Seljukids and Mongols in Iran: who taught whom what? 
For a long time the history of the Seljukids and Mongols was seen as that of a foreign people ignorant of the settled economy  arriving as a destructive force and gradually learning from their settled servitors – Persian bureaucrats – how to rule over an urban and agricultural population. I call into question both the nomads’ initial ignorance and the primacy of the bureaucracy as agents of assimilation.

Beatrice Forbes Manz is Professor of History at Tufts University, where she teaches the history of the Middle East and Central Asia.  Since writing The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989) she has published Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which received the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award. Her major research interest lies in the relationship between pastoral nomads and settled populations during the Mongol and post-Mongol periods.  Other publications include an edited book, Central Asia in Historical Perspective (Westview Press, 1995) and numerous articles on ideology, historiography and political practice in the Mongol and Timurid periods.  She is currently writing a survey history of nomads in the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present entitled Nomads in the Middle East, for the Cambridge series, “Themes in Islamic History.”