An early-fourteenth-century Latin inscription carved in stone, on a wall along a small street in Florence, tells the story of the year 1300, when many Mongols journeyed to Rome and participated in the Jubilee year celebration. Highlighting the Mongol presence in fourteenth-century Rome, Anne Dunlop reassures the reader that this stone inscription is not an isolated piece of evidence; she also cites a later fourteenth-century source that describes a hundred people dressed in the so-called "Tartar dress" attending the Jubilee (13-14).

The effectiveness of Dunlop's opening lies in the element of surprise. The image of Mongols roaming the streets of Rome in the year 1300 would seem to defy many conventional assumptions that one may hold about Italy on the cusp of early modernity and the Renaissance. The vignette draws in the reader because it inspires questions about the unexpected degree of mobility and connectivity that people seemed to have enjoyed in Eurasia, during a period of world history often assumed to be more fragmented and localized: how did Mongols end up in Europe, and what were they doing there?

Dunlop's edited volume-a collection of twelve multidisciplinary essays-is a book that offers and explains many such surprises. During the thirteenth century, Mongols established the largest contiguous land empire in human history, generating an expansive network of exchange across Eurasia. People, goods, and knowledge could circulate through this network, resulting in novel forms of cross-cultural connections and frictions. The existence of long historiographical discourses notwithstanding, the scholarly treatment of Mongols has often been uneven in different fields that constitute the study of premodern Europe and Asia. Academic fields are often bounded by specific geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary specializations, and conversations seldom cross these boundaries. Dunlop acknowledges, for example, that "with a few exceptions, Mongol impact has not been a central theme in studies of medieval or Renaissance Europe" (14). In the field of Islamic art history, however, the Mongol era has long generated an important set of questions. Yuka Kadoi analyzes the historiography of Persian art in her contribution to the volume, unpacking the complex stories of how the period of Mongol rule-conventionally referred to as the Ilkhanid-has been a thorny episode that resisted easy classification in the writing of Persian art history for much of the twentieth century: should the visual and material culture of this period be understood as Mongol, Persian or something else? Describing the historiographical tendency in East Asian studies, Angelo Cattaneo cites Morris Rossabi, who incisively noted that the field often treats the Mongol era as the "Cinderella" or a "step-sister in the study of China" (265).

This volume presents a productive model through which the leading scholars of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Eurasia engage in dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and regional specializations. The project had its origins in a conference that Dunlop convened at I Tatti in Florence in 2019. The essays in the volume collectively respond to the prompt given to the conference participants: to critically reevaluate how one might unpack or clarify the processes and mechanisms through which transregional and cross-cultural histories and art histories manifested in Mongol Eurasia.

The book's essays explore the processes of connectivity and cultural exchange in vastly differing ways. Taken together, the book unfurls as a series of case studies that interrogate how migration, forced displacement, and shifting identities of people and objects drove or shaped the history of Mongol Eurasia.

Sandwiched in the center of the volume, Christopher Atwood's essay perhaps offers the broad conceptual framework through which many disparate essays and case studies in the book can be interwoven. Asking the fundamental question - "Why was the Mongol Empire so conducive to cultural exchange?" - Atwood proposes that for the state's ruling classes, the driving force behind Eurasian cultural exchange lies in the empire's "profit-making enterprise" (138). The enhanced mobility of people and goods in the Mongol Empire, Atwood argues, was intricately tied to the Mongols' acquisitive drive to accumulate income by absorbing more "dues-paying members" of society (148). These acts, literally and metaphorically, were akin to foraging, hunting, and herding, which are key mechanisms for generating wealth in a pastoralist political economy.

Other essays zoom into specific historical contexts to provide thicker descriptions and case studies of mobility and cultural exchange that unfolded in Mongol Eurasia. Michal Biran investigates the city of Baghdad in the wake of Mongol conquest in 1258. Challenging the view that the arrival of Mongols was a catastrophic event that caused the city's decline, Biran traces the great mobility of people, objects, and interreligious ideas that fostered a great cross-cultural ferment and a new life for Baghdad. Morris Rossabi's focus is on maritime trade. The Mongols' ancestral origins in the landlocked region of the North Asian steppe, as well as their relative lack of military success on the water, have contributed to the popular assumption that Mongols were not interested in oceanic commerce. The conventional view indeed holds that the Mongols focused their efforts on developing the overland trade and expansion. Rossabi's essay, however, reveals that the Mongols in fact promoted maritime commerce. Through institutional support, an important network of sea trade emerged, and the port cities of Northeast Asia became connected to their counterparts in the greater Indian Ocean world.

Eiren Shea's contribution highlights the sartorial culture in the Yuan court, the Mongol polity over East Asia. Cross-referencing the imperial records with the surviving examples of robes as well as painted representations of court dress, Shea analyzes the formation of an unprecedented, global aesthetic of costume among the Yuan ruling elites. This dress culture imbued the image of the Mongol ruler with trans-Eurasian and cross-cultural sensibilities. Luxury silks woven with gold threads (nasij) associated with the weaving traditions of Central and Western Asia, as well as the rituals of gift robing, became an important aspect of the courtly culture. Juliane von Fircks's essay is an illuminating piece of art historical detective work on the seal prints on the back of luxury silks woven with gold threads. In von Fircks's hands, the seal prints-their iconography in particular-create links that allow us to chart the network of textile workshops, routes of circulation, and authorities of quality control. Angelo Cattaneo's essay illuminates the legacy of Mongol Eurasia for the visual culture of mapping in the early modern period. Cattaneo juxtaposes two fifteenth-century maps, produced on the two ends of Eurasia: the Fra Mauro map from Venice and the Kangnido map from Korea. These two maps were made thousands of kilometers apart from one another, but they share many features because both emerged out of the same body of geographical and cartographic knowledge that circulated across Eurasia during Mongol rule.

Other essays in the volume turn to the question of afterlives. Even in the post-Mongol world, the historical memory of the Mongols often lingered across Eurasia as a potent symbol of power and authority, and many early modern rulers capitalized on them to achieve various goals. Peter Jackson's essay, for example, discusses the ways in which the Timurids evoked real and imaginary links to Chinggisid genealogy to consolidate political power. David Robinson reveals the ways in which members of the Ming court constructed a multifaceted narrative of Chinggisid history. The utility of such an approach was that they could then tailor the narrative to best compel and convince other states during diplomacy. The historical memory of the Mongols, however, did not always have the same degree of longevity. Reuven Amitai's essay demonstrates that the Mongol identity could also morph and shift into disappearance. He studies the declining number of Mongolian speakers in Southwest Asia after the fall of the Ilkhanate. He shows how this was because Mongols became assimilated into the communities of Turkic language speakers, with whom they shared a strong cultural affinity.

Amidst a series of investigations that highlight the cultural transformations linked to increasing mobility and information exchange across Eurasia, this book also offers a cautionary tale about such an approach. Jong Kuk Nam's essay reminds readers that the degree of connectivity across Mongol Eurasia changed over time. Nam problematizes the romanticized notion of Pax Mongolica and the simplistic assumptions that the Mongols' territorial expansion continuously facilitated unhindered trade across Eurasia. Indeed, wars and conflicts among the Mongol successor states meant that commerce and mobility were often interrupted. By historicizing the ebbs and flows of transregional connectivity in Mongol Eurasia, Nam highlights the importance of recognizing not only the mobility in the Mongol Empire, but also its limitations at specific moments.

The high quality of production makes this volume (which includes 46 color images) a joy to hold and read. Altogether, the twelve essays present rigorously researched ideas in clear prose, making the book accessible to students as well as an intellectually engaged public. Because the volume brings together such a diverse set of historiographical questions and disciplinary methods, it will interest specialist readers from various fields of medieval and early modern Eurasian studies. Readers will find many surprising stories that will change how they think and write about premodern global history and art history.

Yong Cho