of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time firmly understood as being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject of the history
of history was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early to mid-twentieth century by the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes,
following Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie
[History of Modern Historiography], were written by master historians surveying their discipline and its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed
perspective, though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last two or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to
speak of historiography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice.
Since the late 1990s a number of works have been published that challenge the
Eurocentrism of the history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can
now view the European historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many
parallel and—a fact often overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or
speaking about the past from Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks to
provide the first collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe.
It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeks
neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the five volumes collectively

include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, the
division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region. We decided
on the former because the history of non-European historical writing should, no
more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation. We chose the
latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative (albeit with
well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitate comparison and
contrast between regions within a broad time period.
A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series
as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each
individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular


Foreword

x

period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as
they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant materials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter to a
fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;
non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while the
volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue
both within and between its five editorial teams and the general editor, there has
been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.
In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams
have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go
their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—
with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an encyclopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal with every
national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily spread from
five to fifty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the editors seek. We

have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every effort has been
made to balance coverage and provide representation from all regions of the
world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to find out something
about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s more than 150
chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of reference books which
have appeared in the past fifteen or so years, some of which have global range.
Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumulative index an
inefficient and redundant use of space. Similarly, each individual essay offers a
highly selective bibliography, intended to point the way to further reading (and
where appropriate listing key sources from the period or topic under discussion
in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited knowledge of particular
regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain chapters have included a
timeline of major events, though this has not been deemed necessary in every
case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no essays devoted to a single
‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and Herodotus to the present
are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with dates of birth and death,
these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.
Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are necessary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that end, a
number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the very
beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only were scholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across volumes, but
draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary and review by
other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton, Canada in September 2008, brought most of the editors and just
over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and exciting two days
during which matters of editorial detail and also content and substance were


xi

Foreword

discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference and series, is that
it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in separate national
and chronological fields, in order to pursue a common interest in the history of
historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the series’ general editor,
it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of the project and produce further collaborative work in the future.
Several key decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most
important of which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary
repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendrical years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and
‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends
about ad 600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, volume 2, on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in
China (the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every volume), the period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes 4
and 5 have a similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While
1945 is a sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in
China, again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales
School, are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denotation of years bc and ad; here, we reversed an early decision to use bce and ce, on
the grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; bc/ad have at least been
adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian European
origins.
It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two
sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways
as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about
1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further
decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustrations very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion
could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic
forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous
historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of
historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,
Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.
The present volume, though chronologically the second of five in the series, is

last to be published. The editors, Professors Sarah Foot and Chase Robinson,
respectively scholars of early medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East, have
assembled contributions from specialists in a number of regions of the world
spanning the millennium from 400 to 1400. As they note in their introduction,
periodization (always a challenge in projects of global scope) is especially complicated during this very long era (which is one reason why this volume overlaps in
its early centuries with ground covered by volume 1 and, in some chapters,
stretches at the other end into the time scale of volume 3). The centuries covered


Foreword

xii

here witnessed the bureaucratization of an already old Chinese tradition of
historical writing under the Tang dynasty, and further significant innovation
under the Song and Yuan near the end of the period; it also saw the adaptation of
Chinese historiography by nearby East and Southeast Asian countries, in particular Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; an additional influence throughout the region
was Buddhism, imported from India and Sri Lanka. Elsewhere, the seventh and
eighth centuries saw the emergence and rapid expansion of Islam, and with it an
especially vigorous tradition of historical writing in Arabic, Persian, and other
languages. In Europe, with Christendom divided between Greek East and Latin
West, late antiquity gave rise to a host of new genres, beginning with the works
of the great ‘barbarian’ historians of the sixth to eighth centuries, new universal
and church histories, continuing with the ‘gesta’ or deeds of kings, emperors, and
powerful ecclesiastical figures, and ending with the urban chronicles that start to
appear, along with the towns whose social and economic life they reflect, in the
thirteenth century. Throughout the millennium migration, war, and trade contributed to the spread, limited though it may have been, of one culture’s historical
forms elsewhere. This happened, for instance, in the adaptation of Chinese historical forms, rooted in Confucianism, elsewhere in East Asia, and in the dissemination of Islamic historical writing outside its Middle Eastern birthplace,
eventually reaching as far afield as Southeast Asia. The number of languages used
in extant historical writing remained quite limited in much of the world, though

the use of vernacular tongues, once quite sporadic, increased in the last quarter
of the millennium. In rare cases, the conqueror would adopt both the language
and the historiography of the vanquished, as happened during the short-lived
tenure of the Mongol Yuan dynasty over China.
Professors Foot and Robinson note that this is a millennium through most of
which ‘peoples’ rather than ‘nations’ are (along with religions and royal, imperial
or aristocratic dynasties) the more meaningful unit around which historians
organized their writings. With a geographic range as broad as that in volume 1,
the chapters begin in the Far East with China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Japan
and thence travel westward, embracing India, Islam, and Byzantium, ending in
Western Europe thereby (as is the case in volume 3) explicitly de-centreing the
privileged European historiographical achievement. The later chapters of the
book adopt either a topical or a genre-based approach, exploring forms of historical writing from the local to the universal, from the court-centred to the religious;
in some cases they offer explicit comparisons among historiographical traditions
often studied separately, for instance those of Western or Eastern Christendom
and Islam (where contacts were more regular than, say, between Europe and East
Asia). Collectively, the authors of this book have illuminated both the familiar
and the more obscure corners of the historiographical corpus bequeathed to us by
an age which we in the modern West have by long tradition called ‘medieval’—
this in itself being a term that has limited application once one leaves the confines
of Christian Europe for the east.


xiii

Foreword
NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Non-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliterated
using the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using the

Pinyin system). For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac we
have followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies. Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning is
obvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather than
italic face, unless a specific, published English translation is listed, in which case
the bracketed title will also be in italics.


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Contents
List of Maps
Notes on the Contributors
Advisory Board
Editors’ Introduction
Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson
PART I: THE TRADITIONS OF HISTORICAL WRITING,
400–1400
1. The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China
Charles Hartman and Anthony DeBlasi
2. Chinese Historiography in the Age of Maturity, 960–1368
Charles Hartman
3. The Birth and Flowering of Japanese Historiography:
From Chronicles to Tales to Historical Interpretation
John R. Bentley
4. Indian Historical Writing, c.600– c.1400
Daud Ali
5. Kingship, Time, and Space: Historiography in Southeast Asia
John K. Whitmore

6. The Tradition of Historical Writing in Korea
Remco Breuker, Grace Koh, and James B. Lewis
7. Coptic and Ethiopic Historical Writing
Witold Witakowski
8. Syriac and Syro-Arabic Historical Writing, c.500– c.1400
Muriel Debié and David Taylor
9. From Reciting to Writing and Interpretation: Tendencies, Themes,
and Demarcations of Armenian Historical Writing
Theo Maarten van Lint
10. Byzantine Historical Writing, 500–920
Anthony Kaldellis
11. Byzantine Historical Writing, 900–1400
Paul Magdalino

xviii
xix
xxiii
1

17
37
58
80
102
119
138
155
180
201
218

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Contents

12. Islamic Historical Writing, Eighth through the Tenth Centuries
Chase F. Robinson
13. Islam: The Arabic and Persian Traditions, Eleventh–Fifteenth
Centuries
Konrad Hirschler
14. The Shaping of Past and Present, and Historical Writing
in Rus’, c.900– c.1400
Jonathan Shepard
15. Historical Writing in Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary,
Poland), c.950–1400
Nora Berend
16. Slavonic Historical Writing in South-Eastern Europe, 1200–1600
Petre Guran
17. Annals and Chronicles in Western Europe
Sarah Foot
18. The Vicissitudes of Political Identity: Historical Narrative in the
Barbarian Successor States of Western Europe
Felice Lifshitz
19. History, Story, and Community: Representing the Past in Latin
Christendom, 1050–1400
Charles F. Briggs
20. Scandinavian Historical Writing, 1100–1400
Sverre Bagge
PART II: MODES OF REPRESENTING THE PAST

21. Universal Histories in Christendom and the Islamic World,
c.700– c.1400
Andrew Marsham
22. Local Histories
John Hudson
23. Institutional Histories
Peter Lorge
24. Dynastic Historical Writing
Charles West
25. The Abbasid and Byzantine Courts
Nadia Maria El Cheikh
26. Historical Writing, Ethnicity, and National Identity:
Medieval Europe and Byzantium in Comparison
Matthew Innes

238
267
287
312
328
346
368
391
414

431
457
476
496
517

539


Contents
27. Historical Writing and Warfare
Meredith L. D. Riedel
28. Religious History
Thomas Sizgorich
Index

xvii
576
604
629


List of Maps
1. Polities of the Medieval World, c.700
2. Polities of the Medieval World, c.1000
3. Polities of the Medieval World, c.1300

9
10
12


Notes on the Contributors
Daud Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Studies, and Department of History, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Courtly Culture and
Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge, 2004), Querying the Medieval: Texts
and the History of Practices in South Asia (Oxford, 2000, with Ronald Inden and Jonathan

Walters), and editor of several other volumes.
Sverre Bagge is Professor of Medieval History, University of Bergen, and Director of the
Centre for Medieval Studies. His publications include: Society and Politics in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (1991); Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German
Historiography c.950–1150 (2002); and From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State
Formation in Norway, c.900–1350 (2010).
John R. Bentley is Professor of Japanese at Northern Illinois University. Among his previous publications are Historiographical Trends in Early Japan (2002), and The Authenticity
of Sendai Kuji Hongi (2006).
Nora Berend is Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her previous publications include At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval Hungary, c.1000–c.1300 (2001), and the edited volume Christianization and the Rise of Christian
Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c.900–1200 (2007).
Remco Breuker is Professor of Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Among his previous publications are Forging the Truth: National Identity and Creative
Deception in Medieval Korea (2008) and Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea,
918–1170: History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty (2010).
Charles F. Briggs teaches in the history department at the University of Vermont. His
previous publications include Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c.1275–c.1525 (1999) and The Body Broken: Medieval
Europe 1300–1520 (2011).
Muriel Debié is a research scholar in the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes
(IRHT) of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris, and director of
the Ecole des Langues et Civilisations de l’Orient ancien (ELCOA) of the Institut
Catholique de Paris.
Anthony DeBlasi is Associate Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East
Asian Studies of the University at Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Reform in the
Balance: The Defense of Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China as well as articles on various
aspects of China’s middle period history.
Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History at the American University of Beirut. Her
publications include Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (2004). Her research has been focusing on aspects of gender history and the workings of the Abbasid court.


xx

Notes on the Contributors

Sarah Foot is the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford.
She is the author of Æthelstan: The First English Monarch (Yale University Press, 2011),
Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c.600–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and
has written widely on perceptions and uses of the past in the early medieval West.
Petre Guran is a research fellow at the Institute for South-East European Studies (Bucharest)
specializing in religious anthropology applied to Byzantine and medieval South-East European
society and culture, and the relationship between religious thought and political power. He has
studied and taught in Romania, France, and Germany, and defended his dissertation on ‘Royal Sanctity and Universal Power in the Orthodox Commonwealth’ at EHESS, Paris (2003).
From 2004 to 2006 he was a Teaching Fellow of Hellenistic Studies at Princeton University.
Charles Hartman is Professor of East Asian Studies, the University at Albany, State University of New York. The author of Han Yu and the Tang Search for Unity (1986), his articles on medieval Chinese historiography have appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies, T’oung Pao, and the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies.
Ian Hesketh (Assistant Editor) is a research associate in the Department of History at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. His publications include Of Apes and Ancestors:
Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (2009) and The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (2011).
Konrad Hirschler is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Near and Middle East at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Among his books are Medieval Arabic Historiography (2006), Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (2011), and The Written Word in
the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (2012).
John Hudson is Professor of Legal History and Head of the School of History at the
University of St Andrews, Scotland, and also William W. Cook Global Law Professor at
the University of Michigan Law School, USA. Among his previous publications are The
History of the Church of Abingdon, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2002, 2007), and The Oxford History
of the Laws of England, vol. 2: 871–1216 (2012).
Matthew Innes is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. Among his
previous publications are State and Society in the Early Middle Ages (2000), Introduction to
Early Medieval Western Europe 300–900 (2007), The Carolingian World (2011, with Marios
Costambeys and Simon Maclean), and Documentary Culture in the Early Middle Ages
(2012, with Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, and Adam Kosto).
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University (USA). He has

published extensively on the Byzantine historians (both studies and translations) as well
as on Hellenism in Byzantium (2007) and The Christian Parthenon (2009).
Grace Koh is Lecturer in Korean Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), University of London. She is currently working towards the completion of a
book manuscript provisionally entitled, Historical Vision and Literary Imagination: Private
Inception and Public Reception of the Samguk yusa and Early Korean Narratives.
James B. Lewis is the University Lecturer in Korean History at the University of Oxford.
His previous publications include Korea and Globalization (2002) and Frontier Contact
between Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan (2003).


Notes on the Contributors

xxi

Felice Lifshitz is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta. Her publications include Why the Middle Ages Matter (2011), Gender and Christianity in Medieval
Europe (2008), Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies (2007), The Name of the
Saint (2005), and The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria (1995).
Theo Maarten van Lint is Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at the
University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His research addresses the reception of Ezekiel’s throne vision in Armenia, medieval and modern poetry, storytelling
and performing poetry, and the eleventh-century layman Grigor Magistros Pahlawuni’s
epistolary.
Peter Lorge is Assistant Professor of Medieval Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt
University. He is the author of War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795
(2005), The Asian Military Revolution (2008), and Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to
the Twenty-First Century (2011).
Paul Magdalino, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History at the University of
St Andrews, and Professor of Archaeology and History of Art at Koỗ University Istanbul.
His previous publications include The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (1993),
L’Orthodoxie des astrologues (2006), and Studies in the History and Topography of Medieval

Constantinople (2007).
Andrew Marsham is Lecturer in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh. His
publications include Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First
Muslim Empire (2009).
Meredith L. D. Riedel is Assistant Professor of History of Christianity at Duke Divinity
School.
Chase F. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. He has written and edited several books, among which are
Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest (2000), Islamic Historiography (2003), and
The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to
Eleventh Centuries (2010).
Jonathan Shepard was formerly University Lecturer in Russian History at the University
of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse. He wrote, in collaboration with Simon Franklin,
The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (1996); was the editor of The Cambridge History of the
Byzantine Empire (2008); and recently published Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the
Balkans and East-Central Europe (2011).
Thomas Sizgorich was Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He was the author of Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant
Devotion in Christianity and Islam (2008). He died in 2011 after completing this
chapter.
David Taylor is the University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford,
and a Fellow of Wolfson College.
Charles West is Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, UK. His first book,
Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and
Moselle 800–1100 will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.


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Notes on the Contributors

John K. Whitmore is a Research Associate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
University of Michigan, USA, specializing in pre-modern Southeast Asian and Vietnamese history, and the author of a variety of articles in these areas.
Witold Witakowski is Associate Professor of Semitic Languages at Uppsala University,
Sweden. He specializes in Syriac and Ethiopian studies, and has published papers on both
Syriac and Ethiopian historiography.
Daniel Woolf (General Editor) is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Among his previous publications are A Global Encyclopedia of Historical
Writing (1998), The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), and A Global History of History
(2011).


Advisory Board
Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii
Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
Toyin Falola, University of Texas
Georg G. Iggers, State University of New York, Buffalo
Donald R. Kelley, Rutgers University
Tarif Khalidi, American University, Beirut
Christina Kraus, Yale University
Chris Lorenz, VU University Amsterdam
Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne
Jürgen Osterhammel, Universität Konstanz
Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna
Jörn Rüsen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen
Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi


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