In the year 1400 the princes of Europe sympathetically were much bestirred, fearing the imminent fall of Constantinople and the extinction of the Eastern Empire. The Ottoman Sultan Bazayid (otherwise Bajazet) was already in possession of almost the whole of what subsequently became Turkey in Europe. The Emperor Manuel still was lord of Constantinople, but beyond the city walls possessed a mere strip of territory along the north coast of the Sea of Marmora, and extending to the Black Sea, a strip some fifty miles in length but under thirty in breadth. Four years before (September 1396) an...

This exciting collection brings together the major writings of the important English orientalist, Guy Le Strange. The set includes his valuable yet lesser known work: his translation of Nuzhat al-Qulub - the most accurate assessment of the state of Iran in the early post-Mongol period; his translation of Ibn Serapion - a pioneering work on the changing river systems and canals in the Islamic period, a factor that played a key role in the fate of this part of the medieval world; and finally, his work on al-Balkhi's account of Fars, which includes a unique account of Kurdish tribes in this...

Guy Le Strange (1854-1933) pioneered the study of the historical geography of the Middle East, and especially Persia, notably in his Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge, 1905) and the present work which contains an English translation of Mustaufī's Nuzhat al-qulūb

Ḥamd-Allāh Mustaufī was a fourteenth-century historian and geographer. His Nuzhat al-qulūb (Hearts' delight) sets out to give a description of Iran in the form of a gazetteer. Despite some repetition of previous accounts, there are many snippets of up to date information embedded in his...