Research Guides: HIST 347: The Mongol Empire (HC): Primary Sources

Primary Sources

The history and the life of Chinggis Khan: the secret history of the Mongols
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The Tobchi'an (the History ) was written in the Uighuro-Mongol script by Mongol scholars, possibly between 1228 and 1258, and records events during the period from the late 8th to the middle 13th century. It is translated and annotated by Mongolian-born scholar Onon (Cambridge U.).

Primary sources can take many different forms. Letters, accounts and other kinds of documents written at the time of an event or era allow a nuanced and detailed understanding of historical issues. Material below explains ways to locate primary sources in Tripod and Worldcat. To find additional primary sources, historical studies in books and journal articles will often offer the best recommendations. Check footnotes and bibliographies for references to material written in the medieval period.

Finding Primary Sources

Primary source translations that are in the Tricollege libraries will often be listed in Tripod under subject terms and the word "sources." For example, the search mongol* sources produces books including:

Manchu-Mongol relations on the eve of the Qing Conquest: a documentary history
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"The original Manchu and Mongol documents selected for this publication, translated and amply annotated, provide fascinating new information about the relations between Manchus and Mongols before the Manchu conquest of China." "They include diplomatic correspondence, military liaisons, legal cases, and records of tribute missions and present a detailed picture of the relative position of the various Mongol tribes vis-a-vis the future emperors of China."--BOOK JACKET.
Mission to Asia
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This collection of primary sources is superbly accompanied by Christopher Dawson's introduction. He outlines all necessary background information, the rise of the Mongols, the response of Christendom, the eventual alliances between the Mongols and the West against the Muslims in the Holy Land, different Christian sects (Nestorians etc), and analysis of the accounts and their authors.
The Mongols and global history: a Norton documents reader
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Presents a rich collection of primary sources translated into English from Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Franco-Italian, Italian, Korean, Latin, Persian, Russian, Syriac, and Tibetan that will give students a clear sense of the extraordinary geographic and linguistic range of the Mongol Empire as well as insight into the empire’s rise, how it governed, and how it fell.

Finding Primary Sources in WorldCat

Use the same subject searches that yielded results in Tripod to find additional titles that you can borrow through Interlibrary Loan. Titles of interest include:

Classical writings of the medieval Islamic world: Persian histories of the Mongol dynasties. 3 volumes. (I. B. Tauris, 2012)

The Tartar Yoke: The Image of the Mongols in Medieval Russia. (Slavica, 2009)

Manuscript Illustration

Genghis Khan and Chinese envoys (Wikimedia Commons)