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Publicatie
Networked diplomacy
Boek - Dissertatie
Ondertitel:Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Bahmani Sultanate and the fifteenth-century Islamic world
In the late medieval period, the Islamic world had evolved into a transregional complex marked by different landscapes and languages. While this world was politically divided, cultural and societal congruences transcended the regional level. Historians capture this situation through concepts such as “the Persian cosmopolis” and “the Indian Ocean world”. In fifteenth-century central India, the Bahmani sultanate (748–934/1347–1528) in many ways stood on the intersections of such worlds and cosmopolises, as it looked to them to deal with questions of state formation, administration, and identity which it was facing as the first Deccan-based Islamic state. In this thesis, I add historical detail to these encounters by adopting the gaze of one of the Bahmani sultanate’s foremost men of state, the vizier Maḥmūd Gāwān (d. 1481). Through it, when we look out over the Arabian Sea from the harbours of western India’s Konkan coast, a vast network comes into view, composed of family members in the Hijaz and the Mamluk sultanate (chapter 2), and intellectual relations in the Persianate cities of Iran and Central Asia (chapter 3). Arguing that such transregional personal networks of officeholders are essential to understand official state relations in the premodern Islamic world in a more emic way, I show how Maḥmūd Gāwān’s networks impacted Bahmani diplomacy with the Timurids (chapter 4), the Aq Quyunlu, and the Ottomans (chapter 5). In other words, this study sheds light on how elites shaped the representation and discourses of Islamic states in the latter half of the fifteenth century. This networked diplomacy moreover reveals and explains the detailed knowledge that was available to Maḥmūd Gāwān about politics and people in the wider Islamic world. As such, it underscores how the Bahmani engagement with overseas sultans and scholars discerned not only the shared idioms of the cosmopolises, but also specific context-based tendencies among correspondents—tendencies which it echoed, but not necessarily indiscriminately adopted. In a larger historical context, the Bahmani experience fits within processes of knowledge circulation and state formation that had been going on since (at least) the late fourteenth century and continued into the early sixteenth century. Against this background, Maḥmūd Gāwān’s writings—situated on the transition from the late medieval to the early modern period— provide crucial insight into how his generation built on the accomplishments of their precursors and laid the foundations for their successors, while around him the world was drastically changing.
Aantal pagina's: 215
Jaar van publicatie:2022
Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis
Toegankelijkheid:Embargoed