Byzantine Greek historiography forms an indispensable group of written sources for Eurasian history, including the history of the Mongol Empire. The sources must be interpreted within the framework of Byzantine civilization (Greek antiquity, Christianity, and the Roman imperial tradition). One of the major difficulties in interpreting Byzantine sources derives from the archaizing character of ethnonyms: one appellation may refer to several ethnic groups, and sometimes the same ethnos is designated by different terms. Another limitation is that the Byzantines’ horizon extended primarily to the western lands of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde, and Ilkhanid Iran. In this chapter the four major histories of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries (Georgios Akropolites, Georgios Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Ioannes Kantakouzenos) are treated. Then Byzantine sources relating to the Mongol period are enumerated and briefly characterized, according to their literary genres: histories, world chronicles, local histories, poems, epistles, geographical works, state and ecclesiastical documents, encomia, and oracles.

The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves. More specifically, the huge conquests of the United Empire (1206-60) resulted in huge supply of war captives, many of whom eventually sold in the Eurasian slave markets. With the dissolution of the Empire and the halt of its expansion, the demand for slaves remained high, and other means were sought for supplying it. The chapter discusses slavery among the pre-imperial Mongols; the general context of slavery caused by Mongol mobilization and redistribution policies; the various ways of becoming a slave in the Mongol Empire; and the slaves’ dispersion, uses, conditions as well as manumission mechanisms and opportunities for social mobility. It highlights the different types of slavery (extrusive versus intrusive) in China and the Muslim and Christian worlds and argues that in Mongol Eurasia slavery was not always a social death.

This study seeks to explain how the Mongol imperial space was created and administrated by the Mongols and conceived by the Mongols and their subjects mainly in Yuan China and Ilkhanid Iran. It stresses the interplay between the Mongols’ universal vision, their construction of a “Chinggisid space,” and the revival of “glocal” (i.e., local with global characteristic) spatial concepts in Mongol-ruled China and Iran. It starts by reviewing Mongol expansion, analyzing the reasons for its unprecedented success and the impact of its halt, and concludes in assessing the impact of the Mongol Empire on the shaping of the post-Mongol imperial space across Eurasia.