Connected Histories. The Mongol Empire and the Creation of New Worldviews in the Fifteenth Century: Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi (Venice, c. 1450) and the Honil Gangni Yeokdae Gukdo Ji Do (Hanseong, c. 1480)

The study of the Mongols has grown exponentially in recent years in conjunction with the project of writing less ethnocentric global histories and global art histories structured around networks, contacts, and exchanges as engines of historical and aesthetic change. The rise of the Mongols in the thirteenth century serves not only as a privileged paradigm for research, but also as a starting point for a new periodization: the initial glimmers of early modernity defined as an increasingly rapid acceleration in systems of contact and communication. The essay “ ” demonstrates how the Mongol Empire was the catalyst for the creation, around the middle of the fifteenth century, of two fundamental worldviews, in Venice and Hanseong (present-day Seoul) that for the first time brought the Greco-Roman ecumene into communication with the Chinese tianxia. The essay explores how the reception of Mongolian history was watershed historical anx also in cosmography, as well as in art, language, diplomacy and politics, both as case studies in modern historiographies of an interconnected modern world.