Introduction: Kingship and Political Legitimacy in the Persianate World

Abstract

The development of kingship and political legitimacy in the Persianate world is marked by its synthesis and entangling of many different religious, philosophical, and intellectual discourses of varying ethnic and geographical origins.* This is all the truer with respect to the periods after 1258, where the authority of the caliphs in Baghdad was no longer existent and Mongol dominance brought about new types of authority and legitimacy. The ways in which Timur’s authority was characterized during his own time and during the time of his immediate descendants demonstrate amply the complexity involved in the processes of political legitimation in the “post-Baghdad” (or “post-1258”) period: these included, among others, Chengizid (albeit indirectly), astrologically-ordained, and even ʿAlid legitimacies (Mano; Woods; Chann; Moin, ch. 2; Morimoto). In the meantime, vigorous research in recent years has elucidated the evolution of the processes of legitimation in the early-modern Persianate world, where, among others, new modes of interaction between politics and religion were manifested in widespread claims to sacral kingship.1 Attempts are already being made to look at the several centuries of the post-Baghdad period as a