Download PDF | (Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture) Stefan Kamola - Making Mongol History_ Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh-Edinburgh University Press (2019).
322 Pages
Preface
In 1836, Etienne Quatremére published Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, a portion of a dynastic history of the Mongols that had been written more than five centuries earlier. As an introduction, he attached a biography of the author of the work, Rashid al-Din, the doctor from Hamadan, and a description of his many and diverse works. Quatremére opens his study by declaring his goal: to rehabilitate the memory of a tireless civil servant and to compensate Rashid al-Din for the ingratitude of his contemporaries. In this, Quatremére succeeded admirably, assisted by the timely discovery of some of the most remarkable examples of early Persian book painting, which were also found in one of Rashid al-Din’s historical works. Within a decade, scholars across Europe had seized on Rashid al-Din’s historical writings as a key witness to Mongol history and to the emergence of book art in the Islamic world.
Close to two hundred years further on, not much has changed. Rashid alDin’s dynastic history remains invaluable for the study of the Mongol empire and his world history remains a landmark of early Persian book painting. Other biographies have followed on Quatremére’s, but all of them highlight the same set of topics: the year of Rashid al-Din’s birth; his relationship with his family’s Jewish faith and choice to convert to Islam; his rise to prominence, writings, and fall from grace; and his ultimate execution at the hands of the Mongols who had employed him. Meanwhile, his dynastic history of the Mongols has been edited in full and in part, based on a set of widely recognised authoritative manuscripts.
This study attempts to step back from the prevailing approaches to Rashid al-Din’s life and work, which unfolded across momentous historical changes in which he was intimately involved. His record of events, and the reports that others made of his activities during this period, reveal the anxieties of a society undergoing massive change and a court riven by factional conflict. To fix an exact course to Rashid al-Din’s life, or to identify a single authoritative text for his Mongol history is to sacrifice a richness of incidental information imbedded in the heterogeneous, often conflicting historical record. This book looks at the life and work of Rashid al-Din through its unique textual witnesses, highlighting rather than resolving the discrepancies among our sources and exploring the motivations for authors and scribes to write and rewrite the story of the recent and distant past. The result, I hope, is a study of Rashid al-Din’s life and historical writing that embraces the subjective nature of our sources, first and foremost those written by Rashid al-Din himself.
This book follows the course of Rashid al-Din’s life, and so it might be called a biography. However, its main intent is not to definitively reconstruct one man’s life and work, but rather to demonstrate certain historical processes that shaped and were shaped by that life. These include the rapid realignment of social and political identities in the Middle East during and immediately after the Mongol conquests; the forging of a cultural rapprochement between a foreign military ruling elite and indigenous cosmologies of faith, power, and historical time; and the sometimes very personal considerations that might lead a given author or scribe to put certain words on a page and not others.
As lonely as research can be, inquiry remains a social process, and there remain many to acknowledge for their contribution to this project. Joel Walker and Florian Schwarz led the graduate seminar in the winter of 2008 where I first encountered Mongol Studies and Rashid al-Din. Joel oversaw the dissertation on which this book is based with a wise and strategic eye that I continue to learn from. Having left the University of Washington while the project was still in infancy, Florian has offered periodic, insightful and constructive contributions, including a well-timed comment that there might in fact be an audience (of at least one) for a book that is half history and half manuscript study. In the wake of Florian’s departure from Seattle, Charles Melville generously lent his support and expertise to the dissertation and in subsequent conferences and correspondences. Too many other scholars have weighed in along the way for me to list them here; I hope they might recognise the impact of their ideas as evidence of my respect for their contributions. The Society of Fellows at Princeton University was fertile ground in which to nurse the ideas of this book. During my time there, I benefitted from particularly timely interventions by Michael Cook, Mary Harper, Susan Stewart and Wendy Belcher.
Three others who deserve special mention for their sustained encouragementare Sheila Blair, Bruno De Nicola and Jonathan Brack. Sheila responded to a blind email from an anonymous graduate student almost a decade ago and has remained a source of wisdom, perspective and humour about all things related to Rashid al-Din. Bruno wrote a review of my dissertation that helped it gain some interested readership. Jonathan has provided regular and lively debate about many of the issues raised here. He also brought his own familiarity with the material to bear in reading an early typescript of the book, even as Anna Shields did the same from her perspective asking similar questions of the historiography of medieval China. Each of them offered characteristically astute observations, saving me from embarrassing factual errors and clumsy conceptual positions. I must insist on taking sole credit for all such that remain.
This study would have been impossible without access to the libraries and museums that preserve unique witnesses to the past. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the librarians and curators who have facilitated my research, especially Ursula Sims-Williams in London, Francis Richard in Paris, Olga Yastrebova and Olga Vasilyeva in St Petersburg, Alasdair Watson in Oxford, Katharina Kaska in Vienna, and Filiz Cakir Philip and Stephanie Allen in Toronto. Many others have helped me gain access to facsimiles of manuscripts I could not consult in person, particularly Hodong Kim, Christopher Atwood, Arham Moradi, Javad Abbasi, Farshideh Kounani and Abusad Islahi. Finally, I offer my sincere thanks to the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, and the Board of Regents of the Connecticut State Universities, each of which provided funding for a different stage of research and writing. Judy Hanson at the Princeton Department of History quite spontaneously arranged office space for a former post-doc back in town for a month of frenetic writing in the summer of 2017, during which time an idea about a book turned into something like a book. Mia Karpov has weathered this project through its entire life cycle, which ought to be worth more than a brief mention at the end of a preface.
Mongols in a Muslim World, 1218-1280
On a July day in 1318, an elderly doctor and his teenage son faced execution on a charge of regicide. The doctor, Rashid al-Din from the city of Hamadan, had recently been the most powerful individual in the realm, an adviser to kings, patron of scholarship and charity, and author in genres as diverse as history, theology and natural philosophy. Thirty-six years earlier, he had attended the birth of the Mongol khan whom he was now convicted of poisoning. The relationship between the two had been so close that the khan, Oljeitu, had taken the same Muslim name, Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, as Rashid al-Din’s eldest son.
If Rashid al-Din was the pre-eminent statesman of the age, his accuser was a semi-literate arriviste, a jeweller-turned-politician named Taj al-Din ‘Alishah, and he was motivated in his accusation by jealousy of his senior colleague’s influence at court. According to a versified account of the execution written two decades later, Rashid al-Din watched a Mongol soldier behead his son and then spoke his final words. “Tell ‘Alishah,’ he instructed the executioner, “since your deeds have caused innocent blood to flow, the world will seek revenge from your soul. You shall gain nothing from this day. Nothing will come of it but this: that your tomb will be new and mine will be old.””’ As predicted, ‘Alishah enjoyed no lasting benefit from framing the senior statesman, and he is remembered — when he is remembered — as a footnote in a history largely written by and about Rashid al-Din, the doctor of Hamadan.
Rashid al-Din’s death came exactly a century after another rash and momentous execution. In 1218, the city of Utrar — now in southern Kazakhstan — was subordinate to the shahs of Khwarazm. When the governor of Utrar ordered the massacre of a caravan of merchants from the realm of Chinggis Khan (d. 1227), and when Khwarazmshah Muhammad (d. 1220) failed to offer reparation for this act, they set in motion a series of Mongol invasions into southwest Asia. In the decades following the massacre at Utrar, Chinggis Khan and his descendants brought the Islamic civilisation of Iran and Iraq to its knees. They then created a new political and cultural world, built on established Islamic norms and decorated with the scars of conquest and the trappings of transcontinental exchange.
This chapter traces the changing relationship between the predominantly Islamic society of the Middle East and the Mongol military elite that overran, occupied and finally came to rule over it. In the sixty years after Chinggis Khan’s retributive raid against Khwarazmshah Muhammad, his descendants learned to appreciate the potential economic value of the Middle East. As they gradually built a state apparatus in the region, the Mongol elite faced a crisis of legitimacy, finding themselves ruling a foreign land that their predecessors had so violently plundered. At the same time, the experience of the Mongol invasions, culminating with the execution of the last ‘Abbasid caliph in 1258, created a political vacuum within the indigenous society, as the familiar centres of power were swept aside by the new foreign occupying force.
To build and manage their state, and to celebrate their accomplishments in terms that the local population might accept, Chinggis Khan’s descendants hired administrative professionals native to the eastern Islamic world. This first generation of scholar-bureaucrats took the first steps in normalizing the Mongols in the eyes of their subjects through scholarly and architectural projects. By 1280, the outline of a rapprochement had been sketched, to be filled out by later generations of administrators. These included a young Rashid al-Din, who was born into a Jewish medical family between waves of Mongol conquest. Such an individual could never have risen to the highest ranks of the state apparatus if it were not for the particular political culture of the new Mongol rulers and the often impromptu efforts of earlier scholar-bureaucrats to make sense of the Mongols in a Muslim world.
The Middle East in the Mongol Empire
Between 1219 and 1258, Mongol armies overran the lands of the Khwarazmshah and much of the eastern Islamic world in three waves.’ Already at the onset of these invasions, the region faced a crisis of political leadership, as the Great Saljuq Empire disintegrated into a constellation of minor dynasties between Central Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. The family of Khwarazmshah Muhammad was one of several regional dynasties appointed as local governors by the Saljuqs. In the wake of their moribund patron dynasty, the Khwarazmshahs assumed. de facto independence over the lands of Central Asia and eastern Iran. The decline of the Saljugs was accompanied (and to some degree fuelled) by increased political activity of the Nizari Isma‘ili ‘assassins’, who resisted Saljuq authority from fortified strongholds in the mountains of northern Iran and Syria. From these fortresses, they engaged in the political killings for which they are most famous. In Baghdad, the long-reigning ‘Abbasid caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) tried to capitalise on the Saljuq decline to reassert his own office as the central spiritual and secular authority in the Islamic world.
In short, on the eve of the Mongol invasions, political authority in the lands of the ‘Abbasid caliphate was hotly contested. In particular, the antagonism between the emboldened caliph and the Khwarazmshah tilted towards open conflict. The massacre at Utrar precluded a decisive showdown, as the armies of Chinggis Khan descended on the cities of eastern Iran. Muslim accounts of the sudden appearance of Chinggis Khan’s armies describe in apocalyptic terms these horsemen from the East and the butchery they committed against the cities of the Islamic world.* This reaction speaks to the destructive power of Chinggis Khan’s campaign, but also to its sudden and seemingly capricious nature. Some cities were devastated while others were spared. In the end, after seven years of campaigning in western Asia, Chinggis Khan and his army disappeared back onto the steppe, leaving no occupying force to govern the region. Chinggis Khan had achieved his aim with the killing of the Khwarazmshah; the management of the lands of the caliphate was of little interest to him.
At the time of Chinggis Khan’s death in 1227, the Islamic lands through which he had led his armies were still quite peripheral to the empire he had assembled. The most immediate Mongol-language source on the life of Chinggis Khan, the Secret History of the Mongols, describes the westward campaign primarily through the conflicts it engendered between members of the royal family and household. It leaves no impression that the Mongols were interested in anything more than some of the administrative talent that they acquired along the way.’ Chinggis Khan limited his direct accumulation of territory to the steppe areas that were of immediate use to his army of nomads. By contrast, the sedentary regions of the Middle East and China were at most sources of material and human plunder. Before his death, Chinggis Khan divided the steppe lands and nomadic people under his control among the members of his family, and particularly among the four sons by his chief wife, Borte.° Chinggis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui, took command of his father’s central lands and army, while his older brothers inherited bands of territory expanding outward concentrically from the Mongol homeland.’ ‘Ala’ al-Din
Juvayni describes the division of territories:
To his eldest son, Jochi, he gave the territory stretching from the regions of Qayaligh and Khwarazm to the remotest parts of Saqsin and Bolghar and as far in that direction as the hoof of Tartar horse had penetrated. Chaghadai received the territory extending from the land of the Uyghur to Samargand and Bukhara, and his place of residence was in Quyas in the neighbourhood of Almaligh. The capital of Ogedei, the heir-apparent, during his father’s reign was his yurt in the region of the Emil and the Qobugq ... Tolui’s territory, likewise, lay adjacent thereto, and indeed this spot is the middle of
their empire like the centre of a circle.*
Despite the fact that Chinggis Khan and his sons and generals had led armies deep into the Middle East and China, those regions are not described as part of his dispensation of territory. To the west, the portion of land allocated to his eldest son, Jochi, began with the territory of Khwarazm, but its outer boundary was left undefined, limited only by the expansionist capacity of the empire. Such an unbounded frontier invited further conquest westward along the Eurasian steppe belt, especially by the descendants of Jochi, who stood to gain control of the territory thus conquered. It also, however, laid the seed for conflict between the Jochids and other branches of the royal family over the question of who would control the significant resources of the Middle East.
In the years following Chinggis Khan’s westward campaign all this was in the future, and the Middle East mattered little to the family of the Mongol conqueror. In the absence of direct Mongol governance, local political structures began to recover from the shock of the invasion. These included the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the network of Nizari Isma‘ili fortresses, and the remnants of the state of Khwarazm, now led by Sultan Jalal al-Din (1220-31), son of Muhammad. Jalal al-Din had fled to India before Chinggis Khan and his army, and after the Mongols decamped for Inner Asia, he returned to reassert his father’s claim to sovereignty in Central Asia and eastern Iran.
A Mongol army only returned to the Islamic world in 1231, when Chinggis’ son and successor, Great Khan Ogedei (1229-41) dispatched an army under the command of the general (amir) Chormaqun (d. 1241) to confront Jalal al-Din.’ All major branches of the Mongol royal family, notably the families of the four primary sons of Chinggis Khan, contributed representatives and troops to this campaign. This was a signal that the occupation of these western lands was intended to benefit the entire empire, and not just one branch of the royal family. After hunting down Jalal al-Din and putting a definitive end to the state of Khwarazm, Chormaqun established a military occupation of the western conquered lands, headquartered on the rich pastures of Azerbaijan. From there, he led a series of campaigns to subdue the states of the Caucasus and Anatolia.
Only with Chormaqun’s renewed campaign does the Mongol court seem to have woken up to the ample economic resources of the Middle East. Alongside the military occupation there developed an administrative apparatus to tap these resources. At the head of this apparatus there served a series of administrative appointees recruited from various sedentary and semi-sedentary peoples of Inner Asia who had already come under Mongol command: Uighurs, Qara Khitai and subjects of the defunct Khwarazmian state. Many of these individuals were loyal to Batu (d. 1256), Jochi’s son and successor as ruler of the western steppe. As the senior figure among the many grandsons of Chinggis Khan, Batu enjoyed the distinction and honorific title of aga, literally “elder brother’. He never became Great Khan of the empire, but as a respected senior figure in the social dynamics of the ruling family, his opinion carried significant weight at the periodic guriltais, the great meetings of royal and elite Mongols where major decisions were taken concerning imperial affairs, including the selection of Great Khans.
Because Batu inherited Jochi’s patrimony to the western lands ‘as far ...
as the hoof of Tartar horse had penetrated’, and because he was uniquely respected among Chinggis Khan’s descendants, he was largely successful, in the decade following Chormaqun’s occupation, in extending his own influence over the emerging administration of the Middle East. His first deputy in this effort was a Khitan named Chin Temur (d. 1235), who had accompanied Chormaqun’s campaign and who acted as the general’s delegate in eastern Iran.'? Meanwhile at Ogedei’s court at Qaraqorum, on the steppes of Mongolia, Chin Temur’s Khitan kinsman Yeh-lu Chu-ts’ai advocated maintaining the Chinese system for managing the agricultural lands that had come under Mongol administration with the fall of the Jin dynasty in 1234.'' Chin Temur similarly approached his work in Iran with an eye towards maximising the agricultural and commercial potential of the subject region. His sensitivity to the management of sedentary populations, paired with a well-timed embassy to Qaragorum, resulted in 1234 with him securing the right to establish a civil administration over the eastern Iranian provinces. This civil administration was independent from Chormaqun’s military governorship in the far west. It drew on ‘Abbasid and Khwarazmian precedents to lay the foundation for a Mongol-led bureaucratic government in the region.
From 1234, then, Mongol command in the Middle East was divided. Within the region itself, the main Mongol military occupation founded by Chormaqun continued to be based in Azerbaijan, while Chin Temur in the east of Iran developed a structure for civil administration. Chormaqun and Chin Temur were both dead within a decade, but others stepped into their places, perpetuating the division between the civil and military sides of the Mongol administration in the Islamic lands. The growth of a civil administration maps directly on the increased awareness among the Mongols of the region’s economic potential. That awareness was also responsible for a growing rift between branches of the ruling Mongol family, and particularly between Batu Aqa and his cousins who held the title of Great Khan in Qaragorum, over who would benefit from the Mongol occupation of the Middle East. This feud between the central Mongol court and the westernmost branch of the ruling family was a driving force in tearing the Mongol Empire apart. It resulted, by 1258, in the creation of a new dynastic Mongol state in the Islamic lands that had been of such little interest to Chinggis Khan.
Batu’s Feud with Guyug
To staff his new civil administration, Chin Temur employed a number of bureaucrats who had formerly worked under the Khwarazmshahs. A group of such administrators had taken refuge in the eastern Iranian city of Tus, where they lived in hiding until the local residents surrendered them to Chin Temur. Among these fugitives was Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Juvayni, scion of a family who had served Turkic dynasties in eastern Iran as early as the last great Saljug, Sanjar (1118-57). Baha’ al-Din himself had once served Khwarazmshah Muhammad, extending his family’s experience with Turkic nomadic conquest dynasties. At the time of Chormaqun’s invasion, however, he had been living as a private individual in his family’s hometown of Juvayn, near Nishapur, before taking refuge in Tus.
When the residents of Tus handed Baha’ al-Din over to Chin Temur, the Khitan governor took him into service and granted him the title of sahib-diwan, roughly ‘treasury secretary’. By tradition, this title designated the foremost financial authority at court. Baha’ al-Din may have gained it because of his family’s long record of holding it under the Khwarazmshahs. Baha’ al-Din retained this title until his death nearly two decades later, and while he does not seem to have exercised much formal responsibility during that time, he remained an influential adviser to the Mongol governors. By contrast, between 1230 and 1250 numerous individuals with various loyalties to one or another member of the Mongol royal family cycled through the administration of the Middle East. Of these, the most prominent held the title of ulug bitikchi, or Chief Secretary, a Turko-Mongol office that rendered the sahib-diwan largely redundant. Nevertheless, Baha’ al-Din was a constant presence, if not a major actor, in the emerging civil government. His activity ultimately helped to shape the administration once the feuds within the royal family had been settled.
Chin Temur died in 1235, just a year after winning administrative autonomy from Chormaqun. In his place, Great Khan Ogedei appointed Nosal, an elderly Mongol general from the retinue of Batu Aga. Nosal largely limited his activity to military affairs, leaving Chin Temur’s ambitious deputy, the Uighur Korguz, also a dependant of Batu, to take active leadership over the civil administration. Nosal and Korguz were further assisted by another member of Batu’s hereditary domain, the Khwarazmian secretary Sharaf al-Din, to whom the sources refer both by the Turko-Mongol title ulugh bitikchi and the corresponding Islamic title vizier. Meanwhile, Chormaqun’s deputy in the military staff of Azerbaijan, Baiju, was also by all indications a representative of Batu’s interests.'* Thus, in the late 1230s, almost the entire senior administrative staff of the Mongol Middle East was filled by individuals dependent on the branch of the royal family headed by Batu Aga. In 1240, Korguz managed to extend the administrative and fiscal jurisdiction that Chin Temur had won to cover the entire region of Chormaqun’s military occupation. For a moment, it looked as if Batu had secured command over the Middle East away from the imperial centre headed by his uncle Ogedei.
The year 1241 marked a watershed in Mongol imperial history, and also in Batu’s new-found monopoly over the administration of the Middle East. While his proxies had gained key positions in that region, Batu had since 1237 led a new Mongol military push into the lands of Russia and Eastern Europe.'? Like Chormaqun’s army, this one included troops beholden to each of the four main branches of the Mongol royal family. Most notably, at least one royal grandson from each branch participated in the endeavour. Batu, son of Jochi, led the expedition and was joined by Baidar and Buri, son and grandson of Chaghadai, Guyug and Qadan, sons of the Great Khan Ogedei, and Mongke and Bochek, sons of Tolui.'* Over the course of the campaign, a rift opened between the cousins Batu and Guyug. The latter paired his arrogance as the son of the Great Khan with a tendency towards cruelty. Guyug’s lineage posed a threat to Batu’s authority, until Mongke intervened and convinced his uncle Ogedei to allow Batu to discipline their cousin. The animosity this bred between Batu and Guyug had enormous consequences, and ultimately contributed to the Middle East slipping out of Batu’s control.
Despite these quarrels, Batu’s campaign continued into Europe. After annihilating the major forces protecting the edge of the Roman Christian world in near-simultaneous battles at Liegnitz and Mohi, the Mongol force crossed the frozen Danube River on Christmas Day 1241 and stormed into the Balkans in pursuit of the fugitive Hungarian King Bela. As one branch of the army sacked the royal palace at Esztergom, another lay siege to the city of Split in Croatia. There, the archdeacon, Thomas, described the appearance of the horsemen of the East in terms of the miraculous and divine, just as Islamic writers had characterised the initial campaign of Chinggis Khan in the Middle East.'* Thomas and his contemporaries also echoed the Muslim witnesses to Chinggis Khan’s invasion by expressing surprise at how suddenly the Mongol invasion ended. Batu and his cousins did not follow up on their successes with a further drive into Latin territory. Instead, as other Mongol armies had done, they withdrew into the steppe-lands of the Volga basin, leaving Archdeacon Thomas and the rest of Christian Europe as puzzled by the disappearance of the Mongol army as they had been shocked by its arrival. Such capricious ferocity inspired the Latin West to dispatch diplomatic and intelligence missions to learn about the new Mongol threat and how it might be defeated or at least redirected against the Muslim states of Egypt and Syria.'°
Batu’s withdrawal from Europe can be explained in many ways. As had been the case when Chinggis Khan withdrew from the Middle East, Batu’s mission was complete. Further, Europe provide less pasturage for the Mongol horses than the Eurasian steppe, and climactic fluctuation may have made 1242 a particularly difficult year to campaign in the west.'”? Another factor was undoubtedly the death of his uncle, the Great Khan Ogedei, on 11 December 1241. With Ogedei’s death, the attention of the Mongol Empire turned inward towards the central court at Qaraqorum, where a quriltai would select a new Great Khan. Ogedei had expressed his desire that a grandson of his by a junior wife be named as his successor. After his death, however, his senior widow, Toregene Khatun (1241-6), assumed the regency of the empire and began advocating for her own son Guyug to become the next Great Khan. Batu, well established in his family’s western territories and no friend of Guyug after their experience on campaign, held his armies in Western Asia, refusing to participate in the election of the cousin who had acted so insolently when they had campaigned together.
As dowager empress and regent of the empire, Toregene began the process of reasserting central control over the Middle East away from Batu. She pursued this aim by appointing new civil and military administrators for the region.'* In 1241, the same year that Ogedei died in Qaragqorum, Chormaqun and Nosal, both Mongol generals in the west, also died. This allowed the Uighur Korguz to consolidate greater executive control in his own hands, a process he further advanced by having the ulugh bitikchi Sharaf al-Din arrested. In the process of bringing his case against Sharaf al-Din to Qaragorum, Korguz stopped at the Chaghadaid court in Central Asia, where he managed to insult and antagonise a member of that branch of the royal family. Around the same time, news of Ogedei’s death arrived at the Chaghadaid court, throwing Korguz’s case into confusion and compelling him to return to eastern Iran. Almost as soon as he arrived, he was arrested by representatives of the Chaghadaid court because of the insult he had caused during his stay in Central Asia. Unable to reach a suitable verdict in the case, the Chaghadaids referred Korguz to Qaraqorum. Now, however, instead of standing as a plaintiff before Ogedei, he appeared before Toregene as the accused. When she failed to render judgement in the case and sent it back to Central Asia, the Chaghadaids promptly convicted and executed the Uighur administrator for his insulting manner.
The execution of Korguz, alongside the deaths of Chormaqun and Nosal, left the highest ranks of the administration in the Middle East unstaffed. The Chaghadaid court was at that time led by Chaghadai’s grandson and chosen heir Qara Hulegu and his wife Orghina Khatun, who appointed as governor of the Middle East one of their own courtiers, a Mongol of the Oyirad tribe named Arghun.” Arghun had been central both in the investigation of Sharaf al-Din and in the arrest of Korguz. He served as the chief executive officer of the Mongol government in the Middle East from 1241 until 1256. During that time, he established durable fiscal policies that helped to stabilise the region as a productive area of the Mongol Empire.”
At the time of Arghun’s appointment, Sharaf al-Din was confirmed as ulugh bitikchi and Baiju was allowed to assume command over military operations in Chormaqun’s position. Thus, the leading civil and military officials surrounding Arghun remained dependants of Batu, just as had been the case before the spate of deaths in 1241. On the face of it, Batu might have expected to enjoy continued influence in the region. However, the new governor Arghun began the process of stewarding the region away from the orbit of Batu and towards the seat of Mongol imperium at Qaraqorum. In 1246, when Guyug was finally enthroned as Great Khan, Arghun travelled to Qaragorum to lavish the new ruler and his courtiers with gifts. Guyug had initially opposed Arghun’s appointment, but the latter’s display of loyalty to the new Great Khan won him confirmation in his position.
Once enthroned, Guyug continued along the path set by his mother Toregene in trying to reclaim direct imperial command over the Middle East. He dispatched a new commander in chief, Eljigidei, to replace Baiju and thus curb Batu’s influence over ongoing military operations in Anatolia, Georgia and northern Syria. The escalating conflict between the estranged cousins nearly came to a head in 1248, when Guyug left Qaraqorum with an army, ostensibly on a tour of his Central Asian territories, but probably with the intent of confronting Batu directly. This campaign came to a halt when the alcoholic Great Khan died suddenly. Though he had reigned for only two years, Guyug had, through administrative appointments and the threat of direct military action, escalated the animosity between Batu and the central Mongol court. A climactic struggle was postponed by his premature death but it was not permanently averted.
The Toluid Coup
After Guyug’s death, the empire again entered a regency, this time under Guyug’s widow Oghul Qaimish (1248-51), pending the selection of a new Great Khan. As he had done in 1241, Batu interfered in the process without ever leaving his base in the western steppe. This time, however, his absence was not the main factor delaying the selection process. Guyug’s reign had been so short, and his death so sudden, that there was no clear line of succession, and dissent broke out among the various princes and dependants of the family of Ogedei over who should take the throne. Rather than boycott this already troubled process, Batu assumed the role of kingmaker, calling a guriltai in 1251 to select the new Great Khan at Ala Qamagq, southeast of Lake Balkash and far from the imperial centre.
Though he had called the quriltai, Batu did not claim the imperial throne for himself. Instead, he offered it to his cousin Mongke, who had supported Batu’s authority over Guyug while the cousins were on campaign together a decade earlier. In exchange for being elevated as Great Khan by Batu Aga, Mongke recognised his elder cousin’s claim over the contested territory of Chormaqun’s conquests south of the Caucasus. Through this action, Batu
had regained at a stroke what had slipped away from him over the previous decade. The new arrangement relied, however, on the continuing good graces of Mongke.
Batu Aga had orchestrated Mongke’s coronation, but the move was fiercely opposed by members of the family of Ogedei. Their case against Mongke was strong: he was not a descendant of the son whom Chinggis Khan had selected to rule and his coronation was held far from the traditional homeland of the Mongols. In response to this opposition, and to add legitimacy to his claim, Mongke called a second gquriltai to be held on the Mongol steppe. He followed this second coronation with a thorough purge of the Ogedeid family, as well as those members of the family of Chaghadai who had supported Ogedeid claims to the title of Great Khan. A foiled attack on the second quriltai that had been planned by members of the Ogedeid family provided legal cover to present these purges as legitimate judicial proceedings. They put an effective end to any Ogedeid claim to the imperial throne, and the lands of Central Asia were redistributed among the members of the Ogedeid and Chaghadaid families who had acquiesced with Mongke’s accession.
With the crowning of Mongke and the subsequent liquidation of the Ogedeid house, the immediate threat to Batu’s hold over the Middle East was neutralised. However, over the next five years, Mongke and other members of the family of Tolui launched a new effort to win command of the Middle East away from the house of Jochi. As with Toregene’s efforts in this regard, they accomplished their aim through strategic administrative appointments, replacing individuals from the Jochid-dependent region of Khwarazm with others native to the lands of eastern Iran that had not been explicitly allocated to any one of Chinggis Khan’s sons. Central to this shift was the Oyirad governor Arghun, who had first pledged his loyalty to the central court at the coronation of Guyug.
During his long tenure as governor of the Mongol Middle East, Arghun increasingly came to rely on Baha’ al-Din Juvayni, Chin Temur’s honorary sahib-diwan, marginalising other high-level Central Asian administrators in favour of this son of eastern Iran. When Arghun departed for Qaraqorum on the election of Guyug as Great Khan, he appointed two deputies to jointly manage the region in his absence. These were Baha’ al-Din and the Mongol general (amir) Buga. With him, he brought Baha’ al-Din’s son ‘Ala’ al-Din, signalling that the alliance between Arghun and the long-serving sahib-diwan was becoming a family affair.*’ Such durable alliances between families of Mongol governors and their Persian administrators became a marker of the Mongol state in the Middle East for the next century.
As Arghun returned to the Middle East, Baha’ al-Din met him en route with a delegation and gifts of luxury items that he had commissioned to be made for the purpose. Such an act of obeisance and gift-giving accorded with the Mongol custom of tikishmishi, and with it the Iranian Baha’ al-Din signalled his loyalty to Arghun. In 1248, Arghun again set out towards Qaragorum to settle a dispute over the management of artisans at Tabriz, and this time he took with him his ulugh bitikchi Khwaja Fakhr al-Din Bihishti and his sahib-diwan Baha’ al-Din, as well as the latter’s son ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘AtaMalik.” This second embassy never reached Qaraqorum, perhaps because of Guyug’s abrupt death — we are reminded of Korguz’s ill-fated embassy, which was also cut short in a year when the Great Khan died — and the dispute was settled at the Chaghadaid court.
When Arghun once again set out for Qaraqorum in May 1252 after Mongke’s coronation as Great Khan, he took ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ata-Malik along as a personal secretary and appointed Baha’ al-Din Juvayni as sole deputy in the Middle East.” Baha’ al-Din’s appointment by Chin Temur’s two decades earlier was shaping up into another chapter of the family’s long history serving conquest dynasties with roots on the steppes of Inner Asia. Both ‘Ala’ al-Din and his younger brother Shams al-Din performed long service in the government of the Mongols in the Middle East and, as discussed below, they helped direct the first round of efforts to mediate the cultural difference between the nomadic military elite and the indigenous bureaucratic and sedentary society.
Just as the Juvaynis and others in the Middle East were becoming familiar with the presence of the Mongol occupation, the Mongol court increasingly appreciated the economic importance of the Middle East as a part of the empire. Early in the reign of Ogedei, northern China and Turkestan had been designated as special imperial provinces, branch secretariats from which tax income was directed back to the central court, rather than to any of the regional courts led by other members of the royal family.4 Eventually, Iran was added to this list, becoming a third main zone of imperial governance headed by Chin Temur’s administrative apparatus.
In Qaraqorum in 1252, as in 1246, Arghun declared his administrative allegiance to the central court. Now, however, that court was held by a son of Tolui, rather than an Ogedeid. During this visit, the governor and the Great Khan planned a new tax structure for the region, bringing it again to the centre of the court’s attention. In exchange for Arghun’s loyalty, Mongke confirmed the Oyirad once again in his position. The main source for this reappointment, written by Arghun’s personal secretary ‘Ala’ al-Din Juvayni, describes it as a continuation of Mongke’s staffing decisions for northern China and Turkestan, indicating that the Middle East was by this point truly considered a third imperial province alongside the original two. Through the efforts of Chin Temur, Korguz and Arghun, the Mongol court had come to value southwest Asia in a way that Chinggis Khan had not, as a productive and important region within an increasingly bureaucratised empire.
Mongke’s original recognition of Batu’s claim over the Middle East was now untenable, and Toluid efforts began in earnest to wrest the region away from the Jochid house. An immediate justification for renewed imperial intervention in the Middle East was provided around the same time, as voices from the Middle East began calling for Mongol military assistance to stabilise the politics of the region. Among an otherwise anonymous ‘group of plaintiffs’ who gathered at the new Great Khan’s court to complain about the activities of the Isma‘ilis was a judge (gadi) named Shams al-Din from the city of Qazvin in northern Iran.” In early accounts of this episode, Shams al-Din conveys a sense of danger felt by the residents of Qazvin because of the recent rebuilding of Isma ‘ili fortresses. This rebuilding, according to Shams al-Din, allowed the followers of the Isma‘ili imam to spurn Mongol efforts to control and tax the region. In fact, the people of Qazvin had long been embroiled in property disputes with the Isma‘ilis, whose fortresses ringed the city on the north.” Shams al-Din was almost certainly representing local economic interests when he appealed to Mongke for renewed Mongol intervention, indicating that the population had come to see the Mongols as potential partners in their local politics. For his part, Mongke was open to the idea, not out of any desire to rescue the residents of one distant Iranian city, but because of the threat the Isma‘ilis posed to the Mongol fisc.
‘The net result of the various meetings held at Qaraqorum in spring 1252 was a new military campaign, led this time by a member of the royal family.
Mongke dispatched his younger brother Hulegu (d. 1265) with an army to the west just as he sent another brother, Qubilai (d. 1294), to begin the long process of subjugating the Song dynasty of southern China. Later, after the campaign had been successful and Hulegu and his descendants were established as the new ruling dynasty in the Middle East, historians working for them, including Rashid al-Din, recast the motivations for this campaign, crediting it to Mongke’s own genius or to an appeal by the Mongol general Baiju for assistance against the Isma’‘ilis and the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.” At the time, however, the Mongol court was primarily concerned with preserving taxable economic activity. As a result, this new campaign took a very different tone than the smash-and-grab adventure of Hulegu’s grandfather, Chinggis Khan.
Hulegu’s campaign progressed slowly.** In summer 1252, he deputised a Mongol general, Ked Buga, to proceed to Iran and begin the assault of the Isma ‘ili fortresses. Hulegu himself only left Qaragorum with his main army in the winter of 1252/3 and moved gradually across Central Asia, arriving outside the village of Kish — the modern Shakhrisabz, south of Samarqand — in the final weeks of 1255. Here the Oyirad Arghun, who by now had served as governor of the Mongol Middle East for fourteen years, met Hulegu and performed sikishmishi, just as Baha’ al-Din Juvayni had done for him a decade earlier. The pair spent a month feasting in Kish and another in Shaburgan, south of the Amu Darya. Hulegu then dismissed Arghun, who set off once more for Qaragorum.
Arghun later returned to the Middle East bearing the honorific title aga, and he continued to perform important judicial and military functions for Hulegu and his son and successor Abaga (1265-82). The transfer of executive authority from him to Hulegu in 1256 inaugurated a new form of Mongol governance in the region, now led by a representative of the royal family and a brother of the Great Khan. As a marker of his relative position in the imperial governance, Hulegu adopted the title i/khan, or ‘subordinate khan’.” From his position on the lower Volga, Batu Aqa evidently did not initially see the presence of his royal cousin as a significant threat to his own authority over the Middle East. He contributed troops to Hulegu’s campaign, perhaps thinking it would help to subdue the restive elements of a region largely under his own command. However, Batu died around the time that Hulegu
crossed the Amu Darya, removing the strongest opposition to direct imperial and Toluid control of the Middle East. Subsequent months saw a rapid realignment of political authority in West Asia, the end result of which was the firm consolidation of Toluid control over the Middle East.
When Mongke received news of his cousin’s death, he immediately appointed Batu’s son Sartaq, who was living in Qaraqorum, to succeed his father as head of the Jochid family. Sartaq died en route to the Volga region to claim his title, and Mongke dispatched a delegation to invest Sartaq’s son Ulaghchi, with Batu’s wife Boraqchin to serve as regent to the young prince.*? While Mongke was thus meddling in Jochid dynastic affairs, he was also intervening in dynastic policies in the central territories of the Mongol world, held by the members of the families of Ogedei and Chaghadai who had declared their support for him and thus escaped his purges. The net result of these meddlings was that there remained no mature Mongol ruler in command of any part of the fragmenting empire other than Mongke and his brothers Qubilai and Hulegu, who were busy expanding Mongol authority on both sides of Asia.
This situation changed when Ulaghchi died in the winter of 1257/8 and Batu’s brother Berke assumed command of the family of Jochi. Berke’s accession was likely the very scenario that Mongke had tried to prevent by appointing first Sartaq and then Ulaghchi. It posed a dual threat to the newly empowered Toluid imperial system. First, as Batu’s brother, Berke was a mature and experienced leader; and, second, Berke had converted to Islam while in his youth. His accession to the head of the Jochid house created a new arena of potential conflict as Hulegu led his army into the heart of the Islamic world.*! Berke came to the throne around the time that Hulegu was completing his triumph over the Isma‘ilis and beginning a second phase of the campaign against “Abbasid Baghdad. The Muslim Berke had managed to prevent a Mongol attack on Baghdad as long as his powerful brother was alive by appealing to Batu Aqa’s filial seniority over both Mongke and Hulegu.** With Batu out of the way, Hulegu proceeded with his march against Baghdad, capturing the city in February 1258 and killing the last ‘Abbasid caliph al-Musta‘sim. This affront against the faith of Berke, now powerless to prevent it, added religious tension to the political coup that the Toluid brothers had executed in annexing the Middle East to their own family’s demesne.
Having established a royal Toluid presence in a region that Chinggis Khan had largely neglected, but which later generations of Mongols had come to value as an essential source of revenue and resources, Hulegu’s invasion put the lie to the myth of a unified Mongol Empire. After 1258, branches of the family of Chinggis Khan were at war with one another more often than they were not. When Mongke died the following year, the struggle for the position of Great Khan pitted Qubilai against his youngest brother Ariq Boge, while each brother’s allies among the Ogedeid and Chaghadaid members of the family waged a proxy war in Central Asia. In the west, the Mongol advance against Egypt was stopped in 1260 when the forces of the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt defeated Hulegu’s deputy Ked Buga at ‘Ayn Jalut in Palestine (discussed in Chapter 6). The Mamluks, whose title means ‘slave’ because of their origins as Turkic slave soldiers from the western steppe, remained the main geopolitical adversary to the i/khans for the next sixty years.» With the western advance stalled and the eastern Mongol world engulfed in conflict, the i/khan Hulegu was left largely to his own devices to govern the lands of the former ‘Abbasid caliphate.
Monuments of Ilkhanid Legitimacy
In order to govern a region ravaged by his grandfather and squabbled over by subsequent Mongol elites, Hulegu required a source of political legitimacy. He found this in the people that he hired to run his government and in the buildings that they helped him and Abagqa to build. The early years of the Ilkhanate was a period of state formation, as the nomadic horsemen of the steppe learned — or were at least presented as knowing — how to govern in the Islamic world. To support the Toluid assertion of direct command over the Middle East, Hulegu fixed his permanent capital at Maragha, on the high pastures of Azerbaijan. From there, the scholar-bureaucrats of eastern Iran began to build a Mongol state using cultural symbols familiar to the Muslim and Iranian population.
The region around Maragha was the same area where Chormaqun had established his military headquarters and the most suitable territory in the Middle East to support the herds of animals that accompanied the Mongol armies. Members of Jochi’s family had used the area for winter pasture, and it was the most hotly contested stake in Jochid claims over the Middle East in later generations. By building his capital here, Hulegu marked his family’s enduring presence and control. He also made a series of administrative appointments before the fall of Baghdad that alienated the Jochid family from the Mongol government of the Middle East. When he first assumed command of the region from Arghun in the winter of 1255/6, Hulegu gained the assistance of three individuals from the former governor’s entourage. These were Arghun’s son Gerai Malik, a Central Asian Muslim named Ahmad Bitikchi, and ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ata-Malik Juvayni, son of Chin Temur’s original sahib-diwan and frequent travelling companion of Arghun between Iran and Qaragorum. The diverse origins of this group — one Mongol, one Central Asian and one Iranian — speaks to the potentially divided loyalties of the administrative apparatus under Arghun. In subsequent years, Hulegu concentrated leading administrative positions in the hands of prominent scholars and bureaucrats from eastern Iran. These individuals helped to turn Hulegu’s new capital in Azerbaijan into an administrative centre and spearheaded the earliest efforts at an intellectual and cultural rapprochement with the new royal Mongol presence. As Iranians from the eastern provinces living and working in the western Iranian world, they also helped to strengthen an Iranian cultural identity that gave the Ilkhanate an internal cohesion — a kind of pre-modern nationhood — independent of Jochid or any other external sovereignty.
Several of the administrative appointees who came into Hulegu’s service had previously lived and worked under the patronage of the Isma‘ili imam Rukn al-Din Khurshah and joined their patron when he surrendered to Hulegu in early 1256. By far the most prominent of these was Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), the greatest philosopher of his generation.*4 Once in Hulegu’s service, Nasir al-Din oversaw the building and staffing of the first great monument of Mongol patronage in the Middle East, an astronomical observatory and research institute at Hulegu’s new capital of Maragha. Writing most of fifty years later, Rashid al-Din claims that it was Hulegu’s idea to employ Tusi on this project, to avoid sending him to Qaraqorum, where Mongke was also eager to build a new observatory.” Tusi himself says only that Hulegu wanted an observatory, but that he and his staff chose where to build it.*° These accounts might well both be true; taken together, they suggest that the decision to build an observatory on the high plains of Azerbaijan was a demonstration of permanence and political independence, a monument to Hulegu’s claim over the region.”
In addition to founding the observatory at Maragha, Tusi served as Hulegu’s vizier. He was also tasked with administering the many institutions chartered under Islamic endowment law (wagf). Such institutions were historically exempt from government interference, but Hulegu directed that Tusi was to receive 10 per cent of all proceeds to finance operations at the new observatory.** While it is not known exactly how much funding this provided, the rich materials and high level of craftsmanship evident in surviving observation instruments made at Maragha suggest that 10 per cent of the endowed property in the realm amounted to a sizeable sum.* It was, in any event, the first observatory to be funded by wagf revenue, but like so much from the early decades of Mongol rule it set a precedent for later Ikhanid institutions. By the end of the thirteenth century, Hulegu’s great-grandson Ghazan Khan had constructed a second observatory at Tabriz to be funded entirely by charitable endowments.
Nasir al-Din Tusi’s main commission at the new observatory was to coordinate astronomical observations in order to create a new set of tables charting the movement of the visible planets across the field of fixed stars.*° For this, he employed astronomers from across the Islamic world, and from as far away as China. Supporting their efforts served two purposes for the new ilkhan Hulegu. First, it tied him into a tradition of royal support for astronomy that was even older than Islam. The Persian Sasanians had been active patrons of astral sciences for both practical and ideological purposes, a pattern that the ‘Abbasid caliphs were quick to emulate.*! Other dynasties had subsequently adopted astronomy as a central component of royal ideology. Most notably, the Saljuq sultan Malikshah (1072-92) had supported a major observatory at Isfahan, and figural imagery representing stars and planets became a central component of Saljugq-period visual culture.*? Most immediately relevant to Tusi’s experience, the Isma ‘ili imams had been among the strongest supporters of scientific research in the thirteenth century, and Tusi would have had direct exposure to the science under their patronage before Khurshah’s surrender to Hulegu. For the i/khan to continue this pattern of support provided a point of continuity across the otherwise dramatic historical rupture caused by the destruction of the Isma ‘ili and ‘Abbasid political order.
‘The other great service that the Maragha observatory and Tusi’s new astronomical tables offered to Hulegu was a way to determine auspicious days for court ceremonies. This same concern probably motivated Qubilai’s interest in having his own observatory at Qaraqorum. After Hulegu’s death, his son Abaqa ascended to the throne on a date — 19 June 1265 — that was deemed to be auspicious by both shamans and astrologers.“ Beyond the functional and ideological benefits that accrued to Hulegu through his support of the Maragha observatory, Tusi and his staff were responsible for major advances in the science of observation astronomy.“ The tables they produced set a new standard in accuracy for observation. Nasir al-Din also gave his name to the so-called “Tusi couple’, which models planetary motion within a geocentric cosmology.
A second major architectural project that shows the contribution of Tusi and his fellow Persian bureaucrats to the royal ideology and iconography of the young IIkhanate is a palace built for Abaga at the royal Mongol summer camp of Sughurluq, between Lake Urmia and Hamadan. ‘The site of the palace is an elevated mineral plateau, the accretion of a large calcinating thermal spring that forms a lake at its centre. This creates a dramatic setting for any building, and an easy point of reference for identifying the site as it changed in function over time. Under the Sasanians, the site was home to Azargoshnasp, the Zoroastrian fire temple of Azerbaijan particularly associated with the elite warrior estate.” In the centuries after the Arab conquest, a village called Shiz grew up among the ruins of this fire temple.“ Despite the urbanisation of the site, two ninth-century geographers preserve the memory of its Zoroastrian connection. Ibn al-Faqih attributes the temple to the Kayanian Kay Khosrau, while Ibn Khurradadhbih relates a tradition by which Sasanian rulers, after their coronation at the Sasanian capital near Baghdad, performed a pilgrimage on foot to Azargoshnasp for a second spiritual investment at what was believed to be the site of Zoroaster’s birth.” In the tenth century, Hasan “Ali Mas‘udi mentions Shiz in a list of fire temples, and the travelling poet Mis‘ar b. Muhalhil notes its significance among the fire temples of pre-Islamic Iran.“
Mis‘ar’s work was known to and cited by later writers, including the late-IIkhanid historian Hamd Allah Mustaufi (on whom, see Chapter 6), but in the centuries immediately after Mis‘ar wrote, the memory of Shiz as the site of a fire temple disappears from geographic literature.” In place of the site’s Zoroastrian origins, a new association grew up around the dramatic spring-side ruins in Azerbaijan. As early as the eleventh century, the Persian poet Qatran Tabrizi refers to Azargoshnasp as the Throne of Solomon (takhte soleiman), by which it is still most commonly known.” This is part of a pattern in the western Iranian world during the Saljuq period, by which major pre-Islamic Persian monuments were reimagined as relics of JudeoIslamic prophetic history. To the south, by the turn of the thirteenth century, the Salghurids of Fars had created a legitimising ideology for themselves as protectors of the legacy of Solomon, whom they credited with building the Achaemenid ruins at Persepolis.”!
While western Iranian practice thus tended to situate ancient ruins in the context of Islamic prophetic history, the memory of Azargoshnasp as a Zoroastrian site was preserved in the historical writing of the eastern Iranian world, and particularly the Shahnameh of Abu’l-Qasim Firdausi (d. 1020).* The decoration of Abaqa’s new palace employed elaborate tiles glazed with lapis and gold, replete with visual and textual references to the Shahnameh.” These tiles would have reminded visitors of the site’s importance in the Iranian kingly tradition.
Of course, such references necessarily required knowledge of the Shahnameh to interpret and appreciate. Such intimate knowledge of Firdausi’s poem and the Iranian heroic tradition was, at the time of the Mongol conquest, relatively rare in the western Iranian world. In the eleventh century, Qatran Tabrizi, already mentioned, had tried to popularise eastern Iranian literature in the west, but he was largely frustrated in this effort. Further west, members of the Saljuq family in Rum had begun taking the names of legendary Iranian kings from around the turn of the thirteenth century. One historian writing at that court in the late twelfth century, Muhammad b. “Ali Rawandi, frequently cites the Shahnameh, but only in a limited way and for moralising purposes, suggesting that he had access to the text only through a collection of extracts prepared for the great Saljug sultan Malikshah.** Other than Qatran and Rawandi, western Iranian writers largely ignored Firdausi’s work.
By contrast, the practice of invoking pre-Islamic Iranian rulers as exemplars of kingly virtues had become popular among panegyric poets at the eastern Iranian courts of the Ghaznavids and Qara Khanids.” These two dynasties, centred in Afghanistan and Central Asia, respectively, straddled the lands of the Samanids, who held their court at Bukhara and for whose governor at Tus Firdausi had begun his epic work. As the Ghaznavids and Qara Khanids divided up the Samanid state between them in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, both courts adopted the poetic images of individual pre-Islamic kings into their own programmes of legitimation and ideology.
As a result, the lands with the richest poetic memory of the pre-Islamic Iranian kingly tradition were precisely the lands that provided Hulegu with his leading administrative staff as he entered the Middle East. Chin Temutr’s decision to appoint Baha’ al-Din Juvayni as sahib-diwan established a lasting governing alliance between the ruling Mongols and the scholars of eastern Iran, including the Juvayni family and Nasir al-Din Tusi. As discussed in Chapter 3, ‘Ala’ al-Din Juvayni was also the first historian to make systematic use of the Shahnameh in telling the story of the Mongol past. In terms of the visual language of the early Ilkhanid court, Tusi and the Juvaynis — and probably other eastern Iranian administrators, scholars and artists in their service — were instrumental in choosing to decorate Abaqa’s new palace with scenes and verses from a distinctly Iranian historical tradition. Emblematic of the new Mongol state-building programme was the conflation of regional Iranian traditions, as eastern literature decorated a western Iranian site long associated with kingship.
In the half century following the shockwave of Chinggis Khan’s retributive raid against Khwarazmshah Muhammad, Hulegu and Abagqa had created a military patrimony state with at least the partial consent and support of the conquered population. The political situation of the region — already muddy before the arrival of Chinggis Khan — was further complicated by the devastating disinterest with which he viewed the region, its cities and their population. Later Great Khans began to appreciate the financial potential of including the region within the Mongol Empire, but Hulegu’s arrival in the region turned it into a state of its own, with a political cohesion and cultural identity derived largely from Iranian tradition. The permanence of this state, and its aspirations at legitimacy, were signalled by monuments rooted in the literature and science of the Perso-Islamic world, as created by a generation of administrators from the eastern regions of Iran.
For two decades, under the first two i/khans Hulegu and Abaqa, the sons of Baha‘ al-Din Juvayni directed the administration of the state from Tabriz and Baghdad. These years saw constant pressure on the frontiers of the Ilkhanid state, as Abaga faced opposition in Central Asia first by the Chaghadaid Baraq and later by rebellious Mongol factions, and on the Syrian frontier by the Mamluk sultans of Egypt.*° Between these border contests, and perhaps because of them, Abaqa’s reign was a period of relative stability and prosperity for the Ilkhanate. As part of this, the period saw unprecedented levels of cooperation between top Persian and Mongol administrators.” Abaqa moved his capital to Tabriz, while Baghdad remained a key political, economic, and intellectual centre, a second city of the realm to manage the agricultural wealth of Mesopotamia. From Tabriz and Baghdad, and from Hulegu’s original capital of Maragha, the Juvayni brothers and Nasir al-Din Tusi — all of them from the east of Iran — oversaw a series of cultural projects that invested the i/khans as legitimate sovereigns of the Perso-Islamic world. Their successors in the administration grew up under this arrangement. Among them was a young doctor from the western Iranian city of Hamadan, who soon found himself situated for a prominent career at the court of the new lords from the steppe.
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