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The Court of the ll-khans, 1290-1340. Edited by JULIAN RABY and TERESA FITZHERBERT. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. 12. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 218.
The six papers in this collection are the fruit of a conference held in Oxford in 1994 on the intellectual and artistic life of the Ilkhanate. Thomas T. Allsen surveys the career of Bolad Ch'eng-hsiang, once-as Po-lo in Chinese sources-erroneously identified with Marco Polo. Sent to Persia in 1283 by Qubilai Qa'an in an embassy to the ll-khan, he remained there until his death thirty years later. It has long been known that Bolad was the source of much of the historical information on the Mongols found in Rashid al-Din's great compendium, Jami alTawarikh; but Allsen demonstrates that he also played a pivotal role in the transmission to western Asia of Chinese knowledge and of knowledge about the Middle Kingdom. The material concerning Rashid al-Din himself to be gleaned from Mamluk sources is the subject of a paper by Reuven Amitai-Preiss. In particular, the long entry on the celebrated wazir in al-Safadi's biographical dictionary, al-Waf bi l-Wafayat, throws fresh light on intellectual activity at the Il-khan's court during the early fourteenth century. Sheila Blair examines Rashid al-Din's artistic patronage, as evidenced...