Violent behaviour is a major topic in Arabic and Persian sources: battles, fighting, killing, beating, injuring, plundering, robbing, raping are very common indeed.
The study of violence used by armies and lords in the medieval Islamic period, however, is hampered by two serious problems.
First, all of the evidence is anecdotal. This is particularly true for violence off the battlefield, that is, in pressing men to service in the army, in collecting taxes and provisions for the army, and in the cohabitation of ‘civilian' and ‘military' persons.
All accounts beg the question of whether they report typical situations or rather exceptions. Therefore it is hazardous to make an assessment of how the level of violence evolved over the centuries. Second, the sources typically have a normative aim. How do we evaluate a complaint about violent behaviour of an army or group of people? Many of the relevant passages are polemical, that is, directed against a person whom the author had elected as a personal enemy. Here, plausibility will often be all that can be achieved.The present study concentrates on the Turko-Mongol periods and focuses on everyday forms of violence more than incidents of largescale upheaval. Everyday violence has not been a subject of research in itself whereas episodes of large-scale destruction, for example the Mongol invasion and the campaigns of Timur (1370-1405) across Iran, Central Asia, the Near East and India, have been frequently described. There is no need to repeat these descriptions here. I will treat such topics as military recruitment, the provisioning of armies and taxation problems. One of the most evident forms of everyday violence was related to the billeting of troops and other military personnel in private homes, and therefore a substantial section of this chapter is devoted to that topic.