John Masson Smith Jr.

John Masson Smith Jr. taught medieval Central Asian history in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, for 30 years, from 1962 to 1992. He was the most influential scholar of the social, cultural, economic, political, and military history of the great steppe that stretches from China to the Great Hungarian Plain. Smith changed the way we look at the sea of grass linking Budapest to Beijing and brought us to a closer understanding of the people and ideas traversing it. He was among the first to look at the history of the steppe from the nomads’ point of view and to explicate the ways in which nomads are unlike sedentary societies. He was especially respected for his studies of Mongol military history. His work ranged widely in both Mongol and Ottoman domains. He was a devoted equestrian, as befitted a student of the exploits of Genghis Khan, and often rode horses with his wife, Grace, in the East Bay hills.

Smith was born into an academic family in Northampton, Massachusetts, and was one of the early alums of the Putney School. Upon graduation from Harvard College, where he met Grace, John served in the U.S. Army before entering Columbia University as a graduate student. His dissertation research took him to remote areas of Turkey where there were no English speakers. The book he published in 1971 on the basis of his dissertation, The History of the Sarbadār Dynasty, 1336–1381 A.D., and its Sources, was immediately recognized as a model study. Smith used numismatic material he had discovered in archives in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Teheran, and elsewhere. He showed the dynasty was a remarkable enterprise that teetered between Perso-Islamic scribal culture and Inner Asian nomadic norms.

Smith then turned his attention to the wider world of the Mongols, first in the Near East and then to their historic enterprise, the building and sustaining of the greatest land empire in world history. His work in this area depended upon a detailed mastery of anthropological and statistical sources that explicated the economy, society, technology, cuisine, and ideologies of pastoral nomadic powers. This required him to immerse himself in little-known studies published in Mongolia, China, the Near East, and the Soviet Union, and even works on America’s steppe nomads, the Plains Indians. He worked up his material slowly and methodically; when he had written a draft, even during his probationary years, he placed it in a drawer, turned to something else, and returned to revise after six months had passed. The result was work noted for its clarity, probity, depth of analysis, and dry humor. He published primarily monographic articles, each of which, upon appearance, won the attention of specialists.

At the time when he entered this field, the study of nomad empires rested upon generalizations born, ultimately, from the anger of their (usually) defeated enemies, and even specialists found it easy to repeat the notion that the success of a horde rested on the character defects of its members. In a long series of articles, Smith was able to bring order from chaos, numbers from notions, and to explain steppe nomadic history on a firm and, often, quantitative basis. Smith faced the extraordinary puzzle of Mongol coinage, the most complex and expansive of Islamic coinages. In short order he discovered how the system worked, clarified the mechanisms of exchange, and was able to explain the methods of the Mongol mints.

Smith then turned to Mongol fiscal thought. After a close study of anthropological accounts of steppe societies, he worked out the legal and tax practices of the khans. The significance of this work lay in the realization that the independent dynastic law of the Mongols formed the basis for all non-Shari’a legal practice from the Middle Ages to the present. He was also able to explain those demographic changes in Iran that transformed a Sunni Islamic peasantry into a Shi’i society.

In his studies of the Mongol military, Smith was able to show just how a relatively small Inner Asian tribe managed to conquer Inner Asia, unify China, tilt the balance between peasants and pastoralists in the Near East, and reach out beyond the Great Hungarian Plain. Students and audiences enjoyed his proof of the advantages of nomadic archery, based on Islamic miniatures and were captivated by Smith’s personal demonstration of how to shoot three arrows from horseback in two seconds.

Smith travelled with Grace to collections, libraries, and conferences throughout the Near East and Inner Asia. He was a frequent visitor to Mongolia, where he gained fame for teaching local men how to how to tie a bow tie (John’s fashion for the classroom). The friendships John and Grace made abroad were deep and lasting.

John Masson Smith Jr. was a scholar’s scholar. Largely aloof from campus affairs, his attention was focused on his scholarship and teaching. His closest associations at Berkeley were with other medievalists of his generation, especially Robert Brentano, Paul Alexander, Thomas Bisson, and Gerard Caspary.

He died on June 23, 2019, and was survived by his wife Grace.

Rudi Paul Linder
David A. Hollinger
2019