On early modern historiography

sanjay Subrahmanyam

I.

Contrary to the prejudices of many influential European thinkers from the early nineteenth century onwards, perfectly recognisable forms of historiog­raphy - that is to say of the writing of history - had existed over very long periods of time and in many diverse societies, not only those of Europe, the Mediterranean, and China.

In the mid-1780s, when the German philosopher Hegel was still in his teens, a middle-aged historian in the southern Indian kingdom of Arcot completed a Persian history called Tuzak-i Walajahi.

What then does such a text - produced by a fairly ordinary Indo-Persian intellectual when the long shadow of colonial rule had begun to creep over the Indian subcontinent - look like? The Tuzak-i Walajahi is of course a family and dynastic history, and must therefore begin with the distant origins of the founder-figure's family in the Central Asian city of Bukhara, from where it was expelled by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The family then took refuge in northern India, emerging eventually from a milieu of minor provincial notables to occupy a position of prominence in the Mughal administration during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shahjahan in the middle of the seventeenth century.

But these struggles, as Burhan Khan was well aware, involved not just participants from the region or from the Mughal north. They also involved an important exotic group, the Europeans or Franks (firangiyan), a broad category that included both the English and the French, and was also sometimes designated as “hat-wearers” (kulah-poshan). The historian there­fore took it upon himself to provide the reader with at least some sense of what the European East India Companies were, and how this group of lowly merchants who had “made a covenant with their own padshah (emperor)” for the purposes of trade had now emerged as such formidable political actors. He noted that the Frankish groups (ahl-i Firang) on the coast of southern India were five in number, and that they had managed some 300 years earlier to replace the Arab traders who had once dominated this line of commerce. The chief innovator he mentions is a certain Columbus, “an expert in the science of astronomy and geometry (...) the first to understand the qualities of a magnet, the maker of the mariner's compass, who was well acquainted with the rules by which to find his way in all four directions at sea”. This man of genius, supported by the wife of the ruler of Spain, had written down all his discoveries, which included various islands and the American mainland.

Burhan Khan Handi, as we have already noted, was certainly not one of the great intellectuals of his age. He simply cannot measure up even to another of his Shi‘ite contemporaries with a taste for xenology, namely Tafazzul Husain Khan (1727-1800), who in the late 1780s translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into Arabic, while resident in Bengal. But it is precisely the ordinariness of Burhan Khan that may be the point. It implies that an exercise such as that of the Tuzak was actually within the reach of a broad range of intellectuals in South Asia at this time. But we must equally bear in mind that such works of a wide geographical scope existed within a diverse field of historiographical activity. As an inheritor of the long Mughal tradition of historical writing, Burhan Khan certainly had access to a number of key works from the preceding centuries. From hesitant beginnings in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Mughal historical works had bloomed especially in the period after about 1570. By the middle of the eighteenth century, we can not only obtain lists of such works in various courtly libraries and collections, but can even gain a sense of what was available for purchase on the manuscript market (since Persian entered into print only at the very end of that century). If one considers the English East India Company servant James Fraser, who was active in the western Indian port of Surat in the 1730s and 1740s, we gather that he was able to acquire a wide swathe of historiographical works for his personal use over a couple of decades.^[323] These included dynastic chronicles from the reigns of the emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan, but also other texts that ranged further in terms of ambition.

But these great imperial and dynastic works represent only a part of Indo­Persian historiography of the period. Other works focus on a single sub- dynastic figure, like the great patron and general ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan in the early seventeenth century; and some move easily between the genres of autobiography and history, like the texts of Asad Beg Qazwini and Bhimsen Saksena. Some authors eschew the scale of the empire or even the kingdom, and prefer to write works of local patriotism, including chorographies that focus on a single city or town. Moreover, it is frequently the case that authors do not specialise in a single sub-genre of historiography, but instead show considerable flexibility in moving from one type of text to another, at different moments in their careers and as a function of shifting patterns of patronage. It is therefore important to think constantly of each text in relation to others, and of each author as being in conversation with others, whether their contemporaries or their predecessors.

In order to understand how one arrives at such a moment in the late eighteenth century, a long intellectual excavation is necessary. In the following paragraphs, I shall present a somewhat schematic long view of evolution, beginning with some of the earliest works of “universal history”. Rather than take a single and conventional point of departure, namely that of classical Greek historiography in the form of authors such as Herodotus and his successor Thucydides (both fifth century bce), we may begin slightly later with a comparison of the complex and more or less contemporary figures of Polybius in the Mediterranean and Sima Qian in China. Polybius, heir to the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, was a rather long-lived Greek (as his very name suggests) under Roman domination in the 2nd century bce. A man of both the pen and the sword, we know that he himself participated actively in Roman campaigns against Carthage and other Mediterranean rivals. As a member of a subject people, Polybius seems to have had a particularly keen interest in understanding just how Roman hegemony had been established over such a vast space, and in such a short span of time. Thus, while working within a Greek intellectual tradition for the most part, he sought to place himself neither with the victors nor with the vanquished but at a vantage point above the two. As he wrote quite early in his work, The Histories:

My history possesses a certain distinctive quality which is related to the extraordinary spirit of the times in which we live, and it is this. Just as Fortune (tyche) has steered almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and forced them to converge upon one and the same goal, so it is the task of the historian to present to his readers under one synoptical view the process by which she has accomplished this general design. It was this phenomenon above all which originally attracted my attention.^[324]

To Polybius is often attributed the privilege of being the first practitioner of “universal history”. It is certainly a claim that he implicitly makes himself, noting that it is “the fact that none of my contemporaries have undertaken to write a general history” which has led him to take this task in hand. But what in fact does the adjective “universal” mean here? Certainly, Polybius does not cover the entire world known to the Romans, for that would have taken him considerably further east than he actually ventured, indeed at least as far as India - with which the Romans had extensive trade. Rather, it seems that “universal” here is meant to suggest the capacity to embrace at least two traditions, namely one's own and that of a complementary opposite. In other words, a universal history is one that is symmetrical in its conception, with one part being egoistical and the other xenological. The synopsis is thus one achieved between Self and Other, and does not imply by any means that the coverage of the history is “total” in some literal sense. This is a helpful point of departure from which to consider Sima Qian, who was born when Polybius was roughly sixty years of age.

Like Polybius, Sima Qian too combined the pen with the sword, and participated in the military campaigns of the emperor Wu against the Xiongnu in Central Asia. Like his father before him, he was employed by the state in the multiple capacities of astrologer, librarian and adviser; he also travelled exten­sively, and these travels left a mark on his major work, Shiji, which extends over some two thousand years of Chinese history. If Polybius's work repre­sents a curious version of the “vision of the vanquished” (to cite Nathan Wachtel's celebrated phrase), one cannot see Sima Qian as quite writing an official history either. Rather, we know that the historian was in and out of favour, and was imprisoned and rather severely punished because of suspicions cast on his political loyalties. Yet, even so, he maintains an interesting balance, in which the idea of a structuring Han imperial order remains more or less paramount.^[325] At the same time, the Xiongnu, who are ostensibly “barbarians”, are shown to have redeeming qualities of their own, and it is implied that their

way of life is in fact quite appropriate to their circumstances. Reading these historians from two very different traditions together, we can thus see both the common characteristics and the possible variations in ideas of “universal history” that were handed down from classical times.

As it turns out, the two authors in question had very different effects on the historiographies that followed them. Sima Qian was rapidly enshrined in the pantheon of great Chinese authors and continued to be cited and used as a model not only in China, but in the penumbra of the Chinese world, as we see for instance in Korea in the twelfth century. On the other hand, though Polybius was read and used by the likes of Cicero and Livy, he then passed into a relative oblivion for many centuries and had to be recovered as an author in the fifteenth century, in the context of the Italian Renaissance. However, whatever his fate as an individual author, the notion of the universal history that he had practised continued to resurface periodically in a Mediterranean context. In the sixth century ce, the encyclopaedic work of the churchman Isidore of Seville can be classified in this category. Though largely based on compiling earlier materials, this work began a tradition amongst Christian writers who followed in the footsteps of Isidore. As it happens, the dates of Isidore also coincide very closely with those tradition­ally attributed to the life of the Prophet Muhammad at the other extreme of the Mediterranean world. In effect, this represents a sort of notional passage of the historiographical baton, as it was really Muslim writers - above all in Arabic - who kept up the tradition and standard of universal histories in the centuries that followed. These writers in turn made use of earlier historio­graphical traditions in Greek and Syriac to build a considerable edifice.^[326] The first of the great names in this tradition is probably that of Abu Jafar al-Tabari, who lived in Baghdad in the late ninth and early tenth century ce. Tabari, who helped firmly establish the tradition that came to be known as tarikh, was concerned with both religious and secular traditions, as we gather from the title of his work: Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk (“History of Prophets and Kings”). Amongst his contributions is a preoccupation with the reliability of oral transmission, a matter of particular concern in relation to the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, but which could equally be extended to other forms of knowledge transmission. In the centuries that followed, Tabari would remain a crucial point of reference for all those with a pretension to writing history, both within the Arabic-speaking world and at its limits.

II.

An important centre, today all too often neglected, for the further spread and consolidation of this Islamic historiographical tradition, which extended progressively from Arabic into Persian, was Ghazna in Afghanistan in the tenth and eleventh centuries ce. It was here that the great intellectual from Kharizm, Abu Raihan al-Biruni, produced his Kitab al-Hind (“Book of India”), based on conversations and dealings with Brahmin intellectuals in northern India. It was equally in this broad context that the great verse-epic of Firdausi, the Shah Nama, was produced, and thus gave a major impetus to the reconstruction of the pre-Islamic past of the Iranian world. A third work of enormous significance that emerged from the same intellectual milieu was the Tarikh-i Mas ‘udi of Abu'l Fazl Baihaqi, which may be considered as one of the first truly monumental works of Perso-Islamic historiography.^[327] The consistent production of such works implied that as the centre of gravity of the Islamic world moved eastwards from Syria and the eastern Mediterra­nean, to Iraq and Baghdad, and eventually to Khorasan, the early dominance of Arabic eventually gave way to a situation where Persian too had to be given a proper place at the table. To be sure, Arabophone writers often grumbled at this, considering Persian itself to be intrinsically inferior, and Persophone writers to be given to inveterate embellishment and fantasy. But the establishment of the Sultanate of Delhi in around 1200 ce only helped to consolidate the hold of Persian amongst Muslim literati in the eastern part of the Islamic world, as we see from the composition of texts like the Tabaqat-i Nasiri of Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, and the Taj al-Ma’asir of Hasan Nizami.

The point of no return was probably passed on account of Mongol dominance in a good part of the Islamic world in the thirteenth century ce. The collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 had already been prefigured by close contacts between the expanding Mongols and the world of Baghdad. It has been remarked by modern historians that already in the 1230s and 1240s, the notables of Khorasan had begun to flirt with the new great power; some became teachers to the Mongol princes, while others learnt Mongolian as well as the Uighur script. After 1258, a steady traffic came to be established between Iran and China through the Mongol corridor.^[328] This is visible not only in ceramics and textiles, but in the rich illustrations of the most important of the universal histories produced at the time, namely Rashid-ud­Din Fazlullah Hamadani's Persian work Jami‘ al-Tawarikh. This work was composed by a figure of great importance, possessing medical skills, as well as those of the chancery, and known during his lifetime as a great political manipulator. Rashid-ud-Din did eventually overplay his hand, and ended his life on the scaffold in August 1318. But by this time, he had managed to produce a work of vast ambition. Begun under the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan in the 1290s, the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh would be completed in the 1310s; the later sections, completed under Ghazan' s successor Oljeitu, include a notable part on Europe, or the world of the Franks. This section is made up of a political and geographical description, with a fairly scrupulous account of European institutions, and it also used the writings of the Dominican bishop Martin of Troppau to produce a broad chronological narrative of European history. In addition, Rashid-ud-Din also made sure to include materials, often of quite superior quality, concerning India, China and the Mongols before their conversion to Islam, and here he drew both on the Indo-Persian chroniclers and his own immediate predecessors in the western Mongol milieu such as ‘Ata Malik Juwaini.

This Persian historiographical efflorescence of the early fourteenth century effectively sets the stage for the next great leap, namely that of the Timurid historiographical revolution.^[329] Composed in its first stages of works like Yazdi's Zafar Nama, built around the career of the celebrated conqueror Amir Timur (d. 1405), this revolution then continued with successive gener­ations of his descendants, culminating in a last substantial burst at the very end of the fifteenth century in the city of Herat, ruled over by Sultan Husain Baiqara. Among the central figures of this tradition is Hafiz-i Abru (d. 1430), who worked at the court of Mirza Shahrukh and produced an impressive number of quite diverse works. Of these, one that has attracted particular attention is his Jughrafiya, a work combining history, geography and cartog­raphy. Though drawing on earlier works in Arabic, Hafiz-i Abru extended them considerably, and included detailed and varied information on the parts of the eastern Islamic worlds that he knew well, often because he had travelled there himself. However, for our purposes, the most substantial work written in Herat came two generations later: this was the Rauzat al-Safa of Mir Khwand (d. 1498), a work of universal history that extends its ambitions from the world of pre-Islamic Iran, to a detailed history of the prophets of the Abrahamic tradition, and continues with the deeds of the Muslim Caliphs, and various dynasties down to its author's times. This particular work would have a far-reaching influence, extending as far as the Ottoman court (where both Rashid-ud-Din and Mir Khwand were read, as were many other Central Asian authors writing in Persian), and that of the Mughals in northern India, but even beyond the limits of the world of Islam. When European collectors in the sixteenth century began their first attempts to constitute a body of Persian materials, it was often to Mir Khwand that they turned as offering a relatively coherent and comprehensive chronology.

We can gather this from a close reading of a somewhat unexpected text, namely the official sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicle of Joao de Barros (c.1496-1570).^[330] As we are aware, Barros was not merely a historian but an author in a number of different areas and genres, ranging from panegyrics and grammars, to polemical and allegorical works, to a curious chivalric romance which he (like his Castilian contemporary Fernandez de Oviedo) wrote as a relatively young man in around 1520, called the Cronica do emperador Clarimundo. His chief work for our purposes is however Da Asia (“Of Asia”), a work which claimed in its subtitle to deal with “the deeds (dos feitos) that the Portuguese did in the discovery and conquest of the seas and lands of the Orient”. Divided following a well-known classical model, that of Livy, into ten book-long segments, the work is sometimes therefore known as the Decadas da Asia; its first three volumes appeared in print during Barros's lifetime, in 1552, 1553 and 1563, but the fourth was only cobbled together posthumously from manuscript fragments by a later editor and eventually appeared in 1615. This is how Barros begins the first chapter of the first Decada, entitled: “Of how the Moors came to capture Spain; and after Portugal was entitled a kingdom, how its Kings launched themselves over­seas, where they went on to conquer, both in the parts of Africa, and in Asia: and the reason for the title of this work.”

There having arisen in the land of Arabia that great Anti-Christ Mafamede [Muhammad], more or less in the year 593 of Our Redemption, he so worked the fury of his iron, and the fire of his infernal sect by means of his captains and caliphs, that in the space of a hundred years they conquered in Asia, all of Arabia, and part of Syria, and Persia; and in Africa all of Egypt before and beyond the Nile. And as the Arabs write in their Tarigh, which is a summary of deeds which their caliphs accomplished in the conquest of those parts of the Orient, at the same time there arose from there and advanced great numbers of them in order to populate these [lands] of the west, which they call Algarb, and we corrupt into Algarve, beyond the straits; and with the force of their arms they devastated and laid waste the lands, and made themselves lords of the greater part of Mauretania Tingitana, in which is included the kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, though at this time our Europe had not felt the persecution of this plague.¹⁰

At various moments in his text, Barros returns to this same Tarigh. At one point, he states that he has largely been “following what the Persians and Arabs write in their Tarigh (...) which we have in our power in the Persian language”; at another moment in his text, he refers to the “General Chronicle of the Persians, which is the Tarigh of which we made mention in the beginning, which we possess together with other volumes of history and Persian cosmography from those parts”. Again, in a brief digression on the origins and long history of chess, he mentions “a book written in Persian called Tarigh, which we have had translated into our language, which is a summary of all the kings that have been in Persia until a certain time when the Arabs with their sect of Mafamede subjugated it”. All these references turn out to be directed precisely towards Mir Khwand's work, the Tarikh-i Rauzat al-Safa. To be sure, Barros did not possess the erudition to read the text in the original Persian; rather he clearly had a translation - or rather more probably, a digest - made for him. In a similar vein, profiting from his privileged connection with the Portuguese Casa da India (or India House), Barros seems to have acquired a swathe of material from Kilwa on the Swahili coast, from Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf, from Vijayanagara in southern India, and even from China. In each case, he either had summaries made, or - as in the case of Chinese - acquired a slave to help him cope with the texts. Unfortunately for us, Barros's library was dispersed at his death, and not even a catalogue of its precise contents exists.

It would seem that Barros was rather unusual among the Iberian chronic­lers of his time in his desire to approach history through philology, however approximate his methods may have been. His well-known contemporary Fernao Lopes de Castanheda used the official Portuguese archives liberally, but did not venture beyond them while writing his history; and Barros's successor as official chronicler, Diogo do Couto, in fact made far more extensive use of oral materials than is usually recognised. Across the political divide, in Castile, matters were posed in different terms on account of a

1^o Joao de Barros, DaAsia, Decada ι (Lisbon: Livraria Sam Carlos, 1973), Book ι, ch. 1, pp. 1-3. simple fact: in the course of building their empire in America, the Castilians did not encounter a massive body of written textual materials as the Portuguese did in the Indian Ocean. Therefore, the most important of the Castilian chroniclers of the conquest, such as Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Fernandez de Oviedo and then Lopez de Gomara, drew either upon personal experience, written materials in Castilian, or passed into the domain of orality to enter tentatively into the world of indigenous materials. However, as the languages of Mesoamerica gradually came to be written in romanized form (as with the celebrated Nahuatl codex produced under the supervision of Fray Bernardino de Sahagun), some of these materials eventually came to be incorporated into Castilian histories of the Americas. Even so, if we take an official chronicler who may be seen as the Castilian equivalent of Barros - such as Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, author of the Historia general del mundo del tiempo del Rey Felipe ιι, el prudente (“General History of the World at the Time of King Philip II, the Prudent”), published in two volumes in 1600 and 1606 - we note a clear gap between the methods of the two. Herrera is far less interested than Barros in philology, and far more traditional in both his methods and his concerns.¹¹

By the late 1550s, the existence of a published body of such histories in Portuguese and Castilian emboldened even private individuals without privileged access to official materials and documents to try their hand at composing grand histories. One of these was Antonio Galvao, a former colonial official in Asia and author of a somewhat eccentric work entitled the Tratado dos Descobrimentos (“Treatise on the Discoveries”). Galvao decided to depart from his contemporaries on two very substantial counts. First, he took it upon himself to treat “the ancient and modern discoveries that have been made to the year 1550”, and then went on to divide his work broadly into two parts, the first extending from ancient times to the late fifteenth century, and the second from the late fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. Second, with regard to the period from 1400 to 1550, Galvao organised his work in an annalistic form, where the activities of various nations - and not merely the Portuguese - were treated. Thus, for the year 1496-7, we get an account as much of the deeds of Sebastian Cabot, as of ^[331] Christopher Columbus, as of Vasco da Gama. In the 1510s, the activities of the Portuguese in Melaka and the Moluccas are juxtaposed with the arrival of Hernan Cortes in Mexico-Tenochtitlan; and in the 1530s, the arrival of the Spaniards under the Pizarro brothers in the Andes is discussed as part of the same panorama as Galvao’s own presence in the fortress of Ternate in the Moluccas. In sum, for the purposes of Antonio Galvao, the history of the discoveries was a movement by which the Pacific anti-meridian that had theoretically been defined during the Luso-Castilian negotiations of the 1490s was progressively attained by means of an expansion in two directions, to the west by the Castilians and to the east by the Portuguese. Somewhat oddly, this seems to be a world view in which the imagined centre lies in fact in the Moluccas, where Galvao had spent four years of his life. Galvao thus concludes his text as follows.

From all this, what I have arrived at is that the globe (a redondeza) is of 360 degrees, in keeping with its geometry, which the ancients claimed were 17 and a half leagues each, which makes a total of 6300. The moderns state that the degree is 16 and two-third leagues, which gives us 6000 leagues in all. However, I hold that a degree is 17 leagues wide, so that the circumfer­ence of the earth is 6200 leagues. Whatever be the case, all of it is now discovered from west to east, more or less following the sun, but it is quite different in the north-south direction, for to the north not all that much has been discovered beyond 77 or 78 degrees of latitude, making up about 1300 leagues. And to the south, some 900 leagues, for about 52 or 53 degrees have been discovered, with the Strait through which Magalhaes [Magellan] passed, and together these make up 2200 leagues, and if one subtracts this from 6200, one can say that 4000 leagues remain to be discovered.¹²

Galvao’s view is thus very much a geo-historical one, and is based on a combination of his own personal experience in Southeast Asia, and his at times rather indiscriminate reading. At one remove from the Iberian peninsula, other authors of the same broad time period based themselves purely on a synthesis of the materials that had begun to appear in print by the mid-sixteenth century, in Castilian, Portuguese and Italian. The great multi-volume compendium by Giambattista Ramusio, Delle navigazioni e viaggi (“Of Navigations and Voyages”), had an enormous impact upon its publication in the 1550s, as we see even in east-central Europe. We may point there to the example of the prolific if controversial Polish historian Marcin Bielski (1495-1575), who composed a text Kronika tho iesth Historya swiata (“Chronicle of the Whole World”), which claimed to treat the history of the world from the earliest times, and was divided into six periods.¹³ By the time of the second and third editions of his work (respectively of 1554 and 1564), Bielski was able to draw upon information concerning both Asia and America from a variety of printed works. He also incorporated a cosmographic section, as well as one on islands that formed a part of his Book ιv.1⁴ Despite its somewhat eccentric quality, a feature it shared with Galvao’s Tratado, this work seems to have enjoyed a great deal of popularity through the latter half of the sixteenth century. However, his readers may not have been aware that the rather censorious Bielski at times made radical decisions to excise materials from the sources on which he drew, and that he had a marked preference for the activities of the Portuguese in Asia over those of the Spaniards in America.¹⁵

Nor should we imagine that the circulation of these Iberian and Italian materials ceased at the imaginary frontier between Christendom and the world of Islam. By the second half of the sixteenth century (and in some instances even earlier), some members of the Ottoman elite and literary circles also proved to be eager consumers of such works. Though its author’s identity remains a mystery, a late sixteenth-century work like the Tarikh-i Hind-i Gharbi (“The History of the Western Indies”) is clearly based on sources such as Lopez de Gomara’s chronicle and the works of Pietro Martir d’Anghiera. While this text recounts to an Ottoman readership what the nature of the new lands that the Spanish Crown had found to the west was, other roughly contemporary chronicles like that of Seyfi Qelebi were able to provide some significant details concerning parts of the Indian Ocean, such as the Mughal domains or the Sumatran Sultanate of Aceh.¹⁶ Eventually, in the seventeenth century, Katib Qelebi (1609-57) was even in a position to produce a grand synthesis on a world scale, in the form of the Cihan Numa (“Mirror of the World”), an ambitious work replete with maps of China,

Japan and the Philippines, as well as other curious information, and which was one of the first Ottoman texts to enter into print in 1729.¹⁷

III.

By roughly 1600, then, we may discern a move in a variety of locations to a different set of forms of large-scale history that draw upon but also distin­guish themselves from the received tradition of “universal history”. A part of this production is directly linked to projects of empire building, as we see with Barros and Herrera, and as would be the case with Richard Hakluyt and others in England as the sixteenth century drew to a close. With the passage of time, even some amongst the conquered people began to participate in this enterprise, as we see from the remarkable case of Domingo Francisco de San Anton Munon Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (1579-c.1650), from Chalco in central Mexico.¹⁸ Chimalpahin, though he was perfectly conver­sant with Spanish, nevertheless chose to write in Nahuatl, and was the author, compiler, copyist and translator of a large number of texts. One of these contains a section on “how the lands of the world are divided”, and here, Chimalpahin informs us at the outset that “all the lands of this world that have been discovered until now are divided into four parts”, namely Europe, Asia, Africa and the “New World” (for which he uses the Nahua neologism Yancuic Cemanahuac). Obviously, Chimalpahin draws here on his knowledge of materials provided by his interactions with the Spaniards. Thus, in his brief description of Asia, he writes that it “has always been much discussed by writers, because it was here that the first great kingdoms and lordships that there were in the world existed, and had their beginnings, which were ruled over by the Assyrians, the Persians and the Medeans. It is also often mentioned in the holy scriptures, because it was here that Adam, the first man, was created by God Our Lord; and in the same way, Christ, Our Saviour, was born there, and he suffered there to save us.” We then find mentions of one part of Asia dominated by the Grand Duke of Muscovy; a second is ruled over by the Great Khan, Emperor of the Tartars; a third is ruled over by the Turk (where the holy city of Jerusalem may be found); a fourth is ruled over by “a great king called the Sofi, King of Persia”;

1 ⁷ See Gottfried Hagen, "Uberzeitlichkeit und Geschichte in Katib Celebis Gihannuma", Archivum Ottomanicum, vol. xιv, 1995-6: 133-59.

1 ⁸ Domingo Chimalpahin, Las ocho relaciones y el memorial de Colhuacan, ed. and trans. Rafael Tena (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998), pp. 64-70. and “the fifth and last part of Asia [which] is formed by Portuguese India and Great China”. ChimalpahiAs extensive work may be set side by side with other writings by indigenous American writers such as the Andean nobleman Felipe de Guaman Poma de Ayala (c.1535-1616), who for his part preferred to write in Castilian rather than Quechua. Where Guaman Poma was more concerned to elaborate a moral critique of the failings of Spanish rule, in relation to his own ideas of good and proper government, Chimalpahin's writings are notable for their wide curiosity and range, where events from France to Japan find a place.

These historians and their writings may properly be placed under the category of forced acculturation, produced under conditions of imperial domination. But elsewhere, the context for new and creative forms of xenology and translation was simply inter-imperial rivalry. Everywhere in the Asian world where Europeans posed a threat, from Mughal India to Japan, at least some intellectuals in the seventeenth century sought to understand their history and their origins. An excellent example from the Mughal court is Maulana ‘Abdus Sattar's work Ahwal-i Firangistan or Samrat ul-Falasifa, completed in the latter half of 1603, late in the reign of the emperor Akbar. ‘Abdus Sattar makes it clear that he was more or less commissioned to produce the work by the emperor himself.

He gave the order to learn the language of the Franks (zaban-i Firangi), to gain a knowledge of the secrets of that community, their rulers, and the philosophers of Yunan [Greece] and Latin [Rome] according to their own books, and render them into Persian. Thus, what had remained hidden from sight on account of the strangeness of their language, and distance, should be brought forth in our own springtime (...). I took this order of the Shadow of God as a divine order. I raised the skirt of my courage and became totally dedicated, and began to frequent a Padre by name Jeronimo Xavier, one of the select amongst the knowledgeable persons of the Franks who had recently arrived and kissed the threshold. I determined to learn and to have a command over that language. Since I had total dedication and since I was inspired by the emperor more and more every day, in six months I acquired the ability and strength to comprehend practical and scientific (‘ilmi) matters in that language. Because I have spent most of the time in producing translations, and did not have the opportunity to speak much, I still am not capable of conversation.¹⁹

1 ⁹ Citation in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 270-1. ‘Abdus Sattar thus constructed his own version of the history of Europe from ancient times, drawing on whatever materials the Jesuits at the Mughal court would give him access to. The chief written source he drew upon seems to have been Antonio Pierozzi or St Antoninus (1389-1459), the celebrated Dominican friar who had become Archbishop of Florence. But rather than Antoninus's best-known theological works, ‘Abdus Sattar made use of his three-volume Summa Historialis or Chronicon partibus tribus distincta ab initio mundi ad 1360 which had appeared between 1474 and 1479, and been reprinted several times thereafter in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Using this and some other works, the Mughal intellectual was able to piece together a narrative history of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as a more patchy history of medieval Europe.

‘Abdus Sattar's enterprise can justifiably be compared with that of his contemporary in central Europe, Johannes Leunclavius, or Hans Lowenklau (1541-94), who was to publish first the Annales Sultanorum Othmanidarum, and then the Historiae Musulmanae Turcorum, de monumentis ipsonum exscriptae.²⁰ Lowenklau had spent time as a diplomat in the Ottoman Empire, and had been in close touch with a Hungarian renegade called Tarjuman Murad. Using the latter's help, he was able to obtain and work on a number of key Ottoman narrative sources, including Maulana Mehmed Negri's Kitab-i Cihan- numa. In turn, Lowenklau's work would have a long posterity; it was one of the chief sources for what became one of the most celebrated European works on the Ottomans in the seventeenth century, namely Richard Knol- les's The Generall Historie of the Turkes, which appeared in 1603. Despite the absence of evidence of any direct influence, we may see Lowenklau as continuing the line of philological-historical enquiry begun by Barros in Portugal with two evident differences: Barros was clearly far wider in his interests and capacity to gather diverse materials, and Lowenklau was by far the more serious and rigorous in his philological endeavours. This work concerning the Islamic world in particular would then be consolidated by many hands in the course of the seventeenth century, notably in central Europe, the Low Countries, France, and Britain. Substantial collections of materials in Ottoman, Arabic and Persian would be constituted, analysed and at times translated into Latin or the European vernaculars. This would thus permit the gradual emergence of the conditions to allow a more carefully

Pal Acs, “Pro Turcis and contra Turcos: Curiosity, Scholarship and Spiritualism in Turkish Histories by Johannes Lowenklau (1541-1594)”, Acta Comeniana, No. 25, 2011: 25-45. crafted and empirically nuanced history written by Europeans, but extending far beyond the limits of Europe.

Yet, these large-scale histories were certainly not welcomed everywhere, nor did they ever become the dominant current in the early modern period. For example, the Russian court of Ivan ιv in the sixteenth century certainly witnessed a great expansion in historical writing, with the core work being the so-called Litsevoi svod (“Personal Collection”) created in the 1570s, in the form of a chronicle with drawings. Of its ten volumes, the first three dealt with a form of universal history, and drew heavily on the earlier Khronograf, while the following six volumes treated the centuries of Russian history extending from 1114 to 1569, and the last volume eventually dealt with Ivan's own reign. But this history writing remained heavily circumscribed, not merely on account of its dependence on earlier Byzantine sources, but also because - unlike in the Polish or even Hungarian cases - it would seem that Russian historians of the period remained largely indifferent to the explicit use of great compendia and works produced elsewhere such as those of Ramusio, Oviedo or Barros. Yet, once again, we cannot assume this to be a generalised indifference across the intellectual culture, for as it has been argued from a study of cartography, for example, even chorographic works consistently describe Muscovy as “in between”, with the referents being Europe, Asia and America, or Europe and China. In other words, history was only one form through which knowledge of the world at large could be accumulated and also filtered.

A somewhat similar argument can be made for China. Here too, there is certainly little doubt on the nature of transformations in terms of geograph­ical knowledge, and numerous works exist for example on the reception in both China and Japan of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's “Map of All the Countries of the World” of 1602. In the Japanese case, a scholar of the subject has written “it is no exaggeration to say that almost fifty percent of all world maps published in Japan during the seclusion [after 1640] were, directly or indirectly, Ricci's progeny”.²¹ In the case of Ming China, written reflections in a xenological mode suggest that, while knowledge of the distant world and its past was available to literati, they did not choose for the most part to shift the terms of either existing dynastic histories or universal histories to

²¹ Shintaro Ayusawa, “Geography and Japanese Knowledge of World Geography”, Mon­umenta Nipponica, vol. xιx, Nos. 3-4, 1964: 275-94. For a more general discussion, see Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Toku­gawa Period (1603-1868) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). accommodate this knowledge. The cartographic work of the Jesuit Giulio Alenio, produced in the early 1620s, certainly provided the Chinese literati with a rather idealised picture of Europe, and also attempted in passing to cover the Indian Ocean world, Africa, and even Peru and Mexico. Yet, whatever Alenio’s influence on geographers, Chinese historians tended as a rule to regard his work with disdain and suspicion, and the Ming Annals do not bear many traces of this sort of knowledge. On the other hand, the textual knowledge associated with the fifteenth-century Ming expeditions of Zheng He was copied into collections compiled in the 1520s or 1530s, and continued to be printed even in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Thus, early Ming direct knowledge concerning India, Sri Lanka and even Mecca was certainly not forgotten, but rather constantly repro­duced, while materials concerning the western and southwestern fringes of China were also gradually being collected. This may be contrasted with the relative indifference shown by Chinese historians - as opposed to their geographers and cartographers - to the history of Europe and, a fortiori, America.

To conclude, the early modern centuries saw a substantial transformation at various scales and levels in terms of historiographical practice. This chapter has largely concerned itself with only one of these: that of history written on a larger scale than that of a single kingdom, or polity. To be sure, defenders of the sort of “perfect history” practised in France around 1600 usu­ally looked with disdain at such large histories, preferring the comfortable frameworks that they had inherited. But even they were aware that there were other modes of history that were emerging around them, correspond­ing to the new geographies that those same centuries had thrown up. Now, debates in the past few decades on the origins of “world history” or “global history” have often tended to look back no further than the early twentieth century, and the writings of recent historians such as Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. A few other writers, more ambitious in their horizons, have taken matters as far back as the German and Scandinavian contributions to the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, in the form of philo- logically inclined Aufklarers such as August Ludwig Schlozer, known for his prolific contributions to a form of Weltgeschichte.^[332] Yet by a striking paradox, a mere generation after Schlozer, Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte, 1830-1; published 1837), famously wrote that “though the recent discoveries of the treasures of Indian Literature have shown us what a reputation the Hindoos have acquired in Geometry, Astronomy, and Algebra (...) we find the department of History altogether neglected, or rather non-existent. For History requires Under­standing - the power of looking at an object in an independent objective light, and comprehending it in its rational connection with other objects. Those peoples therefore are alone capable of History, and of prose generally, who have arrived at that period of development (and can make that their starting point) at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e., possess self-consciousness.” By means of such sweeping judgments, and furthermore by generalising such views to much of the non-European world, Hegel and those who followed in his footsteps not only wiped the slate clean with regard to the complex historiographical experiments of the previous three centuries, but inaugurated a form of amnesia that melded all too well with the cultural presuppositions of the high European imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[333] The fog of this amnesia is yet to be fully dispersed.

further reading

Adorno, Rolena, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986).

Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

Brownlee, John S., Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600-1945: The Age of the Gods and Emperor Jinmu (University of Tokyo Press, 1997).

Elman, Benjamin, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Fleischer, Cornell H., Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600) (Princeton University Press, 1986).

Grafton, Anthony, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cam­bridge University Press, 2007).

Guha, Ranajit, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Kagan, Richard L., Clio & the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Moyn, Samuel, and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

Ng, On-cho, and Edward Q. Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

Popper, Nicholas S., Walter Ralegh's “History of the World” and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Quinn, Sholeh A., Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas: Ideology, Imitation and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2000).

Rao, Velcheru Narayana, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (New York: Other Books, 2003).

Reill, Peter Hanns, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975).

Sahin, Kaya, Empire and Power in the Reign of Suleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Intertwined Histories: Cronica and TdrIkh in the Sixteenth­Century Indian Ocean World”, History and Theory, vol. xnx, No. 4 (Theme Issue), 2010: 118-45.

“On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century”, Representations, No. 91, Fall 2005: 26-57. Woods, John E., “The Rise of Timurid Historiography”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. xLvι, No. 2, 1987: 81-108.

Woolf, Daniel R., A Global History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2001).