Recent historical scholarship has made great strides in elucidating Inner Eurasian, society, cultural gifts, and contributions of world historical significance. However, with few written texts of its own, the ontology and historical development of pastoral-nomadic civilizations and polities is still an open question, beleaguered by interminable truisms related to environmental adaptation and economic autarky. I propose a hypothesis, grounded in a Geographic Information System, that Eurasia more than supports nomadic-pastoralism and that, in part, nomadic expansion may be related to widening the sphere of pastoralist capital accumulation and connecting to the Silk Roads peripheries.

This dissertation re-examines the concept of javānmardī (“young-manliness”) within the premodern Persianate world. While typically translated as “chivalry,” javānmardī encompassed a broader ethical ideal encompassing courage, generosity, and even trickery, highlighting its protean nature. It shapes how Persianate people understood themselves and others. The Persianate historical, visual, and literary landscape is rich with female figures celebrated as javānmards (manly youths). Regardless, scholars have taken the etymology of the word quite literally and predominantly associated javānmardī with the sexed male body, causing a lack of focused understanding of how women embodied and expanded the concept while also outperforming men in being javānmards.This dissertation recovers how female javānmardī were represented, received, and used in visual and textual sources created and commissioned by both men and women during the “middle periods” (945-1501) and the “early modern period” (1501-1800). Sources collected from various archives are placed in conversation with one another. Traditionally studied separately and siloed into disciplinary and temporal constraints, my interdisciplinary approach to analyzing these sources allows a more comprehensive picture of female javānmardī to emerge, resulting in a better understanding of premodern Persianate female power and a vibrant female intellectual tradition. It also reveals the complex interplay of gender, race, class, and kinship structures within the premodern Persianate world. Specifically, I uncover how Chinese women were recognized as javānmardī exemplars in Persianate sources. Focusing on tensions governing romances between Chinese female javānmards and Iranian men provides another window to understand a Persianate Sinophilia central to emerging gender and sexual discourses of patriarchal kingship. My dissertation shows the premodern Persianate world was much more topsy-turvy than indicated, with javānmardī practiced and understood as a gender-fluid performative model. It further uncovers a previously obscured matriarchal dimension in premodern patriarchal Persianate kingship, and the different ways “female javānmards” and “anxious patriarchs” sought to invert each other to assert dominance. To better understand the complexity of female javānmard, this dissertation explores both their transgressions and limitations. Female javānmardī complicates existing Euro-American-centered theories of gender, sexuality, and power, revealing their constraints and enriching them with insights from the premodern Persianate world.