In July 2021, Petra Sijpesteijn organized the on-line workshop “How to Ask: Strategies of Entreating in Medieval Eurasia,” in conjunction with her senior research fellowship at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. The workshop's theme connected to the European Research Council funded Consolidator Grant project “Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000) which ran from 2017 to 2022. The aim of the workshop was to compare stratagems of persuasion in letters from a wide range of medieval regions and eras, from North Africa to East Asia, in order to understand how letter-writers and petitioners exerted pressure or influence to motivate their correspondents to action in these different epistolary and cultural domains. The articles published here are the reworked and peer-reviewed papers given at the workshop, with the welcome addition of another European contribution to create a more balanced geographical and chronological coverage. Elisabeth Hüls and Karl-Ulrich Gelberg of the Historisches Kolleg and Birte Kristiansen of Leiden University provided crucial support in the design, organization, and execution of the workshop. Carol Symes stepped in at a later stage to offer essential editorial support and assisted in bringing this comparative issue to an integrated and accessible whole.

Together, these essays offer very diverse case studies drawn from a variety of linguistic, documentary, material, geographical, social, and historical contexts; they also differ in the manner in which they were preserved or presented to their contemporaries. Examples range from mundane and quotidian requests to restore commercial relationships, help a family member, or retrieve a renegade tax-payer, to commendations for access to administrative positions, and diplomatic exchanges between political rulers and community leaders. They capture attempts at appeasement and damage control, flattery and self-promotion, as well as open rebukes, threats, and public shaming. They also represent the textual conventions and innovations of Chinese, Arabic, Judaeo- Arabic, Coptic, Latin, Aragonese, and Dutch epistolary traditions from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries ce. Moreover, they are preserved on potsherds, papyrus, and paper; in administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. To facilitate comparison across this great range of examples, all contributions focus on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations, as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Coherence is also achieved by the authors’ careful attention to the shared or contrasting elements that we identified during discussions at the workshop, outlined here.