“Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times”, by Morris Rossabi

322 pages, University of California Press, ISBN-13: 978-0520059139

Morris Rossabi is an American historian and Senior Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College; he was also given an honorary doctorate from the National University of Mongolia for his work on the history of Mongolia, China and East Asia, of which this book, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times, forms a part (and don’t be like Spell-Check; it is spelled “Khubilai” and not “Kublai” throughout). Rossabi and all other historians seeking to review the history of the Khans face a difficult task as the Mongols had no written language, and, so, there are no histories of the Mongols written by the Mongols. The sources available to the historians are Confucian Chinese and Muslim Persian (principally) as well as Shinto Japanese and Nestorian Christian (secondary). As will be readily noted, these sources were recorded with points of view held by peoples subjugated by the Mongols, hardly an ideal situation for an historian seeking disinterested facts. As will also be readily noted, this is not a history intended for the general public. Oh, it’s straightforward enough – Rossabi organizes his topics into chapters, opens each by telling you what he’s going to tell you, tells you what he intended to tell you, and then closes each by telling you what he told you – but in seeking to present a broad sweep of Khubilai’s times we get a series of not-always well-connected stories: military stories, Khubilai’s governance stories, tax-collecting stories, stories describing the theater, stories describing Khubilai’s efforts to create a written language for the Mongols, and so on. Rossabi struggles with his diverse sources and their conflicting points of view, frequently warning the reader that his descriptions are guesses and that he weighed the differing points of view of his sources in order report what Rossabi regarded as the likely truth. This is no bad thing; after all, history is always a set of events sifted by the values of the historian and the richness and perspectives of the sources, and Rossabi’s history of Khubilai Khan has the marks of careful workmanship, given the sources available to him.