In Voyager from Xanadu, a distinguished historian tells the little-known story of the life and travels of the first person from China ever to reach Europe. Portraying one of the most remarkable early encounters between East and West, Morris Rossabi also brings to life the intriguing and turbulent era of the Mongol Empire and the last Crusades. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, at about the time Marco Polo arrived in China, a Christian monk, Rabban Sauma, left it, embarking on a journey that would prove more momentous than he could have dreamed. What began as a religious pilgrimage to the Middle East (supported by the Mongol Emperor, Khubilai Khan) ultimately became an extraordinary diplomatic mission. After several years' eventful stay in Persia, Sauma was dispatched to Europe by Persia's Mongol ruler, the Ilkhan. The monk's task: to persuade the Pope and the Kings of France and England to ally with the Ilkhan and launch a Crusade against their common enemy, the Muslim dynasty that controlled the Holy Land. The mission was a striking early instance of geopolitics on a modern scale. Voyager from Xanadu vividly conjures up the places Sauma visited as he crossed two continents, meeting with monarchs and prelates and seeing everything from a battle to a volcanic eruption to countless grisly relics of long-dead saints. It provides a clear and penetrating analysis of the volatile international situation of the era and its impact on Sauma's embassy. And, of course, Voyager from Xanadu traces the life of an exceptional man, from his comfortable youth, through his unique adventures, to his death far from the land of his birth.

Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static “either/or” categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and racial shape shifting among African Americans in the post–civil rights era. At different times in their lives or over generations in their families, racial shape shifters have moved from one social context to another. And as new social contexts were imposed on them, identities have even changed from one group to another. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people’s lives unfold in fluid sociohistorical circumstances. With contributions by Ryan Abrecht, George J. Sánchez, Laura Moore, and Margaret Hunter, among others, Shape Shifters explores the forces of migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, and the creation and dissolution of states and empires to highlight the historically contingent basis of identification among mixed-race peoples across time and space.

The early modern era is often envisioned as one in which European genres, both narrative and visual, diverged indelibly from those of medieval times. This collection examines a disparate set of travel texts, dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, to question that divergence and to assess the modes, themes, and ethnologies of travel writing. It demonstrates the enduring nature of the itinerary, the variant forms of witnessing (including imaginary maps), the crafting of sacred space as a cautionary tale, and the use of the travel narrative to represent the transformation of the authorial self. Focusing on European travelers to the expansive East, from the soft architecture of Timur's tent palaces in Samarqand to the ambiguities of sexual identity at the Mughul court, these essays reveal the possibilities for cultural translation as travelers of varying experience and attitude confront remote and foreign (or not so foreign) space.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Advocating a global as opposed to a Eurocentric perspective in the college classroom, discusses why and how to teach about China’s Silk Road. The romance of the Silk Road journey, with its exotic locales and luxury goods, still excites the popular imagination. But study of the trade routes between China and central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s can also greatly enhance contemporary higher education curricula. Indeed, with people, plants, animals, ideas, and beliefs traversing it, the Silk Road is both a metaphor of globalization and an early example of it. Teaching the Silk Road highlights the reasons to incorporate this material into a variety of courses and shares resources to facilitate that process. It is intended for those who are not Silk Road or Asian specialists but who wish to embrace a global history and civilizations perspective in teaching, as opposed to the more traditional approach that focuses on cultures in isolation. The book explores both classroom and experiential learning and is intentionally interdisciplinary. Each essay focuses on pedagogical strategies or themes that teachers can use to bring the Silk Road into the classroom. “Based on years of experience, the authors of Teaching the Silk Road offer sound strategies for both stand-alone courses on aspects of the route and mainstreaming what has been uncovered in three decades of research into existing courses in a variety of disciplines.” — H-Net Reviews (H-Asia) “This collection of essays and personal reflections allows the reader to listen in on a relaxed conversation on teaching the topic of the Silk Road. It offers a nice blueprint for integrating the Silk Road into new or existing curricula.” — J. Michael Farmer, author of The Talent of Shu: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual World of Early Medieval Sichuan

The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.