1 book review Christopher P. Atwood, ed. and trans. The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2021. 264 pp. ISBN: 9781624669903 When hearing the term “Mongol era”, the average reader tends to think of the great western campaigns of the Mongols, the empires of Chinggis’s successors that covered much of the known world at the time, and of the most exten- sive state formation in world history. These thoughts often revolve around a glorious, ruthless, but highly efficient system, and are mainly drawn from the histories of western (from the Mongols’ point of view) peoples who had not encountered the Mongols before. However, there are also some less-published references from this period, from sources whose authors were geographically much closer to the Mongols: Chinese documents. Christopher Atwood’s new volume adds to the well-known sources some very important new ones, which provide invaluable insights into the often imprecisely understood overall pic- ture. The sources illuminate hitherto little known and, above all, little studied details at the mesoscopic and microscopic levels. The Rise of the Mongols publishes five sources: three documents from the Southern Song (1127–1279), of which two date from Chinggis’s time and rank as the earliest texts ever written on the rise of the Mongols, while a third rec- ords the Mongol administration under Chinggis. The other two accounts are from the Qubilai era (1264–1294), but pre-date his accession to the throne, and were written by Chinese officials in the Mongol service. One of these is a biogra- phy of Ila (Y elü) Chucai 耶律楚材 (1190–1244)1 and the other is a visit to Qubilai by the low-ranking northern Chinese official Zhang Dehui 張德輝 (1194–1274), when the former was only one of Chinggis’s hundreds of grandchildren. The peculiarity of these texts is that they differ significantly from both the western accounts on the Mongols and from the Mongols’ own surviving his- toriographical records, first and foremost from The Secret History. Without revealing too much of the details, suffice it to say that the episodes, presumably intentionally unrepresented from the Mongols’ point of view, shed extraordi- nary light on our knowledge of, among other things, Chinggis’s rise to power, and especially on his relationship with the Jurchen Jin dynasty. Similar new insights can be gleaned about Öködei Khan’s (c.1186–1241) reforms and, more specifically, about their implications for Ila Chucai, which are confirmed by the accounts of contemporaries in the rival Southern Song who may have known him personally, albeit in different ways in terms of the extent of Ila’s role. This 1 On the two different readings and the Chinese transcription of the name, see “Imperial Sur- names of the Kitans and Jurchens” in the volume under review (44). See also Wittfogel and Feng (1949), 59. Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:10.1163/26662523-20230011 © Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky, 2023 | ISSN: 2190-8796 (print) 2666-2523 (online) Downloaded from Brill.com 10/07/2023 04:51:57PM via free access