Vasily Bartold

Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold (Russian: Васи́лий Влади́мирович Барто́льд;[note 1] 15 November [O.S. 3 November] 1869 – 19 August 1930), who published in the West under his German baptism name, Wilhelm Barthold,[1] was a Russian orientalist who specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples (Turkology).

Vasily Barthold
Born	15 November [O.S. 3 November] 1869 Saint Petersburg
Died	19 August 1930(1930-08-19) (aged 60) Leningrad
Nationality	Russian
Occupation	Historian

Barthold was born in St. Petersburg to a Russianized German family.[1] His career spanned the last decades of the Russian Empire and the first years of the Soviet Union.

Barthold'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 (Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 1898-1900), he pointed out the many benefits the Muslim world derived from Mongol rule after the initial conquests. Barthold was the first to publish obscure information from the early Arab historians on the 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, Barthold 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 (1918), Muslim Culture (1918) and The Muslim World (1922). He also contributed to the development of Cyrillic writing for the Muslim countries of Soviet Central Asia.

Most of his writings were translated to English, Arabic, and Persian. Barthold's collected works were reprinted in 9 volumes between 1963 and 1977, and while Soviet editors added footnotes deploring his 'bourgeois' attitudes, his prestige was such that the text was left uncensored, despite not conforming to a Marxist interpretation of history. Some of his works have been reprinted more recently in Moscow.