Gavin Menzies’ ‘1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance’ is a parody of historical scholarship that purports to offer insight into the critical stages of early global modernity. Cast in a flawed East/West paradigm that has shaped much of Euro-American scholarship, 1434 enjoys significant popular and political readership internationally and eclipses recent scholarship that would allow a more nuanced and integrated understanding of our shared early modern history. This review article challenges the Sinocentrism of Menzies and others, and suggests a broader Eurasian perspective for understanding the interplay of societies that defined innovation and creativity at the start of the modern era.
Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.
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