The lands of the eastern caliphate : Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem conquest to the time of Timur / by G. Le Strange.

  • Guy Le Strange
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The lands of the eastern caliphate : Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem conquest to the time of Timur / by G. Le Strange. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE. IN the following pages an attempt is made to gather within a convenient compass the information scattered through the works of the medieval Arab, Persian, and Turkish geographers, who have described Mesopotamia and Persia, with the nearer parts of Central Asia. The authorities quoted begin with the earlier Moslem writers, and conclude with those who described the settlement of these lands which followed after the death of Timur,—the last great Central Asian wars of conquest,—for with the fifteenth century the medieval period in Asia may be said to come to an end. The present work is also the complement of Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate published in 1900, and carries forward the geographical record which I began in Palestine tinder the Moslems, a work that appeared in 1890. To keep the volume within moderate compass, the geography of Arabia, with the description of the two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, though these for the most part were under the dominion of the Abbasids, has been omitted. Perhaps some other scholar may take up the subject, with fuller knowledge than I have, and write the historical geography of Arabia with Egypt across the Red Sea under the Fatimid Caliphs ; completing the circuit of Moslem lands by describing the various provinces of North Africa, with the outlying and shortlived, though most splendid, western Caliphate of Spain.