Bibliographical Essay

Violence by armies or soldiers off the battlefield has not been a field of research in its own right for the region and periods under study so far, and there is no source genre dealing directly with violence.

Another approach to the problem has been through regional history. Several studies of individual regions of Iran are relevant, among them David Durand-Guedy, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers: A History of Isfahan in the Saljuq Period (London: Routledge, 2010), and Denise Aigle, Le Fars sous la domination mongole (Paris: Association pour l'Avancement des Etudes Iraniennes, 2005). Local lordship, including violent lordship, is treated in Jürgen Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft im Iran des 12. Jahrhunderts: Herrschaftspraxis und Konzepte (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016).

Sources used in this chapter, in Arabic and Persian, come from diverse genres: narrative sources, that is, universal chronicles, regional and dynastic histories and individual biographies (in both Arabic and Persian) as well as hagiography (in Persian). Hagiography is particularly rewarding because it offers insight into the ways ‘ordinary' people felt about lords and armies. I have discussed the methodology of using hagiography in ‘Hagiographische Texte als historische Quelle', Saeculum 41.1 (1990), 17-43 and in ‘Histoires de Turcs dans l'hagiographie persane pre-mongole', in Veronique Schiltz (ed.), De Samarcande d Istanbul: etapes orientales. Hommages d Pierre Chuvin II (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2015), pp. 193-204. Drafts and copies of official letters (most of them in Persian) are important because they give the official point of view: telling people not to do something may mean that this was current practice. Geography (in Arabic) has given some elements. Some types of sources are absent because they do not exist or at least are no longer extant: documents from legal practice, court records and so forth. Fiction and poetry have not been used but could possibly yield interesting results; the laments about large-scale destruction wrought by the Ghuzz in Khurasan were the subject of an elegy by Anwari, a twelfth-century panegyrist; the poem was translated into English by William Kirkpatrick as early as 1785 and has since then been known as ‘The Tears of Khorassan' (for references, see J. T. P. de Bruijn, ‘AnwarT, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. ii (1986), pp. 141-3).