The manuscript text was everywhere in Persia, and it was highly prized and respected.

As with the ‘Afghan Tartars,’ people plug gaps in knowledge about people loosely, by analogy or merging with other categories.

By integrating an exotic girl with such a symbolic name into her retinue, Elizabeth I could display her own power.

A pilgrim like Yusuf Rumi was faced with a climate and environment only heard about in stories

Through our blog posts so far we have travelled through space and time, traversing lands both real and imagined

English access to these Eurasian routes required travelling east of the Caspian Sea, in early seventeenth century texts often described only as ‘Tartaria’.