The Mongol invasions of Iran and the collapse of the ʿAbbasid hegemony gave a great impetus to Persian historical writing in the late thirteenth century, expressed both in the patronage of the rulers and senior ministers of the court, and in the provincial centers on the peripheries of the Iranian plateau. After surveying the Persian histories of the Mongol invasions and early Ilkhanate, the chapter covers the rich literature that evolved following the conversion of the Mongols to Islam. The history of the period was also written by later authors, sometimes drawing on sources now lost, or consolidating the information provided by their predecessors but now presented with a new underlying narrative, with the benefit of looking back on the more distant past. The survey concludes with the work of some historians of the Timurid period, who narrate the history of the Ilkhanate in the longer perspective of Persian history.

This volume is conceived and offered as a tribute to Robin Bligh, in recognition of his long and dedicated service to the Gibb Memorial Trust, spanning a remarkable forty-six years from 1974 until his retirement in 2020, and in gratitude for the calm and efficient way in which he guided and managed the work of the Trust and husbanded its resources.

Robin is well aware of the aims and efforts of the Gibb Memorial Trust, to promote and publish research in the core areas of Middle East studies (or, as it was generally known, Oriental studies), and of the largely human obstacles to their achievement – indeed no doubt often to the point of ennui; the advent of emails and the internet has had little impact on the speed of correspondence, decision-making or on the intervals between a volume being proposed and its final publication. When Robin was appointed Clerk to the Trust in 1974 upon the retirement of Mr W. L. Dominy, the Trustees in attendance were Robin Zaehner (in the Chair), Freddie Beeston, J. A. Boyle, Ann K. S. Lambton, Jim Pearson, Bob Serjeant and Geoffrey Lewis, with apologies from Bernard Lewis and Malcolm Lyons. Robin Zaehner died before the next meeting, while Bernard Lewis, who had just moved to Princeton, never attended another meeting – but most of the others would become quite familiar figures over the next few years, not to mention other Trustees appointed subsequently. But how much did Robin, with his background as an accountant and struggling to impose order and efficiency on their dealings, actually know about them all and their academic achievements? With meetings only once a year and often little contact in between, the annual gatherings over lunch and a relatively short agenda may have revealed little more than the Trustees’ interests, sociability and general demeanour.

Rather than a history of the Gibb Memorial Trust, of which Robin himself is such a significant part, we therefore thought it might be more interesting to our dedicatee to present a series of portraits of former Trustees, written by current ones.

This appendix aims to provide a convenient handlist of all the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series (GMS) publication, for ease of reference. Information is simplified and reduced to the essentials – that is, titles, authors and editors/translators, rather than the full bibliographic details as published. This is partly because these are often very long and couched in an unwieldy and elderly system of transliteration, and partly because, for the most part, they are listed conveniently at the start of many of the volumes; both reasons that would make it tiresome to retype them. It should be noted, however, that many of the printed lists are inaccurate, especially as to the date of publication and sometimes also are themselves quite reduced; from around 1960, the practice of listing them was discontinued. Such details as are provided here are taken from the volumes themselves. The Minutes of the meetings of the Trust do not contain systematic notices of recent publications.

The Trust supported the publication of several other works; some of these are very occasionally noted, but these are not listed here. It is notable that E. J. W. Gibb's History of Ottoman Poetry, of which only volume one (1900) was published in his lifetime but was seen through the press by E. G. Browne and kept in print by the Trust ever since, was never included in these lists as a GMS publication.

The name of the publisher is omitted: it was principally Luzac & Co. of London, publisher to the Trust until 1978, after which the place of publication is generally unstated, although, as the Trust was based in Cambridge, some volumes indicate Cambridge as the place of publication. Later volumes were first distributed and produced for the Trust by Aris & Phillips of Warminster until 2002 and latterly Oxbow Books of Oxford, until 2022. Many of the early volumes also record E. J. Brill, ‘Imprimerie Orientale’ of Leyden (Leiden), as the publisher, but strictly speaking the Trust was the publisher and all these (and other firms) were responsible for the printing or distribution. The place of publication is only included if specifically mentioned on the title page. Some volumes, notably of the Masnavi, were frequently reprinted, but only new editions are noted here when identified.

Starting with C. A. Storey, the duration of service runs from their appointment to their resignation, or attendance at their first and final meeting, as minuted. The names of the current Trustees were printed in the prelims of the GMS publications until 1962, and then again (without details) from 1992 onwards. It is not recorded that Ida Gibb actually attended any meetings, but occasionally correspondence with her is recorded, and her approval was sought.

James Douglas (Jim) Pearson was born on 17 December 1911 in Cambridge but brought up as an only child in Linton by foster parents who both suffered from deafness, which perhaps encouraged his love of books. He was educated at Cambridge County High School for Boys but left school at the age of sixteen with, as he put it, ‘undistinguished attainments’ and secured a post as a bookfetcher, or ‘library boy’ in the Cambridge University Library, where he developed a passion for Oriental languages. He was awarded a scholarship at St John's College, where he graduated in 1935 with a degree in Oriental Languages (Arabic and Aramaic), and then moved to Pembroke College with an E. G. Browne Scholarship to read Arabic and Persian (1936–37); the scholarship was extended to the end of 1937 at the request of R. A. Nicholson and Reuben Levy, with whom Pearson was reading Persian and ‘working reasonably hard and consistently’; he was also reading Sanskrit with Professor Bailey, ‘who tells me his work is satisfactory there’. Levy considered Pearson ‘quite worthy’ of the extension.

Pearson then returned to work in the Oriental section of the library until 1941, when he was called up for military service as a signaller; he was later transferred to the Field Security section of the Intelligence Corps and served in Germany at the end of the war. Demobilised on the last day of 1945, he returned to Cambridge and worked again in the University Library as an Assistant Under-Librarian until 1950.

In 1950 he was appointed Librarian of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and from then until 1972 oversaw the drastic expansion and development of the library in what were probably the most important years of its history. In the mid-1950s, he decided that, in addition to maintaining the normal catalogue of books, it would be useful also to compile a catalogue of the articles contained in the library's periodicals and other collective volumes. If left uncatalogued, much of this research, especially in the less obvious sources, would tend to be overlooked. With assistants at SOAS he eventually compiled a register of more than 25,000 articles published between 1906 and 1955; once classified together with the holdings of libraries other than SOAS, this valuable reference work was published as Index Islamicus.

Alexander George Ellis was born on 14 October 1858, son of Frederick Charles Ellis, of the Paymaster General's Office, Whitehall. He was the last in a direct family line of public servants, whose lives, incidentally, each approached or exceeded the span of ninety years. His great grandfather, a Doctor of Divinity, came to London from his native Yorkshire well back in the eighteenth century. His grandfather, Sir Henry Ellis directed the British Museum from 1827 to 1856, and it is perhaps not surprising that A. G. joined the staff of the Museum in 1883 and spent the next twenty-six years there, chiefly in cataloguing Islamic literature, at first printed books and later both books and manuscripts.

Ellis was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, where he was solidly grounded in Hebrew as well as in the classics, and went on to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he matriculated as a Pensioner in Michaelmas Term 1877 and studied at the feet of William Wright and other eminent Orientalists. He became a Scholar in 1878 and a recipient of the Tyrwhitt Hebrew Scholarship upon graduating with a first-class degree in Semitic Languages in 1881. He left Cambridge with a sound equipment in Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic, and he soon extended his studies to include Persian, Turkish and Armenian, which enabled his work to cover an unusually wide field.

In 1894 he published volume one of his Catalogue of Arabic Books in the British Museum, the second volume appearing in 1901. This meticulous work of reference contains descriptions of nearly all the printed Arabic literature acquired by the Museum during the nineteenth century. For his first ten years at the Museum Ellis had as a senior colleague Charles Rieu, author of the monumental catalogues of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts, and after Rieu's retirement Ellis became to a large extent responsible for dealing with the Islamic manuscripts acquired by the Museum, as well as the books. Part of his work in this field was published together with Edward Edwards. He was also joint author of the Supplementary Catalogue published in 1926.

Alexander Hargreaves ‘Sandy’ Morton was proposed by A. K. S. Lambton for membership of the Gibb Trustees at the meeting in Durham in 1985, and his first attendance was the following year in Cambridge, with Malcolm Lyons as Chairman. By that date, Sandy had recently become Lecturer in Persian at SOAS, where the demanding Professor Lambton would have had time to refresh her opinion of his talents and abilities – an opinion originally formed, no doubt, when first supervising Sandy's PhD thesis on nineteenthcentury Persian travel diaries and an opinion that survived her considerable disapproval of his failure to complete it.

The reasons for this ‘failure’ are not difficult to imagine, when life takes you on its course, but at the same time it is not entirely untypical of Sandy's later style; he had many interests and projects and worked on them at his own speed, with meticulous attention to detail but the lack of any obvious sense of urgency. He led a reflective, thoughtful life – if he was energetic, it was mentally rather than physically so. I count it, indeed, as one of the achievements of my own rather more hectic activities that I managed to wring two fine articles out of him for volumes I was editing, which I refused to finalise until I had received his contribution. In both cases, they are remarkable textual analyses of Persian historical works concerning the first Safavid ruler, Shah Isma‘il. Fortunately, the absence of a doctorate had no impact on his career, especially as he did not appear motivated by everyday ambitions or the urge for self-promotion. The recognition that he achieved and the respect in which he has been held came from his scholarship and his collegiality.

Sandy was born on 11 April 1942 in Multan, Pakistan, son of Kenneth Morton, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Mary Hargreaves, whose father served in the Indian Archaeological Survey under Sir John Marshall, who worked on early excavations at the famous sites of Mohenjodaro and Taxila and ended his career as Director General of the Survey.

Charles Ambrose Storey was the first Trustee to be appointed after the death of E. G. Browne in January 1926 and attended his first meeting the same year, together with H. A. R. Gibb, appointed at the same time. Storey was then Assistant Librarian to the India Office. He was born in Blackhill, Co. Durham on 21 August 1888, elder son of the local vicar, and educated at Rossall School (Lancashire). In 1908 Storey went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Major Scholar and had a brilliant academic career, achieving first-class honours first in Classics, awarded the Porson Prize for translating English poetry into Greek. He graduated in 1912 with a Distinction in Oriental Languages (Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic), carrying off several Hebrew prizes, and became Tyrwhitt Scholar in Hebrew in 1914. But in the same year he was appointed Professor of Arabic at the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College (now the Muslim University) of Aligarh, India, where he published a text edition of Mufaddal b. Salama's al-Fakhir, a ninth-century Arabic treatise on the popular proverbs and colloquial expressions of the Arabs. This was based on his PhD thesis, supervised by A. A. Bevan and examined by E. G. Browne and R. A. Nicholson, who were thus more than usually aware of his academic credentials. Storey describes himself on the title page as ‘formerly scholar of Trinity College and Allen Scholar (1913) in the University of Cambridge’. He dedicated the work ‘to my father’.

He left Aligarh in 1919 for the India Office in London. By the time he was promoted to Librarian, in 1927, he had published the first part of what was to become his life-time's work and claim to fame, on Persian literature. He went on to complete a continuation of the catalogue of the India Office library's Arabic manuscripts; both of these early works concerned Qur’anic literature.

Storey left the India Office in 1933, having been elected Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge on the retirement of R. A. Nicholson, and spent the rest of his career devoted to the Bio-Bibliographical Survey of Persian Literature.

Although he was not a prophet, false or otherwise, St Matthew's remark ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ seems rather appropriate to apply to Reuben Levy. Arriving in Cambridge not long after Levy's death, I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but rather quickly and inevitably became familiar with his work, particularly two books: The Social Structure of Islam and his edition (and for an undergraduate, even more important translation) of the Nasihat-nama known as the Qabus-nama, of Kai Ka’us b. Iskandar. The Persian text of the Qabus-nama was published in the Gibb Memorial Series, NS XVIII, in 1951, and A Mirror for Princes the same year, by the Cresset Press, London. These were far from his only fruits, as we shall see.

Levy was born in Manchester on 28 April 1891, son of Harris Levy, a draper, and educated at the Friars School and the University College of North Wales, in Bangor, where he graduated in 1912. He then transferred to Jesus College, Oxford, as was relatively common at that time, and was awarded a Meyrick Graduate Scholarship to read Oriental Languages for a second, two-year degree. He gained a second in his Finals in 1914, when he specialised in Arabic and Hebrew. Levy clearly attracted attention in Oxford, as he hoovered up quite a few scholarships along the way: he was the Pusey and Ellerton Scholar in 1913, the Junior Kennicott Scholar in 1914 and later the James Mew Rabbinical Hebrew Scholar in 1915, as well as Senior Kennicott Scholar in 1923 when he returned after the war.

During the First World War, he was a captain in General Staff Intelligence in Mesopotamia (1916 to 1918) and worked in the Iraq Political Service (1918 to 1920). This gave Levy a chance to use and develop his knowledge of the languages he had studied, but more than that, to gain a close and sympathetic personal acquaintance with the society and cultures of the Middle East, about which he later wrote most effectively. He returned to Jesus College and lectured in Persian language at Oxford from 1920 to 1923, where he produced his first two books, Persian Literature: An Introduction, reprinted several times and most recently in 2012, as a classic reprint by an outfit disappointingly called Forgotten Books.

John Andrew Boyle was born at Worcester Park in Surrey in 1916, to a family of Scottish origin. The family moved to Birmingham where Boyle's father, a versatile bibliophile and bookseller, became Bolivian consul and provided much of his early education. He taught him Latin and Greek and employed him in his bookshops in London and Birmingham, where he profited from wide reading that stood him in good stead for his later work and where he was attracted by a work in Persian. In 1933, Boyle won a scholarship to Birmingham University, where he graduated with first-class honours in German in 1936. He was then awarded an exchange studentship at Berlin, and there and at Göttingen he began the study of Oriental languages, under such scholars as H. H. Schaeder, Olaf Hansen and Richard Hartmann, giving him his first training in Old, Middle and New Persian, as well as Arabic and Turkish. It was in Professor Schaeder's Seminar in Berlin in the autumn of 1938 that Boyle first became acquainted with Tarikh-i Jahan-gusha (History of the World Conqueror) of Juvaini. With the threat of war Boyle returned to England in 1939 and became a postgraduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, with a Special Grant for Iranian studies and a Forlong Scholarship, but not for long – this was soon interrupted by the war.

In 1941 he became a sapper in the Royal Engineers, but the following year he was assigned to the Special Intelligence branch of the Foreign Office where he remained until 1950. In 1945 he married a colleague, Margaret Elizabeth Dunbar, who became a constant support in his work. He found time to continue his doctoral research, on Juvaini's History, which he completed in 1947 under the supervision of Vladimir Minorsky, who was the most important influence on Boyle's academic work, notable chiefly for his studies of the Mongol Empire. In 1949, Boyle wrote to the Trustees of the Gibb Memorial, asking if they would consider publishing his translation of volume one of Juvaini (the Persian text of which, of course, had been published by the Trust in 1912), but was told ‘that the Trustees saw no prospect of publishing this work’. A further request to publish his translation, in 1952, was ‘declined with thanks’, presumably on the grounds of limited resources.

Arthur Arberry was the next to be appointed to the Gibb Memorial Trust after Reuben Levy; at the first meeting of the Trustees after World War II, on 12 January 1946, ‘it was unanimously resolved that Dr Arberry, who during the emergency had been invited to act as a coopted trustee, be appointed a trustee of the memorial’. It is likely that this affiliation, which consolidated connections already made, further facilitated a change of course and his return to Cambridge the following year, where in 1947 he took up the offered Chair of the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic, vacated by Charles Storey's decision to retire, also as a Gibb Trustee. Arberry had no hesitation in moving from London, where he had been first Professor of Persian (on the retirement of Vladimir Minorsky in 1944) and then even more briefly Professor of Arabic (in 1946): ‘my dream of returning to Cambridge became reality […] This was the supreme, the most eagerly coveted honour, to be a successor of Wheelock and Ockley, Samuel Lee and Wright, Browne and Nicholson’. Inevitably, Arberry saw himself as next in line of the great sequence of Cambridge Professors of Arabic who had done so much to promote the field and particularly the study of Persian literature, and it can be said that he remained intellectually stuck in that mind- and time-frame throughout his career.

The foundations of this great post-war success were laid in the brilliant achievements of his early years. The facts of his career are well known, because he narrates them himself, with a befitting effort at modesty, in some detail, and they are naturally repeated in various later accounts. Arthur Arberry was born on 12 May 1905 in Portsmouth, into a modest family, the father a petty officer in the Royal Navy who later fought, as Arberry proudly relates, in the battle of Jutland. Both parents were keen readers of ‘good books’, and he was ambitious to succeed, winning a scholarship to Portsmouth Grammar School and then to Pembroke College, to read Classics, by which time, in 1924, he ‘had read everything worth reading in Latin and Greek’.