Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

In the early 15th century, Shah Rukh, the son of Timur, sent an embassy east to the target of his father's last military campaign, Ming China. Making that journey from Timurid Herat to the home of the Yongle Emperor (with stops along the way at Samarkand, Tashkent, Hami, Ganzhou, and finally Khanbaliq) was a chronicler and painter named Ghiyāth al-Dīn. His story is one of medieval diplomacy and travel.

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I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

• "Report to Mirza Baysunghur on the Timurid Legation to the Ming Court at Peking," in A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, selected and translated by W. M. Thackston. Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989.
• Ford, Graeme. "The Uses of Persian in Imperial China: The Translation Practices of the Great Ming," in The Persianate World, edited by Nile Green. University of California Press, 2019.
• Lipman, Jonathan N. Familiar Strangers A History of Muslims in Northwest China. University of Washington Press, 2011.
• Park, Hyunhee. Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Rossabi, Morris. A History of China. Wiley, 2013.
• Rossabi, Morris. "Two Ming Envoys to Inner Asia," in T’oung Pao 62, no. 1/3 (1976): 1–34.
• Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. Perpetual Happiness. University of Washington Press, 2011.

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Tāj al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Anjab ibn al-Sā’ī was born in the last years of the 12th century and lived until the last quarter of the 13th. He was a prolific writer who grew up Abbasid Baghdad and saw it fall to the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan.

His solitary work that survives in its entirety is Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad. In that book, he reaches all the way back to Hammādah bint ‘Īsā, who was married to al-Mansūr the Abbasid dynastic founder and died in 780, and all the way up to Shāhān, a contemporary of his and the concubine of al-Mustansir who died in 1242. He fills its pages with the women of the Abbasid caliphal court, women who appear there as wives, concubines, poets, and more. This episode is about some of those medieval women.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

• Ibn al-Sā'ī. Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad, edited by Shawkat M. Toorawa. New York University Press, 2015.
• Caswell, F.M. The Slave Girls of Baghdad: The Qiyan in the Early Abbasid Era. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

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Fernão Mendes Pinto, respected by many of his contemporaries for the expertise knowledge which he'd gained through his travels, absolutely synonymous for others with lies and exaggerations.

From humble beginnings and vaguely unfortunate events in his early life, Pinto would find a place for himself in the 16th-century world of colonial Portugal, would write himself into it if necessary.

He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

3 Things:

1. Article on the history of the mango and a Portuguese connection.
2. Article about the discovery of a shipwreck, thought to have come from Vasco da Gama’s armada.
3. The story of the rhino of Lisbon.

Sources:

• The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
• The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Sir John Mandeville, a 14th-century figure who travelled/maybe travelled/almost definitely didn't travel from England to Jerusalem and its holy places, to the court of the sultan in Egypt, to the realms of the Mongol khan, and to the long sought lands of Prester John. With this episode, we start the journey.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here, my Ko-fi is here, and Paypal is here.

I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, my website is www.humancircuspodcast.com, and I have some things on Redbubble at https://www.redbubble.com/people/humancircus.

Sources:

• Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels, translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford University Press, 2012.
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated by Charles Moseley. Penguin, 2005.
• Clark, James G. A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c.1350-1440. Clarendon Press, 2004.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Higgins, Iain Macleod. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
• Tzanaki, Rosemary. Mandeville's Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550). Taylor & Francis, 2017.

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Born in the 12th century, Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi travelled the Ayyubid world in search of students, mentors, and patrons. His curiosity stands out, and does his impatience with scholars who, as he saw it, wasted their time with alchemy or other unimportant topics.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

• ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī. A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years. NYU Press, 2021.
• Bonadeo, Cecilia Martini. ʿAbd Al-Laṭīf Al-Baġdādī’s Philosophical Journey From Aristotle’s Metaphysics to the ‘Metaphysical Science’. Brill, 2013.
• Ibn Abi Usaybi'a. A Literary History of Medicine. Edited by E. Savage-Smith, S. Swain, and G.J. van Gelder. Leiden, 2020.

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