About

Sources

Every citation on this site resolves to an item in this list, and the build fails if one does not. 440 works, cited across 277 narrative polities, 50 reference polities and 325 succession edges.

• A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

  A. B. Bosworth, the Alexander historian, not C. E. Bosworth, whose works on the Islamic dynasties are also cited here.

  ab-bosworth-1988

• A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013)

  peacock-yildiz-2013

• A. H. Hill, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, in Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1960) link

  The Pasai chronicle in romanised Malay with an English translation and a long introduction, scanned in full and readable at the URL. Hill sets out the north Sumatran background from the Chinese records and Marco Polo, argues against Snouck Hurgronje's dismissal of the text as a children's tale, and traces the single surviving manuscript from a Javanese regent's library in Demak to the Royal Asiatic Society in London.

  hill-1960

• Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017)

  A thousand pages from the Safavid revolution to 2009 by a specialist in the nineteenth century, layering ideology, economy and the arts over the dynastic narrative. Cited for the Qajar record, where the political history alone would make the century look like a list of concessions.

  amanat-2017

• Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi, Tarikh es-Soudan (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1900)

  A Timbuktu chronicle finished about 1655 by a man who held office under the Moroccan pashalik and whose family lived through its arrival. For the Songhai empire and the Moroccan conquest of 1591 it is the central source and a local one: al-Sadi is writing about the destruction of his own city's world by a government he then worked for, which shows in what he chooses to record and in what he declines to say plainly. Out of copyright.

  tarikh-es-soudan-houdas

• Abd. Rahman, Indigenous Populations, Plantations, and Agrarian Conflicts in Rural North Maluku during the Colonial Period from the 17th to the 20th Century (IHiS (Indonesian Historical Studies) 8 (1), 1-25, 2024)

  Cited for the 1910 "korte verklaring" that stripped the sultans of Ternate, Tidore and Bacan of their personal land rights (aha kolano), the early-1900s Halmahera uprisings against continued Dutch monopoly control (Jailolo 1876, Kao 1904, Loloda 1906-1909, Galela 1906-1907, Jailolo 1914), and the 1998 and 2006 land disputes over the Ternate sultanate's former holdings after Suharto's fall. Open access.

  rahman-2024

• Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873, in Eastern African Studies (James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1987)

  An economic history of the Zanzibar empire from the East African side rather than the Arabian one, and the standard account of the two transformations it turned on: slaves used to grow cloves for export instead of being the export, and an ivory frontier pushed to the Great Lakes. It is cited here so that the Omani empire's economy is described by somebody writing about the people it was imposed on.

  sheriff-1987

• Abu Nasr al-Utbi, The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical Memoirs of the Amir Sabaktagin and the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (Oriental Translation Fund, 1858)

  A secretary in Ghaznavid service writing about his own employers, in rhymed Arabic prose so ornamented that the translator complains about it in the preface and the reader has to work to get the event out of the sentence. It is a panegyric and makes no pretence otherwise: Indian kings are "the accursed", every Ghaznavid decision is generous, and victory is always the fulfilment of a Qur'anic promise. What makes it indispensable anyway is that al-Utbi was there or knew the men who were, and that he records the terms of treaties, the composition of armies and the arguments inside the Ghaznavid camp, including the ones his patrons lost. Reynolds translated the Persian version rather than the Arabic original. Out of copyright.

  utbi-reynolds

• Abu Salih the Armenian, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries (Clarendon Press, 1895)

  A thirteenth-century survey of the Christian buildings of Egypt, with chapters on Nubia and Ethiopia appended, compiled by a writer whose own name is uncertain. The Egyptian material is first-hand and the Nubian is not: he does not say where he got it, and it arrives mixed with folklore about invisible harvesters and mountains whose water cannot be reached. It is nonetheless the fullest description of Christian Nubia from outside it, and Evetts and Butler's notes set it against the other Arabic geographers. Out of copyright.

  abu-salih-evetts

• Adolphus Slade, Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea with the Capitan Pacha (Saunders and Otley, London, 1854)

  A British naval officer who arrived in 1829, during the Russian war, went to sea with the Ottoman fleet and later served in it for seventeen years. He is the closest thing to an embedded observer of Mahmud II's new army in its first years, three years after the destruction of the janissaries. He is opinionated, hostile to Russia, condescending about almost everyone, and convinced the reforms were being done the wrong way — which is why he records the detail that supports the case, and why the detail has to be read as evidence for a thesis he already held. Out of copyright.

  slade-1854

• Afonso de Albuquerque the younger, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, Part IV (Hakluyt Society, 1884)

  The commander's own son compiled these from his father's papers, and they are a defence of him as much as a record. What they are unusually good at is the texture of an operation going wrong: the failed assault on Aden in 1513 is described in detail the author had no motive to invent, down to whose ladders broke and why. Read for the mechanics rather than the judgements, which are those of a man arguing his father's case against the Portuguese court. Out of copyright.

  albuquerque-birch

• Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (Columbia University, 1916)

  Compiled in the ninth century from earlier authorities, and organised as a province-by-province account of how each place came under Muslim rule and on what terms. Its interest is that it is not written as a story: it is written as a dossier, because the tax status of a district in the ninth century depended on what had been agreed in the seventh, and Baladhuri records the competing versions, the documents, and the objections to them. Hitti's translation of the first part is out of copyright and complete.

  baladhuri-futuh

• Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan), Part II (Columbia University, 1924)

  The continuation Hitti did not translate, covering the eastern provinces: the Jibal, Adharbaijan, Basra, Khuzistan, Fars and Kirman, Sijistan and Kabul, Khurasan and Sind. Where Hitti's volume carries the Syrian campaign, this one carries the decade after Nihawand, and it is the better source for what the reduction of the Iranian plateau actually consisted of: raids launched from a garrison and returning to it, districts taken by force or by capitulation on stated terms, and covenants broken and re-imposed under a later governor. Out of copyright.

  baladhuri-murgotten

• Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (Oriental Translation Fund, 1843)

  A seventeenth-century Maghribi compilation that preserves long verbatim extracts from Andalusi historians whose own works are lost, which is what makes it usable: Gayangos translates the quotations and names the authority for each. Cited here for the destruction of Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahra in the civil war after 1009, where the eyewitness testimony comes through Ibn al-Raqiq. Out of copyright.

  maqqari-gayangos

• al-Masudi, Les Prairies d'or, volume II (Imprimerie Impériale, Paris, 1863)

  A Baghdadi geographer and traveller writing in 943, in the French translation printed with the Arabic. His chapter on the Caucasus and the Caspian is the fullest contemporary description of the Khazar state there is: the capital, the confessional courts, the Muslim guard and the terms of its service. He did not go to Atil himself and says where he is reporting rather than observing; he is also a compiler who prints what he was told and leaves inconsistencies standing. Out of copyright.

  masudi-meynard

• al-Masudi, El-Mas'udi's Historical Encyclopaedia, entitled 'Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems', Volume I (Oriental Translation Fund, 1841)

  The first volume of the same work translated into English, and the only one Sprenger completed. It carries the geographical books, including the account of the Caspian, the Caucasus and Bab al-Abwab as they stood in the 930s and 940s — who held which mountain kingdom, which of them paid the Shirvanshah and which did not, and the arrival of the Rus fleet in a sea no fleet had ever entered. Sprenger annotates heavily and disagrees with his author in the notes, sometimes rightly. Out of copyright.

  masudi-sprenger

• Ali Haydar Midhat, The Life of Midhat Pasha: A Record of His Services, Political Reforms, Banishment, and Judicial Murder, Derived from Private Documents and Reminiscences (John Murray, London, 1903)

  A biography of the architect of the 1864 provincial law and the 1876 constitution, written by his son from Midhat's own papers and the reminiscences of men who served under him — an insider's account rather than a disinterested one, and it reads in places as a brief for the defence of a father judicially murdered by Abdulhamid II in 1884. Used here for the administrative detail of the Danube vilayet reforms, which the son had the documents to give in specifics: council structures, road and bridge counts, the schools project and how it was killed. Out of copyright.

  midhat-1903

• Ali ibn al-Hasan al-Khazraji, The Pearl-Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1906)

  The Rasulid dynasty's own chronicle, by a man who lived at the court of its seventh sultan alongside Firuzabadi, the chief judge of the kingdom and author of the great Arabic dictionary. It is a court history and reads like one — the sultan is divinely aided on every page — but it is also a dated register of a working state: revenue circuits, appointments, the court's seasonal move between Ta'izz and Zabid, famines and revolts, often day by day. It stops in 1400, sixty years before the dynasty fell, because the author died in 1409. Translated from what was then a unique manuscript by a British lexicographer who says in his preface that his interest was Aden's bygone fortunes as the empire's coaling station. Out of copyright.

  khazraji-redhouse

• Alphonse Rousseau, Annales tunisiennes, ou aperçu historique sur la régence de Tunis (Bastide, Algiers, 1864)

  A French consular interpreter's history of Ottoman Tunis, compiled from the Tunisian chroniclers Ibn Abi Dinar, al-Wazir and Hajj Husayn Khoja, whom he names as he goes. Cited here for the Ottoman capture of Tunis and the administration Sinan Pasha left behind it. Written in Algiers under the French occupation by a man in the service of it, and the contempt for what he is describing is on the surface rather than hidden; his figures come from his chroniclers and he prints the ones that disagree. Out of copyright.

  rousseau-1864

• Ameen Rihani, Arabian Peak and Desert: Travels in al-Yaman (Constable, 1930)

  A Lebanese-American writer who travelled through Yemen in 1922 and was received by Imam Yahya at Sana'a, four years after the Ottoman withdrawal and while the imamate was governing an independent country. He is a partisan of Arab self-rule and says so, which is why the book is worth reading: he admires the imam and still records the hostage system, the retained Ottoman officers, the uncultivated land and the sectarian war against the Shafi'is of the Tihama, and argues with his own subject about all of it. His figures come from what he was told on the road and should be read as such. Out of copyright.

  rihani-1930

• Amira K. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

  bennison-2016

• Ammianus Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (Bohn, 1902)

  A Greek-speaking staff officer of the Roman army writing in Latin in the 380s, the last major historian of the empire before its western half went. His geographical digressions describe the provinces as an officer saw them — which cities were fortified, what the country produced, how it had been acquired — and are cited here for what the Nabataean kingdom had become two and a half centuries after it stopped existing. Out of copyright.

  ammianus-yonge

• Andre Ourednik and contributors, historical-basemaps: Historical country boundary GeoJSON link

  Map polygons only. Never a source for a measure. See hard rule 5: areas computed from these polygons are not published as figures.

  historical-basemaps

• Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2006)

  newman-2006

• Andrew M. Smith II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (Oxford University Press, 2013)

  Reads Palmyra from its own inscriptions and archaeology as a community that built a state, rather than as the backdrop to thirteen famous years. The emphasis matters for this site: the caravan city is the polity, and Zenobia is what it did once.

  smith-2013

• Andy Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals, in The Peoples of Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

  The first book in English on the North African kingdom, and explicitly a reinterpretation: against the reading of the Vandals as a raiding band that destroyed a province, Merrills and Miles describe a state with a fiscal apparatus, a court literature and a foreign policy. This site's Vandal institutions are coded from it.

  merrills-miles-2010

• Anna Komnene, The Alexiad (Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1928)

  The emperor Alexios I's daughter writing about her father's reign, hostile to the Normans throughout and open about it. Its unique value for the crusader states is documentary: Anna transcribes the treaty of Devol of 1108 at length, apparently from the chancery text, so Bohemond's submission survives in the words he agreed to. Dawes' translation is out of copyright.

  alexiad-dawes

• Anne-Marie Eddé, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Saladin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)

  The full-length modern biography, and the corrective this site needed for a page whose only Saladin source was a book about how Europe read him. Eddé works from the Arabic chancery and chronicle material on the parts the legend has no use for — the Egyptian fiscal reorganisation, the iqta' assignments, the twelve years spent fighting other Muslims — and is unsentimental about the propaganda apparatus Saladin's own secretaries ran.

  edde-2011

• Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (Longmans, Green, 1912)

  A working sailing handbook written in Greek in the middle of the first century AD by somebody who had made the voyages, listing the ports of the Red Sea, the East African coast, South Arabia and India with what could be bought and sold at each and who governed them. It is not a history and has no interest in being one, which is what makes it useful: it names the rulers of South Arabia in passing, as facts a merchant needed, at a moment no other outside source describes. Schoff's translation and notes are of their period and the notes are freer with speculation than the text. Out of copyright.

  periplus-schoff

• Anonymous, The Georgian Chronicle (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 1991)

  The medieval Armenian adaptation of the Georgian royal chronicle *Kartlis Tskhovreba*, translated from classical Armenian and released by the translator into the public domain. It is a dynastic chronicle and behaves like one: the army sizes are epic rather than administrative, the kings speak in proverbs, and the genealogies run back to the Tower of Babel. What it preserves that no outside source does is the Iberian court's own account of its dealings with Iran and Byzantium — which refusal was made, in what words, and what the refusal cost.

  georgian-chronicle-bedrosian

• Anonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (John Murray, 1888)

  A Jewish history of the years 175 to 134 BC, written in Hebrew in the generation after the events and surviving in Greek, by an author committed to the Hasmonean family and hostile to everyone who opposed them. Its unusual value is that it quotes documents — letters, treaties, and the decree of 140 BC that made Simon high priest and ethnarch — at what looks like full length. Wace's edition prints the Authorized Version text with a commentary that argues with it, including over whether the writer has reported the Roman correspondence accurately. Out of copyright.

  first-maccabees-wace

• Anonymous (Syriac), attributed to a companion of Rabban Sauma, The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China (Religious Tract Society, 1928)

  A Syriac life of two Nestorian monks of Khanbaliq, Rabban Sauma and Markos, who set out around 1275 to walk to Jerusalem and never arrived: war blocked the road west of Baghdad, Markos was made Patriarch of the Church of the East as Mar Yahballaha III, and Sauma was later sent by the Ilkhan Arghun as an ambassador to the courts of Rome, Paris and England. Budge's translation covers both journeys; cited here for the outward leg, which is an eyewitness crossing of the Yuan's own western frontier during the war with Qaidu. Out of copyright.

  barsauma-budge

• Anonymous Qajar court historian, The Dynasty of the Kajars, Translated from the Original Persian Manuscript Presented by His Majesty Fath Ali Shah to Sir Harford Jones Brydges (John Bohn, 1833)

  The Qajar dynasty's own account of itself, written at court and handed by the reigning shah to a departing British envoy as a gift — which means it is a primary source for what the dynasty wanted a foreign government to know about it. The rhetoric is unbroken panegyric, and the reason it is worth reading is that the panegyric does not exclude the atrocities: the storming of Kerman and the order that its inhabitants perish by the sword are set down as accomplishments, in the same register as the recovery of the crown jewels. Brydges translates closely and adds a long introduction of his own that disagrees with his text in places. Out of copyright.

  kajars-brydges

• Anonymous, with Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Ancient Accounts of India and China, by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the Ninth Century (Sam. Harding, 1733)

  Two ninth-century Arabic texts on the sea route from the Gulf to China — the first a merchant's account of the voyage and of Tang China, the second a commentary written at Siraf about 916 by a man who questioned returning sailors. They are the earliest description of that route by people who used it, and they are practical: which port a ship loads at and why, how many leagues to the next watering place, which strait the China ships will not attempt. Renaudot's 1733 English is loose and his notes are of their century. Out of copyright.

  akhbar-renaudot

• Anthony Jenkinson and others, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia (Hakluyt Society, 1886)

  The papers of the English merchants who opened the northern route to Russia and pushed on down the Volga to Bukhara and Persia. Jenkinson reached Astrakhan in 1558, the year after Moscow took it, and went on across the Nogai steppe in a famine year; he is a factor reporting to the Muscovy Company, so he records what things cost, how many days a stage took, and how many people were for sale. He is also describing a catastrophe from the deck of a boat and has no interest in its causes. Out of copyright.

  jenkinson-hakluyt-society

• Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Harvard University Press, 2015)

  Argues that the eastern Roman empire was a republican monarchy rather than a theocracy: the emperor held power on behalf of a res publica that could and did withdraw its acceptance, and the frequency of depositions is evidence of a constitution rather than of chaos. Contested, and cited on this site where a coded field turns on it, with the disagreement stated.

  kaldellis-2015

• Anthony Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898 (Oxford University Press / University of Malaya Press, 1969) link

  Scanned in full and readable at the URL. Its introduction carries the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Aceh — the decline of the sultanate into a symbol, the rise of the uleebalang as hereditary territorial chiefs, the pepper coast, Penang, and the Anglo-Dutch treaties — which is the period the Acehnese chapters here previously jumped over. Reid's own preface is candid about the evidence: no Atjehnese state records have ever been found, so the Acehnese view survives directly only in a few popular epics, and the account rests on British and Dutch documents.

  reid-1969

• Anthony Reid, Sixteenth Century Turkish Influence in Western Indonesia, in Journal of Southeast Asian History (1969) link

  Reid sets the Turkish, Acehnese and Portuguese accounts of the embassy side by side and shows how far they disagree. His most useful observation for this site is that the strongest version of the story — Aceh submitting as a vassal — is a late Turkish retelling, and that the reading of the mission as tribute rather than alliance "may owe something to the events of 1873, when the Atjehnese attempted to portray their country as under Turkish suzerainty."

  reid-1969b

• Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (Yale University Press, 1988)

  The first volume of the standard account of the region's commercial centuries, on environment, material life, social organisation and law rather than on dynasties. This site's Melakan institutions are coded from it, because the questions the fields ask are the ones Reid organised the book around.

  reid-1988

• Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore University Press, 2005)

  Forty years of work on Sumatra, weighted toward Aceh, and the source this site's Aceh record is coded from. It is a collection of studies rather than a continuous narrative, which is why the span dates on that record come from it only where it states them.

  reid-2005

• Anthony Reid (ed.), Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem (Singapore University Press / NUS Press, 2006) link

  Scanned in full and readable at the URL. Carries Aceh from the sultanate to the 2005 Helsinki settlement, with a dated chronology and chapters by M. Isa Sulaiman on the destruction of the uleebalang and the origins of Acehnese nationalism, and by Edward Aspinall on violence and identity under Indonesian rule. The source for what happened to Aceh after 1903.

  reid-2006

• Appian of Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (Macmillan, 1899)

  A second-century Alexandrian who wrote Rome's history arranged by enemy rather than by year, so that each conquered people gets a continuous narrative from beginning to end. That structure makes him the best single source for the Mithridatic wars: he follows Pontus for forty-two years without cutting away. He is working from earlier accounts, mostly hostile ones, and preserves their figures without much scrutiny. Out of copyright.

  appian-white

• Archibald Henry Sayce, The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire (Religious Tract Society, 1888)

  Written eighteen years before Hattusa was excavated and twenty-seven before Hittite was deciphered, by the Assyriologist who had argued the empire's existence into scholarly acceptance from Egyptian and biblical evidence alone. Almost every particular in it has since been corrected; what it records exactly is the moment when a great power had been recovered as a name and not yet as a language, a capital or a history. Out of copyright.

  sayce-1888

• Aristakes Lastivertsi, History Regarding the Sufferings Occasioned by Foreign Peoples (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 1985)

  An Armenian cleric writing in the 1070s about the two decades he had lived through: the surrender of Ani to Byzantium in 1045, the Seljuk raids, the sack of Ani in 1064 and Manzikert in 1071. The translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. Aristakes is writing a lament and reads the whole period as punishment for Armenian sin, which shapes his emphases but not his facts; he is precise about who handed over what and what they were paid for it, and he is bitter about it, which is the reason the detail survives at all.

  aristakes-bedrosian

• Ármin Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia (John Murray, London, 1864)

  A Hungarian orientalist who crossed the Turkmen desert in 1863 disguised as a Sunni dervish returning from Mecca, and reached Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand — the first European to see all three and come back. He was lame, he spoke the languages, and detection meant slavery or death, so he took no notes where he could be seen and wrote much of it up afterwards. The narrative is an adventure; the second half of the book is a sober survey of the three khanates — their taxes, officials, armies, populations and histories — compiled from what he was told by people who had no idea they were talking to a European. Out of copyright.

  vambery-1864

• Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (Hodder and Stoughton, 1884)

  Written some four hundred and fifty years after the events, by a Roman senator and provincial governor working principally from Ptolemy and Aristobulus, both of whom were on the campaign and neither of whose books survives. It is the soberest of the five surviving narratives and the only one that consistently says which of its lost sources a statement comes from. Chinnock's translation carries notes identifying where Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch differ. Out of copyright.

  arrian-chinnock

• Ashoka, Inscriptions of Asoka (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, volume I, 1925)

  The rock and pillar edicts, in the standard edition, with the Prakrit, Greek and Aramaic texts and translations. They are the oldest deciphered inscriptions in India and one of the very few places in the ancient world where a ruler speaks in the first person at length. What they are is a government's public statement of its own policy, cut where people would see it — so they record what Ashoka wanted said about Ashoka, and the absence of any independent check on it is the thing to hold on to. Out of copyright.

  asoka-hultzsch

• Athenaeus of Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (Henry G. Bohn, 1854)

  A rambling third-century dinner-table compilation whose value is almost entirely that of a quarry: Athenaeus quotes hundreds of lost books at length, and several survive only in him. Book V preserves a long extract from Kallixeinos of Rhodes describing the grand procession of Ptolemy II at Alexandria, item by item, down to the weight of the spices and the cost of the crowns. It is a description of a display, written to impress, copied by a man collecting curiosities — and it is the only account of the occasion there is. Out of copyright.

  athenaeus-yonge

• Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (John Murray, 1849)

  The account of the excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh by the man who dug them, written for a general audience and enormously popular in its day. It is a period piece about the Ottoman provinces as much as an archaeological report, and its value here is that it records what the Assyrian capitals looked like before anybody knew what they were. Out of copyright.

  layard-1849

• B. A. Litvinsky, Zhang Guang-da and R. Shabani Samghabadi (eds), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume III: The Crossroads of Civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750 (UNESCO Publishing, 1996)

  The reference volume for the five centuries between the Kushans and the Arabs in Central Asia, written by scholars from the countries the territory is now in and covering the material — Bactrian documents, coinage, seals, archaeology — that the Greek, Chinese and Persian narratives do not. Cited for the Hephthalites, who are named on this site's Sasanian record as the people who killed a king of kings and were not otherwise here.

  litvinsky-1996

• B. C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, in Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (Brill, 1986)

  On diplomacy, strategy, propaganda and support rather than on battles, which suits a record whose most consequential single act was a massacre organised by correspondence. McGing is also careful about the dynasty's double descent claim, which this site counts on the Achaemenid record.

  mcging-1986

• Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

  Argues against the decline narrative: that the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a socio-economic transformation producing a second, differently constituted state rather than the beginning of a long failure. Cited for the chapter on that period, which this site would otherwise have had to write in the vocabulary of decline by default.

  tezcan-2010

• Bar Hebraeus (Gregory Abu'l-Faraj), The Chronography of Gregory Abu'l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician, Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus (Oxford University Press, 1932)

  A universal chronicle compiled in the 1280s by the Syriac Orthodox maphrian of the East, who wrote it in Syriac and then translated an Arabic version of it himself for Muslim readers. He worked from Arabic and Persian histories now partly lost as well as from Syriac ones, and his value here is that he is outside every party he describes: a Christian bishop under Mongol rule reporting on Turkish sultans, Arab caliphs and Byzantine emperors with no stake in which of them was legitimate. He preserves court ceremonial in physical detail — what was worn, how high a throne stood, who was permitted to bow — and his year-numbers, cross-dated between the Arab and Greek eras, are frequently inconsistent with each other and have to be reported as his rather than relied on. Out of copyright.

  bar-hebraeus-budge

• Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 3rd edn (Routledge, 2018)

  Not a narrative history but an account of how the Egyptian state actually worked — the redistributive economy, the temple estates, the mentality that held a uniform style across three thousand years. Kemp directs the excavation at Amarna, and this is the book the institutions on this site's Egyptian record are coded from, because a political narrative cannot supply them.

  kemp-2018

• Beatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

  manz-1989

• Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

  The successor volume to this site's Tamerlane source, on Shahrukh's Iran rather than Timur's conquests. Its question is the one the corpus keeps running into: how a government with no monopoly of force controlled a heterogeneous society, and why that arrangement was stable for decades at a time. Cited for the half of the Timurid century this site's page had compressed into a sentence.

  manz-2007

• Benjamin R. Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (Routledge, 2016)

  The first book-length study of the Akkadian period, drawing together forty years of work by a Yale Assyriologist and covering statecraft, army, cities, economy and daily life — which is what this site's fields ask for and what a general history of the ancient Near East cannot give at the necessary depth. Its last chapter is on how the empire has been presented by modern historians since the decipherment, including the Soviet literature summarised in English for the first time.

  foster-2016

• Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

  An intellectual biography and an account of how a society dominated by Zaydi Shi'ism was reoriented towards Sunni reformism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how that reorientation served the imamate's own political needs. Cited for the tension this site's Zaydi record kept naming without a source for it: an office open to any qualified Alid that had become hereditary in one house.

  haykel-2003

• Bernard Pares, A History of Russia (Jonathan Cape, 1926)

  A single-volume academic history running from the medieval principalities to the 1917 revolutions, used here for the Tsardom and Empire of Russia's span from Ivan IV's reign through the 1613 Romanov election, Peter the Great's 1721 assumption of the imperial title, the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, the 1905 revolution and October Manifesto, and Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917. Out of copyright.

  pares-1926

• Bertrandon de la Broquière, The Travels of Bertrandon de la Broquière to Palestine, and His Return from Jerusalem Overland to France, During the Years 1432 and 1433 (Hafod Press, 1807)

  The first esquire-carver to Philip the Good of Burgundy, sent east in the guise of a pilgrim and returning overland through Anatolia and the Balkans to report on whether a crusade could be got through. He is therefore a spy writing a route survey: distances, garrisons, which lord hates which, and how many men each could raise. That purpose makes him credulous about anything that argues for the expedition and precise about everything a quartermaster would need. Out of copyright.

  broquiere-johnes

• Bilge Qaghan and Yolig Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. V, 1930)

  The memorial stones raised in the Orkhon valley in 732 and 735 for Kul Tegin and Bilge Qaghan, in Ross's English of Thomsen's final Danish rendering. They are the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language and the only place a steppe empire of this period speaks at length in its own voice — which is exactly what has to be watched: the text is a qaghan's address to his own people, justifying his house, blaming its subjects for its collapse and warning them off the Chinese, and every campaign in it is a victory. Thomsen's readings carry a good many bracketed queries and they are kept here. Out of copyright.

  orkhon-ross

• C. E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (Edinburgh University Press, 1996)

  The spine for regnal dates and dynastic spans throughout. Where this repository gives a span as a single year, it is usually Bosworth's.

  bosworth-1996

• C. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (Edinburgh University Press, 1963)

  bosworth-1963

• C. E. Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India, 1040-1186 (Edinburgh University Press, 1977)

  bosworth-1977

• C. E. Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542-3) (Mazda Publishers, 1994)

  bosworth-1994

• C. E. Bosworth, The Political and Dynastic History of the Iranian World (A.D. 1000-1217), in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1968)

  bosworth-1968

• C. E. Bosworth, TAHERIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-taherids

• C. E. Bosworth, SAFFARIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-saffarids

• C. E. Bosworth, SAMANIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-samanids

• C. E. Bosworth, GHAZNAVIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-ghaznavids

• C. E. Bosworth, GHURIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-ghurids

• C. E. Bosworth, KWARAZMSHAHS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-khwarazmshahs

• C. E. Bosworth and others, Ilek-Khans or Karakhanids, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Brill)

  ei2-karakhanids

• Carl F. Petry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

  petry-1998

• Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)

  hillenbrand-1999

• Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (John Murray, 2005)

  The standard single-volume narrative across the whole span, from the frontier beylik to the abolition of the sultanate. Imber's account stops at 1650, and Finkel is what carries the story from there: the wars with Russia, the nineteenth-century reforms, and the end.

  finkel-2005

• Cassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, Being a Condensed Translation of the Variae Epistolae (Henry Frowde, 1886)

  The official correspondence of the Ostrogothic kingdom, written by the man who ran it and published by him afterwards to demonstrate that his influence had always been exerted on the side of good government. It is therefore both the best source for how that state actually worked and a defence brief. Hodgkin condenses and paraphrases some letters and translates others in full, and his long biographical introduction is itself the standard account of Cassiodorus's career. Out of copyright.

  cassiodorus-hodgkin

• Cassius Dio, Dio's Roman History (Pafraets, 1906)

  A Roman senator of Greek descent who served under the Severans and wrote eighty books of Roman history, of which the third-century portion is contemporary testimony rather than compilation. Cited here for the Roman campaigns against Parthia, where he is unusually willing to say that a celebrated victory achieved nothing. Out of copyright.

  dio-herbert

• Caterino Zeno, Josafa Barbaro, Ambrogio Contarini, Vincentio d'Alessandri and others, A Narrative of Italian Travels in Persia in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Hakluyt Society, 1873)

  Six Venetian reports on Iran, written by envoys and merchants sent to find an ally against the Ottomans and to see whether one was worth having. They are commercial and military intelligence rather than travel writing, which is why they record revenues, troop numbers, how justice was actually administered and how long a foreigner was kept waiting. D'Alessandri's report of 1571 is the only close description of Shah Tahmasp late in his reign by anyone who was in the country. The Venetians confuse Persian names constantly and Grey's notes correct some and not others. Out of copyright.

  italian-travels-grey

• Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence, Current Intelligence Memorandum: The Situation in Yemen (1963)

  A four-page assessment written on 9 September 1963, declassified and released through the CIA's reading room. It is a working memorandum for American policymakers rather than a history: it says what the analysts thought was happening in the first year of the civil war, including where they were relying on UN estimates they doubted. Its judgements are those of a party with an interest in the outcome and its figures are estimates it labels as such. Cited for what the war looked like from outside while it was going on. A United States government work, in the public domain.

  cia-1963-yemen

• Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 1973)

  Published for the Asian Center at Quezon City, and the standard account of the Sulu and Maguindanao sultanates written from Philippine Muslim sources alongside the Spanish ones. This site's Sulu record is coded from it.

  majul-1973

• Charles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (University of California Press, 2001)

  Angkor from the archaeology rather than from the temple inscriptions alone, by the excavator whose work on the pre-Angkorian Mekong is the reason the Khmer state is no longer explained as an import.

  higham-2001

• Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Indiana University Press, 1985)

  halperin-1985

• Charles James Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, Chiefly Pre-Islamic (Williams and Norgate, 1885)

  A scholarly selection of pre-Islamic odes with an introduction on how the poetry reached us: the institution of the rawi, the eighth-century collectors, and the specific grounds for doubting some of what they transmitted. Cited here for the transmission rather than for the verse. Out of copyright.

  lyall-1885

• Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume II (Cambridge University Press, 1888)

  Two years in northern Arabia between 1876 and 1878 by an Englishman who would not conceal that he was a Christian, written up in a deliberately archaic English that has kept the book famous and hard to read. He spent months at Ha'il as a guest of the Rashidi amir and was eventually sent away. He is exact about physical things — how a house is built, how many wards a town has, what is and is not paid for out of public funds — and he records his own humiliations as carefully as anything else, which makes him unusually checkable for a traveller. Out of copyright.

  doughty-1888

• Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

  The first full-length history of Ayutthaya in English, and the reason this site's Ayutthaya record carries the revenue coding of a port rather than of a rice kingdom: its central argument is that Ayutthaya lived on trade and on the products of forest and water, not on an agrarian surplus.

  baker-pasuk-2017

• Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, in The Penguin History of Europe (Allen Lane, 2009)

  Written against the idea of a dark age, and structural rather than narrative: what changed between the Roman world and the early medieval one was above all the disappearance of the land tax, and Wickham's account of what a state without taxation can and cannot do is why this site's Carolingian revenue field reads as it does.

  wickham-2009

• Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton University Press, 1987)

  beckwith-1987

• Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance, in The Middle Ages Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

  Argues that the Frankish states governed populations that were mostly Eastern Christian rather than Muslim, and that the arrangement they arrived at was neither the persecution of the older accounts nor convivencia but an unarticulated practical accommodation. Edessa is the central case, which is why this site cites it there rather than on the Jerusalem page.

  macevitt-2008

• Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

  imber-2002

• Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Penguin Books, 1978)

  Source for peak population and for the world-population denominators used by era-normalised mode.

  mcevedy-jones-1978

• Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (Hakluyt Society, 1897)

  An Alexandrian merchant who traded in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in the 520s, became a monk, and wrote a book arguing that the earth is a flat rectangle shaped like the Tabernacle. The cosmology is why nobody read him for centuries and the digressions are why he matters: to prove points about the reach of Christianity he describes the places he had been, including Adulis and the gold trade of the Aksumite kingdom, and he copies out two Greek inscriptions he was asked to transcribe there. He is credulous, and he is reporting the Sasu gold trade at second hand from the traders who made the journey. Out of copyright.

  cosmas-mccrindle

• Cyril Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (Georgetown University Press, 1963)

  Six hundred pages on the dynastic and social structure of Armenia, Iberia and Albania before the Bagratids, and the foundation of the field in English. Toumanoff's subject is the nakharar and eristavi houses rather than the kings — which is what this site's `client-levy` coding on three Caucasian records rests on.

  toumanoff-1963

• D. T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State, in Cambridge World Archaeology, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

  The standard account, revised from 1999 with more than eight hundred additional sources. Potts is an archaeologist and the book is organised around material evidence, which is why this site's two Elamite records carry one coded institution each: what survives is monuments, royal inscriptions and other people's descriptions, not administration.

  potts-2016

• Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume I (University of Chicago Press, 1926)

  The companion volume, running from the earliest Assyrian rulers to Sargon II, and the fullest English gathering of the Middle Assyrian royal inscriptions there is. Its editorial matter is as useful as the translations: Luckenbill states which king he thinks a text belongs to, what the rival attributions are, and where he is guessing — the note on the Broken Obelisk sets out three incompatible readings and settles on none of them with confidence. Out of copyright.

  luckenbill-1926

• Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume II (University of Chicago Press, 1927)

  The Assyrian royal inscriptions in translation, arranged by reign, with the formulaic passages given in full rather than summarised. Cited here for Ashurbanipal's account of the sack of Susa, which is one of the most detailed descriptions of a deliberate obliteration written by the person who ordered it. Out of copyright.

  luckenbill-1927

• David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd edn (Blackwell, 2007)

  Used for the Mongol campaigns and for the sceptical handling of the casualty figures the medieval sources give.

  morgan-2007

• David W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn, 1000 BC - AD 1300 (James Currey, 2012)

  An archaeologist's account, running four centuries past the kingdom's end in order to argue for continuity into Christian Ethiopia rather than for a collapse. Cited here alongside munro-hay-1991 for the material evidence — the stelae, the settlement pattern, the Adulis trade — which is most of what this record has, since Aksum left inscriptions and coins and almost no administration.

  phillipson-2012

• Demetrius Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (James, John and Paul Knapton, 1756)

  A Moldavian prince who spent some twenty years in Istanbul as a hostage and a client, knew Turkish, Persian and Arabic, sat in on the politics he describes and then defected to Peter the Great, writing the book in exile. It is where the two-part periodization of Ottoman history — growth, then decay from the later seventeenth century — enters European writing, and that framing is itself a claim to be weighed rather than a fact. He names informants, including his own father, and reports court explanations he cannot have witnessed. The scan used here is the English edition; its spelling is eighteenth-century and its typography uses the long s.

  cantemir-1756

• Demetrius Charles Boulger, The History of China (W. Thacker & Co., 1898)

  A narrative political history in three volumes running from antiquity to 1895. Cited here for the founding of the Sung by Chao K'uang-yin in 960, the 1127 fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the destruction of the last Sung fleet at Yamen in 1279, and, from volumes one and two, Nurhaci's rise, the 1644 Manchu conquest, the revolt of Wu Sangui, Qianlong's reign, the first Opium War, the Taiping rebellion and Gordon's campaigns, and the war with Japan of 1894-95. Out of copyright.

  boulger-1898

• Denis Twitchett (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 3: Sui and T'ang China, 589-906, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1979)

  twitchett-1979

• Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

  loewe-twitchett-1986

• Derek A. Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (British Museum Press, 2002)

  The standard account of the three Christian Nubian kingdoms, by an excavator who has spent twenty years on them. Cited here for the narrative, the conversion, the baqt and the ending; Ruffini supplies the inside of the state.

  welsby-2002

• Derek A. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires (British Museum Press, 1996)

  The companion to welsby-2002 and by the same excavator, covering the thousand years upstream of it. Built from the archaeology as much as from the Egyptian and classical notices, which matters for a kingdom whose own language nobody can read.

  welsby-1996

• Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (Routledge, 1998)

  The standard account, and used here for its argument rather than for its booklist: that the translation movement was a state-sponsored social phenomenon serving Abbasid ideological needs, sustained for two centuries by demand and patronage, rather than the work of a few enlightened individuals or of Christian translators acting alone.

  gutas-1998

• Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500-1453, in History of Civilization (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971)

  The book that coined the phrase this site's Balkan and Rus material keeps needing: a cultural and religious sphere held together by liturgy, script and a shared idea of empire rather than by any polity's authority. Cited here for what went out of Bulgaria to Serbia and the Rus, which is the substance of the First Bulgarian record's one influence count.

  obolensky-1971

• Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton and Walter Oudney, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, in the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824 (John Murray, 1826)

  The British mission that crossed the Sahara from Tripoli and reached Lake Chad, the first Europeans to describe Bornu at first hand. Denham wrote the Bornu sections and is a careful observer of things he can count — cavalry, armour, the layout of a town — and a contemptuous one about everything else: he arrives expecting to find either an army or a few naked slaves, and his surprise at finding the first is on the page. The party travelled with a Tripolitan slave-raiding expedition and Denham accompanied it, which he reports. Out of copyright.

  denham-clapperton-1826

• Donald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, in Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

  Strongest on administration, which is what this record needs: the Sicilian kingdom's interest is that it ran an Arabic fiscal bureau, a Greek chancery and a Latin court at once, and Matthew is the account that explains how rather than simply noting it.

  matthew-1992

• Dosabhai Framji Karaka, History of the Parsis, including their manners, customs, religion and present position (Macmillan, 1884)

  Written by a Parsi member of the Bombay legislative council for a Victorian readership, and partisan about its own community in the way that implies. Its value is that it prints and discusses the Qissa-i Sanjan, the only substantial account of the migration to Gujarat, which was composed in 1600 — some nine hundred years after the events — and that Karaka is candid about its chronology: he sets out in a footnote why the traditional date of 716 does not reconcile with the Hindu and Parsi dates given, and concludes that the first and later emigrations have been confused. Cited here with that provenance stated. Out of copyright.

  karaka-1884

• Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa (Hakluyt Society, 1918)

  A Portuguese official who spent years in India as a factor and interpreter and compiled, about 1518, a description of every coast from the Cape to China. He is very good on what a port contained, what it traded and who it obeyed, and for the East African towns he is the first outsider to describe them after the Portuguese arrival — which is also the limit of him: the sackings are reported as the just consequence of a king's arrogance, and the interior he gives at second hand from the Sofala traders. Dames's notes are a separate authority and are cited as his where used. Out of copyright.

  barbosa-dames

• E. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian. A Study in Political Relations, in Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (Brill, 1976)

  Fifty years old and still the standard political narrative of Judaea from 63 BC to the third century. Its subject is the relationship rather than the religion, which is what a corpus of polities needs: it is precise about who held which territory under what arrangement, in a period where that changed constantly and where most accounts are organised around something else.

  smallwood-1976

• Eckart Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (Basic Books, 2023)

  A full history from the city on the Tigris to the empire and its afterlife, by an Assyriologist at Yale. Cited here for the institutional material this site's Assyrian record was asserting without a source addressing it — the standing army, the provincial system, the succession oaths — and for the royal women, who are absent from the older narratives.

  frahm-2023

• Edited and translated by A. Teeuw and D. K. Wyatt, Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani, in Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970)

  The Patani court chronicle in Malay with an English translation and a commentary that is longer than the text. It is the internal source for a sultanate whose archive was destroyed twice, and like the Sejarah Melayu on this site's Melaka record it was written by people arguing about a succession while it was still open.

  teeuw-wyatt-1970

• Edmund Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154 (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912)

  A narrative of the Hauteville conquest and Roger II's reign built directly on Amari and the Arabic sources alongside the Latin chroniclers, and unusually careful about saying which of them is being followed and where they disagree. It stops at Roger's death, so it carries nothing about the kingdom's last forty years. Out of copyright.

  curtis-1912

• Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume I: From the Earliest Times until Firdawsi (T. Fisher Unwin, 1902)

  A survey of Persian letters from the Achaemenids to about 1000, written by a Cambridge orientalist working through the Persian and Arabic anthologies — Awfi, Dawlatshah, Nizami-i-Arudi — and quoting them at length in his own verse translations. Its value here is that it prints the whole surviving early material rather than a selection: it is how one can see that the entire Persian poetic output of the Tahirid period, as the anthologists knew it, is two couplets by one man. Browne is candid about which of his anecdotes are late and unreliable, and says so before quoting them. Out of copyright.

  browne-1902

• Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (T. Fisher Unwin, 1906)

  The continuation of Browne's survey, covering roughly 1000 to 1290. Its use here is source-critical rather than literary: Browne works through the later Persian anthologists — Dawlatshah above all — and shows, item by item, which of their celebrated stories were lifted without acknowledgement from earlier books, which anecdotes have been reassigned to more famous men than the ones they happened to, and which are simply invented. He is equally careful about Sultan Mahmud, whose reputation as a patron he treats as a thing the sultan bought and Firdawsi destroyed. Out of copyright.

  browne-1906

• Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (Cambridge University Press, 1920)

  The third volume of Browne's survey, covering the period between the Mongols and the Safavids — the one for which the Persian biographical tradition is richest and least reliable. He is cited here for three things the chronicles handle badly: the Sarbadar revolt, where he prints the founder's own reported words and Lane-Poole's count of twelve chiefs and nine violent deaths; the loss of Ibn-i Yamin's divan at Zawa and what that makes unknowable; and the invitations Hafez received and declined, with the verses he sent instead. Browne says throughout which of his anecdotes rest on late authorities and which do not. Out of copyright.

  browne-1920

• Edward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (Cambridge University Press, 1910)

  The standard English account of the Constitutional Revolution for most of a century, written by the Cambridge professor of Persian while the events were still going on, by a man who was simultaneously campaigning in England on behalf of the constitutionalists and against the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907. He declines to call it a history, says in the preface that his purpose is to arouse sympathy for the Persians, and prints the constitutional documents in full as appendices so that a reader can check him. Cited here as a partisan source that declares itself. Out of copyright.

  browne-1910

• Edward Harper Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (Sampson Low, London, 1895)

  A British consul in China who read the dynastic histories and turned their accounts of the northern peoples — Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, Türk, Uyghur, Khitan — into a continuous narrative in English, translating long stretches of Sima Qian and the Han and Tang histories as he went. He is opinionated, his transcriptions are his own, and his Victorian asides about the peoples he describes are of their period and are not the reason to read him. What he offers is the Chinese record of the steppe, in English, in order. Out of copyright.

  parker-1895

• Edward Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, by the Route of Kazroon and Feerozabad; with Various Remarks on the Manners, Customs, Laws, Language and Literature of the Persians, to which is added a History of Persia from the Death of Nadir Shah to the Present Time (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807)

  A Company servant who spent 1802 in Shiraz and appended to his travel book a history of the Zands built from two Persian manuscripts he had acquired — one written under the Qajars, one by a man who had been secretary to a grandson of Karim Khan's brother and was present for much of what he describes. Waring says plainly in his introduction what is wrong with each: a historian writing under a reigning dynasty will flatter and lie, and a historian attached to the losing family will credit to fortune what was really foresight, and his method is to play one against the other. He footnotes where his two texts disagree and where both disagree with Francklin. Out of copyright.

  waring-1807

• Edwin Lawrence Godkin, The History of Hungary and the Magyars, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Late War (John W. Parker and Son, 1853)

  A nineteenth-century narrative history running from the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin through the 1848-49 war of independence. Used here for the medieval Kingdom of Hungary's span from the conquest (884-895) and Stephen I's coronation through the Golden Bull, the Mongol invasion, John Hunyadi and Matthias Corvinus's reign, and the 1526 Battle of Mohacs. Out of copyright.

  godkin-1853

• Edwin Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks (Longmans, Green, 1903)

  A British barrister who lived in Constantinople for forty years and read the Greek, Italian and Turkish accounts against each other. He is thorough on the sources and closely translated from Kritovoulos and Sphrantzes, which is what he is used for here. His interpretative chapters are Victorian in the worst sense — sweeping judgements about races and churches — and are not borrowed from. Out of copyright.

  pears-1903

• Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

  chi-3

• Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (Harper and Brothers, 1880)

  A courtier's biography of an emperor he had served for over twenty years, written in the 820s on the frame of Suetonius and borrowing Suetonius's sentences outright in places. It is the source of nearly every familiar image of Charlemagne and it is a defence of the dynasty by a man with a position in it, which shows most in the opening pages on the kings the family displaced. Out of copyright.

  einhard-turner

• Elishe, The History of Vartan and of the Battle of the Armenians, Containing an Account of the Religious Wars between the Persians and Armenians (Oriental Translation Fund, 1830)

  The Armenian account of the war of 450-451 and of the battle of Avarayr, written within living memory of it by a man who presents himself as present, and the foundational text of Armenian national memory — the speeches in it are still quoted. It is a martyrdom narrative and shapes everything to that end, but it is exact where it matters: it names the noble houses that fought, counts the dead of each one, and gives the casualty figures for both sides. Neumann's notes argue with the text and with the parallel account of Lazar P'arpec'i. Out of copyright.

  elishe-neumann

• Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (George H. Doran Company, New York, 1913)

  The Daily Telegraph's special correspondent, accredited to Abdullah Pasha's army and present at Lüleburgaz and through the retreat to the Çatalca lines, written with his brother Seabury. He is candid about his own running war with Ottoman press censorship and about the army's collapse alike, and the retreat chapters are eyewitness reporting rather than reconstruction after the fact: he marched in the column. Out of copyright.

  ashmead-bartlett-1913

• Emil Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (Trubner, 1888)

  A Russian legation physician in Peking who translated the Chinese sources on Inner Asia in full and annotated them against the Persian and Arabic ones. Cited here for his complete rendering of the Liao shi's account of Yelu Dashi, which is the Qara Khitai founding as the dynasty's own successor state told it. Bretschneider is a translator rather than an interpreter and says so; his identifications of tribal names are nineteenth-century guesses and are flagged as such in his notes. Out of copyright.

  bretschneider-1888

• Éric Vallet, L'Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasulides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454) (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010)

  The study of the Rasulid state as a commercial one, worked from the dynasty's own administrative and fiscal archives — material that only came to light recently and that almost no medieval Islamic polity has left. It is why this site can code a Yemeni dynasty's revenue basis from something better than inference.

  vallet-2010

• Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja (Sampson Low, London, 1876)

  The American consul at St Petersburg travelled through the newly conquered Russian territories and the surviving khanates in 1873, and wrote the fullest contemporary account in English of what the conquest looked like from inside. He is a diplomat with no stake in Russian self-congratulation and says so about the Khivan campaign; his appendix on Khokand is assembled from the Russian scholarly literature and from Chinese records, and is the only connected history of that khanate in English from the period. Out of copyright.

  schuyler-1876

• Eyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity, in Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013)

  Reads the dynasty's self-presentation off its coins, its palaces at Jericho and its use of the Temple rather than off the books of Maccabees alone, and argues that the Hasmonean state was not a conventionally Hellenistic monarchy. This site's Hasmonean legitimation and succession fields are coded from it, because the question those fields ask — on what public ground was the right to rule asserted — is the question the book is about.

  regev-2013

• F. E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (Princeton University Press, 1994)

  A collage of primary accounts across the whole span, Muslim and Western, with Peters' commentary between them. Cited for the long view this site needed on a polity that lasted nine and a half centuries and for which no single political narrative exists in English.

  peters-1994

• Farhad Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

  The standard survey of Isma'ili history across twelve centuries, and the source for the Nizari state on this site. Used particularly for its insistence that the Nizaris be read from Isma'ili material rather than from the hostile chronicles and Crusader traveller-tales that supplied almost everything Europe believed about them.

  daftary-2007

• Faxian, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (Clarendon Press, 1886)

  A Chinese monk who walked to India in 399 to find a complete copy of the monastic rules, spent about a decade there, and came home by sea. He is the only eyewitness account of Gupta India by an outsider, and his interests are narrow and consistent: monasteries, relics, discipline, and what the roads were like. What he says about government and society is incidental, which is exactly why it is useful — he had no reason to flatter anybody and no theory of Indian kingship to defend. Out of copyright.

  faxian-legge

• Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC - AD 337) (Duckworth, 1977)

  The book that reframed the emperor as a man who mostly answered letters. Millar's method is to ask what emperors demonstrably did rather than what the constitution said they were, and the answer — hearing embassies, judging cases, replying to cities — is why this site's Roman legitimation field carries `election` rather than something grander.

  millar-1977

• Filip Van Tricht, The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium: The Empire of Constantinople (1204-1228), in The Medieval Mediterranean 90 (Brill, 2011)

  Translated by Peter Longbottom. Argues against reading the Latin empire as a foreign occupation that never governed: Van Tricht's case is that its emperors presented themselves as legitimate Roman emperors and substantially continued Byzantine institutions, which is why this site's record for it codes `titulature` and why the Byzantine record now counts a successor claim it did not.

  van-tricht-2011

• Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009)

  Reads the material culture of the eighth to thirteenth centuries in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and north India against the standard account of the period as unbroken hostility between two monolithic religious cultures. Cited for the Ghurid chapter on what the dynasty built, which is very nearly all it left.

  flood-2009

• Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)

  A Jerusalem priest of Hasmonean descent who commanded in Galilee against Rome, surrendered, predicted Vespasian's accession, and spent the rest of his life in Rome writing the history of his own people for a Roman audience under Flavian patronage. Every one of those facts shows. He is the only continuous narrative source for the Hasmoneans and the Herods, and he is settling scores throughout. Whiston's eighteenth-century translation is the one that circulated. Out of copyright.

  josephus-whiston

• Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as the Black Death (Simpkin Marshall, 1893)

  A Victorian monastic historian's account of the plague, valuable here for the long translated extracts from Gabriele de' Mussi, the Piacenza notary whose narrative is the source of the story that the disease entered Europe through the Genoese colony at Caffa. Gasquet calls de' Mussi an eyewitness in his text and then prints, in a footnote on the same page, the evidence that he was not — which is the kind of self-correction worth reading a nineteenth-century book for. Out of copyright.

  gasquet-1893

• François Baron de Tott, Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars (G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1786)

  A French officer of Hungarian descent sent to reside with the khan of the Crimea in 1767, who accompanied the Tatar army on its last great raid into Russian territory and later reorganised Ottoman artillery. He is vain, a good observer of technical things, and writing to be read in Paris. The English edition used here prints alongside him the hostile Observations of Charles de Peyssonnel, French consul in the Crimea before him, who corrects his facts and supplies eyewitness detail of his own; where the two disagree the disagreement is on the page, which is the best thing about the volume. Out of copyright.

  tott-1786

• François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (Oxford University Press, 1916)

  A French physician who spent twelve years in India, most of them attached to a senior noble of Aurangzeb's court, and who watched the war of succession from close range. He is the sharpest European observer of the Mughal state in the seventeenth century and the origin of a very influential argument — that all land belonged to the crown, that there was no secure private property, and that this explained everything he thought was wrong with India. The argument travelled to Montesquieu and Marx as "oriental despotism" and has been contested by every historian of Mughal revenue since. Out of copyright.

  bernier-constable

• Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton University Press, 1981)

  The standard study of the Rashidun conquests, and the reason the Rashidun chapters here are about tribal mobilisation and garrison towns rather than battles.

  donner-1981

• Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)

  Fifty years old and still the reference account, from the fifth century to the eighteenth. Lane was an economic historian and the book's centre of gravity is the shipping, the money and the constitution rather than the art, which is why this site's Venetian institutions are coded from it.

  lane-1973

• Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

  mote-twitchett-1988

• Friedrich Hirth, China and the Roman Orient: Researches into their Ancient and Mediaeval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records (Georg Hirth, Leipzig and Munich, 1885)

  A sinologist in the Chinese customs service who collected and translated every notice of the Roman east — Da Qin, later Fulin — in the Chinese histories from the Hou Han Shu to Ma Duanlin, printed the Chinese text beside the translation, and argued out what each place-name meant. The translations are the reason to use it: they are the Chinese record of the western world in the words the Chinese used. Out of copyright.

  hirth-1885

• G. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)

  A colonial-era narrative history built on the Burmese chronicles and the Old Burmese inscriptions alike, cited here for Narapatisithu's violent accession in 1173, the 1180 Sinhalese naval raid provoked by his own trade sanctions, his temple-building programme at Pagan, and the succession story that produced his eventual heir Htilominlo. Out of copyright.

  harvey-1925

• G. M. Trevelyan, Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (Longmans, Green, 1923)

  Trevelyan wrote it as the third of his Italian Risorgimento books and it is frankly a partisan's account, warm about Manin and cold about Austria. Its value here is the documentary work behind it: he read the Venetian municipal archive, the diaries and the Austrian side, and he cites them line by line, so the detail can be used even where the verdicts cannot. Out of copyright.

  trevelyan-1923

• G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2000)

  The standard Umayyad monograph, and the source for the Sufyanid/Marwanid split and for the argument that the hostile Abbasid-era sources shape most of what is written about the dynasty.

  hawting-2000

• G. Rex Smith, The Ayyubids and Early Rasulids in the Yemen (567-694/1173-1295), in E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (Trustees of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1974)

  An edition, translation and study of Ibn Hatim's chronicle, which is the fullest source for Yemen from Turanshah's conquest to the point where the Ayyubids' own followers had replaced them. Two volumes, 1974 and 1978.

  smith-1974

• G. W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, in Emblems of Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013)

  Reconstructs the sixth-century war between Jewish Arabia and Christian Ethiopia from two inscriptions on a monument that no longer exists, known only because a sixth-century traveller copied them. Cited for the Himyar record, and for the Aksumite invasion of 525 that ends it.

  bowersock-2013

• G. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Harvard University Press, 1983)

  The history of the country between the Negev and the Hawran from the fourth century BC to Constantine, and still the standard account of the Nabataean kingdom and of what Rome did with it in 106. Bowersock's case that the annexation was carried out without a war is the reason this site's Nabataean record does not code `conquest`.

  bowersock-1983

• G. Wyman Bury, Arabia Infelix, or the Turks in Yamen (Macmillan, 1915)

  A British traveller and political agent who lived in Yemen and Aden and knew the country and its languages, writing while the Ottoman vilayet still existed and Imam Yahya was in the middle of his career. He is valuable for the sequence of events between the Egyptian occupation and the 1911 settlement, which he sets out compactly and had partly witnessed. He is also a wartime propagandist with a low opinion of the people he is describing — the passages on Islamic law and on tribal religion are contemptuous, and his judgements are not to be borrowed. Cited here for what he reports, not for what he thinks of it. Out of copyright.

  bury-1915

• Galeote Pereira, Certain Reports of the Province China, in Reprinted in the introduction to Mendoza's History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, Hakluyt Society (Hakluyt Society, 1853)

  A Portuguese trader captured smuggling on the Fujian coast in 1549 and held with his companions in Chinese custody, under sentence and then as a registered resident, for several years before he got home. His account of it was printed in Portuguese in 1565, translated into English by Richard Willes for Richard Eden's Historye of Trauayle in 1577, and reprinted at length in the Hakluyt Society's Mendoza. He writes as a prisoner reporting on the system that held him — the whipping he watched, the almshouses he was startled to find, the post that outran his own captivity — and he has no reason to flatter any of it. Out of copyright.

  pereira-eden

• Gary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, in Writings from the Ancient World 7, 2nd edn (Scholars Press, 1999)

  Translations of twenty-one treaties, eighteen diplomatic letters and eighteen edicts from the Hittite chancery, including the Shattiwaza treaty this corpus's Mitanni record is largely reconstructed from and the Hittite text of the 1259 treaty with Egypt. A source of documents rather than of argument, and cited where a page quotes or dates one.

  beckman-1999

• Geoffrey de Villehardouin, The Chronicle of Geoffry de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, Concerning the Conquest of Constantinople (William Pickering, 1829)

  The marshal of Champagne was one of the six envoys who negotiated the shipping contract with Venice, was present at every stage of the Fourth Crusade, and dictated this account afterwards in French. It is the first substantial prose narrative in the language and the fullest eyewitness record of the conquest — written by a man who had been personally responsible for the decisions he is describing and who never once suggests that the expedition should have gone to Egypt as agreed. Out of copyright.

  villehardouin-smith

• Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, in Memoirs of the Crusades (J. M. Dent, Everyman's Library, 1908)

  The marshal of Champagne was one of the six envoys who negotiated the transport contract with Venice in 1201, and he wrote the crusade up afterwards in the third person. He is therefore the participant with the strongest interest in the outcome looking defensible: the diversions to Zara and Constantinople are presented throughout as things that had to be done, and the men who left the army rather than take part are consistently described as deserters. What he cannot hide, because he is proud of it, is the arithmetic — he records the terms of the contract, the numbers who failed to arrive, and what Venice was owed. Out of copyright.

  villehardouin-marzials

• George Coedes, edited by Walter F. Vella, translated by Susan Brown Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 1968)

  The translation of the third French edition of 1964. It is the work that assembled the epigraphy of mainland and island Southeast Asia into one narrative, and it is old enough that its organising idea — a set of states formed by the reception of Indian models — has been argued with ever since. This site uses it for chronology and for inscriptions, and takes the framework as a position rather than as a background.

  coedes-1968

• George McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, volume VI (Government of the Cape Colony, 1900)

  A nine-volume collection of Portuguese and Dutch documents on the region, translated and printed for the Cape government; volume VI opens with the extracts from Joao de Barros's Da Asia that contain the earliest written description of a zimbabwe, published in 1552 from reports Barros never saw himself. Theal is a colonial historiographer of the 1890s and his own commentary carries the assumptions of that office, which is a reason to use the documents he printed rather than the frame he printed them in. Out of copyright.

  theal-records-vi

• George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, in A History of Russia, Volume II (Yale University Press, 1948)

  The standard English-language academic history of the Kyiv-based period, running from the Varangian founding traditions to the Mongol invasion of 1237. Out of copyright.

  vernadsky-1948

• Gernot Wilhelm, trans. Jennifer Barnes, The Hurrians, in Ancient Near East Series (Aris & Phillips, 1989)

  The survey of the Hurrian-speaking world by the principal authority on the language, with a chapter on the archaeology by Diana L. Stein. Cited here because Mitanni cannot be written from a political narrative alone: no archive of the kingdom survives, and what is known about how it worked comes from Hurrian material found at the places it ruled rather than from the place it ruled them from.

  wilhelm-1989

• Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Michael Roaf and Robert Rollinger (eds), Continuity of Empire (?): Assyria, Media, Persia, in History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (S.a.r.g.o.n., 2003)

  The proceedings of the Padua meeting of 2001, and the volume in which the case against the Median empire was assembled: that the Assyrian and Babylonian records describe Median chiefs rather than a Median state, that the archaeology supplies no administration, and that the empire Herodotus describes may be a Greek and Achaemenid construction. The question mark in the title is the argument. Cited on the one page in this corpus where what is disputed is not the polity's dates or its institutions but whether it was a polity.

  lanfranchi-2003

• Giovanni R. Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (Oxford University Press, 2012)

  Built from the Old Nubian documents excavated at Qasr Ibrim — land sales, accounts, letters, much of it still unpublished — and the reason this site's Makurian institutions can be coded at all. Ruffini's finding is a monetised economy with exchange rates connected to the wider world, in a kingdom whose external reputation rests entirely on archery and a treaty.

  ruffini-2012

• Graham Saunders, A History of Brunei (Oxford University Press, 1994)

  The only full-length history of the sultanate from its beginnings, and careful about the difference between what the European sources record and what the Brunei genealogies claim. This site's Brunei record follows it in both.

  saunders-1994

• Greg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity, in Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford University Press, 2011)

  The study of the Arab clients of Rome and Iran in the century before Islam, and the reason this site's page is called Jafnid rather than Ghassanid. Fisher separates the ruling families — Jafnids, Nasrids, Hujrids — from the confederacies later tradition attached to them (Ghassan, Lakhm, Kinda), and argues that the empires' agreements were with individuals rather than with peoples. That distinction is a claim about what kind of object a polity is, which is this site's own question.

  fisher-2011

• Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015)

  Nearly two hundred and fifty translated extracts from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian and Arabic sources and from inscriptions in several alphabets, with commentary by more than twenty specialists. It is a sourcebook rather than a narrative, which suits a corpus whose rules are about what a source will actually carry: for pre-Islamic Arabia the evidence is inscriptions and other people's accounts, and this is where both are assembled.

  fisher-2015

• Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire's Story (Oxford University Press, 2012)

  woolf-2012

• Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks (Columbia University Press, 1916)

  A Gallo-Roman bishop writing in the 580s about events partly within living memory. He is a Catholic writing about Arians and a partisan of the Frankish house, and the bias is not concealed: Goths flee "as was their custom" and city walls fall down when Clovis looks at them. What he preserves of what people said and did is worth having anyway, and the partisanship is itself evidence about the period. Out of copyright.

  gregory-brehaut

• Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks (Clarendon Press, 1927)

  The complete text, where Brehaut's widely used edition is a selection that omits most of the Spanish material. Dalton's second volume carries the chapters on Leovigild's family, which Gregory followed closely because a Frankish princess had married into it and because the quarrel was about the faith he shared with her. He is a partisan, he is writing about Arians, and he reports miracles and divine vengeance in the same voice as troop movements; what he is not is late, since he was alive while it happened and talking to people who had come back from Toledo. Out of copyright.

  gregory-dalton

• Gregory the Great, Selected Epistles, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volumes XII-XIII (Christian Literature Company, 1895)

  Something over eight hundred letters survive from the pope who governed Rome from 590 to 604, and they are the only substantial administrative archive from Italy in the century of the Lombard conquest. They are correspondence rather than history: Gregory writing to generals, exarchs, bishops and the emperor about grain, ransoms, hostages, unpaid soldiers and the terms of a truce, in the ordinary irritable voice of a man doing a job. He detests the Lombards and says so constantly, which has to be allowed for. Barmby's Victorian translation is a selection and his notes are partisan in the other direction. Out of copyright.

  gregory-great-barmby

• Günther Hölbl, trans. Tina Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (Routledge, 2001)

  The standard narrative of the dynasty from Alexander's death to Actium, and the first general history of the Ptolemies since Bevan in 1928. Hölbl is an Egyptologist rather than a classicist, which is why the pharaonic half of the arrangement — the temple decrees, the ruler cult, the titulary — is present at all.

  holbl-2001

• Guy Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, from contemporary Arabic and Persian sources (Clarendon Press, 1900)

  A topographical reconstruction rather than a narrative history: Le Strange works from Ya'qubi, Ibn Serapion, Khatib al-Baghdadi, Yaqut, Ibn Jubayr and the Persian historians of the Mongol conquest to establish where in Baghdad each gate, canal, market and palace actually stood. Cited here for the plan of al-Mansur's Round City, for the measurements the Arabic authorities give and disagree about, and for the siege of 1258 and what became of the city afterwards. Out of copyright.

  lestrange-1900

• Guy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge University Press, 1905)

  A province-by-province topography of the Islamic east built out of the Arabic and Persian geographers — Ibn Khurdadbih, Ibn Hawkal, Istakhri, Muqaddasi, Yaqut, Mustawfi and the Fars Namah — quoted and dated individually. Its use here is for what happened to old places after the polities that built them stopped: it records what a tenth-century traveller found at a Sasanian fire sanctuary, how large a former capital still was when a given geographer saw it, and what later inhabitants believed the ruins in front of them had been. Out of copyright.

  lestrange-1905

• H. J. de Graaf and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, De eerste Moslimse vorstendommen op Java: studiën over de staatkundige geschiedenis van de 15de en 16de eeuw, in Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1974)

  The standard study of the first Muslim states on Java, and the first to work systematically from the Javanese babad and the Sadjarah Banten rather than from Portuguese and Dutch reports alone. Read here in the Indonesian translation, Kerajaan-Kerajaan Islam di Jawa, published in the Seri Terjemahan Javanologi. The authors are consistently explicit about which of their statements rest on chronicle, which on European report, and which on inference, which is what makes it usable for a sixteenth century whose documentation is this thin.

  graaf-pigeaud-1974

• H. St. John Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (Constable, 1928)

  The diaries of a British political officer attached to Ibn Sa'ud in 1918, published a decade later once the outcome was known. Philby had by then become a partisan of the man he was reporting on and an opponent of the Hashemite policy his own government had adopted, so his judgements of the sharifs should be read as advocacy. What he records verbatim — a conversation in a majlis, his own explanation of British motives to an Arabian court — is the value. Out of copyright.

  philby-1928

• Hans Hagerdal, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (White Lotus, 2001)

  Balinese and Sasak material read against the Dutch company's records, on the period when Bali's kingdoms projected power across the strait to Lombok. This site's Gelgel record uses it for the seventeenth century and Coedes and Ricklefs for what comes before.

  hagerdal-2001

• Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus the Vagabond (William Heinemann, 1912)

  A picaresque novel published in 1668 by a man who had been swept into the Thirty Years' War as a boy and spent most of it in and around armies. It is fiction, and it is satire, and it is also the only sustained account of that war written from inside it by someone who was not an officer, a diplomat or a chronicler. The famous passages — the sack of the farm, the tree of war — are set pieces built for effect and should be read as such; what they are evidence of is what a survivor thought the war had been like. Out of copyright.

  grimmelshausen-goodrick

• Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, updated edn (University of California Press, 2002)

  A one-volume survey to the present, used here for the four centuries tamrat-1972 does not reach — Gondar, the Zemene Mesafint, Tewodros, Menelik and Adwa, and the ending. Marcus is brisk about the nineteenth century's imperial expansion in a way older Ethiopian historiography was not, which matters for a record whose peak reign doubled the state at the expense of its neighbours.

  marcus-2002

• Harriet Crawford (ed.), The Sumerian World, in Routledge Worlds (Routledge, 2013)

  Thirty-two specialists on southern Mesopotamia from 3000 to 2000 BC, organised by theme rather than by reign. This site's Ur III institutions are coded from it, because the questions the institution fields ask — what an army was paid with, what a state's income consisted of — are answered in this corpus by thematic handbooks and almost never by a narrative of kings.

  crawford-2013

• Heinz Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (Brill, 1996)

  halm-1996

• Henry Cassels Kay (ed. and trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (Edward Arnold, 1892)

  Edition and translation of Umara al-Hakami's history of Yemen, written in the twelfth century by a man who had served the courts he describes, with supplementary extracts from Ibn Khaldun and others. It is the narrative spine for the Ziyadids, Najahids, Sulayhids and Zurayids — the dynasties for which no modern monograph exists — and it is cited here as what it is: a Victorian translation of a partisan contemporary, useful for sequence and detail and to be read against Bosworth for dates.

  kay-1892

• Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (Longmans, Green, 1880)

  The nineteenth-century compilation that assembled, in English, the Russian chronicle material and the Persian and Turkic histories on the Jochid successor states — the White Horde and the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, Khwarazm, the Shibanids of Siberia, and the Nogais. Howorth is a compiler rather than a researcher of manuscripts, and he follows Karamzin and Müller closely; what he offers is continuous narrative with his sources named in the notes, for polities where nothing else in English is continuous at all. Out of copyright.

  howorth-1880

• Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (Longmans, Green, 1876)

  The first volume of the same compilation, and the only continuous account in English of what the house of Chinggis did after it lost China — the khans at Karakorum, the catastrophe at Buyur Nor, the Oirat ascendancy, Dayan Khan, the conversion to Lamaism and Ligdan's collapse before the Manchus. Howorth works from de Mailla and Delamarre for the Chinese side and from Schmidt's translation of Sanang Setsen's Erdeni-yin Tobchi for the Mongol one, and says which is which, including where they contradict each other and where the Mongol chronicle passes over a disaster in silence. His asides on the peoples he is describing are of their period and are not the reason to read him. Out of copyright.

  howorth-1876

• Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division I (Longmans, Green, 1880)

  The Golden Horde from Jochi to its dissolution, assembled in English out of the Russian chronicles, the Persian historians Rashid al-Din and Wassaf, the Arabic sources on Mamluk Egypt, and the coinage. Howorth is a compiler and says so; what he provides is a continuous narrative of a state whose own records did not survive, with the disagreements between his authorities left visible on the page. Out of copyright.

  howorth-1880-div1

• Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part III: The Mongols of Persia (Longmans, Green, 1888)

  The Ilkhanate reign by reign, from Hülegü to the Jalayirids, worked up chiefly from d'Ohsson, from Quatremère's edition of Rashid al-Din, and from Wassaf. It is the fullest connected account of that state in English from before the modern scholarship, and it quotes its Persian authorities at length rather than paraphrasing them. Out of copyright.

  howorth-1888

• Herbert A. Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose (Kelly & Walsh, 1923)

  An anthology of translated Chinese prose from the Zhou dynasty to the nineteenth century, each piece given with a short biography of its author. Cited here for Li Si's memorial against the expulsion of foreign advisers from the Qin court, written before the unification and preserved because it worked: the Qin king who received it went on to become the First Emperor with Li Si still at his side. Out of copyright.

  giles-gems-1923

• Herbert A. Giles, The Civilization of China (Williams and Norgate, 1911)

  A short survey by the Cambridge professor of Chinese, written for a general reader and organised by theme rather than reign. Cited here for its translation of Sima Qian's own description of the First Emperor's tomb, given entire rather than summarised. Out of copyright.

  giles-1911

• Herbert A. Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (D. Appleton and Company, 1901)

  A survey of Chinese letters by dynasty, written for English readers with no Chinese. Cited here for its account of the burning of the books and the tradition that melons grew in winter over the pit where the executed scholars were buried — Giles reports the tradition and is explicit that it is one. Out of copyright.

  giles-1901

• Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

  franke-twitchett-1994

• Heribert Busse, Iran under the Buyids, in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4 (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

  busse-1975

• Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (eds), Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009)

  Twenty specialists on one event — Rajendra Chola's raid of 1025 on the ports of the Melaka strait — from the Indian side, the Southeast Asian side and the archaeology. Cited here because it is the only sustained treatment of the single most consequential thing that happened to Srivijaya, and because the Chola state that launched it has no record on this site.

  kulke-2009

• Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (Macmillan, 1890)

  Written about a century after Babylon became a Persian province, by a Greek who reports what he was told there. It is not a source for what the Neo-Babylonian empire was; it is the best surviving source for what people in the fifth century believed about it, which is a different and equally useful thing. Out of copyright.

  herodotus-macaulay

• Homer B. Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (Methodist Publishing House (Seoul), 1905)

  A pioneering English-language history of Korea from the Dangun founding legend through the fall of the Joseon dynasty, drawing on Korean and Chinese annals. Used here for Gojoseon's span from the legendary founding of Tan-gun (2332 BCE) through Gija's arrival (1122 BCE), Wiman's usurpation (193 BCE), and the Han Chinese conquest that ended Wiman's line (106 BCE). Out of copyright.

  hulbert-1905

• Homer B. Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume II (Methodist Publishing House (Seoul), 1905)

  The continuation of hulbert-1905, covering the Imjin War's final campaigns through the author's own present day. Its narrative thins into a year-by-year chronicle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and stops in December 1904, partway through the Russo-Japanese War - before Korea's 1905 protectorate treaty or its 1910 annexation, neither of which this source can therefore speak to. Used here for Joseon's span from Yi Sŏng-gye's 1392 accession (carried over from Goryeo's own end) through the 1897 proclamation of the Korean Empire. Out of copyright.

  hulbert-1905-v2

• Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 2nd edn (Pearson Longman, 2004)

  kennedy-2004

• Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007)

  Used for the second wave of conquest under al-Walid I — Transoxiana, Sind and al-Andalus in the same decade — which is the campaign that produced this site's second-largest reach figure and which the Umayyad page had no chapter for.

  kennedy-2007

• Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (Longman, 1996)

  kennedy-1996

• Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2000)

  shaw-2000

• Ibn Abd al-Hakam, History of the Conquest of Spain (Williams and Norgate, 1858)

  The earliest Arabic narrative of the conquest of Spain, by an Egyptian writing in the ninth century, and therefore the closest thing to a near-contemporary account that survives on the Muslim side. It is a transmission of traditions rather than a chronicle and it carries folklore alongside campaign detail — the padlocked house at Toledo sits in the same sequence as the crossing — so it is used here with the seams left visible. Jones's apparatus is part of its value: his note on Ilyan sets out the argument, still live, over whether the man existed at all. Out of copyright.

  ibn-abd-al-hakam-jones

• Ibn al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (Luzac, 1932)

  A Damascene administrator's year-by-year chronicle, contemporary with everything it describes down to 1160, and the closest thing to a newspaper record of the crusading century from the Syrian side. Gibb translates the portion covering the crusades and annotates the identifications. Out of copyright.

  ibn-al-qalanisi

• Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (Oriental Translation Committee, 1829)

  The earliest full English version, made from an abridgement rather than the complete Arabic text, so it is shorter and looser than the modern translations and its transliterations are eccentric. It is used here for the Anatolian chapters, where Ibn Battuta is describing what he walked through in about 1332 — a different sultan in every town, and the akhi brotherhoods that fed him in all of them. Out of copyright.

  ibn-battuta-lee

• Ibn Battuta, translated by H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354, in Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series (The Hakluyt Society, 1994)

  The complete four-volume Hakluyt translation, finished in 1994 by Beckingham decades after Gibb began it. Ibn Battuta reached a striking number of the polities on this site — Delhi, Mali, Kilwa, Pasai — and this is the first record here to cite him. He is an eyewitness who wrote afterwards from memory and from other people's books, and the record that uses him says which of his claims it is relying on.

  gibb-battuta

• Ibn Isfandiyar, An Abridged Translation of the History of Tabaristan (Luzac, 1905)

  A local history of one province, written in Persian about 1216 by a man whose father had served the Bavand court and who had been at that court himself. It is the principal source for almost everything known about the dynasty, and it is not a neutral one — Browne's translation is abridged and says where it abridges. A later hand carried the chronicle on to 1349, which is why it also contains the close account of how the house ended: the murder in the bath at Amul, the sons who were sheltered by the ustandar of Rustamdar, and the last attempt to put them back. Out of copyright.

  ibn-isfandiyar-browne

• Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (Imprimerie du Gouvernement, Algiers, 1852)

  The narrative half of the work whose introduction is the Muqaddima, in the four-volume French translation made for the French army in Algeria. Cited here for the Almoravids, the Almohads and the Hafsids, where it is the fullest connected account there is and often the only one: Ibn Khaldun held office under the Hafsids, his own great-grandfather sat on the council that governed Seville in 1248, and for the fourteenth century he is a witness rather than a compiler. He is correspondingly partial — his Hafsid patrons are "our lord the sultan", the Arab tribes of the interior are wolves and dogs — and his transcribed dates go wrong often enough that de Slane corrects them in the notes. Out of copyright.

  ibn-khaldun-de-slane

• Ibn Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (Oriental Translation Fund, 1843)

  Some eight hundred lives of notable men of the Islamic world, compiled in thirteenth-century Cairo and Damascus by a judge who names his authority for each anecdote and says when he does not believe it. Its value here is that it preserves the small things chronicles discard — what a prince paid for a couplet, what was written on the wall of an abandoned castle, what a man asked to have buried with him. De Slane's translation is out of copyright.

  ibn-khallikan

• Ibn Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842)

  A thirteenth-century Kurdish judge in Cairo and Damascus compiled short lives of the eminent Muslims of the preceding six centuries — jurists, poets, generals, viziers — with dates, teachers, works and death notices, and de Slane translated the whole of it into English in four volumes. It is a reference book rather than a narrative, and its value here is that it reaches the Maghreb, where almost nothing else in English does: the qadis of Kairouan get entries with their dates and their books, and de Slane's footnotes carry long extracts from the lost local chronicles of Ifriqiya he was working from. Ibn Khallikan records what a learned man of his own school thought worth remembering, which is why soldiers appear mostly when they were also scholars. Out of copyright.

  ibn-khallikan-slane

• Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States, in African Archaeology Series (AltaMira Press, 2001)

  A synthesis of the whole Zimbabwe culture — Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Mutapa — by a Zimbabwean archaeologist, and the reason this site can carry a record for a polity that left no writing of any kind. Every field on that page comes from stonework, imported ceramics, radiocarbon and faunal remains, which is why so many of them are empty.

  pikirayi-2001

• International Crisis Group, Southern Thailand: Insurgency, Not Jihad (Asia Report N°98, 2005)

  Published 18 May 2005, covering the 4 January 2004 army-depot raid that opened the current wave of violence, the 28 April 2004 Kru Se Mosque killings and the 25 October 2004 Tak Bai deaths, and the political and religious background - Haji Sulong's 1940s movement, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional and Patani United Liberation Organisation - against which the report assesses whether the violence amounts to a jihadist campaign or a nationalist insurgency. Freely published.

  icg-2005-southern-thailand

• Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Al-Hira: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext, in Islamic History and Civilization 104 (Brill, 2014)

  The monograph on the Nasrid capital, and the reason this site can code a religion carried on that record. Toral-Niehoff's subject is al-Hira as a city rather than the dynasty as a client: the churches and monasteries, the Church of the East hierarchy seated there, the poets, and the argument that the Arab urban culture assembled at al-Hira passed more or less directly into Kufa, its Islamic successor a few kilometres away.

  toral-niehoff-2014

• Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, in African Studies Series 13 (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

  Eight hundred pages on how one African state actually worked — the bureaucracy, the roads, the treasury, the succession, the factions in council — and still the fullest institutional account of any sub-Saharan polity in this bibliography. It is why the Asante record can code three fields with confidence and why the fourth is empty for a reason the vocabulary cannot fix.

  wilks-1975

• J. A. Boyle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1968)

  chi-5

• J. G. Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (Princeton University Press, 2010)

  Reads the Ptolemaic state as a state rather than as a Greek episode in Egyptian history or an Egyptian episode in Greek history. Its argument — "bargained incorporation", a political economy negotiated between the ruler and the constituencies who could withhold cooperation, and a dynasty that ruled through Egyptian society rather than over it — is what this site's institutions fields for the polity are coded from.

  manning-2010

• J. R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, Volume I (John Murray, 1838)

  A lieutenant of the Indian Navy who surveyed the Omani coast and travelled inland in the 1830s, during Sayyid Said's reign. He writes as a naval officer assessing an ally: what the harbour would take to fortify, how many guns the frigates carry, how long a squadron from India would need to arrive. The book's anxieties are imperial — much of the Oman chapter is about what Russia might do — and that is exactly what makes his estimate of Omani strength worth having, since he had no motive to inflate it. Out of copyright.

  wellsted-1838

• J. Theodore Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (C. Kegan Paul, 1881)

  A Victorian narrative history, and an openly partisan one: Bent finds the Genoese factions squalid, the Jacobins contemptible, and the republic's last three centuries a period he wishes could be struck from the record. Read past the verdicts and he is detailed and specific about the events of 1796-97 and 1814-15, which are the years used here, and he prints what the participants said. Out of copyright.

  bent-1881

• J. Theodore Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland: Being a Record of Excavation and Exploration in 1891 (Longmans, Green, 1895)

  The first archaeological account of Great Zimbabwe, by an English traveller sent out under the auspices of the British South Africa Company in the year after the Company occupied the country. Bent dug carefully, surveyed accurately with the help of R. M. W. Swan, and published plans and finds that are still consulted. He also concluded that the builders were Arabians and that no African could have built it, and set out the reasoning by which he got there — which is why the book is read now: it is the clearest surviving statement of how the foreign-origin theory was assembled, written by the man assembling it. Out of copyright.

  bent-mashonaland-1895

• Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, History of the Caliphs (Tarikh al-Khulafa') (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881)

  Written in Cairo in the 1490s by a scholar who had grown up in the household of one of the caliphs he describes and whose father drafted their documents. It is the only history of the caliphate written from inside the Cairo Abbasid establishment, and it quotes the paperwork. Out of copyright.

  suyuti-jarrett

• Jalal al-Din Rumi, Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (Cambridge University Press, 1898)

  Nicholson's first book, with the Persian and the English facing and a commentary he later thought too free. The poems are the ghazals Rumi wrote under the name of Shams of Tabriz, at Konya, in the decades on either side of the Mongol conquest of the sultanate. Out of copyright.

  rumi-nicholson-1898

• James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (Macmillan, 1889)

  Written as a prize essay in 1862 and expanded over forty years, with a supplementary chapter on the German empire of 1871 added while that empire was new. Bryce's constitutional judgements have been overtaken and his certainty that the medieval empire's failure was its failure to become a nation is exactly the reading later historians set out to overturn; he is used here for what he saw and reported, and his 1871 chapter is itself a piece of the story rather than an account of it. Out of copyright.

  bryce-1889

• James Fletcher, The History of Poland, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Harper & Brothers, 1836)

  A nineteenth-century narrative history running from the legendary Piast founding through the Jagiellonian union with Lithuania and the 1569 Union of Lublin to the eighteenth-century partitions. Used here for the Piast and Jagiellonian Kingdom of Poland's span from Mieszko I's baptism through Casimir the Great's reign and Louis of Hungary's succession, Jadwiga and Jogaila, and the 1569 union. Out of copyright.

  fletcher-1836

• James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905)

  The narrative companion to Breasted's Ancient Records, written by the man who had just finished translating the whole corpus of Egyptian historical inscriptions, and still the fullest continuous account built directly from them: almost every paragraph carries a reference to a document in the Records. Its absolute chronology is a century too high in places and is not used here — dates on this site follow shaw-2000 — and its Victorian judgements about national vigour and decadence are of their period. What it is used for is what the documents say, which is where its author was unmatched. Out of copyright.

  breasted-1905

• James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume I: The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties (University of Chicago Press, 1906)

  Every historical inscription then known from Egypt down to the Seventeenth Dynasty, translated and numbered in sequence, with the damaged passages marked and the conjectures flagged as conjectures. The translations have been revised many times since; the apparatus is what makes it usable here, because it shows on the page how much of any Old Kingdom text is actually standing. Out of copyright.

  breasted-1906

• James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912)

  The narrative companion to Breasted's Ancient Records, quoting the documents at length in his own translations. Cited here for the Report of Wenamun, which he prints nearly in full. Out of copyright.

  breasted-1912

• James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume IV: The Twentieth to the Twenty-Sixth Dynasties (University of Chicago Press, 1906)

  The fourth volume of Breasted's translation of the Egyptian historical inscriptions, covering the long fragmentation and the Kushite and Saite recoveries. Its centrepiece is the Piye stela from Gebel Barkal, which Breasted prints in full with a section-by-section apparatus and calls the most instructive surviving document on the internal political condition of Egypt in a period without a central power. The translation is a century old and a few readings have since been revised; the run of the narrative, which is what a reader wants from it, has not. Out of copyright.

  breasted-1906-iv

• James Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

  Reads the Seljuk arrival and the First Crusade from inside Syria rather than from either invading direction, and takes the local Arab, Kurdish and urban powers seriously as the actors they were rather than as the furniture two invasions rearranged. Cited for the polities this site added to close the gap between 1004 and 1102.

  wilson-2023

• Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

  abun-nasr-1987

• Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2013)

  Reads the ninth- and tenth-century Andalusi jurists on the practical problem of keeping communal boundaries legible in a society where conversion, intermarriage and a shared language kept dissolving them. Cited for the Cordoba chapter on the three communities, which is deliberately not a chapter about tolerance — and it is the second work cited on that page, which until now rested entirely on one book.

  safran-2013

• John C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman, in Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

  Traces regional identity, tribal organisation and political authority in south-eastern Arabia across some twelve hundred years. Cited for the first Ibadi imamate, and for the distinction between an imamate as an office repeatedly reconstituted and a dynasty that persists.

  wilkinson-1987

• John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, revised and expanded edn (University of Utah Press, 1999)

  The monograph on the White Sheep, and the book that made the fifteenth century in this region an argument rather than an interval. Woods reads the confederation through its own genealogical ideology — the descent from Bayandur Khan, the Oghuz past invoked as a right to rule — and through the three-stage movement his subtitle names, which is how this page's legitimation field came to be coded.

  woods-1999

• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (Longmans, Green, 1908)

  The standard English narrative of the Murid wars, written from the Russian military archives and from travel over the ground. Baddeley is a sympathetic outsider to both sides: he refuses the Russian literature's account of the movement as fanaticism, refuses equally to romanticise Shamil, and presses the charge of cruelty. His closing assessment — that Muridism was in the long run the instrument rather than the enemy of Russian rule, an argument he credits to Shamil's own claim in captivity — is the reason he is cited here. Out of copyright.

  baddeley-1908

• John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture, revised edn (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

  On the century in which the eastern Roman empire lost two-thirds of its revenue and rebuilt its army, its taxation and its administration around what was left. This site's Byzantine institutions are coded from it, because the state the fields describe is the one that came out of this century rather than the one that went into it.

  haldon-1997

• John F. Healey, The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus, in Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (Brill, 2001)

  Built from Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions, iconography and archaeology rather than from literary sources, which is what makes it usable for a coded field: it can say what the kings claimed because it is reading what they had carved. Cited here for the divinisation of Nabataean kings and for the script, Healey having also edited the Nabataean tomb inscriptions of Mada'in Salih.

  healey-2001

• John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

  richards-1993

• John Faithfull Fleet, Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings and Their Successors (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, volume III, 1888)

  The Gupta inscriptions with texts, translations and notes, including the Allahabad pillar prashasti of Samudragupta. The inscriptions are the dynasty's own account of itself in the most formal register available — court poetry cut in stone by a named officer of the king — and Fleet's translations preserve the lacunae rather than filling them, which is why the passages quoted here have gaps in them. Out of copyright.

  fleet-cii-iii

• John L. Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages, in Chicago Studies on the Middle East (Middle East Documentation Center, 2010)

  Reads the sharifate as a polity with a political economy rather than as a religious appendage of somebody else's empire: its alliances in the Hejaz, its relations with Cairo, and its dependence on the Indian Ocean traffic through Jeddah. Written partly from sources composed by Meccan scholars rather than only from the Egyptian material, which is why the city has agency in it.

  meloy-2010

• John Lewis Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830)

  Published posthumously from the notebooks of a Swiss traveller who spent years in Arabia in Muslim dress and reached Mecca and Medina, gathering material on the Wahhabi state while it still existed and while the Egyptian war against it was being fought. He never got to the Najd, so the Diriyah material is second-hand — but it is collected from people who had been there, at the time, by somebody with no interest in the outcome, and it records the tax rates and the libraries as readily as the wars. Out of copyright.

  burckhardt-1830

• John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (John Murray, for the African Association, 1819)

  Burckhardt went up the Nile in 1813 and 1814 disguised as a poor Syrian trader, on very little money, and wrote down the stages, the prices and the ruins. He had no interest in Christian Nubia and did not know what he was looking at when he passed it: the churches he notes on the hills are recorded as Greek because they were Christian and looked Byzantine to him. That incuriosity is what makes the observations useful, since he had no thesis to fit them to. Published posthumously. Out of copyright.

  burckhardt-nubia

• John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (Henry Colburn, 1829)

  A Swiss traveller in Egyptian service who reached Mecca in 1814, passed as a Muslim, performed the pilgrimage and stayed months, arriving in the year Muhammad Ali's army was taking the Hijaz back from the Wahhabis and the last independent sharif was being removed. He is an exact and unromantic observer of what things cost, who collected which tax, which fort was built by whom, and what the townspeople said about the government they had just lost. His contempt for particular people is frequent and can be left where he put it. Out of copyright.

  burckhardt-1829

• John Masson Smith, Jr., The History of the Sarbadar Dynasty 1336-1381 A.D. and its Sources, in Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (Mouton, 1970)

  The monograph on a polity that is hard to write about because its own records do not survive and the chronicles that describe it were written by people who disapproved. Smith works the coins and the inscriptions alongside the literary sources, which matters here: the numismatic evidence is most of what establishes who was actually ruling in a state that changed rulers a dozen times in forty-four years.

  smith-1970

• John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 1999)

  hunwick-1999

• John of Plano Carpini, The Journey of Friar John of Pian de Carpine to the Court of Kuyuk Khan, 1245-47 (Hakluyt Society, 1900)

  A Franciscan in his sixties sent to the Mongols by Innocent IV, who reached the imperial camp in time to watch Güyük enthroned in August 1246 and came back with the khan's reply. He was writing an intelligence report as much as a travel account — how the Mongols fight, how they besiege, what they do to a city that resists, and what a European army would need to do about it — and the practical register is what makes him useful. He is also a hostile witness who was cold, hungry and frightened for most of the journey, and says so. Printed by Rockhill in the same volume as Rubruck. Out of copyright.

  carpini-rockhill

• John R. Perry, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747-1779, in Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (University of Chicago Press, 1979)

  The monograph on the one ruler in this region's six hundred years whom Iranians remember warmly, and on the thirty years of recovery he ran from Shiraz while declining to call himself shah.

  perry-1979

• John V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (University of Michigan Press, 1983)

  The standard English narrative of the Balkans before 1200 and the source for this site's First Bulgarian record. Fine is careful about the difference between what the Byzantine sources say happened in Bulgaria and what can be established, which matters on a record where almost all the written evidence is the enemy's.

  fine-1983

• John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (University of Michigan Press, 1987)

  The companion volume, covering 1185 to the Ottoman conquest, and the source for this site's Second Bulgarian record. The two books together are why this corpus can carry Bulgaria twice with the same evidentiary footing on both sides of the interruption.

  fine-1987

• John, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (Text and Translation Society, 1916)

  A Coptic bishop of the Egyptian Delta writing within living memory of the Arab conquest of Egypt, and the only substantial narrative of it from the side that lost. Surviving in an Ethiopic version made from an Arabic version of the Coptic or Greek original, which is a long chain and is why its dates are unreliable and some place-names are corrupt. Its value is not chronological: it is that a contemporary Egyptian reports the conquest as sack, flight and taxation rather than as a transfer of administration, and reports his own community's view that Heraclius had brought it on the Romans by persecuting them. Out of copyright.

  john-of-nikiu

• Jonas Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, with a Journal of Travels, to which are added the Revolutions of Persia (Printed for Mr. Dodsley, 1753)

  Written by an English merchant of the Russia Company who went to Persia in the 1740s to open a Caspian trade, lost his goods in a rebellion, and came home and explained why the venture had failed. It is not scholarship and does not claim to be; its value is that it is contemporary, that Hanway talked to people who had been in the room, and that his interest was commercial rather than dynastic — so he records the condition of the country and the collection of revenue in a way the court chronicles do not. Out of copyright.

  hanway-1753

• Josef A. Katzel, translated and annotated by Daniel K. Berman, A Short History of Lithuania to 1569: Centennial Edition (1921-2021) (Godot Press, 2021)

  An annotated English translation of Katzel's 1921 Russian-language popular history of Lithuania to 1569 (Istoriya Litvy), itself a compilation from secondary sources including Lyubavsky's 1915 Review of the Lithuanian-Russian State. The 2021 edition's editorial notes flag points where the century-old original diverges from current scholarship. Covers Ryngold and Mindaugas's founding of the Grand Duchy, Gediminas, Algirdas and Vytautas the Great, the Union of Krewo, the Battle of Grunwald, and the 1569 Union of Lublin.

  katzel-2021

• Josef Wiesehöfer, trans. Azizeh Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (I.B. Tauris, 1996)

  A survey of the whole twelve hundred years built on Persian written, archaeological and numismatic evidence rather than on the Greek and Roman accounts the Western tradition has usually reached it through — which is the argument this site's Achaemenid and Parthian records already make and had been making from other books. Cited here for the small dynasties the imperial narratives leave out.

  wiesehofer-1996

• Jost Gippert, Wolfgang Schulze, Zaza Aleksidze and Jean-Pierre Mahé, The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai, in Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero-Caucasica 2 (Brepols, 2008)

  The first edition of the only substantial texts in Caucasian Albanian, recovered from the erased under-layers of two Georgian manuscripts at St Catherine's on Sinai — identified by Aleksidze in 1996 and read by an international project over the following decade. Cited for the chapter on a script that was lost for a thousand years, because the manner of its recovery is the evidence and not an anecdote about it.

  gippert-2008

• Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, The History of the Conquest of China by the Tartars (Hakluyt Society, 1854)

  A Spanish bishop's account of the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest, written in the 1650s from reports reaching Mexico and Manila while the war was still being fought. It is close to the events and remote from the country: Palafox is working from missionary letters and merchant hearsay, names are mangled through several languages, and the providential framing is his own. Cited here for what the fall looked like to outsiders watching it happen. Out of copyright.

  palafox-tartar

• Juan González de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (Hakluyt Society, 1853)

  An Augustinian friar compiled the first substantial European account of Ming China without ever going there himself, working from the reports of the Spanish embassy of Martín de Rada, who spent two months in Fujian in 1575 with official escorts, visited its schools, prisons and a provincial graduation ceremony, and brought back a chest of printed Chinese books. Mendoza wrote it up in 1585; this is the 1588 English translation as reprinted by the Hakluyt Society, with the editor's introduction that supplies the earlier eyewitness of Galeote Pereira alongside it. Out of copyright.

  mendoza-1588

• Judasz Tadeusz Krusiński, The History of the Revolution of Persia, taken from the memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan (Printed for J. Pemberton, 1728)

  An eyewitness account of the fall of Isfahan by a Jesuit who had lived in the city for years, spoke the language, knew the court, and was inside the walls for the whole of the six-month siege. He despised the Safavid government and says so, so his explanations of the decline — the princes raised in the harem, the eunuchs, the ministers — should be read as the judgement of a hostile and extremely well-placed observer rather than as analysis. On what happened during the siege itself he is the fullest testimony that exists, and it is not pleasant. Out of copyright.

  krusinski-1728

• Julius Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (University of Calcutta, 1927)

  The 1902 Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz in English. It is the study that established the Umayyad period as a subject in its own right rather than as the prelude to the Abbasids, and it is unusually explicit about which Arabic authority each statement rests on and how far that authority can be pressed. A century of scholarship has revised it; its judgements about the sources are still worth reading, and it is cited here for the dynasty's fall and for what happened to its survivors.

  wellhausen-1927

• K. W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

  Weighted toward the premodern centuries that most surveys of Vietnam hurry through, and written against the national narrative of a single continuous people resisting the north. This site's Dai Viet record follows it in treating the Ly and the Tran as a specific thing with a beginning and an end rather than as an early chapter of a country.

  taylor-2013

• Kartlis Tskhovreba: A History of Georgia (Artanuji, 2014)

  The Georgian national chronicle in English. It is a compilation assembled over centuries out of older material, and for the pre-Christian period it is not a historical source in the ordinary sense: it has Alexander conquering Kartli, which he never entered, and builds its chronology backwards from his death. Cited here for what it is — the account the Georgians themselves kept — and specifically for the regime Parnavaz is remembered as overthrowing, the eight eristavis and the spaspet he is said to have appointed, and the chronicle's own remark that the arrangement was modelled on Persian practice.

  kartlis-tskhovreba

• Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, in Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 35 (Harvard University Press, 2002)

  On what the Safavid movement was before it was a state: Persianate Sufism and Alid messianism, and rulers whose followers expected the end of the world rather than a government. It is the source for the `divine-sanction` on this site's Safavid record, which had been coded off a general history that describes the outcome rather than the claim.

  babayan-2002

• Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)

  hall-2011

• Khalid Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn 'Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads, in SUNY Series in Medieval Middle East History (State University of New York Press, 1994)

  The argument that the Umayyad state was structurally financed by continuing conquest and could not survive its stopping. Cited here for the Umayyad revenue coding — it is the source that treats campaign proceeds as structural income rather than as something armies did — and for the second siege of Constantinople as the point the expansion met a limit it never passed.

  blankinship-1994

• Khwandamir and others, The History of India, as Told by its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, Volume IV (Trübner, 1872)

  Translated extracts from Persian histories, assembled by two British officials who wanted the Indian material and took whatever came attached to it — which is why the volume carries long stretches of Khwandamir's *Habib al-Siyar* on Ghaznavid campaigns in Iran that nobody has since translated into English. The editors are working from manuscripts, note where their copies disagree, and say when a chronicler has omitted an episode his rivals record. The framing is imperial and the selection is made for a purpose, and the translations are of late compilers rather than contemporaries; but Khwandamir was working from earlier books, some of them lost, and for several of these decades this is the only English there is. Out of copyright.

  elliot-dowson-4

• L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (University of Chicago Press, 1990)

  The standard account of the two and a half centuries between the fall of Seville and the fall of Granada, covering the Nasrid emirate and the Muslim communities living under Christian rule alongside it. Cited for the Nasrid record, which needed a source that treats the period as something other than an epilogue.

  harvey-1990

• L. W. King, Babylonian Boundary-Stones and Memorial-Tablets in the British Museum (British Museum, 1912)

  The kudurru corpus: Babylonian charters recording grants of land and exemptions, carved on shaped stones under the emblems of the gods who guaranteed them. Their historical value is accidental and therefore unusually high — a charter has to justify the grant, so it opens with what the grantee did to earn it, and the campaign narratives embedded in these preambles are often the only account of the events they describe. King gives each stone in transliteration and translation with the damaged signs argued over in the notes. Out of copyright.

  king-1912

• L. W. King and R. C. Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (British Museum, 1907)

  A fresh collation of the three versions of the Behistun inscription made on the rock itself, with the Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian texts printed together and a full index of proper names in all three. Its use here is that index, which is where the Babylonian name for the province the Persians called Armina can be read off directly. Out of copyright.

  king-thompson-1907

• Lady Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race (John Murray, 1881)

  Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt crossed the Nafud to Ha'il in the winter of 1878-79 and stayed as guests of Muhammad ibn Rashid at the height of his power. They had gone to buy mares. She keeps the journal, records what people told her rather than what she concluded, and is explicit where the local account contradicts Palgrave's. Out of copyright.

  blunt-1881

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e, Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (Thomas Martin, London, 1790)

  Letters written in 1716-18, when the author accompanied her husband on his embassy to Ahmed III, and published after her death. She learned some Turkish, got into houses and conversations no male traveller could reach, and was contemptuous of the travel writing of her contemporaries, which makes her both unusually well informed and unusually keen to correct somebody. Used here for her account of the balance of power between sultan, soldiery and religious establishment, and for the smallpox inoculation she watched and carried home. She was a guest of the state she is describing and saw its capital, not its provinces.

  montagu-letters

• Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (Hakluyt Society, 1896)

  A Granada-born Moroccan diplomat, captured by corsairs and presented to Pope Leo X, who wrote his account of Africa in Italian in the 1520s from journeys made a decade or so earlier. Pory's 1600 English is the version given here. Leo is excellent on what he saw — prices, buildings, court protocol, what the caravans carried — and unreliable where he is repeating what he was told, which includes most of what he says about the religion of places he did not enter; his Bornu chapter describes as heathen a kingdom that had been Muslim for four centuries. Out of copyright.

  leo-africanus-pory

• Leonard William King, A History of Sumer and Akkad (Chatto and Windus, 1910)

  A survey of Mesopotamian history to the fall of Babylon by the British Museum's keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities, written when the subject was sixty years old. Much of its reconstruction is superseded — King was not certain that Sargon of Agade and the king he calls Shar-Gani-sharri were the same man. Cited here for exactly that: it records what was known, and how it came to be known, at a moment when the difference between the legend and the evidence was still being worked out. Out of copyright.

  king-1910

• Leonard William King, The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, Volume III (Luzac, 1900)

  The cuneiform texts, transliterations and translations of Hammurabi's own administrative correspondence — most of it addressed to Sin-idinnam, governor of Larsa — with a long introduction classifying what the king wrote to his governors about. It is the ordinary paperwork of the man whose law collection is the most famous document of the ancient world, and it is out of copyright.

  king-hammurabi

• Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (University of Hawaii Press, 1993)

  The standard account of the north Moluccas, built on Iberian and Dutch records read against Malukan categories rather than through them. Its organising argument — that Maluku was structured by a dualism between Ternate and Tidore rather than by a single centre — is why this site's Ternate record is written the way it is.

  andaya-1993

• Leonard Y. Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (Oxford University Press, 1975)

  Built on the Dutch company records at The Hague, which are the fullest external archive anybody kept on a Malay court in this period. It covers eighty-seven of this site's Johor record's hundred and seventy-one years, including the killing of 1699, and the record's span dates outside that window come from elsewhere.

  andaya-1975

• Leonard Y. Andaya, The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century, in Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1981)

  Written around the Bugis prince who fought for the Dutch company against Makassar and won South Sulawesi for himself, and therefore an account of the fall of Makassar from the side of the Sulawesi allies rather than from the company's. This site's Makassar record is coded from it and from Reid.

  andaya-1981

• Liudprand of Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Routledge, 1930)

  A north Italian bishop who went to Constantinople twice — in 949 as an envoy of Berengar of Italy, and in 968 as Otto I's ambassador to negotiate a marriage — and wrote both journeys up for western readers. The first account is admiring and the second is a sustained insult, because the second embassy went badly and he was writing to explain why. He is therefore a hostile witness who cannot help recording how impressive the thing he is belittling was. Out of copyright.

  liudprand-wright

• M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200, 4th edn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

  The standard general history, beginning at exactly the point this corpus's Majapahit record does. Cited here for the fifteenth century — the Paregreg war, the Islamisation of the north Java ports and the shift of trade to Melaka — which hall-2011 covers as trade history and Ricklefs as politics.

  ricklefs-2008

• Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

  The standard single-volume history, by an anthropologist from a family the Saudi state displaced, which is worth knowing and does not make the book partisan — it makes it unusually attentive to the regional powers the national narrative absorbs. Cited for the three Saudi states and for the Rashidi record alongside her own monograph on them.

  al-rasheed-2010

• Madawi Al-Rasheed, Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidi Tribal Dynasty, in Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 1991)

  The monograph on the dynasty that beat the Saudis in the nineteenth century and lost to them in the twentieth, and on the wider question it raises: why a camel-herding confederation became susceptible to political centralisation at that particular moment, and why the result did not last.

  al-rasheed-1991

• Malcolm Barber, The Crusader States (Yale University Press, 2012)

  A political history of the four Frankish states of the Levant as states — how they were governed, paid for and defended — rather than as episodes in the history of the crusading movement. The spine for the Jerusalem and Edessa records here, and the work this site relies on for the distinction between the kingdom that ended in 1187 and the one that ended in 1291.

  barber-2012

• Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC, 3rd edn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)

  van-de-mieroop-2015

• Marc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography, in Blackwell Ancient Lives (Blackwell, 2005)

  The institutions on this site's Old Babylonian record are coded from it. Van De Mieroop's argument is that Hammurabi's reputation as a lawgiver has obscured a career that was mostly diplomacy and a state that mostly did not outlive him, which is the shape that record takes.

  van-de-mieroop-2005

• Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (John Murray, 1903)

  Yule's third edition, revised by Henri Cordier. Polo's own text on Lesser Armenia and Turcomania is a page each and reads like a merchant's briefing note, which is what makes it useful: he says what was traded and who was paying tribute to whom. Yule's annotation is several times the length of the text and carries the nineteenth-century scholarship on the Cilician kingdom, including where its last king ended up. Out of copyright.

  polo-yule

• Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2009)

  lewis-2009

• Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society, in The Peoples of Africa (Blackwell, 2000)

  An archaeologist and an anthropologist writing together, which is what the Swahili coast requires: the documentary record is thin and late and the excavated one is enormous. Their central argument — that Swahili society is African and coastal rather than a colony of anybody — is the one this site's Kilwa record's `legitimation` field is coded against.

  horton-middleton-2000

• Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (Macmillan, 1996)

  whittow-1996

• Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, in Writings from the Ancient World 6, 2nd edn (Scholars Press, 1997)

  Translations of the Mesopotamian and Hittite law collections in one volume — the laws of Ur-Nammu, of Lipit-Ishtar, of Eshnunna, of Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian laws and the Hittite laws. Cited on this site wherever a page quotes or dates one of them, which is on four records in the Ancient Near East and nowhere else in the corpus.

  roth-1997

• Martin Hinds, The Murder of the Caliph 'Uthman, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 3(4), 450-469 (1972)

  Used for Uthman's caliphate, which this site previously recorded only as a corpse. Hinds reads the killing as the outcome of a distributional quarrel — fiscal centralisation over the conquered crown lands, Umayyad kinsmen in the governorships, and precedence in Islam used as a claim on stipend rank — rather than as a moral episode. The Rashidun chapter on Uthman follows him, including his argument that the pious rallying-cry was a cloak for material grievance.

  hinds-1972

• Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris's English History, from the Year 1235 to 1273 (Henry G. Bohn, London, 1852)

  The chronicle of St Albans, written by a monk who never travelled further than London and who collected everything that reached him — royal letters, travellers' reports, market prices, rumour. For the Mongols he is worthless as description and invaluable as evidence: he records what Europe was told between 1238 and 1245, in what order, by whom, and how it was received, including the price of herring at Yarmouth and the bishop of Winchester's reply to a Muslim embassy asking for help. Out of copyright.

  paris-giles

• Megasthenes, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Thacker, Spink, 1877)

  The surviving fragments of the account written by Seleucus Nicator's envoy to Chandragupta Maurya, collected out of the later Greek and Latin authors who quoted him. He is the only outsider who saw the Mauryan capital, and his measurements of it have been partly confirmed by excavation. He is also at three removes from the reader: nothing of his own text survives, so every sentence is somebody else's paraphrase, and the quoting authors preserved the marvels — the gold-digging ants, the men without mouths — as readily as the administration. Out of copyright.

  megasthenes-mccrindle

• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018)

  The major recent revision, built from Arabic manuscripts, oral tradition and archaeology together, and unusually direct about slavery, caste and gender in the Niger empires. Cited on this site's Mali and Songhai records where Gomez departs from the older narratives, and the departures are stated rather than smoothed over.

  gomez-2018

• Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 1985)

  Built on the Old Burmese donative inscriptions, and the source of the argument this site's Pagan record is coded around: that the kingdom was undone by the accumulation of tax-exempt monastic land rather than by the Mongols. It is a contested reading and the record says so.

  aung-thwin-1985

• Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (I.B. Tauris, 2006)

  The first full study of Nader in English since Lockhart in 1938, and unusually good on the military question this corpus keeps running into: how an army was actually raised, paid and made to fight, and what it cost the country underneath it to keep one in the field.

  axworthy-2006

• Michael Brett, The Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

  brett-2017

• Michael Jursa, Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC: Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of Economic Growth, in Alter Orient und Altes Testament 377 (Ugarit-Verlag, 2010)

  Built on more than 21,500 dated tablets from Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, Sippar and Uruk. This site's Neo-Babylonian revenue and military bases are coded from it rather than from a political narrative, because it is the only work in this corpus's bibliography that can say what a state's income actually consisted of from primary accounts rather than from a chronicler.

  jursa-2010

• Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

  The first monograph in a Western language on a dynasty four chapters of this site were already leaning on. Used for the whole Qara Khitai record: the Chinese imperial forms retained two thousand miles from China, the indirect rule through Muslim vassals, and the religious policy that its last ruler reversed.

  biran-2005

• Michal Biran, Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Curzon Press, 1997)

  biran-1997

• Miguel de Castanhoso and João Bermudes, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541-1543 (Hakluyt Society, 1902)

  Two accounts of the same campaign by men who were on it, printed together. Castanhoso was a soldier in Cristóvão da Gama's four hundred and wrote a plain military narrative; Bermudes claimed to be patriarch of Ethiopia, was probably not, and wrote a self-serving one. Whiteway prints both, sets the Ethiopian and Arabic accounts against them at the end of each chapter, and is unsparing about Bermudes. Between them they are the only eyewitness description of the war that decided whether the Ethiopian highlands stayed Christian. Out of copyright.

  castanhoso-whiteway

• Minhaj al-Din Abu Umar-i Uthman al-Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881)

  A general history written at Delhi in the 1260s by a man from a family of scholars in the Ghurid highlands, dedicated to a grandson of Iltutmish and paid for with a village in the Punjab. That biography is also its bias: it is warm about the Ghurids and warmer about the Delhi sultans, and Raverty's notes are combative about the errors of earlier translators. Its value here is as a near-contemporary witness on two things the Persian and Arabic chronicles cover thinly — the purchase and manumission of Iltutmish, which Juzjani had from the court that descended from him, and the manoeuvring between the Khwarazmshah, the Qara Khitai and the last Karakhanid of Samarkand. Out of copyright.

  juzjani-raverty

• Mirza Mahdi Khan Astarabadi, The History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia (J. Richardson, 1773)

  Nader's own secretary and official historian, writing the *Tarikh-i Nadiri* while the events were current, translated into French for the king of Denmark and then into English by Jones, who was twenty-six and had been handed the manuscript because nobody else could read it. It is a court history and says so: the campaigns are triumphs, the massacres are necessities, and the failures are other people's. What makes it worth reading anyway is that Mirza Mahdi was present for a great deal of it and records the mechanics — how a defeated army was paid back into confidence, what a review looked like, which general refused to come out of his entrenchments — with a staff officer's attention. Jones's own footnotes argue with his author from time to time. Out of copyright.

  jones-nader

• Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (Sampson Low, Marston, 1895)

  A Chaghatayid noble of the Dughlat house, cousin to Babur, who ended his life ruling Kashmir and wrote the history of his own people because nobody else had. It is the principal source for Moghulistan, for the eastern Chaghatai khans, and for the origins of the Kazakhs, and for long stretches it is the only one. He is writing about his own family's rivals and patrons, he is a partisan of the Chaghatayid line against the Uzbeks, and the early sections rest on oral tradition he says so himself. Ney Elias's introduction and notes run to nearly two hundred pages and are a separate work of geography. Out of copyright.

  rashidi-elias-ross

• Miskawayh and Abu Shuja al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (Basil Blackwell, 1921)

  Two Baghdad chronicles of the tenth century in translation, written by men with government careers who knew how the administration worked and say so in a register no court panegyric uses: what a campaign cost, what a negotiation was really about, which official was afraid of whom. Cited here for the Qarmatians as Baghdad experienced them, for the Daylamite captains who became the Buyid dynasty, and — in Abu Shuja's continuation, written a century later from the papers of men who had been in the room — for the succession that followed Adud al-Dawla. Out of copyright.

  miskawayh-margoliouth

• Mohd Hazmi bin Mohd Rusli and Muhamad Azim bin Mazlan, Sultan of Sulu's Sabah Claim: A Case of 'Long-Lost' Sovereignty? (RSIS Commentaries No. 043/2013, 2013)

  Published 12 March 2013, in the middle of the Lahad Datu crisis it analyses. Cited here for the 1878 North Borneo agreement's terms (Alfred Dent and Baron von Overbeck of the British North Borneo Company, 5,000 Malayan dollars a year), the annual cession payment Malaysia still makes to the Sulu sultan's heirs, the 1963 accession of North Borneo to Malaysia as Sabah, and the February-March 2013 occupation of Lahad Datu by armed followers of Jamalul Kiram III. Freely published.

  rsis-2013-sabah

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (Frank Cass, 1994)

  The standard study, worked from Russian, Arabic and Turkish archives, of a polity that held out against an empire for a quarter of a century in country the empire could reach and could not hold. Its subject is as much the state Shamil built as the war he fought with it, which is what this site needs: the institutions are the reason the resistance lasted.

  gammer-1994

• Movses Dasxuranci, The History of the Caucasian Albanians (Oxford University Press, 1961)

  The only surviving history of Caucasian Albania, written in Armenian and compiled in stages between the seventh and the tenth centuries. It is the source for almost everything known about the Mihranid princes, and its third book carries the events the country's own literature stops at: the murder of the last Mihranid, the transfer of the principality to the Eranshahik house, the raid on Partaw. Dowsett's edition prints the variant readings and the chronological disputes rather than smoothing them.

  dasxuranci-dowsett

• Movses Dasxurantsi, History of the Aghuans (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2010)

  The only surviving history of Caucasian Albania, compiled in Armenian from earlier material and preserving documents, letters and eyewitness accounts that exist nowhere else; the translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. The compiler is a churchman writing for a church, so the miracles and the relics get more space than the administration, and the long central section on the prince Juanshir reads as a panegyric by someone who knew him. Its value is that it is the country describing itself, in the century in which it stopped being able to.

  dasxuranci-bedrosian

• Mpu Prapanca, translated by Stuart Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama), in KITLV Verhandelingen 169 (KITLV Press, 1995)

  The Majapahit court poem of 1365 in translation with commentary, by the superintendent of Buddhist affairs at the court he is describing. It is the principal internal source for that record and the reason its fourth chapter is about how to read a list.

  robson-1995

• Muhammad al-Saghir al-Ifrani, Nozhet-elhâdi: histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc, 1511-1670 (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1889)

  A Moroccan scholar's history of the Saadis, written at Marrakesh around 1720 under the dynasty that replaced them, in Houdas's French. It is the fullest Moroccan account of the sixteenth century and the only connected one for several stretches of it, and it is a court history twice over — al-Ifrani admires the Saadis and serves the Alawis, so the Wattasids are usurpers, the Alawis arrive as deliverance, and sultans are addressed in the vocabulary of lions and eagles. He is also a biographer of scholars and saints before he is a chronicler of campaigns, which is why the best material in him is what jurists said to sultans. Out of copyright.

  ifrani-houdas

• Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXI: The Victory of the Marwanids (State University of New York Press, 1990)

  Annotated translation of the year-by-year chronicle for 66-73/685-693, built from named ninth-century transmitters — chiefly al-Waqidi's informants — quoting participants and witnesses rather than summarising them. Used here for the siege of Mecca and the last day of Ibn al-Zubayr: the farewell to his mother Asma, his death on the field, and the display of his head, all given as direct reported speech from people who said they were there. Tabari preserves competing versions without choosing between them, which the notes make explicit.

  tabari-21-fishbein

• Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXII: The Marwanid Restoration (State University of New York Press, 1989)

  Continues the chronicle into 74-81/693-701, covering al-Hajjaj's governorship of Iraq after Mecca fell: the Kharijite Shabib b. Yazid, who held out with a few hundred men and twice entered al-Kufah itself, and the beginning of the unrest that grew into Ibn al-Ash'ath's revolt. Used here for what holding the province actually required once the war over the caliphate was already won elsewhere.

  tabari-22-rowson

• Muhammad ibn Umar al-Waqidi, The Life of Muhammad: al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi (Routledge, 2011)

  The earliest surviving dedicated account of the Medinan campaigns, compiled in the late eighth century and much fuller on the expeditions than the biographical tradition it sits beside. Used here for the negotiation at al-Hudaybiyya, which it reports at length and with the arguments over wording intact.

  waqidi-maghazi

• multiple contributors, SALJUQS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-saljuqs

• multiple contributors, ABBASID CALIPHATE, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-abbasid-caliphate

• Mustafa Banister, The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, 1261-1517: Out of the Shadows, in Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

  The full-length study of the line this site counted as the Abbasids' only successor claim while describing it nowhere. Its argument is against the dismissal in its own subtitle — that a caliphate with no territory, army or revenue was nonetheless doing work, and that reading these men purely as figureheads is a judgement inherited from hostile brevity rather than one made from the record.

  banister-2021

• Mustafa Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1927 (K. F. Koehler, 1929)

  Thirty-six hours of speech delivered over six days to the congress of his own party, published in English two years later. It is the founder's account of how the Ottoman state was ended and the republic made, composed at the height of his power, and it is a work of self-justification by a man with no surviving rivals: everyone he quarrelled with is in it, and their side is not. Used here for what he says he did and why he says he did it, which is documentary regardless of whether the reasons are the real ones. Out of copyright.

  nutuk-1929

• N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, in Fontes Historiae Africanae, Series Arabica IV (Cambridge University Press, 1981)

  Translations of what Arabic writers from the ninth to the fifteenth century said about West Africa, with the apparatus for judging it. It is the reason this site's Ghana record can be written at all: every field on that page comes from men who mostly had not been there, and a sourcebook that prints them side by side is the only way to see how much of the account is one author copying another.

  levtzion-hopkins-1981

• Naosuke Mukoyama, Oil in the Imperial Periphery (Phenomenal World, 2025)

  Published 13 February 2025, drawing on the author's book "Fueling Sovereignty." Cited for the 1929 Seria oil strike and its effect on British colonial policy toward Brunei (including the 1906 treaty guaranteeing no further cession of Bruneian territory), the 1962 Brunei revolt against the proposed merger into the Malaysian Federation over control of oil revenue, and the path to independence in 1984. Freely published.

  mukoyama-2025

• Nasir-i Khusraw, trans. W. M. Thackston, Jr., Naser-e Khosraw's Book of Travels (Safarnama), in Persian Heritage Series 36 (Bibliotheca Persica, 1986)

  The eleventh-century traveller's own account, in translation. Cited so that the description of al-Hasa on this site's Qarmatian page — the untaxed residents, the state granaries, the interest-free loans, the mosque with no Friday prayer — is attributed to the man who wrote it rather than to a modern survey quoting him. He was an Isma'ili himself, which is a reason to cite him directly and to say so.

  thackston-1986

• Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (Methuen, 1973)

  levtzion-1973

• Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2000)

  Two dozen specialists on Islam in Africa region by region, and the only general work in this bibliography that treats Kanem-Bornu at length. This site's Kanem-Bornu institutions are coded from it, alongside the early Arabic notices in levtzion-hopkins-1981.

  levtzion-pouwels-2000

• Neil Christie, The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 1995)

  History and archaeology together, from the invasion of 568 to Charlemagne taking the kingdom in 774. Christie is unusually useful for a record whose central difficulty is that the written sources are two centuries later than the events and were written to justify what had happened.

  christie-1995

• Nevill Forbes, Bulgaria, in The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (Clarendon Press, 1915)

  Forbes wrote the Bulgarian and Serbian sections of a wartime Oxford volume, and the date shows: the book was published to explain the Balkans to a British public whose government was fighting in them, and its judgements about national character should be left alone. What it is good for is the sequence of the nineteenth-century revival, which Forbes sets out concretely — who funded the schools, when the church broke with Constantinople, what the Exarchate was — and the aftermath of 1018, where he is specific about what happened to the see at Ohrid. Out of copyright.

  forbes-1915

• Nicholas Postgate, Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

  Ten Middle Assyrian government archives from Ashur and the provinces, many previously unedited, read for what the practice of writing did to the practice of governing. This site's Middle Assyrian institutions are coded from it; the Neo-Assyrian record three hundred years later is coded from frahm-2023, and the two together are the closest this corpus comes to watching one state's machinery across a long interruption.

  postgate-2013

• Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

  di-cosmo-2002

• Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

  Covers the Mongol empire, its Chinggisid successor states and the non-Chinggisid dynasties that followed them, from the twelfth century to Russian and Chinese hegemony. Cited for the Uzbek khanate, which this corpus had been naming in prose on two pages while leaving the field that should point at it empty.

  di-cosmo-2009

• Nicolai Sinai, The Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Introduction, in The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

  Used for the Uthmanic standardisation of the Qur'anic text: the traditional account of the committee and the copies sent to the garrison towns, and what the early manuscript evidence does and does not settle. Cited for a chapter that is about a state act and its distribution network, not about scripture.

  sinai-2017

• Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East, in Oxford Studies in Early Empires (Oxford University Press, 2020)

  The first full study of early Parthian history since 1938, and the first to treat it as Hellenistic political history rather than as a prologue to the Roman wars. Cited because the Parthians are the least-served major polity in this corpus and the older literature reaches them almost entirely through Roman defeats.

  overtoom-2020

• Notker the Stammerer, De Carolo Magno, in Early Lives of Charlemagne (Chatto and Windus, 1907)

  A monk of St Gall writing about Charlemagne for Charles the Fat, some seventy years after the emperor's death and within a few years of the collapse of the empire. It is not a biography in Einhard's sense: it is a collection of anecdotes, several of them plainly drawn from songs already in circulation, addressed flatteringly to a living descendant. Its value is that it catches the legend at the moment of formation — half a century after the man died, and while people who had fought under him were still alive to be talked to. Out of copyright.

  notker-grant

• Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (C. Kegan Paul, 1881)

  The Habsburg ambassador at Suleyman's court from 1555 to 1562, writing four long letters home to a friend. He was there to negotiate over Hungary, he was often effectively under house arrest, and he used the time to describe the Ottoman army, the court and the succession with an attention nobody in Europe had matched. He is an enemy diplomat and he says so; the peculiar value of the letters is that everything admiring in them is admiration extracted from a man who expected to be beaten by what he was watching. Forster and Daniell's translation is Victorian and readable. Out of copyright.

  busbecq-forster

• Oliver Wardrop, The Kingdom of Georgia: notes of travel in a land of woman, wine and song (Sampson Low, 1888)

  A young Englishman's travel book, written eighty-seven years after the Russian annexation, with appended sketches of Georgian history and literature and a bibliography. The framing is entirely of its period — the subtitle is a fair warning, and the passages about Georgia's neighbours are worse — and it is used here for the two things it is a first-hand witness to: what a traveller found on the ground under Russian administration in the 1880s, and what Georgians themselves told him about Rustaveli and what they did with his poem. Out of copyright.

  wardrop-1888

• Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam, in University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 37 (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

  Argues from early poetry, coinage and epigraphy that the Umayyads styled themselves khalifat Allah, deputy of God, and claimed a religious authority the later Sunni tradition reserved for the scholars. The thesis is contested and the Umayyad chapter drafted from it says so; it is cited because the legitimation coding on that page has to rest on what the dynasty claimed rather than on what its successors said it claimed.

  crone-hinds-1986

• Patricia Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (Croom Helm, 1986)

  On how an Arabian principality came to project political and commercial power into both East Africa and India, and on the tribal politics and the religious office underneath that. Cited for the two Omani records this site added after its own Ibadi imamate page had listed the later imamates by name to explain why it stopped in 893.

  risso-1986

• Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (Clarendon Press, 1989)

  Combines ethnography with history to describe the tribal system of the northern Yemeni highlands over roughly a thousand years, and the relation of the tribes to Islamic learning and to the Zaydi imamate. Cited here for why an office that had to be claimed rather than inherited lasted so much longer than the states around it.

  dresch-1989

• Paul E. Walker, Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996-1021 (American University in Cairo Press, 2009)

  The full-length study of the Fatimid caliph the sources cannot agree about. Used because the chapter drafted from it is as much about the historiography as about the reign: Walker's point that the mad tyrant and the divinely ordained imam are two constituencies' portraits of the same man is the reason this site declines to pick one.

  walker-2009

• Paul E. Zimansky, Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State, in Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 41 (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1985)

  An argument that the Urartian state was a superstructure of royal fortresses and state agriculture imposed on a landscape that could not have produced it unaided, built as a response to the Assyrian army. This site's Urartian institutions are coded from it, and its `revenue_basis` turns on Zimansky's account of how the fortress estates were stocked.

  zimansky-1985

• Paul E. Zimansky, Ancient Ararat: A Handbook of Urartian Studies, in Anatolian and Caucasian Studies (Caravan Books, 1998)

  The reference handbook: kings, chronology, sites, inscriptions and the state of the arguments. Cited here for the dynasty, the script and the ending, which is the part of the record where a handbook's willingness to say that nothing is known is worth more than a narrative.

  zimansky-1998

• Paul J. Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014)

  Asks what a dynasty does when it rules an enormous territory to which it has no historic claim, and answers it from the city foundations, the royal progresses, the frontier treaties and the geography the Seleucids commissioned. It is the modern argument this site needed for a polity whose page had been drafted from a volume published in 1983.

  kosmin-2014

• Paul the Deacon, History of the Langobards (University of Pennsylvania, 1907)

  The only narrative of the Lombard kingdom written by a Lombard, composed at Monte Cassino in the 780s by a man who had served the last king's daughter and then spent years at the court of the king who deposed her father. It breaks off at 744 and never reaches the end it was written after. Paul is two centuries from his early chapters and repeats saga where he has nothing better; Foulke's footnotes are relentless about saying so and are as useful as the text. Out of copyright.

  paul-deacon-foulke

• Paul-Alain Beaulieu, A History of Babylon, 2200 BC - AD 75, in Blackwell History of the Ancient World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)

  The narrative spine of this site's Neo-Babylonian record. Beaulieu is a professor of Assyriology at Toronto and the standard modern authority on the period's last king; the book's virtue for this corpus is that it treats Babylon as one continuous object across seventeen centuries, which is what makes it possible to say precisely which Babylon this page is.

  beaulieu-2018

• Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556-539 B.C., in Yale Near Eastern Researches 10 (Yale University Press, 1989)

  The monograph on the ten years the king spent at Tayma. Cited here for the dates of the departure and return and for the argument that the quarrel was political and economic before it was religious, against the older reading that made Nabonidus a heretic.

  beaulieu-1989

• Percy Horace Braund Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (Edward Arnold, 1912)

  A contemporary account of the 1911 revolution and the Qing abdication, published the same year, by a writer with direct access to Peking sources and reproducing the abdication edicts of 12 February 1912 in full. Out of copyright.

  kent-1912

• Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439 (George Routledge, 1926)

  A Castilian gentleman who travelled the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea for his own curiosity, met most of the rulers in it, and wrote the journey up years later for a readership at home. He is boastful and his chronology slips, but he was received at courts a merchant would not have entered and he repeats conversations. Used here for Trebizond in 1438, where his testimony fixes a date historians had wrong. Out of copyright.

  tafur-letts

• Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

  The last volume of the series, covering 1722 to 1979, and the spine of this region's extension past the Safavids. It carries the political narrative of the Afghan interlude, the Afsharids, the Zands and the Qajars, together with the parts this site's institutions fields need — land tenure, revenue administration, and the tribes.

  chi-7

• Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Otto Harrassowitz, 1992)

  Used for the steppe polities: Karakhanid, Uyghur, Khazar.

  golden-1992

• Peter B. Golden (ed.), trans. Tibor Halasi-Kun and others, The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot — Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol, in Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 (Brill, 2000)

  The edition of a six-language glossary compiled by a Rasulid sultan, with introductory essays by Golden and Thomas Allsen. Cited here for the object itself, which is a better piece of evidence about what fourteenth-century Aden was than any figure this site could print.

  golden-2000

• Peter Borschberg, Urban Impermanence on the Southern Malay Peninsula: The Case of Batu Sawar Johor (1587-c.1615) (Journal of East-Asian Urban History, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2021)

  Built on VOC factory records and the published account of Admiral Cornelis Matelieff, who surveyed Batu Sawar's defences in 1606. Cited here for Johor's early capitals, the Portuguese blockades of 1603-1604 and 1609-1610, the court factionalism among Sultan Ali Jalla's four sons, and Iskandar Muda's Acehnese conquest of Batu Sawar in 1613 and again in 1615. Open access.

  borschberg-2021

• Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture, 2nd edn (University of California Press, 2014)

  Not a narrative of emperors: a structural account of how the empire was paid for, governed, supplied and stratified, with chapters by Elsner, Goodman, Gordon and Woolf added to the second edition. This site's Roman institutions are coded from it, for the same reason kemp-2018 rather than a campaign history supplies the Egyptian ones.

  garnsey-saller-2014

• Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016)

  Published in Britain as The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History. Organised thematically rather than by reign — one section on the imperial ideal, one on territory, one on governance, one on society — which is what a record with eight hundred and forty-four years and no narrative spine requires, and why this site's institutions for it are coded from Wilson rather than from a chronicle.

  wilson-2016

• Peter Heather, The Goths, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 1996)

  Covers both Gothic successor kingdoms in one account, which is why this site's Visigothic and Ostrogothic records share it: Heather's argument is that Gothic identity was assembled in the fourth and fifth centuries out of several groups rather than carried out of Scandinavia, and both records are coded on that reading.

  heather-1996

• Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

  jackson-1999

• Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (Yale University Press, 2017)

  jackson-2017

• Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

  Contains H. R. Roemer's chapters on the Türkmen dynasties and the successors of Timur, which are the standard English narrative of the fifteenth century in Iran and Azerbaijan. This site had been running two Turkmen pages off a genealogical manual.

  chi-6

• Peter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, in Studies on Personalities of the New Testament (University of South Carolina Press, 1996)

  The standard biography, built from Josephus read against the archaeology of the building programme and the coinage. Cited here for the institutions of the Herodian kingdom, and for the argument the title makes: that the two halves of Herod's position were a single arrangement rather than a contradiction he managed.

  richardson-1996

• Photius of Constantinople, The Library of Photius, Volume I (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920)

  A ninth-century patriarch's reading notes on some three hundred books, many of them now lost, summarised at whatever length he thought each deserved. For several works his summary is all that survives — among them the history of Nonnosus, a sixth-century Byzantine envoy to the Arabs, Aksum and Himyar. Photius compresses, occasionally editorialises, and sometimes dismisses a stretch of his author as fabulous without saying what was in it, so what reaches us is a digest of a digest. Out of copyright.

  photius-freese

• Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002)

  briant-2002

• Pietro Casola, Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (Manchester University Press, 1907)

  A Milanese canon in his sixties who went to Jerusalem on a Venetian pilgrim galley and kept a diary of everything, including the five weeks he spent in Venice waiting for it to sail. He is precise, a compulsive comparer of other cities with his own, and entirely uninterested in politics, which is what makes the account useful: he describes the warehouses, the vegetable boats and the shops because he wants to say how much there was of everything. Newett's introduction and notes on the galley trade are substantial and separately valuable. Out of copyright.

  casola-newett

• Piotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom, in Mesopotamian Civilizations 15 (Eisenbrauns, 2011)

  The letters between the kings of Ur and their officials, collated across more than a hundred manuscripts. Cited here for the last years of the dynasty, which these letters describe from inside as they are happening, and for the standing warning Michalowski attaches to them: they survive as school copies, and a school copy of a royal letter is a literary object before it is a document.

  michalowski-2011

• Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume III (Books XII-XVII) (Henry G. Bohn, 1855)

  Book XII contains the fullest ancient account of the frankincense trade — where the trees grow, who is allowed to harvest them, what is taken at each stage of the road to the Mediterranean and what a pound costs at the end. Pliny is compiling from other men's reports and from Roman customs figures rather than from travel, and he has a case to make: that the luxury trade is draining the empire. The numbers are therefore worth treating as Roman accounting rather than Arabian, which is precisely what makes them usable. Bostock and Riley annotate heavily and flag the readings they doubt. Out of copyright.

  pliny-bostock

• Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

  Biography rather than history, and Plutarch says so; his interest is character, and he selects for it. Two things make it useful here anyway. The last chapters of the Life of Alexander quote the court diary of the final illness almost day by day, and the Roman lives record what later generals did with Alexander's memory — which is a fact about the Romans and reliably reported. Out of copyright.

  plutarch-clough

• Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (Macmillan, 1889)

  An Achaean statesman deported to Italy after Pydna as one of the thousand hostages, who spent seventeen years in Rome, became a friend of the Scipios, and wrote to explain to Greeks how the Romans had conquered the world in fifty-three years. He is a participant, a detainee and an admirer at once, which is why his account of Roman diplomacy is so much colder than his account of Roman virtue. Out of copyright.

  polybius-shuckburgh

• Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (Loeb Classical Library, 1914)

  The secretary of Belisarius, writing in the 540s about a war he was present at, with a long digression on the Red Sea and the Arabian interior that is the only contemporary outside account of Roman dealings with Himyar and the tribes of central Arabia. He is well informed on what Constantinople decided and much less so on what happened at the far end of it, which is itself worth knowing. Out of copyright.

  procopius-dewing

• Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (Loeb Classical Library, 1916)

  Belisarius's secretary was on the expedition that destroyed the Vandal kingdom, and this is the account of somebody who was standing there. He opens with a hundred years of Vandal history from Roman sources and then shifts into eyewitness reporting, and the change of register is visible. Out of copyright.

  procopius-vandalic

• Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books V-VIII: The Gothic War (Loeb Classical Library, 1919)

  The companion to the Vandalic War and by far the longer book: four volumes on the reconquest of Italy, from the landing in Sicily in 535 to the destruction of the Gothic army in 552. Procopius was Belisarius's secretary and was inside Rome for the siege of 537-38, which is the most detailed account of a siege to survive from antiquity, down to the arrangement of the floating mills. He is at his least reliable when explaining why Justinian did things and at his best describing what he watched. The later books, written after he had turned against the regime, treat Totila with a respect he gives almost nobody on his own side. Out of copyright.

  procopius-gothic

• R. E. Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (Clarendon Press, 1983)

  Built from the inscriptions rather than from the literary sources, which for a dynasty this poorly served by narrative historians is the only way to get at how the kingdom worked. This site's Attalid institutions are coded from it, and its account of the settlement of 188 is why that record's second turning point is a treaty rather than a battle.

  allen-1983

• R. Malcolm Errington, A History of Macedonia, in Hellenistic Culture and Society (University of California Press, 1990)

  Translated by Catherine Errington from the German of 1986. Its emphasis is the structure of the Macedonian state and how it worked rather than the campaigns, which is what this site's Antigonid institutions need — and its caution about the constitutional role of the Macedonian army assembly is the reason that record's succession field is null.

  errington-1990

• R. N. Frye (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

  chi-4

• R. Stephen Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus 1193-1260 (State University of New York Press, 1977)

  humphreys-1977

• Rachel Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (University of California Press, 2014)

  Works the archaeology, the coins and the documents of Greek Bactria against the question of what the people there thought they were — which is the right question for a polity that survives almost entirely as objects, and the wrong one to answer from the two paragraphs the classical historians give it. Ai-Khanoum is the book's centre and is the only extensively excavated Hellenistic city in Central Asia.

  mairs-2014

• Ralph-Johannes Lilie, trans. J. C. Morris and Jean E. Ridings, Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096-1204 (Clarendon Press, 1993)

  The standard treatment of the imperial claim on Antioch: the oath at Constantinople in 1097, the treaty of Devol in 1108, and the two occasions on which an emperor came in person to collect what those documents said was his. Cited for the one edge in this corpus that makes a Frankish state a Byzantine vassal.

  lilie-1993

• Rein Taagepera, Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia, in International Studies Quarterly 41(3), 475-504 (1997)

  Source for peak territorial extent. Taagepera reports in megametres squared; this repository stores km2 as given, without rescaling beyond the unit conversion.

  taagepera-1997

• Rein Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D., in Social Science History 3(3/4), 115-138 (1979)

  taagepera-1979

• Rein Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size, in Social Science Research 7(2), 108-127 (1978)

  taagepera-1978b

• Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (St. Martin's Press, 1997)

  Two volumes covering antiquity to the twentieth century, and the most comprehensive treatment of the whole span in English. Cited because Armenia is named on eighteen pages of this corpus — from the Sasanians to the Safavids — and had no record of its own.

  hovannisian-1997

• Richard N. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement, in The Centers of Civilization Series (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965)

  A short book about one city at its height, by the translator of Narshakhi's History of Bukhara. Cited for the Samanid capital as a place rather than as a seat of government: the agrarian base, the caravan trade, the bureaucracy and the literary culture that made the identity line on that page true.

  frye-1965

• Richard of Devizes, Chronicle of the Deeds of King Richard the First, in Chronicles of the Crusades (Henry G. Bohn, 1848)

  A monk of Winchester writing within a few years of the events, hostile to almost everybody and funny about it. He is used here for the winter of 1190-91, when the armies of England and France stopped in Sicily on their way to the Third Crusade and one of them sacked Messina. He is entirely on Richard's side, reports the king's speeches as though he had been present, and records the insults the Sicilians threw at the English because he thinks they prove his case. Out of copyright.

  devizes-giles

• Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, about 2250 B.C. (University of Chicago Press, 1904)

  The autographed text, transliteration and translation of the Susa stele, published two years after it was dug up, with an introduction describing the object and its condition. Its chronology is five centuries out and its framing is frankly biblical — both of which make it a good record of what the discovery meant at the moment it was made. Out of copyright.

  harper-1904

• Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, in Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13 (Darwin Press, 1997)

  The survey of roughly 120 non-Muslim texts bearing on the first century and a half of Islam. Used for the Rashidun chapter on the evidence, which is the one place this site says plainly that its most important polity is reconstructed from sources written a century and more after the events, and what independent contemporaries do and do not confirm.

  hoyland-1997

• Robert Grant Watson, A History of Persia from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Year 1858 (Smith, Elder and Co., 1866)

  Written by a member of the British legation at Tehran from the legation's papers and from people who had been in the room, and for a century the only connected English account of the period. Watson is a Victorian liberal with a theory — he cites Buckle to the effect that a people makes its own government and no government can force progress on an unsound one — and that theory shapes his verdicts, particularly on why reform failed. The narrative underneath it is close, dated and specific, and he names his informants often enough that a reader can see where the detail comes from. Out of copyright.

  watson-1866

• Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250-1382 (Croom Helm, 1986)

  The political history of the Bahri period at the length the Cambridge volume's single chapter cannot give it. Cited for the factional mechanics — how a household actually took a sultanate, and why the Qalawunids are the exception that proves the sultanate had no succession rule.

  irwin-1986

• Roger Collins, Visigothic Spain, 409-711, in A History of Spain (Blackwell, 2004)

  Combines chronology and theme, and argues against a good deal of the received account — of how the kingdom was governed, of its law, and of the Arab conquest. Collins had already written a book on that conquest, which is why this site's Visigothic record is drafted from him: its ending is the part every other page in the corpus points at.

  collins-2004

• Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (Penguin, 2004)

  Reconstructs the raid of 1026 and, more to the point, what was subsequently made of it — from Sanskrit inscriptions, merchant and royal biographies, court epics and popular narrative, set against the Persian and Arabic accounts. Cited for the Ghaznavid chapter on the Indian campaigns, because the afterlife of that event is a larger historical object than the event.

  thapar-2004

• Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (University of California Press, 2002)

  thapar-2002

• Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd edn (Indiana University Press, 1994)

  The standard account of Georgian history in English, from the first millennium BC to 1991. Cited for the same reason as the Armenian volumes: the corpus had been referring to Georgia on eight pages without carrying it.

  suny-1994

• Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

  mckitterick-2008

• Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan, in International Library of Iranian Studies (I.B. Tauris, 2012)

  Argues against the moral-decline account of the seventeenth century — the weak shahs, the harem, the wine — and for a structural one: a small economic base, a tribal composition that had to be renegotiated continuously, and an environment that would not support the revenue the state needed. Cited because this site had disposed of a hundred years and the fall of a capital in one sentence.

  matthee-2012

• Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy to the Court of Timour at Samarcand (Hakluyt Society, 1859)

  The journal of a Castilian embassy sent to Timur in 1403, kept by one of the ambassadors, who had no particular literary ambition and therefore wrote down what he was told and what things cost. He is used here for Trebizond, where the party wintered and where he reports the court gossip of a small empire without appearing to realise how damaging it is, and for Samarkand in the autumn of 1404, where he is the only Western eyewitness of Timur's court and records the feasts, the executions and the building works with the same flat attentiveness. Markham's notes are Victorian and occasionally wrong. Out of copyright.

  clavijo-markham

• S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (University of California Press, 1967)

  Six volumes published between 1967 and 1993; cited by the first. Used for the Fatimid chapter on the Geniza, which is the one place in this corpus where a polity's ordinary economic life is documented by its own paper rather than reconstructed from chronicles written afterwards.

  goitein-1967

• S. W. Bushell, The Early History of Tibet, from Chinese Sources (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, new series vol. XII, 1880)

  A translation of the Tibetan chapters of the Tang histories, with the embassies, campaigns and treaty texts in full. It is the fullest continuous narrative of the empire in any language other than Tibetan and it is entirely a Chinese court's account of a rival: Tibetan victories appear as frontier disturbances, Tibetan envoys arrive to submit, and the chronology follows the reign years of the dynasty being attacked. Out of copyright.

  bushell-1880

• Salil ibn Razik, History of the Imâms and Seyyids of 'Omân, from A.D. 661-1856 (Hakluyt Society, 1871)

  The Omani chronicle, in a translation with a long editorial introduction. Its provenance is part of its interest: the original manuscript was given to Badger at Muscat in 1860 by Sayyid Thuwayni, while Badger was sitting on the British commission that was about to divide Thuwayni's father's empire between him and his brother. Salil ibn Razik writes as an Ibadi partisan and calls the Portuguese polytheists; Badger annotates him as a Victorian churchman who thinks the sect fanatical. Read past both and it is the fullest continuous narrative any Arabian polity of this period left. Out of copyright.

  badger-1871

• Samuel Noah Kramer, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (University of Chicago Press, 1940)

  The first full edition and translation of the Sumerian lament for the fall of Ur, assembled from twenty-two tablets and fragments, with a prose summary of each of the poem's eleven "songs" preceding the line-by-line translation. The summary is what is used here: the translation itself is printed with the philological apparatus interleaved and with gaps marked in every second line, which is honest about the state of the text and makes it hard to quote. Published as Assyriological Studies 12 and made freely available by the Oriental Institute.

  kramer-1940

• Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (George Bell and Sons, 1896)

  A working collection of the constitutional documents of medieval Europe in English: Charlemagne's capitularies, the papal and imperial letters of the investiture quarrel, the Concordat of Worms, the Besançon correspondence, the Golden Bull, Magna Carta. The translations are Victorian, sometimes stiff and occasionally loose, and Henderson's linking commentary takes the imperial side more often than not; the documents themselves are what this is used for, and they are the words the parties actually exchanged. Out of copyright.

  henderson-1896

• Serbian oral tradition, Serbian Ballads (Published for the Kossovo Day Committee, 1916)

  A threepenny pamphlet of the Kosovo and Marko Kraljević cycles, translated by a historian of the Habsburg lands and issued in London in June 1916 by a committee organising a British commemoration of the battle's five hundred and twenty-seventh anniversary while Serbia was under occupation. The ballads are centuries of oral tradition rather than evidence about 1389; the pamphlet itself is evidence about 1916, which is why it is used here. Seton-Watson says frankly that they are untranslatable and that he has aimed at something recitable. Out of copyright.

  seton-watson-ballads

• Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Hakluyt Society, 1851)

  A Habsburg diplomat who went to Moscow in 1517 and again in 1526, spoke a Slavonic language, and wrote the book that told Europe what Russia was. His chapters on the Tatars are the fullest outside account of the Jochid successor states while they still existed: Kazan, Astrakhan, the Nogai and the Crimea, with dynastic detail he had from the Muscovite court and from Tatar princes living in Moscow. He is a Catholic imperial envoy who regarded the Muscovites as schismatics and the Tatars as a problem to be managed, and his information about places he never visited came from people with an interest in what he thought. Out of copyright.

  herberstein-major

• Sima M. Ćirković, The Serbs, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 2004)

  A one-volume history from the Slav settlement to the end of Yugoslavia, deliberately weighted towards socio-economic development rather than dynastic politics — which is why this site's Serbian institutions are coded from it. Ćirković is the authority on the medieval Serbian mining economy, and that is the field this record turns on.

  cirkovic-2004

• Simon de la Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (Tho. Horne, 1693)

  The report of Louis XIV's envoy extraordinary to Ayutthaya, who spent three months there in 1687-88 and left just before the revolution that expelled the French. He is systematic and sceptical, checks figures where he can, and says when he could not — but he saw a court under a Greek-born favourite in the last months of a reign, was managed throughout, and never went outside the capital's orbit. The 1693 English is used here. Out of copyright.

  loubere-1693

• Sir Charles Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (John Murray, London, 1940)

  The memoir of the general who commanded the Allied occupation forces at Constantinople from October 1920 — already present in this record as the man Mehmed VI appealed to for protection in November 1922. Used here for the Chanak crisis and the Mudania conference of October 1922, which Harington negotiated directly with İsmet Pasha and which forced the Allies to deal with the Ankara government as the authority in Turkey, three weeks before the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. A participant's account, written eighteen years after the fact from his own papers, and unapologetically pleased with his own conduct of it. Out of copyright.

  harington-1940

• Sir Richard Burn (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume IV: The Mughul Period (Cambridge University Press, 1937)

  Cited for the 1601 siege of Asirgarh and the annexation of Khandesh, which falls after the scope of volume III. Out of copyright.

  haig-1937

• Sir Wolseley Haig (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (Cambridge University Press, 1928)

  Dedicated chapters on each of the regional sultanates that broke from Delhi after Timur's 1398 sack - Jaunpur, Bengal, Kashmir, Gujarat, Khandesh and Malwa - drawing on the Persian chronicles of each court. Out of copyright.

  haig-1928

• Smbat Sparapet, Chronicle (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2005)

  The constable of Cilician Armenia and elder brother of King Het'um I, who knew Latin, Greek and Turkish, translated the kingdom's law code, and went to the Mongol court himself in 1248; the translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. The chronicle is annalistic and domestic — deaths, marriages, harvests and raids entered year by year — and its value is that the man writing it was in the room for a good deal of what he records and had no reason to explain the kingdom to anybody, so he does not.

  smbat-bedrosian

• Spenser St John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, or Travels in Northern Borneo, 2nd, revised edn (Smith, Elder and Co., 1863) link

  St John was Britain's consul-general in Borneo and an ally of James Brooke, and his twelfth chapter, "The Kingdom of Borneo Proper", is the fullest contemporary description of the Brunei government there is. It is also a brief. His account of Brunei's misrule was written while Britain and the Brookes were acquiring the sultanate's territory, and it argues for exactly the conclusion that acquisition needed. Read it for the detail — the offices and their holders, the parishes and their trades, the numbers — and read the judgements as an interested party's.

  st-john-1863

• Stanley Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (Methuen, 1901)

  A narrative history built largely on al-Maqrizi, with the numismatic and documentary detail of a curator who had catalogued the coins himself. The judgements are of their period and are sometimes contemptuous of their subjects; the detail is checkable and carefully attributed. Cited here for the Fatimid library and for the abolition of the caliphate in 1171. Out of copyright.

  lane-poole-1901

• Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

  The first comprehensive history of the republic in English, and unusually willing to say that the Genoese constitution did not work — which is the finding this site's Genoese succession field is coded around, and the reason the two maritime republics carry the same value with opposite results.

  epstein-1996

• Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (Henry G. Bohn, 1857)

  Written in the reign of Augustus by a Greek who had travelled some of what he describes and read everything else. Book XVI carries the fullest surviving account of the Nabataeans, much of it second-hand from Athenodorus, a philosopher friend of Strabo's who had lived at Petra, and the fullest account of the Roman expedition into Arabia under Aelius Gallus, which Strabo had from Gallus himself. He is therefore reporting a failed campaign in the words of the man who failed, and the explanation offered — that a Nabataean minister sabotaged it — should be read with that in mind. Out of copyright.

  strabo-hamilton

• Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)

  munro-hay-1991

• Suhayl Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004-1094 (Dar al-Amanah, 1971)

  The monograph on the ninety years between the Hamdanids and the Seljuks, which is the century this region's record skipped. Zakkar is the standard account of the Mirdasid emirate and of the Kilab, and is quoted in every later treatment for the judgement that the tribe "served those who paid most and often, at a time of crisis, would sell their employer to the highest bidder" — which is a description of a revenue basis, not a moral complaint.

  zakkar-1971

• T. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (John Murray, 1819)

  The African Company's mission to Kumasi in 1817, written up by a twenty-six-year-old who spent several months there and drew and measured everything. He was negotiating on behalf of a trading company with an interest in the outcome, and his judgements about Asante intentions should be read with that in front of you. His descriptions are unusually exact, including of the human sacrifice he witnessed and would not soften. Out of copyright.

  bowdich-1819

• T. W. Rhys Davids, The Questions of King Milinda (Clarendon Press, 1890)

  A translation of the Pali Milinda-panha with a long introduction on the identification of Milinda with the Greek king Menander. Its value here is that introduction, which assembles in one place every surviving classical notice of Menander — four of them — alongside the numismatic evidence, and is unusually careful about what the material will and will not support: it accepts that the coin epithets show Buddhist subjects, denies that they show a Buddhist king, and treats the text's own account of Menander's conversion as a literary ending rather than a historical report. Out of copyright.

  rhys-davids-1890

• Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527, in Oxford Studies in African Affairs (Clarendon Press, 1972)

  The book that established the field, on the two and a half centuries in which the Solomonic dynasty, the monasteries and the expansion into the south were all one process. This site's Ethiopian institutions are coded from it for the medieval period, and its account of the gult and the itinerant court is why that record's `capitals` field carries a comment.

  tamrat-1972

• Taef Kamal El-Azhari, The Saljuqs of Syria During the Crusades, 463-549 A.H./1070-1154 A.D., in Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1997)

  The study of the Syrian Seljuk principalities and the atabeg houses that replaced them, which is the institution this site had described five times — Zangi at Mosul, Nur al-Din, the Burids at Damascus — without ever citing a work about it. Ends in 1154, the year Damascus falls to Nur al-Din, which is where the region's record picks up again.

  el-azhari-1997

• Tayeb El-Hibri, The Abbasid Caliphate: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

  Used for the Abbasid arc after Harun al-Rashid, in particular the fourth fitna and the Samarra period.

  el-hibri-2021

• The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (Camden Society, 1914)

  The town chronicle of the one major Russian city the Mongols never sacked, kept year by year and translated complete. It is annalistic and uneven — some years hold a single line about a fire or a frost — and its writers are clergy whose framework is that disaster is punishment for sin, which produces the repeated epithets: the godless, the lawless Ishmaelites, the accursed raw-eating Tartars. What it also does is record dates, names of the dead, prices in famine years and the terms of demands, because a town chronicle is partly a municipal record. Out of copyright.

  novgorod-michell

• The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma (Oxford University Press, 1923)

  The Burmese royal chronicle, compiled by a commission at Ava in 1829 out of earlier chronicles, in the standard English translation of the Pagan section. It is not a source for what happened at Pagan: it is a source for what the Burmese court in the nineteenth century understood to have happened, and the two are different in ways the chronicle itself sometimes admits — it quotes rival chronicles against each other and argues. Nagas hide infants, horses are demons, and a king emits a radiant wheel when he speaks. Out of copyright.

  glass-palace-chronicle

• The Kebra Nagast, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Medici Society, 1922)

  The Ethiopian national epic, in the form assembled at Aksum in the early fourteenth century by a scribe named Isaac, with Budge's introduction and his summary of what Isaac believed he was doing. It is not evidence about Solomon or about the tenth century BC. It is first-rate evidence about what a fourteenth-century Ethiopian court wanted its dynasty's title to rest on, which is what it is used for here. Budge's translation is dated and his commentary more so. Out of copyright.

  kebra-nagast-budge

• The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (George Bishop, Ralph Newberie and Robert Barker, London, 1600)

  An English clergyman spent his life collecting the papers of English voyages — logs, letters, ambassadors' reports, cargo lists, patents — and printed them with almost no editing, which is exactly what makes the collection useful four centuries later. The documents are written by the participants for their employers rather than for readers, so they record prices, quantities and slights. Hakluyt had a purpose in publishing: he wanted England in the trades Spain and Portugal held, and the collection is arranged to make that case. Used here for the Barbary embassies, where the English ambassadors report their own receptions at Marrakesh in detail because the reception was the point of the mission. Out of copyright.

  hakluyt-navigations

• The Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum), The Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum) (Boston Book Company, 1910)

  The Visigothic law in English, with a preface by its translator. Scott is an enthusiast whose admiration for his subject runs well past the evidence, and his rhapsodies about the Code's influence on all modern systems of government should be discounted heavily. His concrete statements about where and when the laws were still being applied are another matter, and are what is used here. Out of copyright.

  scott-1910

• Theodor Noldeke, Sketches from Eastern History (Adam and Charles Black, 1892)

  Essays by the founder of modern critical Arabic and Iranian philology, including "A Servile War in the East", still the fullest account of the Zanj revolt available in English outside the copyrighted translations of Tabari, whose narrative it follows closely and cites throughout. Noldeke is explicit that Tabari writes from the government side and calls the rebel leader the abominable one, and he weighs the sources against each other rather than paraphrasing them. His nineteenth-century vocabulary for African people is of its period and is not reproduced here. Out of copyright.

  noldeke-1892

• Thomas Ripper, Die Marwaniden von Diyar Bakr: eine kurdische Dynastie im islamischen Mittelalter, in Mitteilungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der islamischen Welt (Ergon Verlag, 2000)

  The only monograph on the Marwanids, in German, and cited here for the one argument this site takes from it directly: that the eleventh-century emirate began the westward Kurdish settlement that made Diyar Bakr a Kurdish country. The narrative chapters on that page are drafted from kennedy-2004, which is what this site could actually read against.

  ripper-2000

• Thomas S. Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130 (Boydell Press, 2000)

  How the principality was actually assembled in its first three decades — its frontiers, its lordships, its relations with the Armenian and Greek population it governed — as against the narrative of the First Crusade that usually stands in for it. Cited here for the formation chapters and for the argument that Antioch was a going concern before Jerusalem was.

  asbridge-2000

• Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java (Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817)

  Written by the Lieutenant-Governor who had just administered Java for the British, and to be read as such: the account of a province's disorder is also the case for the government that came in to settle it. Cited here for the Banten of 1808 to 1813, which Raffles describes at first hand and with figures, including the pension for which the last sultan gave up the administration of the country.

  raffles-1817

• Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1989)

  The exhibition catalogue that is still the standard treatment of Timurid art as a court programme rather than as a collection of objects. Cited because this site had been asserting that the Herat and Samarkand workshops set the standard three later empires worked from, on the authority of a political biography.

  lentz-lowry-1989

• Tilman Nagel and others, AL-E BUYA, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link

  iranica-al-e-buya

• Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2009)

  Used for the Sasanian state, its Zoroastrian establishment, and the collapse of 628-651.

  daryaee-2009

• Translated by C. C. Brown, Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, in Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Oxford University Press, 1970)

  The Malay Annals in translation — the court chronicle of Melaka, composed after the sultanate had fallen and the dynasty was in exile at Johor. It is the principal internal source for that record and, like the Timbuktu chronicles on this site's Songhai page, it is elegy written by the survivors of the thing it describes.

  brown-1970

• Translated by Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes, The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, in Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (Camden Society / Royal Historical Society, 1914)

  The standard English translation of the Novgorod First Chronicle, the city's own year-by-year record, with an introduction on the republic's institutions (the veche, the posadnik, the archbishop's role) and the 1471 crisis that ended Novgorod's independent relations with Moscow. Out of copyright.

  forbes-1914

• Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, new edn (Oxford University Press, 2005)

  The narrative history of Bronze Age Anatolia in English, revised from the 1998 first edition. Dates on this site's Hittite record follow Bryce's middle chronology; the absolute dates are not secure and the page says so.

  bryce-2005

• Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford University Press, 2002)

  The companion volume to bryce-2005, on how the state and the household worked rather than on what the kings did. This site's Hittite institutions are coded from it, for the same reason kemp-2018 rather than a campaign narrative supplies the Egyptian ones.

  bryce-2002

• Usama ibn Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (Kitab al-I'tibar) (Columbia University Press, 1929)

  The memoirs of a Syrian nobleman of Shayzar who spent his long life among the Franks as neighbour, enemy, guest and occasional ally, written in old age as a book of instruction and full of anecdotes he found funny, alarming or instructive. It is the closest thing to an ordinary Muslim view of the crusader states from inside them, and it is unusually careful to distinguish what its author saw himself from what he was told. Out of copyright.

  usama-hitti

• V. O. Kliuchevsky, translated by C. J. Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (J. M. Dent & Sons / E. P. Dutton, 1912)

  The standard English translation of the great Russian historian's lecture-course history, covering Daniel of Moscow's 1263 founding of the princely line, the rise of Moscow among the appanages, the Tartar yoke, and Ivan III and Ivan IV's building of the Muscovite autocracy through Ivan IV's 1547 coronation as Tsar. Out of copyright.

  kliuchevsky-1912

• V. V. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (Luzac (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series), 1928)

  The second edition of the survey Barthold published in Russian in 1900, still the standard account of Transoxiana between the Arab conquest and Chinggis Khan, and the only one built from a systematic reading of the Arabic and Persian sources side by side with the coinage. He argues with his authorities in the footnotes — rejecting Ibn al-Athir's two campaigns of Bughra-Khan because Gardizi and Bayhaqi agree on a single date, doubting Tha'alibi's estimate of his own informants — and the reader can usually see which chronicle each sentence rests on. Out of copyright.

  barthold-1928

• Various, The History of India, as Told by its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, Volume III (Trübner, 1871)

  The volume of the series that covers Timur's Indian campaign, printing side by side the *Malfuzat-i Timuri* — which presents itself as Timur's own memoirs, written in the first person — and Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's *Zafarnama*, which tells the same events in the third. The editors set out the case about the memoirs at length and do not settle it: the Persian text claims descent from a Turki original, the two books agree closely enough that one was plainly shaped to the other, and which way that shaping ran is disputed. What is not in question is that both were composed inside the Timurid house for Timurid readers, so that the self-justifications are the ones the dynasty wanted on the record. Out of copyright.

  elliot-dowson-3

• Venetia Porter, The History and Monuments of the Tahirid Dynasty of the Yemen 858-923/1454-1517, in PhD thesis, University of Durham (1992)

  The only sustained study of the last independent Yemeni dynasty before the Ottomans, and it works from the buildings as much as the chronicles — the mosques and madrasas the Tahirids put up across the southern highlands are better evidence of where their authority actually reached than any account of their campaigns.

  porter-1992

• Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (Clarendon Press, 1904)

  A narrative political history running from the sixth century BC through the Kushans and up to the Muslim conquests, by an official of the Indian Civil Service writing at the point where inscriptional and numismatic evidence for the Mauryas and Kushans was still being assembled. Cited here for Bindusara's reign, unattested in any surviving inscription of his own, and for Vima Kadphises' war with Han China. Out of copyright.

  smith-1904

• Vladimir Minorsky, Jihan-shah Qara-qoyunlu and his Poetry (Turkmenica 9), in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1954)

  Edits a selection of Jahan Shah's divan from manuscript and discusses the Azerbaijani Turkic he wrote it in. Cited because this site's page had asserted that a Kara Koyunlu ruler wrote Turkic poetry under a pen-name on the authority of a genealogical manual, which does not carry the claim.

  minorsky-1954

• Vladimir Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (W. Heffer & Sons, 1958)

  An edition, translation and commentary of the local chronicle that is almost the only narrative source for the eastern Caucasus in these two centuries. It exists because Minorsky reconstructed the text from a later compilation; without it the Shirvanshahs would be a king-list with dates.

  minorsky-1958

• Vladimir Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian History: New Light on the Shaddadids of Ganja; The Shaddadids of Ani; Prehistory of Saladin, in Cambridge Oriental Series 6 (Cambridge University Press, 1953)

  Three studies and an appendix on the Musafirids and Rawwadids, which between them are the scholarship on the Muslim dynasties of the eastern Caucasus. The third essay is on Saladin's family before it was famous, which is worth noting on a site whose Ayyubid record begins in Egypt: the Ayyubids came out of Shaddadid service at Dvin.

  minorsky-1953

• W. A. Wigram, An Introduction to the History of the Assyrian Church, or The Church of the Sassanid Persian Empire, 100-640 A.D. (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1910)

  The standard English narrative of the Church of the East for a long generation, and it has to be read with two things in front of you. Wigram was an Anglican missionary to the Assyrians and writes as an advocate; and for the early centuries his principal authority is Mshikha-Zkha's History of the Bishops of Adiabene, a sixth-century compilation whose authenticity has been seriously disputed since. He accepts it more readily than a modern reader should. Cited here for what that tradition contains — the bishops of Arbela, who persecuted them and on whose authority, and the position of Adiabene as a refuge for Christians from the Roman side — with the provenance stated in the chapter. Out of copyright.

  wigram-1910

• W. M. Flinders Petrie, Syria and Egypt from the Tell el Amarna Letters (Methuen, 1898)

  A letter-by-letter walk through the Amarna correspondence, with each tablet summarised in order and the references to the editions given, by the excavator who had dug at Amarna a few years earlier. What it is used for here is the content of the letters, which has not changed: who wrote to whom, what they asked for and what they complained of. Petrie's surrounding history has not aged as well — his chronology is his own, and his identification of Tadukhipa with Nefertiti is not now accepted — so his inferences are attributed to him where they are used and are not passed off as settled. Out of copyright.

  petrie-1898

• W. M. Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (John Murray, for the Royal Geographical Society, 1890)

  An attempt to fix the sites of every ancient city in Anatolia against the roads, the bishopric lists and the ground, by a man who had walked a great deal of it. His identifications have been revised in many places. What does not date is the incidental observation — which villages had which names in whose mouths in the 1880s — because he was recording it while it was still there to record. Out of copyright.

  ramsay-1890

• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Clarendon Press, 1956)

  The standard study of the ten years at Medina treated as political history: how the community was governed, what its finances were, who actually held power, and how far Muhammad's authority extended at each stage. Its most useful feature for a record of the polity is that Watt separates the question of religious authority from the question of constitutional power and shows they moved at different speeds. Prints the so-called Constitution of Medina in full translation with the clause numbering established by Wensinck, and argues from its contents that Muhammad's formal powers in 622 were very slight.

  watt-1956

• Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford University Press, 1997)

  treadgold-1997

• Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

  Used for the succession disputes and the first fitna. Madelung argues a minority position on the legitimacy question; the chapters follow him on sequence and chronology, not on that argument.

  madelung-1997

• William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (Harper & Brothers, 1883)

  A nineteenth-century narrative history of Japan, explicit about the legendary status of Jimmu's traditional 660 BC founding and treating the reign of Kimmei (540-571), when Buddhism and continental civilization arrived from Korea, as the point the succession becomes reasonably historical. Used here for the Yamato imperial court's span through Minamoto no Yoritomo's 1192 appointment as shogun. Out of copyright.

  griffis-1883

• William Francklin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia in the Years 1786-7 (Printed for T. Cadell, 1790)

  An East India Company officer who spent eight months at Shiraz in 1787, living in a Persian household and learning the language, seven years after Karim Khan Zand's death and in the middle of the wars that followed it. He is a soldier and describes walls and ditches with a professional eye; he is also writing before the outcome was known, which is why his account of the Qajar escape from Shiraz is reported flatly rather than as the beginning of anything. Out of copyright.

  francklin-1790

• William Gifford Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (Macmillan, 1865)

  A Jesuit of Jewish descent travelling under a false identity as a Syrian doctor, who reached Ha'il and Riyadh and spent weeks at the court of Faysal ibn Turki. He is the only detailed eyewitness of the second Saudi state at its height. He also detested Wahhabism, wrote to be read in London, and has been accused since of embroidering; his descriptions of places and arrangements are worth much more than his verdicts on people, which are frequently vicious. Out of copyright.

  palgrave-1865

• William of Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-55 (Hakluyt Society, 1900)

  A Flemish Franciscan sent east by Louis IX, who reached Mongke Khan's court at Karakorum and wrote the fullest eyewitness description of the Mongol empire at its height by anyone from outside it. He is unusually good precisely because he was unimpressed: he counts, measures, asks what things cost, refuses the mare's milk, and reports his own humiliations. He is also a missionary who failed, and his judgements on Nestorians, Buddhists and Muslims are those of a man who lost arguments with all three. Out of copyright.

  rubruck-rockhill

• Xuanzang, Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (Trubner, 1884)

  The record a Chinese monk made of the countries he passed through between 629 and 645, on a journey to India he began by leaving the empire against an imperial prohibition and ended by being received at court. He is describing the Western Regions in the decade the Tang was taking them, and he is exact about what a town contained and how far it was to the next one. He is also a pilgrim: the length of an entry tracks the number of monasteries rather than the size of the place, and the miracle stories are reported as he was told them. Out of copyright.

  siyuki-beal

• Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Luzac, 1922)

  The autobiography of the founder of the Mughal empire, written in Chaghatay Turkish and translated here from the Haydarabad codex rather than from the Persian version made for Akbar. It is the only substantial first-person memoir left by any ruler of the Islamic world before the modern period, and its value is that it records the unimpressive parts: the provinces lost, the winters without money, the walking barefoot in the hills. Beveridge's notes are exhaustive about where the manuscript has gaps, which matters, because several years of Babur's life are missing entirely. Out of copyright.

  babur-beveridge

• Zosimus, The History of Count Zosimus (Printed for J. Davis, 1814)

  A pagan Greek official of the imperial treasury writing about 500, whose declared purpose is the reverse of Polybius's: Polybius showed how Rome gained an empire in fifty-three years, and Zosimus means to show how it lost one. He blames the abandonment of the old rites and reads omens into everything, which is worth knowing before using him. What he preserves, including a circumstantial account of Aurelian's Palmyrene campaign that exists nowhere else in this form, is better than his explanations of it. This anonymous 1814 English translation is out of copyright.

  zosimus-1814