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Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300–1800 Rulers & Elites Series Editor Jeroen Duindam (Leiden University) Editorial Board Maaike van Berkel (Radboud University Nijmegen) Yingcong Dai (William Paterson University) Jean-Pascal Daloz (University of Strasbourg) Jos Gommans (Leiden University) Jérôme Kerlouégan (University of Oxford) Dariusz Kolodziejczyk (Warsaw University) Metin Kunt (Sabanci University) volume 11 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rule Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300–1800 By Richard van Leeuwen leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc-nd License, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: Jahangir preferring a Sufi shaikh to kings from the St. Petersburg Album, by Bichitr, 1615– 1618. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, d.c.: Purchase – Charles Lang Freer Endowment, f1942.15a. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017028405 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2211-4610 isbn 978-90-04-34053-4 (hardcover) isbn 978-90-04-34054-1 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Richard van Leeuwen. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill nv. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures viii Introduction 1 The Thousand and One Nights and Processes of Transmission 6 Source Material 11 1 Kings, Viziers, Concubines 24 The Cycle of the ‘Seven Viziers’/‘Seven Sages of Rome’ and Its Cognates 25 Variations: The Story of ‘Jaliʾad of Hind and His Vizier Shimas’ 34 King Wu’s Expedition against Zhou and Proclaiming Harmony 38 Concluding Remarks 48 2 Gods, Demons, and Kings 52 The Prince and the Demons of Evil: The Legendary Vikramaditya 53 The Thirty-Two Steps of the Throne 54 Harun al-Rashid, Vizier Jaʾfar, and the Jinns 61 Harun al-Rashid and the Discourse of Power 68 Fighting the Evil Spirit: Creation of the Gods 71 Concluding Remarks 76 3 Divine Insights, Cosmic Harmony 78 The Cycle of the ‘Queen of the Serpents’ 79 King and Cosmos: The Sorcerer’s Revolt 88 Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse 98 Concluding Remarks 107 4 The Knight and the King 109 Tirant lo Blanc: The Ideal Knight 113 The Harbinger of the Faith: Amir Hamza 121 The Emperor and the Barbarians: The Exploits of Yue Fei 133 Hang Tuah, the Malay Hero 141 The ‘Foreign’ Sultan: Al-Zahir Baybars 147 The Muslims against the Byzantines: Sayyid Battal 155 Concluding Remarks 159 vi contents 5 Kingship and Love 163 The Prince and the Mysteries of Love 167 The Enchantment of Love: European Fantasies of Kingship and Love 182 Concluding Remarks 196 6 Unrequested Advice 198 The Frustrated Official: Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli 201 Against the Old Order: Huang Zongxi and Hung Sheng 210 European and Oriental Despots: Montesquieu and Diderot 215 A Modern Mirror-for-Princes: Christoph Martin Wieland’s Der Goldene Spiegel 232 The Official and His Empress: Alexander Radischev and Catherine ii 239 Concluding Remarks 250 Conclusion 253 Bibliography 261 Index 268 Acknowledgements The research for this book was part of the research programme ‘Eurasian Empires’ funded by the Dutch research organization n.w.o. and conducted at Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. I am grateful to the directors of the programme, Jeroen Duindam, Peter Rietbergen, Jos Gommans and Maaike van Berkel for inviting me to join the research team and providing me with the opportunity to delve into a fas- cinating and important field of study. Together with the PhD and Post-Doc students Barend Noordam, Lennart Bes, Willem Flinterman, Kim Ragetli, Lies- beth Geevers, Hans Voeten, and Cumhur Bekar they created a stimulating and agreeable scholarly environment, ensuring a critical and inspiring exchange of ideas. My special thanks go to all participants for their questions and com- ments on the text presented here; to Barend Noordam for helping me with the transliteration of Chinese names; to Kate Delaney for copy-editing the text; to David Claszen for finalizing the format and compiling the index; and to Joost van Schendel for helping to find and select the illustrations. Needless to say, all remaining deficiencies and mistakes are entirely my own. The research overlapped with my contribution to the programme ‘Early modern encounters with the Orient’,financed by hera and directed by Charles Burnett (University of London) and Jan Loop (University of Kent). They kindly provided the funding for the online publication of the text. List of Figures 1 Prince and astrologers, ascribed to Basavana. India, Mughal dynasty, circa 1585–1590, Musée des arts asiatiques-Guimet, Paris eo 3577 a. 18 2 Mounted official, by Zhao Mengfu. Dated 1296, Palace Museum, Beijing. 44 3 Chinese pantheon, from Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis (Amsterdam, 1667). 66 4 Emissaries bring news from the provinces of Khaybar and Chin to Anusherwan, from the Hamzanama, 16th century, by Mir Sayyid Ali. Courtesy of the mak— Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Arts, bi 8770–8772. Photograph: mak/Georg Mayer. 92 5 Yue Fei’s mother tattooing Yue Fei, 18th century painting from the Long Corridor at the Beijing Summer Palace. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, Shizhao. 114 6 Diderot and Catherine ii, 19th century engraving by Alphonse Marie de Neuville, from François Guizot, A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times. Volume 6, 321. 139 7 Sultan Bayazid before Timur, folio from an Akbarnama (History of Akbar). Painting by Dharam Das, ca. 1600. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1935. 157 8 Emperor Huizong, Listening to the Qin, by Zhao Ji. Ca. 11th century, Palace Museum Beijing. 175 9 The Emperor of China ploughing the first furrow, by Christian Bernhardt Rode, ca. 1773. Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo: Jörg P. Anders. 202 10 Portuguese map of Malacca, from Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa. Volume 1 (Lisbon, 1666) 148. 226 Introduction In general, the study of history can be meaningful only if embedded in well- defined frameworks. These frameworks can, for instance, be temporal, geo- graphical/spatial, disciplinary, or discursive. If the scope of the framework is widened, the field of research will automatically split up to become a cluster of subordinated histories, which interact and coalesce around specific centres, boundaries, periods, and source-types. These divisions and the representation of history as consisting of various components become inevitable for the con- struction of a meaningful historical narrative, which conveys the idea that the course of history can be comprehended and interpreted. It is the only way in which history can be useful as the basis of a worldview, a view of the present and a sense of the future. Still, the nature and rationale of the division into components and the differentiating boundaries, as they are defined within dis- ciplinary paradigms, can and will be questioned, challenged, and revised in order to find new and illuminating interactions and coherences. This book emerged in the context of a research programme aimed at tran- scending well-entrenched disciplinary demarcations and matrices of analyses of historical processes. The programme, ‘Eurasian empires. Integration pro- cesses and identity formation, 1300–1800’,was set up to examine developments in a historical field that is, both temporally and spatially, vast and to identify parallels hitherto largely obscured by all kinds of disciplinary and thematic boundaries.1 Evidently, such a broad approach presents many theoretical and methodological challenges, drawing researchers out of their comfort zones and forcing them to see their material in a new light. This process may be highly rewarding, of course, when new connections and relationships are revealed, but the results may be confined to tentative and speculative conclusions, since the research has departed from familiar interpretive frameworks. The more historical research is stretched over time and space, the more difficult it is to construct a coherent framework in which connections and parallels become meaningful and convincing. These remarks are perhaps even more relevant for research into the history of culture and literature. Although developments within these fields are obvi- ously linked to the historical processes in which they are embedded, they are 1 The programme was a cooperative project between Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam, and Radboud University, Nijmegen, and funded by research organization nwo (2011–2016). © richard van leeuwen, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004340541_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc-nd License. 2 introduction not completely congruent with these processes and seem to have a dynamic of their own. Whereas political, economic, and social history are as a rule vis- ibly linked to events, cultural history is more diffuse and less easily delimited into neatly traceable entities. To give an example, languages are a major fac- tor in both cultural and political history, but the way in which they operate within these fields is not necessarily complementary or congruent.