Vasily Bartold

Who was Vasily Bartold?

Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold was a Russian and Soviet historian who specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples.

Bartold's lectures at the University of Saint Petersburg were annually interrupted by extended field trips to Muslim countries. In the two volumes of his dissertation, he pointed out the many benefits the Muslim world derived from Mongol rule after the initial conquests. Bartold was the first to publish obscure information from the early Arab historians on Kievan Rus'. He also edited several scholarly journals of Muslim studies, and contributed extensively to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In 1913, he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. In February 1917 he was appointed to the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia.

After the Russian Revolution, Bartold was appointed director of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, a post he held from 1918 to 1921. He wrote three authoritative monographs on the history of Islam, namely Islam, Muslim Culture and The Muslim World. He also contributed to the development of Cyrillic writing for the Muslim countries of Central Asia.