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The Mongols and The Islamic World From Conquest To... - (1 MEDIEVAL AUTHORS On The MONGOLS)

Professor Denise Aigle's study highlights the challenges historians face regarding primary sources on the Mongols, primarily due to the scarcity of Mongolian writings and the predominance of accounts from non-Mongolian cultures. The document categorizes various sources into nine groups, including Islamic writings from within the Ilkhanate and accounts from rival states, while also noting the limited contemporary Mongolian and Chinese materials. It further discusses the perspectives of medieval authors like Ibn al-Athīr and Nasawī, who documented the Mongol invasions and their impact on the Islamic world.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

67 views32 pages

The Mongols and The Islamic World From Conquest To... - (1 MEDIEVAL AUTHORS On The MONGOLS)

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1

MEDIEVAL AUTHORS ON THE MONGOLS

I n her authoritative study of the Persian province of Fārs during the

Mongol era, Professor Denise Aigle draws attention to three problems
surrounding the primary sources. Virtually all of them, firstly, emanate
from non-Mongolian cultures, since we have little written by Mongols and
the material tends to come from either the subject peoples or from rival
polities like the Mamlūk empire in Egypt and Syria. Secondly, a large part of
what we have represents the writings of men who held office in Mongol
Iran (the Ilkhanate) and were consequently very much tied to the regime.
And thirdly, there is a marked contrast between the rich historiography for
the early decades of the empire and the relative poverty of sources for the
era when the Ilkhanate collapsed.1 To these problems a historian concerned
also with Mongol rule in the Islamic world beyond Iran might add another:
the heavy preponderance of contemporary sources produced within the
Ilkhanate, as against the pronounced dearth of material from the other two
westerly Mongol states that became part of the Islamic world, namely the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Golden Horde (or, to use alternative terms, the ulus of Jochi or the Qipchaq
khanate), based in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, and the Chaghadayid
khanate in Central Asia.
After a relatively short section on the Mongolian and Chinese material,
I shall divide the sources – most of them in Persian or Arabic – into nine
categories: (1) the works of authors writing outside the limits of Mongol
sovereignty prior to 1260, and therefore contemporary with the first inva-
sions and the earliest phase of Mongol rule; (2) Islamic sources composed
within the empire but prior to the Mongol rulers’ conversion; (3) Islamic
sources from within the territories of the Muslim Ilkhanate (deemed to
date, for this purpose, from the conversion of Ghazan in 1295), though

Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World : From Conquest to Conversion, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4832373.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2025-08-04 23:02:41.
MEDIEVAL AUTHORS ON THE MONGOLS 15

reserving a separate section (4) for the local histories written within Ilkhanid
Iran and Iraq; (5) non-narrative material from the Ilkhanate; (6) the histo-
riography of the Jochid and Chaghadayid khanates, along with the Timurid
sources; (7) sources dating from after the division of the empire (c. 1261)
and composed in enemy territory, notably the Mamlūk Sultanate; and, lastly,
(8) histories belonging outside the Sunnī Muslim tradition – that is, by Shī‛ī
and eastern Christian subjects of the Ilkhans – and (9) the writings of
Christian visitors to the Mongol territories from Catholic Western Europe.
I should mention at this point sources that have not entered into consid-
eration. I have largely neglected the hagiographical material (but see below,
p. 33): histories of the different sufi orders (silsilāt); lives of sufi saints; and
collections of their discourses (malfūz.āt), all of which present considerable
problems for the historian interested primarily in political history and in
developments in the religious history of an entire society (rather than the
spirituality or organic growth of the sufi order itself). In addition, I have
tended not to cite the later general histories in Persian, such as those of Mīr
Khwānd (d. 903/1498) and Khwānd-Amīr (d. 942/1535–6), since they are
almost wholly dependent on sources that have come down to us from the
Mongol period. For the same reason I have made sparing use of relatively
late Arabic compilations from the Mamlūk empire, referring very little to
al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), and to the general history, ‛Iqd al-jumān, by
al-‛Aynī (d. 855/1451), and not at all to the history by Ibn al-Furāt
(d. 807/1405) or the fifteenth-century biographical dictionaries of Ibn
H.ajar and Ibn Taghrībirdī.

Mongolian and other Far Eastern material

The sole surviving Mongolian source is the epic Mongghol’un niucha
tobcha’an or Chinggis Qaghan-u huja’ur, better known as the ‘Secret History
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of the Mongols’, which includes a good deal of folk tradition (though the
main outline is apparently historical). Igor de Rachewiltz has recently
advanced fresh arguments in favour of 1229 as the date of the original
composition, but it is also generally accepted that the final section, covering
Ögödei’s reign, as also certain paragraphs relating to events within Chinggis
Khan’s lifetime, were added at a later date – most probably in or soon after
1251–2, following Möngke’s accession (below, p. 98).2 On Mongol activities
in the Islamic world, however, the ‘Secret History’ has little to offer: it
exhibits a far greater interest in events in the Mongolian homeland and in
the war in China, dismissing Chinggis Khan’s operations in Western Asia in
a comparatively brief space.

The only other Mongolian historical source known to have existed is

called the Altan Debter (‘Golden Book’) by Rashīd al-Dīn Fad.l-Allāh (below,
pp. 26–8), who also describes it as ‘the books of histories (kutub-i ta’rīkh)
that are to be found in the royal treasury (khazāna-yi ‛āmira)’.3 The use of
the plural might indicate that we are dealing with something akin to the
‘veritable records’ (Ch. shilu; Mo. tobcha’an), the annals for each qaghan’s
reign, which were maintained in China and which, after the Mongols’ expul-
sion by the Ming, would be utilized in the creation of the official dynastic
history of the Chinggisid qaghans, the Yuan shi.4 It is clear that Rashīd
al-Dīn had access to this Mongol material, most probably through Bolod
Chingsang, his Mongol informant. The Altan Debter now survives only in
Chinese as Shengwu qinzheng lu (‘The Deeds of the Holy Warrior’, namely
Chinggis Khan), produced between 1263 and 1285.5
Chinese sources yield a little more than do those of Mongolian origin.
The compilers of the principal annals in the Yuan shi, headed by Song Lian
and working in haste during the early Ming era, had only scattered material
to draw on for the first three chapters, covering the reigns down to Möngke’s
death in 1259 (the sole part of the annalistic section translated).6 But more
is to be found in the (untranslated) biographical sections, containing notices
on numerous Mongol and Chinese figures.7 Reports by envoys from Song
China to the Mongols in 1221 and 1237 provide information of general
importance. But some data on the condition of Transoxiana and neigh-
bouring lands at the time of Chinggis Khan’s expedition are to be found in
Li Zhichang’s Xi you ji (‘Account of a Journey to the West’), detailing the
journey in 1221–4 of the Daoist adept Changchun (Qiu Chuji) from China
to the conqueror’s headquarters in the Hindu Kush.8 This is more valuable
than the Xi you lu (‘Record of a Journey to the West’) of the sinicized Kitan
minister, Yelü Chucai, who accompanied Chinggis Khan and spent the
years 1219–24 in Central Asia: its author’s main purpose was a polemical
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attack on the Daoists, and his descriptions of the territories he saw are
sketchy.9

Muslim observers contemporary with the early Mongol invasions:

Ibn al-Athīr, Nasawī, Jūzjānī and others
It will be natural to begin with those of our sources which were contempo-
rary with Chinggis Khan’s invasion and the subsequent Mongol advance
under Chormaghun and Baiju. Disregarding for the moment two observers
who travelled in regions under attack by Chinggis Khan’s forces, namely the
geographer Yāqūt al-H.amawī and the savant Ibn al-Labbād, the earliest

source to yield extensive information is al-Kāmil fī l-ta’rīkh (‘The Perfection

of History’) of ‛Izz al-Dīn Abū l-H.asan ‛Alī al-Jazarī, better known as Ibn
al-Athīr (b. 555/1160; d. 630/1233), writing in Mosul (al-Maws.il).10 It is
clear from his narrative that a number of circumstances made a profound
impression on Ibn al-Athīr. One was the precipitous downfall of the
Khwārazmshāh ‛Alā’ al-Dīn Muh.ammad b. Tekish, who had accumulated a
vast empire only a few years before the Mongols arrived to destroy it. Ibn
al-Athīr saw this as an inevitable consequence of Muh.ammad’s temerity in
challenging the ‛Abbasid Caliphate.11 He was also struck, as was Yāqūt, by
the speed and geographical scale of the Mongols’ operations. Within a strik-
ingly short time, they had emerged from the confines of China, overrun
Transoxiana, passed through northern Iran as far as the frontiers of Iraq,
and ruined Azerbaijan and Arrān prior to moving into the Qipchaq steppe;
other squadrons had campaigned in Kirmān, Sijistān (Sīstān) and the
Indian borderlands.12 The Mongols were able to reduce even a region diffi-
cult of access, like Māzandarān, which had defied the early Caliphs for
several decades after the conquest of the rest of Iran.13 For this phenomenal
achievement, it seems, an explanation lay to hand: Muh.ammad’s elimina-
tion of so many princes meant that once he in turn had been overthrown
nobody remained to offer the Muslims leadership against the invaders.14
On balance, the dominant chord struck by Ibn al-Athīr is one of disaster.
Two further circumstances that coloured his judgement were that the
Mongol invasions had coincided with the capture of Damietta by the forces
of the Fifth Crusade in 616/1219, involving a formidable threat to Muslim
Egypt,15 and that Muslim rulers appeared to be prey to constant dissension,
regardless of the menace from either enemy. He was among those who
came to believe the rumour (which he ascribed to Persian Muslims) that
the Mongols had been summoned by the ‛Abbasid Caliph al-Nās.ir li-dīn
Allāh (d. 622/1225) as a weapon in his conflict with the Khwārazmshāh.16
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For Ibn al-Athīr, there was no prince whose aspirations rose ‘above his belly
or his private parts’, and appeals to God to send a leader fit to take up the
defence of the Islamic world recur later in his narrative.17 There is just a hint
that the Khwārazmshāh Muh.ammad’s son and effective successor, Jalāl
al-Dīn, who inflicted greater harm on the Christian Georgians than any of
his precursors despite the adverse circumstances in which he had to operate,
could have been Ibn al-Athīr’s candidate for this role – though the outrages
committed by the Khwarazmian forces against Muslims are roundly
condemned.18
At one point Ibn al-Athīr believed that God had intervened to save the
Muslims from the Mongols, just as he had delivered them from the Frankish

crusaders in the Nile delta in 618/1221.19 He did not live to witness the
Mongol attack on the Saljuq Sultanate of Rūm in 640–1/1242–3 or the
major campaigns of Hülegü’s forces in the late 1250s, which culminated
in the sack of Baghdad and the overthrow of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate
(656/1258). It was possible for Ibn al-Athīr to infer from the pattern of the
Mongols’ campaigns during his lifetime that they were intent only on wide-
spread plunder and devastation and – unlike the Franks – did not aim at
permanent conquest.20 Only towards the end of his book does he betray a
dawning awareness of his error, for he cites a letter from a Muslim merchant
of Rayy who had accompanied the Mongols into Azerbaijan in 627/1229–30
and who warned his co-religionists that the invaders sought far more
than loot.21
Shihāb al-Dīn Muh.ammad b. Ah.mad al-Khurandizī al-Nasawī (d.
647/1249–50) completed his Sīrat al-Sult.ān Jalāl al-Dīn, an Arabic biog-
raphy of the last Khwārazmshāh, in 639/1241–2; later in the century, an
anonymous author produced a Persian translation (which omits, however,
a number of chapters). Having witnessed the final months of the
Khwarazmian regime in eastern Iran, from c. 622/1225 Nasawī was in the
entourage of the fugitive Jalāl al-Dīn, whom he served as head of the secre-
tariat (kātib al-inshā’).22 An earlier work by Nasawī in Persian, the little-
used Nafthat al-mas.dūr (‘The Coughings of the Consumptive’) dating from
632/1234–5, furnishes an account of his tribulations between Jalāl al-Dīn’s
death and his own arrival as a refugee in Mayyāfāriqīn.
Nasawī, who had access to Ibn al-Athīr’s Kāmil and was bemused by the
earlier author’s capacity to obtain high-quality information on lands in the
most distant east when domiciled in Mosul, states his determination to
relate only such events as he experienced personally or learned of from
eyewitnesses.23 It is not clear that he adheres consistently to this principle.
The structure of the Sīrat is highly confusing, moreover, as the author leaps
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

from one geographical location to another, sometimes, it seems, with the

aim of recounting events in strict chronological order, whether or not there
was any connection between them. Nasawī was profoundly struck both by
the collapse of the impressive empire of Muh.ammad b. Tekish and by the
vicissitudes of his son’s career.24 The work in fact contains less material on
the Mongol campaigns than on Jalāl al-Dīn’s tireless, and ultimately fruit-
less, efforts to carve out a new principality at the expense of his brother and
of other Muslim dynasts in western Iran. It is noteworthy that for Nasawī,
as for other loyal servitors who appear in the work, the prince was the sole
bulwark of Islam against the pagan Mongols.25 Somewhat less emphasis is
placed on the Khwarazmian forces’ own depredations against their fellow

Muslims in Azerbaijan and northern Iraq, which made them a byword for
brutality.
The third author contemporary with Chinggis Khan’s onslaught on the
Dar al-Islam was Minhāj al-Dīn ‛Uthmān b. Sirāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī, younger
than Ibn al-Athīr by an entire generation and writing in c. 658/1260, at a
distance of almost forty years from these events and from the relative safety
of the independent Delhi Sultanate.26 Yet as a native of Ghūr who had left
for India only in 623/1226, Jūzjānī had the two advantages of direct famili-
arity with the eastern Islamic lands and personal experience of the inva-
sions. In much the same way, moreover, as Ibn al-Athīr had access to people
who had been in Iran during these early Mongol campaigns, so did Jūzjānī,
in Delhi, benefit from second-hand information furnished by distinguished
Muslim refugees from beyond the Indus.
The stance Jūzjānī took in his T.abaqāt-i Nās.irī (‘Nās.irī Epochs’, dedi-
cated to the reigning Delhi Sultan, Nās.ir al-Dīn Mah.mūd) was relatively
unequivocal. Although he was ready to concede the occasional virtue to
Mongol rulers – Chinggis Khan’s justice, for instance, or Ögödei’s clem-
ency27 – and although, too, he was aware that at least one Mongol prince,
Berke in Jochi’s ulus, had embraced Islam, he regularly describes Chinggis
Khan and his successors as ‘accursed’ (mal‛ūn) and as heading, at the
moment of death, to Hell. The invasions themselves are depicted as an
unmitigated disaster, the most recent phase in a process of infidel encroach-
ment on the Islamic world that had begun with the Qara-Khitai in the
twelfth century.28 On this second occasion, ‘from the borders of China,
Turkistān, Mā warā’ al-nahr, T.ukhāristān, Zāwul[istān], Ghūr, Kābul,
Ghaznayn, ‛Irāq, T.abaristān, Arrān, Ādharbāījān, the Jazīra, Anbār, Sīstān,
Makrān, Kirmān, Fārs, Khūzistān, Diyār Bakr and Maws.il, as far as the limits
of Shām [Syria] and Rūm’, everything had fallen under the sway of the
infidel, and ‘not a trace of the Muslim princes and sultans remained’.29 This
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

was an overstatement, since even within the lands listed several Muslim
princes continued to rule under Mongol overlordship. Yet it enabled Jūzjānī
to portray the Delhi Sultanate as the sole surviving bastion of Islam.30 He
appears also to have believed that he was living in the Last Days, heralded
inter alia by the advent of the Mongols, and the book takes on at times an
apocalyptic tone.31
So much, then, for the principal contemporary sources that describe
Chinggis Khan’s campaigns in Western Asia. Let us now turn to various
lesser figures. The geographer Yāqūt al-H.amawī (d. 626/1229), who trav-
elled through eastern Iran and Khwārazm in 617–18/1220–1, just prior to
the Mongol attack,32 testifies to the prosperity of these regions at the time

and relates the subsequent fate of certain cities at second hand. Another
of the first Muslim Arabic authors to refer to the Mongol incursion is
the savant ‛Abd al-Lat.īf al-Baghdādī, also known as Ibn al-Labbād
(d. 629/1231–2). The work in question, which is unidentified, has not
survived in its original form, but lengthy extracts from an ‘account of the
Tatars’ attributed to Ibn al-Labbād are preserved in the Ta’rīkh al-Islām of
Shams al-Dīn Muh.ammad al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), who also used the
works of Ibn al-Athīr and Nasawī for this early period. Ibn al-Labbād’s
narrative of the invasion would evidently make its mark on al-Dhahabī,
who apostrophizes it as ‘an account to swallow up [all other] accounts, a
report to throw [all other] reports in the shade, a tale to cast [all other] tales
into oblivion, a calamity that reduces every [other] calamity to insignifi-
cance and a disaster that has spread over the earth and filled its length and
breadth’.33 Travelling in northern Syria and Anatolia in the 1220s, Ibn
al-Labbād met fugitives, including traders, from whom he gleaned infor-
mation about the Mongols.34 Like both Ibn al-Athīr and Yāqūt, therefore, he
wrote on the basis of hearsay; and it may be that he indulged in hyperbole
to a greater extent than his more famous contemporary in Mosul.
We are fortunate that a source emanating from Ismā‛īlī Assassin circles
has become accessible within the last few years. Dīwān-i qā’imiyyāt (‘Poems
of the Resurrection’; an allusion to the spiritual resurrection, or Qiyāma,
proclaimed at Alamūt in 559/1164) is a collection of qas.īdas compiled by
H.asan Mah.mūdī Kātib, a close associate of Nas.īr al-Dīn T.ūsī (on whom see
below, p. 40). A number of these poems refer to Chinggis Khan and the
‘Tatars’, and are valuable for revealing the amicable relations that initially
existed between Alamūt and the Mongols, although the conqueror is some-
what implausibly made out to be an instrument of the Assassin Master and
subject to his authority.35
Ibn Abī l-H.adīd al-Madā’inī (b. 586/1190; d. 656/1258), who lived in
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Baghdad and survived the Mongol conquest of the city by just a few months,
had incorporated an account of the Mongol irruption in his commentary
(sharh.) on the Nahj al-balāgha, begun in 644/1246 and completed in
649/1251; the last date mentioned is 643/1245.36 Although much of this is
borrowed from Ibn al-Athīr, it is not distinguished by any notable accuracy:
for instance, Ibn Abī l-H.adīd confuses the expedition headed by the Mongol
generals Jebe and Sübe’edei from 617/1220 onwards with that commanded
by Chormaghun several years later. But for the period after 630/1233 he
becomes an important – and seemingly more reliable – source in his own
right, of particular value for the fate of Is.fahān, which resisted the Mongols
until 633/1235–6, and for various campaigns in Iraq during the next

ten years.37 The work of a slightly later Baghdādī historian, Ibn al-Sā‛ī
(d. 674/1276), has not survived for this period, but was used by the author
of al-H.awādith al-jāmi‛a (pp. 30–1 below).
We come, lastly, to a small group of Arabic sources composed within
Syria. Muh.ammad b. ‛Alī (Ibn Naz.īf) al-H.amawī’s al-Ta’rīkh al-Mans.ūrī,
which dates from 631/1233–4 and is dedicated to the Ayyubid ruler of H.amā,
al-Mans.ūr Muh.ammad, contains accounts of Chinggis Khan’s assault upon
the Khwarazmian empire and the early operations by Chormaghun’s forces
in north-western Iran from 628/1230.38 The first of these narratives combines
reasonably accurate detail with confusion regarding proper names (for
example, the Mongol conqueror is at one point erroneously called ‘Kushlū’,
i.e. identified with Chinggis Khan’s enemy Güchülüg); but it is independent
of Ibn al-Athīr and must represent fairly early information. Otherwise, the
Syrian sources simply rely upon Ibn al-Athīr and have no original value for
the period before 628/1230–1. At that date it was still possible in Syria to
ignore the Mongol advance. Writing in H.amā, Ibn Abī l-Damm (d. 642/1244),
whose chronicle (extant only in an abridged version) ends in 628/1230–1
and who seems to have skirted round topics that presented too formidable a
challenge to his diplomatic skills, felt able to avoid mentioning the Mongols
at all in his coverage of the years from 618 onwards (although the reason may
be in part that he saw the Franks as a much greater threat, following the
recent crusade of the Emperor Frederick II).39
For the two or three decades following Ibn al-Athīr’s death, however, we
are fortunate to have access to some important sources: a history of
Damascus by Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Shāma (b. 599/1203; d. 665/1268), al-Dhayl
‛alā l-Rawd.atayn (‘Supplement to the Two Gardens’), which continues
another work of his (begun, in fact, later) on the age of Saladin;40 a general
history, Mir’āt al-zamān fī ta’rīkh al-a‛yān (‘The Mirror of the Age in the
History of Notable Men’), by the Damascene author Shams al-Dīn Abū
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l-Muz.affar Yūsuf b. Qizūghlī (b. c. 581/1185; d. 654/1256), commonly called

Sibt. (‘the maternal grandson of ’) Ibn al-Jawzī;41 and Mufarrij al-kurūb fī
akhbār banī Ayyūb (‘The Dissipator of Cares in the Account of the Ayyubid
Line’), a dynastic history completed in Egypt soon after 659/1261 by Jamāl
al-Dīn Muh.ammad b. Sālim, better known as Ibn Wās.il (b. 604/1208; d.
697/1298), a native of H.amā.42 The latter two authors supply important
information on the Mongol attacks on Iraq, Anatolia and northern Syria,
while Ibn Wās.il and Abū Shāma are additionally among our principal
sources for the short-lived occupation of Syria and Palestine in 658/1260.
Both Ibn Wās.il and Sibt. Ibn al-Jawzī saw Jalāl al-Dīn as a rampart against
the Mongols, though they were far more condemning of his operations

than his client Nasawī had been; and Ibn Wās.il, at least, had the satisfaction
of knowing that the Mongol tide to which the last Khwārazmshāh’s death
exposed Iraq and Syria would eventually be stemmed by the armies of
Egypt, first at ‛Ayn Jālūt in 658/1260 and then in subsequent victories by
the Mamlūk Sultans Baybars and Qalāwūn.43 I include here, lastly, the Kitāb
al-majmū‛ al-mubārak of the Coptic Christian historian al-Makīn Ibn
al-‛Amīd (d. c. 1272), which ends in 1260 and is indebted to an earlier,
probably Muslim source; it provides the odd detail on the Mongol advance
omitted by his two more important Muslim contemporaries.

Muslim historians writing under the pagan Ilkhans:

Juwaynī and others
Unlike the other authors named so far, ‛Alā’ al-Dīn ‛At.ā Malik Juwaynī
(d. 681/1283) was born after the Mongols’ initial onslaught on the lands of
Islam, in 623/1226.44 His family were bureaucrats in Khurāsān who had
served the Saljuqs and the Khwārazmshāhs in turn; his grandfather had
accompanied the Khwārazmshāh on his flight south from Balkh. Juwaynī’s
father passed into the Mongols’ employment, twice visiting the court of the
Qaghan Ögödei in the 1230s. He transmitted information about Chinggis
Khan’s invasion to his son,45 and Juwaynī himself, as an official in the suite
of Arghun Aqa, then viceroy of south-west Asia, travelled to the Qaghan
Möngke’s headquarters (ordo) and back in 650–1/1252–3, and gathered
further material while in Mongolia. It was there, he tells us,46 that he was
persuaded to begin the Ta’rīkh-i jahān-gushā (‘History of the World-
Conqueror’), which is dedicated to Hülegü. The occasional cross-reference
to a non-existent chapter suggests that what has reached us was unfinished.
Even so, this is, by any standard, the most valuable work composed by a
Muslim historian writing in Iran prior to the conversion of the Ilkhans.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Juwaynī, then, was the first Muslim historian of the Mongols to occupy
a position in the Mongol administration of Iran. He might decry the low
cultural attainments of some of those alongside whom he worked;47 he
might regret the passing of the Khwārazmshāhs and deplore the advent of
infidel masters; but the fact that he served them inevitably coloured the way
he wrote his history. When Juwaynī makes Körgüz, the governor-general of
Khurāsān, report to Ögödei that ‘the servants of the Qaghan’s realm’ lived in
comfort and luxury,48 we are not obliged to take this quotation by one
bureaucrat from another at face value: officials may have many reasons for
offering sanguine reports to their sovereigns, among them the vindication
of their own activity and a guarantee of their survival in office.

Whereas Ibn al-Athīr had been ambivalent concerning Jalāl al-Dīn,

Juwaynī’s partisanship for the last Khwārazmshāh cannot be in doubt (though
he is frank regarding the massacres perpetrated by the Khwarazmian forces);49
and when he took up his pen, the outlook still appeared unremittingly bleak in
many ways. Juwaynī alludes to Hülegü’s presence at Tabrīz at the end of
Ramad.ān 657/mid-September 1259 while preparing to invade Syria, and at
one point gives the current year as 658/1260.50 He accordingly finished writing
well over twenty months after the overthrow of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate. He had
been in Hülegü’s entourage during the advance on Baghdad in Dhū l-Qa‛da
655/November–December 1257,51 and at the time his work was completed he
was governing the stricken city on the Mongols’ behalf. Yet Juwaynī ends his
history prior to the Baghdad campaign; there is no mention of Baghdad or
the Caliph in his account of Möngke’s instructions to Hülegü prior to the
expedition.52 Either Juwaynī simply could not bring himself to write on the
subject or he felt unable, as governor, to treat it with the appropriate honesty.
But in some respects the scene had improved dramatically since the
Mongols’ first irruption into the lands of Islam; and it was also possible – or
in some measure, perhaps, merely advisable – to see them as the instru-
ments of a divinely ordered providence. We shall see in chapter 11 how he
subtly portrayed them as quasi-monotheists. For Juwaynī, better informed
than Ibn al-Athīr about the Mongols’ conquest of the Qara-Khitai empire,
God had sent them to deliver Güchülüg’s Muslim subjects from persecu-
tion (though we cannot discount the possibility that this merely echoes the
Mongols’ own propaganda).53 Paradoxically, too, Islam had now spread to
regions that it had never penetrated, a development that at one point
Juwaynī associates specifically with Ögödei’s reign.54
Ögödei’s accession (1229), followed several years later by that of Möngke
(1251), had, in Juwaynī’s view, served to demonstrate God’s mercy and
beneficence towards the people of Islam.55 Nations are represented as
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hearing of Ögödei’s mild reputation and seeking to submit to his rule.56 A

series of anecdotes is designed to illustrate what God had implanted in his
nature not merely by way of generosity, justice and clemency but also by
way of the teachings of the true faith.57 Möngke, as the reigning qaghan
under whom Juwaynī wrote and whose representatives he served, had to be
painted in still more glowing terms – as ‘the bearer of the blessings of peace
and security (māda-yi ni‛mat-i amn-u amān)’ and one through whose
justice the whole of Creation had recovered and bloomed afresh.58 For
suppressing and punishing an alleged conspiracy by the ruler (iduq-qut) of
the Uighurs to extirpate the Muslims of Beshbaligh, Möngke is at one point
described as pādishāh-i ghāzī (‘holy warrior monarch’).59

In this respect a yet more serviceable instrument lay to hand. Whatever

he thought of the Mongols’ sack of Baghdad and their murder of the last
‛Abbasid Caliph and his family, one circumstance at least could ensure that
Juwaynī viewed the westward campaign of the Qaghan’s brother Hülegü as
providential: the destruction of the strongholds of the Ismā‛īlī Assassins in
northern Iran. This was ‘the balm of Muslim wounds and the cure to the
disorders of the Faith’, and travellers now called down blessings on the
monarch who had annihilated the sect.60 Juwaynī uses the term jihād, ‘holy
war’, to describe these operations by a pagan Mongol prince at the head of
an army that was only partly made up of Sunnī Muslim contingents;61 and
the overthrow of the hated Ismā‛īlīs, a task that had defied the mighty
Saljuq Sultan a century and a half earlier, is at one point portrayed, tout
court, as the work of ‘the swordsmen of the faith (shamshīr-zanān-i
ah.madī)’.62 Professor Carole Hillenbrand suggests that the Saljuqid efforts
to destroy the Ismā‛īlīs are here deliberately overstated in order to glorify
the Mongol achievement.63 But through this victory God’s hidden purpose
in raising up Chinggis Khan had now at last, for Juwaynī, been manifested.64
Juwaynī’s handling of Hülegü’s expedition, moreover, differs greatly in
tone from his account of the operations of Chinggis Khan and his generals.
His brief allusion to Hülegü’s penchant for restoring what lay in ruins65 is
symptomatic. Juwaynī took care to record only such of Hülegü’s activities as
occurred in regions that had been under Mongol rule for some decades –
apart, of course, from the Assassin territories. He spares us any account of
the prince’s later campaigns that for the first time violently subjugated
orthodox Muslim territories in Iraq and Syria: to detail those would have
required Juwaynī to paint a landscape far more evocative of the activities of
Chinggis Khan’s forces in Iran in the previous generation.
The period of over four decades that separates the works of Juwaynī and
Rashīd al-Dīn has been termed a ‘historiographical void’.66 In his Tasliyat
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al-ikhwān (‘The Consolation of the Brethren’) Juwaynī himself described

the tribulations that he and his brother, the finance minister (s.āh.ib-dīwān)
Shams al-Dīn, suffered in the period 1281–3; a supplement found in only
one manuscript carries the narrative down into the reign of Tegüder
Ah.mad.67 Otherwise, until recently we possessed only the account of the
Mongol capture of Baghdad and the destruction of the Caliphate furnished
by Z.ahīr al-Dīn ‛Alī b. Muh.ammad Ibn al-Kāzarūnī (b. 611/1214;
d. 697/1298) at the very end of his skeletal history (in Arabic) of the
‛Abbasid dynasty, Mukhtas.ar al-ta’rīkh (‘Epitome of History’), and two
brief general histories, written respectively by the Qadi Nās.ir al-Dīn ‛Abd-
Allāh Bayd.āwī in c. 674/1275 and by Negübei (Nīkpāy) b. Mas‛ūd at some

point in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Of these, Bayd.āwī’s

Niz.ām al-tawārīkh (‘The Classification of Histories’) was by far the more
widely read, to judge from the number of extant manuscripts.68 Described by
Edward G. Browne as ‘a dull and jejune little book’,69 the standard recension
tells us hardly anything of which we do not learn more from Rashīd al-Dīn.
But Professor Charles Melville has identified a second recension, composed
following Ghazan’s accession in 694/1295 and including some material not
found elsewhere.70 As Melville indicates, the value of Bayd.āwī’s work lies
primarily in the fact that it reveals how attempts were being made at an early
stage to reconcile the Mongol regime with the traditions of Persian culture
and what late thirteenth-century educated Persian Muslims knew about the
first years of the Ilkhanate. It is noteworthy that this was the only historical
work of the Mongol era of which Abū l-Majd Muh.ammad Tabrīzī included
an epitome in his compendium Safīna-yi Tabrīz (early 1320s).71
The void has now been filled, in some measure, by Akhbār-i mughūlān
dar anbāna-yi Qut.b (‘The Account of the Mongols in Qut.b’s Portmanteau’),
an anonymous chronicle discovered at Qum, in a manuscript of an
anthology (majmū‛a) made by the philosopher and astronomer Qut.b
al-Dīn Mah.mūd b. Mas‛ūd Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311),72 and published in 2009.
The author of this chronicle, which was begun in 680/1281–2 and ranges
over events from the first appearance of the Mongols down to the Ilkhan
Arghun’s enthronement in 683/1284, is unknown. None of the other pieces
in the majmū‛a is Shīrāzī’s own work, and he may have obtained the chron-
icle from one of the many scholars he met while working in the observatory
at Marāgha. It reads more like a collection of notes than a connected history:
there are gaps, sometimes extending over several years; and the discursive
style renders the chronology at times elusive.73 The manuscript once
belonged to Rashīd al-Dīn, who recounts at least one episode (the treason
of Jalāl al-Dīn, son of the caliph’s ‘Lesser Dawātdār’, in 662/1264) in a manner
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strongly reminiscent of the Akhbār. As Dr George Lane has signalled,74 this

short work is of great value, offering a good deal of information not supplied
by either Juwaynī or (curiously enough) Rashīd al-Dīn on the reigns of the
Ilkhans Hülegü and Abagha (for example, the armaments that accompa-
nied Hülegü to Iran and the grounds for the conflict between Hülegü and
his Jochid cousins). It is interesting that the Ta’rīkh-i alfī, a voluminous (and
otherwise not unduly valuable) compilation which was produced in Mughal
India by a series of authors headed by Ah.mad b. Nas.r-Allāh Daybulī Tattawī
(d. 996/1588), contains a passage that strongly resembles one found in the
Akhbār.75 Possibly it came from a fuller text or another, as yet unidentifiable
common source.

Muslim writers active in Iran following the conversion of the Ilkhans

This section will notice only those authors who wrote within the Ilkhanid
period – that is, down to c. 1350.76 Chief among them is the polymath
Rashīd al-Dīn Fad.l-Allāh Hamadānī (d. 718/1318), who belonged to a
Jewish family of physicians, and probably converted to Islam in the early
1290s, while serving as physician and ba’urchi (cook, steward) to the Ilkhan
Gaikhatu (r. 690–94/1291–95).77 Rashīd al-Dīn subsequently rose to be
chief minister to the Ilkhans Ghazan (r. 694–703/1295–1304) and Öljeitü (r.
703–16/1304–16). A formidable number of writings that bear his name
(though in all likelihood produced by teams of scholars under his direc-
tion) are listed in the Jāmi‛-i tas.ānīf-i Rashīdī (the title given, in one manu-
script, to his collected philosophical-theological works).78 Here attention
will be confined to his great history, Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh (‘Collection of
Chronicles’); his theological oeuvre will be mentioned in chapter 13; his
works concerned with other subjects, such as medicine or agronomy, in
chapter 8. That this vast output was intended to stand the test of time is
clear from Rashīd al-Dīn’s instructions, in appendices to the endowment
deed (waqf-nāma) drawn up for his foundation at Tabrīz, that a copy of
certain of these writings was to be produced annually in both Persian and
Arabic.79 The Persian text of the Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh, his best-known work,
can be reconstituted from the numerous surviving manuscripts; but regret-
tably only fragments of the Arabic version are still extant.
Like Juwaynī’s work, Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh can be termed
‘official history’ – still more so, in fact, because commissioned by Ghazan
himself (though it appears that some modifications were made later
regarding Ghazan’s early career and his conversion to Islam, and were
included in a version presented to his successor Öljeitü: this text is repre-
sented by a few manuscripts, notably BN supplément persan 1113).80 The
section on Ghazan even incorporates the texts of many of his decrees.
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Here again it is incumbent on us to be wary of the bureaucrat’s confidence

in the efficacy of central diktat. Rashīd al-Dīn claims that prior to Ghazan
the Ilkhanate was groaning in travail, and that order, justice and prosperity
were reintroduced only through the administrative reforms and legislative
enactments of his master – activity, of course, of which Rashīd al-Dīn
was doubtless the true originator and for which, equally, he is our only
source.81 Even had there been such great need of reform – and even had
Ghazan himself been genuinely as committed to that task – as Rashīd
al-Dīn suggests, there still remains room for doubt as to its ultimate
effectiveness.

Rashīd al-Dīn’s background differed markedly from Juwaynī’s. If Juwaynī

offers the prime example of a traditionally minded Muslim author whose
response to the Mongol conquests was muted by his official status, Rashīd
al-Dīn represents, by contrast, another type of Mongol servitor, the parvenu
– in this case, the recently converted Jew whose position hinged entirely on
the favour of his imperial masters. And as a convert he was under pressure
to display authentic Muslim credentials in the face of rivals who envied,
suspected and traduced him. Some at least of his adulation of the Ilkhans
Ghazan and Öljeitü for becoming Muslims was surely directed to that
end.
There are important differences between these two major sources for
the history of the Mongols, not least in scope and perspective.82 We shall
examine the latter contrast in chapter 13. In terms of its geographical reach,
Rashīd al-Dīn’s was a far more comprehensive work than the Ta’rīkh-i
jahān-gushā. In the first place, he sought to produce a more accurate history
of the Mongols themselves and of the descendants of Chinggis Khan, and
one more in line with the Mongols’ own traditions than the history written
by his predecessors (chiefly, we must assume, Juwaynī).83 The first part,
known as the Ta’rīkh-i mubārak-i Ghāzānī, is divided into three sections: on
the Turkish and Mongol tribes; on Chinggis Khan’s forebears, the conquer-
or’s own career and the history of the qaghans down to the current sover-
eign, Temür (d. 1307); and on Hülegü and his Ilkhanid successors. Rashīd
al-Dīn was indebted to the oral testimony of Mongol informants, notably
his sovereign, Ghazan, and Bolod Chingsang (d. 713/1313), the qaghan’s
resident ambassador at the Ilkhanid court and an expert on Mongol tradi-
tion.84 His written sources included not only the works of Ibn al-Athīr and
Juwaynī but also – thanks, in all likelihood, to Bolod – the now lost Altan
Debter. Borrowings are clearly in evidence when Rashīd al-Dīn recounts
the Mongol operations against the Khwarazmian empire in terms evocative
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of the Shengwu. True, the material is simply incorporated alongside passages

taken from Ibn al-Athīr and Juwaynī, with no attempt at critical evaluation
or the resolution of conflicting testimony. It provides us, nevertheless, with
the closest approach we have to a Mongol viewpoint for events after the
‘Secret History’ ends in c. 1240.
But beyond the history of the Turks and Mongols, which takes up over
half the work and is among its most original sections, Rashīd al-Dīn, at the
prompting of Ghazan’s successor Öljeitü, wrote a second part, incorporating
the histories of other peoples, both Muslim and non-Muslim. In the Ta’rīkh-i
mubārak-i Ghāzānī he mentions in passing a continuation (dhayl) containing
a separate and fuller treatment of the Oghuz, another on the Uighurs and

one on China.85 Of these, the histories of the Oghuz and of China have
survived in Part II, together with sections on earlier Muslim dynasties in
Iran and on the histories of India, the Jews and the Franks and Armenians.86
It is because of this panoramic vision that his work has been termed ‘a vast
historical encyclopaedia, such as no single people, either in Asia or in
Europe, possessed in the Middle Ages’.87 The breadth of his interests is
reflected in the range of his informants, who included a Buddhist monk
from Kashmir and possibly the Frank Isolo, a Pisan in Ghazan’s service.
In 705/1305–6 Rashīd al-Dīn supplemented the Ta’rīkh-i mubārak-i
Ghāzānī with a genealogical work, Shu‛ab-i panjgāna (‘The Fivefold
Branches’), that included the Chinggisids. Although this in large measure
duplicates the genealogical sections within the main work, it has two advan-
tages: Chinggisid proper names are frequently given in the Uighur as well
as in the Arabic-Persian script, thus enabling us to identify the exact
spelling; and additional or variant details are also introduced, regarding for
example Mongol commanders. It can therefore be regarded as of primary
significance.88
Rashīd al-Dīn’s history of the Ilkhan Öljeitü has not come down to us.
But the reign was covered by other contemporary authors. Rawd.at ūlī
l-albāb fī ma‛rifat al-tawārīkh wa l-ansāb (‘The Garden of the Intellects in
the Knowledge of Histories and Generations’; usually known simply as
Ta’rīkh-i Banākatī), completed by Fakhr al-Dīn Abū Sulaymān Dā’ūd
Banākatī in 717/1317, is in large measure an abridgement of the Jāmi‛
al-tawārīkh, though brought down to the first year of the reign of Abū Sa‛īd
and hence including original material on Öljeitü; it contains, moreover,
some data for the period prior to 703/1303 not found in the earlier work. A
richer source, devoted specifically to this one reign, is Ta’rīkh-i Uljāītū by
Jamāl al-Dīn Abū l-Qāsim ‛Abd-Allāh Qāshānī, which also goes down to
717/1317. The arrangement is annalistic, and the detailed dates, which often
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include the corresponding date in the Turco-Mongol twelve-year Animal

Cycle, point to some form of court diary. The single manuscript that
survives from the fourteenth century indicates a carelessly constructed
piece in which the same episode is occasionally recounted twice, though
one replete with details that are not found elsewhere. Qāshānī’s assertion
that he was the real author of the Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh has generally evoked
incredulity on account of the pronounced difference in style between the
two histories. On the evidence of a surviving section of Qāshānī’s own
general history, Zubdat al-tawārīkh, however, the late Alexander Morton
showed that the claim most probably applies to sections of the second part
of Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh and not to the Mongol history in the first.89

Just a few years before the appearance of Rashīd al-Dīn’s great work,
Shihāb al-Dīn ‛Abd-Allāh b. ‛Izz al-Dīn Fad.l-Allāh al-Shīrāzī, better known
by the sobriquet Was.s.āf al-h.ad.rat (‘The Court Panegyrist’), embarked on a
history of the Mongols, and of the Ilkhans in particular, Tajziyat al-ams.ār
wa-tazjiyat al-a‛s.ār (‘The Apportionment of Countries and the Passing of
Epochs’), designed as a sequel to Juwaynī’s history and commencing in
655/1257 (it should be noted that Was.s.āf unaccountably dates Hülegü’s
campaign against Baghdad in 654–5/1256–7). The first volume was begun
in 698/1298–9, and the preface was written in late Sha‛bān 699/mid-May
1300; the third volume was presented to the Ilkhan Ghazan under the aegis
of Was.s.āf ’s fellow historian, the chief minister Rashīd al-Dīn, in 702/1303;
and the fourth, on which Was.s.āf was working in 706/1306–7, was submitted
to an allegedly uncomprehending Öljeitü in 712/1312.90 A fifth and final
volume did not appear until c. 728/1327–8.91
Was.s.āf ’s bombastic prolixity, carrying Juwaynī’s stylistic excesses to even
greater extremes, is all the more regrettable, given the scope of his work,
which not only covers Ilkhanid history but also notices events in Central
Asia and even in Yuan China under Qubilai’s grandson, the Qaghan Temür
(1294–1307), and his successor. As a functionary in the fiscal administration
of Fārs who resided for the most part in his native Shīrāz, moreover, his
perspective is as much that of a local historian of southern Iran and the
islands; his pride in the region is manifest.92 Yet he visited Baghdad in
696/1296–7, and gleaned information about the Mongol conquest of the
city.93 Although his work can be viewed in some degree as ‘official’ history,
not least because sections of it were presented to two successive Ilkhans, this
taxonomy becomes somewhat meaningless, given his evident sympathy for
the Ögödeyid khan Qaidu, an enemy of the Yuan regime and the Ilkhanate.
The 1330s saw the appearance of a clutch of histories dedicated to
Rashīd al-Dīn’s son Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muh.ammad (d. 736/1336), wazir to the
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Ilkhan Abū Sa‛īd (716–36/1316–35). In 733/1332–3 Muh.ammad b. ‛Alī

Shabānkāra’ī completed a general history, the Majma‛ al-ansāb fī l-tawārīkh
(‘A Collection of Genealogies in the Histories’). But the work was destroyed
when the wazir’s residence was sacked three years later, and Shabānkāra’ī
had to produce a new recension in 738/1337 (a third version, presented to
the Chobanid ruler of Azerbaijan and unpublished, dates from 743/1343).94
Shabānkāra’ī’s vantage point, like Was.s.āf ’s, is Fārs and the south.
In 730/1329–30, only a year or two after Was.s.āf completed the Tajziyat,
H.amd-Allāh Mustawfī Qazwīnī produced his Ta’rīkh-i guzīda (‘Choice
History’), a general survey of Islamic history dependent in part on Ibn
al-Athīr, Juwaynī and Rashīd al-Dīn for the Mongol period, but also

furnishing information not available elsewhere.95 It was an abridged version

of the versified history, Z.afar-nāma (‘The Book of Triumphs’), which he
was to complete in 735/1334–5 after fifteen years’ labour. Modelled on
Firdawsī’s eleventh-century Shāh-nāma, Z.afar-nāma presents some mate-
rial not found in the Ta’rīkh-i guzīda (including, unfortunately, lengthy
passages of homespun wisdom regarding the mutability of fate, the futile
nature of wealth and power, and so on). H.amd-Allāh claims to have gleaned
his information from Persian (tāzīk) and Mongol officers (sarwārān), spec-
ifying at one point that he was indebted for details of Hülegü’s activities to
a certain Buqa, son of *Yula Temür, a Naiman officer whose family was
closely associated with the town of Qazwīn and who was well versed in the
history of the ‘Turks’.96 But for the period down to 1303 it is clear that
H.amd-Allāh was primarily indebted to Rashīd al-Dīn; and indeed he claims
that his task was to put the Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh into verse.97 The Z.afar-nāma
would serve as a source for the Dhayl-i Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh, a continuation of
Rashīd al-Dīn’s history of the Mongols by the Timurid historian H.āfiz.-i
Abrū (below, p. 35), for the period after 703/1304 and especially for Abū
Sa‛īd’s reign.98 Like Was.s.āf, H.amd-Allāh was a fiscal official, though in the
northern town of Qazwīn, and his expertise also enabled him to insert
valuable data on economic and administrative affairs into the geographical
work, Nuzhat al-qulūb (‘The Hearts’ Delight’), which he finished in or soon
after 741/1340; some of this material bears directly on the impact of the
Mongol conquests and of Mongol rule.

Local histories from the Ilkhanid territories

It should be pointed out that the term ‘local history’ does not carry all the
connotations that the phrase does in the context of the European Middle
Ages or even in that of the Arabic local historical tradition of the pre-
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Mongol era. In other words, we do not have accounts written, say, by

members of urban patriciates or surveys centred, for instance, on biogra-
phies of local scholars or other notables, a genre that had proliferated in the
earlier period.99 In much the same way as a number of the Ilkhanid histo-
ries described above, like Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmi‛ al-tawārīkh and Was.s.āf ’s
Tajziyat al-ams.ār, the works cited in this section were produced at and for
royal or princely courts, namely those of client dynasties within the Ilkhan’s
dominions. The preoccupation is still dynastic; it is simply that the vantage
point is regional as opposed to imperial.100
It is now widely believed that al-H.awādith al-jāmi‛a (‘Collected
Events’) – a history of Iraq down to 700/1300–1 and the only such history

written in the Ilkhanate in Arabic by a Sunnī Muslim – is not the work that
Ibn al-Fuwat.ī mentions as his own in his biographical dictionary (below,
p. 32) and which he claims had been commissioned by ‛Alā’ al-Dīn ‛At.ā
Malik Juwaynī.101 Whoever he was, the author belonged in the tradition of
the Baghdad school of historical writing, and for the period down to the
Mongol capture of the city he was in part indebted to Ibn al-Kāzarūnī’s
Mukhtas.ar al-ta’rīkh (p. 24 above); though he displays a less sure grasp of
dates for events at some distance from Iraq (placing the Chaghadayid inva-
sion of Khurāsān, for instance, in 665/1266–7 rather than 668/1270) than
had his precursors. To quote the most recent commentator on the work, ‘it
cannot really be situated on either side’ of the Arabic-Mamlūk/Persian-
Mongol divide.102 Although the author clearly regarded the destruction of
the Caliphate as a cataclysmic blow, he regularly calls the infidel Hülegü ‘the
Sultan’, presumably without intending any irony.
Anatolia (Rūm) produced three histories, of which the first, Ibn Bībī’s
al-Awāmir al-‛alā’iyya fī l-umūr al-‛alā’iyya (‘The Loftiest Imperatives
Concerning the Most Exalted Matters’), is an in-house history of the Saljuq
Sultans down to 679/1280; there is also an abridgement, Mukhtas.ar-i Saljūq-
nāma. In 723/1323, Karīm al-Dīn Āqsarā’ī produced a general history,
Musāmarat al-akhbār wa-musāyarat al-akhyār (‘Nocturnal Narratives and
Keeping Up with the Good’), of which the fourth and final section is
devoted to the era of the Mongol khans and their Saljuqid contemporaries.
The third of these sources is the relatively brief Ta’rīkh-i āl-i Saljūq,
completed in or soon after 765/1363 but beginning in 675/1277 and written
by someone who was active as early as c. 1290.103
At the other end of the Ilkhanate, Sayf b. Muh.ammad b. Ya‛qūb al-Harawī
(commonly known as Sayfī), whose Ta’rīkh-nāma-yi Harāt (‘Historical
Account of Herat’) dates from c. 722/1322, provides a wealth of data on a
region not otherwise strongly represented in the Mongol period. Although
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this can claim to be the most substantial and informative of the local histo-
ries of Iran, Sayfī, who made extensive use of Rashīd al-Dīn’s work, is vague
regarding his other sources, telling us, for instance, that he gleaned his infor-
mation on Chinggis Khan’s campaigns from old men who had in turn heard
it from eyewitnesses.104 Among other works that furnish useful data are the
Ta’rīkh-i Sīstān, completed in c. 726/1326 (from which point we are
dependent on the Ih.yā’ al-mulūk, ‘The Recollection of Kings’, dating from
1028/1619, by Shāh H.usayn, a member of the ruling house);105 two histories
of the Qutlughkhanid dynasty in Kirmān (623–703/1226–1304), the anony-
mous Ta’rīkh-i shāhī-yi Qarākhit.ā’iyyān (‘The Royal History of the Qara-
Khitai [rulers]’; early 1290s) and the Simt. al-‛ulā li l-h.ad.rat al-‛ulyā (‘The

Necklace of Eminence for the Exalted Court’; 715/1315–16) of Nās.ir al-Dīn

Munshī, chief scribe in the Kirmān writing office (dīwān al-rasā’il wa
l-inshā’);106 the Shīrāz-nāma (‘The Story of Shīrāz’), a history of Fārs by Ibn
Zarkūb (d. 744/1343–4); for Yazd, two fifteenth-century compositions, Ja‛far
b. Muh.ammad Ja‛farī’s Ta’rīkh-i Yazd and Ah.mad b. H.usayn b. ‛Alī Kātib’s
Ta’rīkh-i jadīd-i Yazd (‘A New History of Yazd’);107 and a few histories devoted
to the various Caspian provinces, notably Awliyā’ Allāh Āmulī’s Ta’rīkh-i
Rūyān (764/1362–3) and the fifteenth-century Ta’rīkh-i T.abaristān-u
Rūyān-u Māzandarān by Sayyid Z.ahīr al-Dīn Mar‛ashī. In addition, the
general histories composed by authors resident in southern Iran are of great
value for local affairs: Was.s.āf ’s work provides much information on Fārs,
Kirmān, Luristān and neighbouring regions, while Shabānkāra’ī’s Majma‛
al-ansāb contains a section on the local dynasty of Shabānkāra.

Non-narrative sources from the Ilkhanate

The sources composed under the Ilkhans, plentiful as they are, belong
almost exclusively to the narrative genre. The only general biographical
dictionary that survives from Mongol Iran is Talkhīs. Majma‛ al-ādāb fī
mu‛jam al-alqāb (‘Abridgement of The Collection of Belles-Lettres in the
Lexicon [Arranged by] Honorifics’) by Kamāl al-Dīn ‛Abd al-Razzāq Ibn
al-Fuwat.ī (d. 723/1323). Until 679/1280–1 he was librarian of the observa-
tory founded at Marāgha by Hülegü’s astronomer and minister, Nas.īr al-Dīn
T.ūsī, and thereafter he lived in Baghdad. The value of this work for the
Mongol era has recently been flagged up by Professor Devin DeWeese.
Even in its abridged form, the dictionary has regrettably not survived in its
entirety. Possibly it was never completed, since numerous entries amount to
just a name or little more than that, and some individuals are allotted two
entries – and even, in the case of Kamāl al-Dīn ‛Abd al-Rah.mān (the close
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confidant of the Ilkhan Tegüder Ah.mad), three entries.108 From the extant
portion (from ‛izz to muwaffaq), the Talkhīs. nevertheless appears to be a
remarkable work inasmuch as, unlike earlier Muslim biographical diction-
aries, it does not confine its scope to Muslims but includes notices on
Christian and Jewish dignitaries and even on the pagan Mongols Chinggis
Khan and Hülegü.109 Narrower in scope is the Nasā’im al-ash.ār min lat.ā’im
al-akhbār (‘The Fragrances of Enchantment among the Perfume-Boxes of
Histories’), a useful collection of biographies of Persian wazirs, completed
in 725/1325 by the above-mentioned Nās.ir al-Dīn Munshī Kirmānī.
Otherwise, for biographical dictionaries we are dependent on those
composed within the Mamlūk empire (see below).

Apart from a brief treatise on finance (dating, probably, from the early
1260s) by Nas.īr al-Dīn T.ūsī,110 two guides to Ilkhanid administration have
come down to us: Sa‛ādat-nāma (‘Auspicious Book’) of ‛Alā’ al-Dīn Falakī
Tabrīzī, an accounting manual which dates from Öljeitü’s reign (1304–16),111
and Dastūr al-kātib fī ta‛yīn al-marātib (‘A Handbook for the Scribe on the
Assignment of Ranks’) by Muh.ammad b. Hindū Shāh Nakhchiwānī, finished
under the Jalayirid Sultan Shaykh Uways in Iraq after 1360 but begun before
the end of the Ilkhanate and describing institutions of that earlier period.
There is little by way of correspondence on the part of Ilkhanid statesmen,
and the most prominent candidates, of whom two produced the most
important narrative histories, disappoint us. Professor Jürgen Paul found
virtually no information about contemporary events in the letters of Shams
al-Dīn Juwaynī and his brother ‛Alā’ al-Dīn, the historian and governor of
Baghdad;112 while Alexander Morton demonstrated, conclusively in my
view, that Rashīd al-Dīn’s correspondence (mukātibāt), long regarded as a
valuable resource but containing some decidedly suspect letters, is a
fifteenth-century fabrication.113
The contribution of hagiographical sources to social and, to a lesser
extent, economic history is undeniable. I have made limited use of the
S.afwat al-s.afā (‘The Purest of the Pure’) by Tawakkulī Ibn Bazzāz Ardabīlī
(written in c. 1358), a collection of anecdotes concerning the life of Shaykh
S.afī’ al-Dīn Ardabīlī (d. 735/1334), the ancestor of the Safawid Shahs. The
accent on miraculous activity and the general lack of chronological data, so
characteristic of the genre, render the work problematic. But, as has been
pointed out, its value is enhanced by the fact that it is a compilation of
(near-contemporary) testimonies rather than just a literary composition.114
And mention should be made, lastly, of the writings of ‛Alā’ al-Dawla
Simnānī (d. 734/1334), which, though concerned with spiritual matters,
refer to his own experiences prior to his withdrawal from Arghun’s service
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and throw a welcome light on the religious climate at the court of a pagan
Ilkhan.115

Jochid, Chaghadayid and Timurid sources

As far as we know, the ulus of Jochi produced no historians of its own
during the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries, and events in the khanate can
only with difficulty be reconstructed with recourse to a variety of external
sources: the chronicles of the client Rus´ principalities and (at least for the
period down to c. 1270) of Armenia; the oeuvre of Ilkhanid historians; and,
above all, histories composed in the Near Eastern territories of the Golden

Horde’s Mamlūk allies (see pp. 36–9).116 Apart from the early sixteenth-
century Tawārīkh-i guzīda-yi nus.rat-nāma, which amplifies the genealogies
of Jochi’s descendants found in the Mu‛izz al-ansāb (see below, p. 35),117 the
later historical works that have come down to us from the Golden Horde
territories after 1500 appear to be based exclusively on oral tradition.118
This is not to deny their value. Professor Uli Schamiloglu has highlighted
the information to be gleaned from these sources on the administrative
system of the Golden Horde, for instance,119 while DeWeese has argued
forcefully that the accounts of the conversions of the khans Berke and
Özbeg in the Ta’rīkh-i Dūst Sult.ān of Ötemish H.ājjī, dating from the 1550s,
afford an insight into how the Islamization process was recalled some
generations later.120
Although only a very incomplete account of its history can be assem-
bled without recourse to the Chinese material from the Yuan empire and to
indigenous documentation in Mongolian, Chaghadai’s ulus was slightly
better served than that of Jochi in terms of Muslim sources. We are fortu-
nate that Jamāl al-Qarshī, having completed his Persian-Arabic dictionary,
al-S.urāh. min al-S.ih.āh., in 681/1282, appended to it a historical supplement
(mulh.aqāt) that carries Central Asian history down through the Mongol
period to the accession of Qaidu’s son Chapar in 702/1303. The author, who
was born at Almaligh in 628/1230–1, spent much of his early life at the
court of the local client dynasty. After being obliged to leave the town in
662/1264, he travelled extensively in western Turkestan, but was based at
Kāshghar, where he was evidently close to the headquarters of the line of
administrators founded by Mas‛ūd Beg; he also attended Qaidu’s court on
several occasions. He owed his nisba (from Tu. qarshi, ‘palace’) to his prox-
imity to one or the other centre of power.121 Despite these illustrious
connections, however, the Mulh.aqāt bi l-S.urāh. is less detailed than we
might wish, and we remain heavily indebted to the material on Qaidu and
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his Chaghadayid confederates that is provided by the Ilkhanid historians,

Rashīd al-Dīn, Was.s.āf and Qāshānī.
After Jamāl al-Qarshī the Chaghadayid territories did not produce
another indigenous historian for 250 years. Some details of the fourteenth-
century history of the ulus can be gleaned from the historical works
composed in Iran under the Timurids, the dynasty founded by Temür-i
lang (‘the Lame’; hence ‘Tamerlane’; d. 807/1405), a member of the Turco-
Mongol tribe of the Barlās (Barulas) in Transoxiana. The most notable are
the Z.afar-nāma of Niz.ām al-Dīn Shāmī (806/1404); the Z.afar-nāma of
Sharaf al-Dīn ‛Alī Yazdī (828/1424–5), to which was added subsequently a
prologue (muqaddima) on the history of the Mongols prior to Temür; and

the Muntakhab al-tawārīkh-i Mu‛īnī of Mu‛īn al-Dīn Nat.anzī (817/1414).122

Mention should also be made of the Mu‛izz al-ansāb (‘Homage to
Genealogies’) composed in Iran in 830/1426–7 by an unknown author who
reproduced Rashīd al-Dīn’s Shu‛ab-i panjgāna (though with some modifi-
cations and without the forms in Uighur script), continued it down to his
own era, and added an extensive section on Temür, his dynasty and their
military officers;123 he possibly also used a slightly earlier genealogical work
by H.usayn b. ‛Alī Shāh, which has survived in a unique manuscript.124
Although the account of the Chaghadayid khans in the Shajarat al-atrāk
(‘Tree of the Turks’) – an abridgement of the lost Ta’rīkh-i arba‛a ulūs-i
chingīzī (‘History of the Four Chinggisid Uluses’) attributed to Temür’s
grandson Ulugh Beg (d. 853/1449)125 – largely follows Yazdī’s muqaddima,
it adds the odd detail. The most prolific Timurid author was Shihāb al-Dīn
‛Abd-Allāh b. Lut.f-Allāh al-Khwāfī, known as H.āfiz. -i Abrū (d. 833/1430),
whose oeuvre included not only the above-mentioned Dhayl-i Jāmi‛
al-tawārīkh but also a reworking of Shāmī’s Z.afar-nāma, a general history,
Zubdat al-tawārīkh (‘The Cream of Histories’), and a geography that is
especially rich on the history of Khurāsān.
The works of Shāmī, Yazdī and Nat.anzī must be used circumspectly. The
chronology supplied by the first two authors for the Chaghadayid khans
after c. 1309 is faulty, the regnal dates being approximately seven years too
early.126 Nat.anzī’s account of the Jochids and Chaghadayids, apparently
based on oral tradition, is skeletal and somewhat superficial; his chronology
is even less reliable, and the khans’ genealogy here bears little relation to
that found in Yazdī’s work or in the Mu‛izz al-ansāb.127 It should be empha-
sized, lastly, that both Shāmī and Yazdī (the latter in particular) present a
distorted version of Chaghadayid history that ascribes a quite unrealistic
influence and authority to Temür’s forebears, beginning with the thirteenth-
century noyan Qarachar of the Barulas (below, pp. 386–7).
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While the western half of the Chaghadayid ulus was from 771/1370
under the rule of Temür and his descendants, the eastern khanate – the
region that came to be known as ‘Mughalistān’ – retained its autonomy. In
952/1546 Mīrzā H.aydar Dughlāt, a member of a Turco-Mongol family that
had governed Kāshghar, Āqsū and neighbouring cities since the late four-
teenth century and was closely linked to the eastern Chaghadayid khans,
finished his Ta’rīkh-i Rashīdī, which he dedicated to the reigning khan,
Sult.ān ‛Abd al-Rashīd. Clearly one of his chief purposes was to glorify his
own dynasty and to project its currently exalted standing back into an
earlier epoch, much as Timurid historians had done for Temür’s forebears.
Apart from Yazdī’s Z.afar-nāma, from which he borrows lengthy passages

on Temür’s campaigns in Mughalistān, H.aydar relied upon oral sources. He

begins with the accession of the khan Tughluq Temür in 748/1347 and
furnishes a useful account of that ruler’s conversion to Islam. But for these
early decades he is otherwise remarkably uninformative. This is due only in
part to the Chaghadayid Mongols’ allegedly profound ignorance of their
past; H.aydar also had no desire to commemorate the deeds of khans who
were not Muslims.128 As a result, the history of the ulus between c. 1340 and
the mid-fifteenth century lies in a darkness relieved only fitfully by details
from the works of Timurid authors.

Authors writing after c. 1265 in the dominions of the Mongols’ enemies

The Mamlūk empire in Egypt and Syria – the Ilkhans’ principal rival –
generated an impressive volume of historical writing.129 There are, firstly,
biographies of individual Mamlūk Sultans, notably two lives of al-Z.āhir
Baybars: al-Rawd. al-zāhir fī sīrat al-malik al-Z.āhir (‘The Blossoming
Garden concerning the Life of al-Malik al-Z.āhir’), by the secretary of his
chancery (kātib al-inshā’), Muh.yī’ al-Dīn Ibn ‛Abd al-Z.āhir (d. 692/1292);
and the incomplete Ta’rīkh al-malik al-Z.āhir by a Syrian, ‛Izz al-Dīn
Muh.ammad b. ‛Alī Ibn Shaddād (b. 613/1217; d. 684/1285);130 and two lives
of al-Mans.ūr Qalāwūn: Ibn ‛Abd al-Z.āhir’s Tashrīf al-ayyām wa l-‛us.ūr fī
sīrat al-malik al-Mans.ūr (‘The Glorious Days and Epochs in the Life of
al-Malik al-Mans.ūr’); and al-Fad.l al-ma’thūr min sīrat al-sult.ān al-malik
al-Mans.ūr (‘The Best to be Transmitted from the Life of Sultan al-Malik
al-Mans.ūr’) by his nephew Nās.ir al-Dīn Shāfi‛ b. ‛Alī al-‛Asqalānī (d.
730/1330).131 Since all these authors were in the Sultans’ service and Ibn
‛Abd al-Z.āhir at least wrote his Rawd. at Baybars’ request, their works should
be regarded as ‘official’ history, somewhat parallel with that of Rashīd
al-Dīn. They reflect the vantage point of rulers who, possessing as they did
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in Cairo from 660/1262 a serviceable ‛Abbasid Caliph, articulated their

own universalist claims in opposition to those of the Mongols.
The Mamlūk dominions also produced a number of important chroni-
cles, whose interrelationship is a complex matter. Of those that emanate
from Egypt, two were the work of Rukn al-Dīn Baybars al-Mans.ūrī
al-Dawādār (d. 725/1325), a mamluk commander who rose to be briefly
deputy (nā’ib al-salt.ana) to Sultan al-Nās.ir Muh.ammad b. Qalāwūn: the
more voluminous Zubdat al-fikra fī ta’rīkh al-hijra (‘Choice Thoughts on
Hijrī History’), of which the extant portion ends in 709/1309–10; and an
abridged version, Tuh.fat al-mulūkiyya fī l-dawlat al-turkiyya (‘The Gift for
Kings concerning the Dynasty of the Turks’), which goes down to

711/1311–12 and includes data not found in the longer work. Baybars
al-Mans.ūrī clearly harboured a particular interest in the Sultanate’s foreign
relations, and Zubda incorporates valuable material on Saljuqid Rūm and
on the Golden Horde.132 Abū Bakr b. ‛Abd-Allāh b. Aybak Ibn al-Dawādārī,
himself the son of another mamluk officer, composed his lengthy Kanz
al-durar wa-jāmi‛ al-ghurar (‘The Treasury of Pearls and the Choicest
Hoard’) in or just after 735/1334–5.133 Al-Nahj al-sadīd wa l-durr al-farīd fī
mā ba‛d ta’rīkh Ibn al-‛Amīd (‘The Correct Path and Peerless Achievement
in the Sequel to the History of Ibn al-‛Amīd’) by the Coptic Christian histo-
rian, al-Mufad.d.al Ibn Abī l-Fad.ā’il, completed in 759/1358, was designed as
a sequel to the work of his uncle al-Makīn (see p. 22). He appears to have
used al-Nuwayrī (p. 38 below) and frequently cites the Zubda in addition to
the two biographies of al-Z.āhir Baybars; but he takes the narrative down to
c. 1341 and further inserts details not found elsewhere for the earlier
decades.134
Important historical works were also produced in the Mamlūk province
of Syria. Abū Shāma survived the imposition of Mamlūk rule by only a few
years; but his history was continued, some decades later, by al-Muqtafā
(‘The Sequel’) of his fellow Damascene, ‛Alam al-Dīn al-Qāsim al-Birzālī
(d. 739/1339), whose interests extended beyond the city and who includes
useful material on the Ilkhanate. But for our purposes the three most valu-
able Syrian sources are al-Dhayl Mir’āt al-zamān, a continuation of Sibt. Ibn
al-Jawzī’s work by Qut.b al-Dīn Mūsā al-Yūnīnī (b. 640/1242; d. 726/1326);
H.awādith al-zamān wa-anbā’uhā wa-wafayāt al-akābir wa l-a‛yān min
abnā’ihi (‘The Events and Reports of the Era and the Obituaries of the Great
and Notable among its Sons’) by Shams al-Dīn Muh.ammad b. Ibrāhīm
al-Jazarī (b. 658/1260; d. 739/1338); and the voluminous Ta’rīkh al-Islām of
Shams al-Dīn Abū ‛Abd-Allāh Muh.ammad al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348),
which we have already encountered (p. 20).135 All three works include
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under each year not merely significant events but also death notices, as al-
Jazarī’s title makes explicit. Al-Dhahabī also produced a shorter work,
Duwal al-Islām (‘Islamic Regimes’). Al-Mukhtas.ar fī akhbār al-bashar (‘The
Abridged History of Humanity’), written by the penultimate Ayyubid
Sultan of H.amā, al-Mu’ayyad Abū l-Fidā Ismā‛īl b. ‛Alī (usually known
simply as Abū l-Fidā, d. 732/1331), has been cited more frequently, perhaps,
than it deserves. For the period prior to 659/1261 it is dependent on the
Mufarrij of Ibn Wās.il, who had been one of Abū l-Fidā’s teachers, and has
no original value; though for his own lifetime the author supplies some
useful material. Two briefer histories, dating from the mid-fourteenth
century, were collected and edited by K. V. Zetterstéen in 1919. One of these,

an anonymous work attributed to ‘Author Z’, includes an eyewitness account

of the public acceptance of Islam by the Ilkhan Ghazan in 1295 which is for
the most part identical to that furnished by al-Jazarī.
Various geographical works contain substantial historical information.
Al-A‛lāq al-khat.īra fī dhikr umarā’ al-Shām wa l-Jazīra (‘The Most Precious
Valuables in the Account of the Amirs of Syria and the Jazīra’) by ‛Izz al-Dīn
Ibn Shaddād (d. 684/1285), mentioned above as one of Baybars’ biogra-
phers, is a topographical-historical dictionary, arranged first by region
and then in alphabetical order of place name, which frequently includes
details not found elsewhere regarding Mongol military operations.136 A
later geography, the Nukhbat al-dahr fī ‛ajā’ib al-barr wa l-bah.r (‘Select
Passages of the Age regarding the Marvels of Land and Sea’) of Shams
al-Dīn al-Dimashqī (d. 727/1327), tends to regurgitate data from earlier
Muslim geographers, but nevertheless offers some original information
for the Mongol-Mamlūk era.137
The value of the authors listed so far lies principally in supplementing or
modifying the accounts produced within the Mongol dominions: they tell
us about Mongol campaigns and about diplomatic contacts, and sometimes
they provide a more detailed narrative of events within Mongol Asia. But
two voluminous works from the Mamlūk empire are noteworthy for their
own discrete and connected surveys of Mongol affairs. One is the encyclo-
paedia Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Aspiration in the
Scribal Arts’) of Shihāb al-Dīn Ah.mad b. ‛Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (d.
733/1333), a clerk in the Mamlūk administration who had opportunities
for first-hand contact with Mongols and who included a section on the
Mongol world in the historical part of the work.138 The other is the encyclo-
paedia of Shihāb al-Dīn Ah.mad Ibn Fad.l-Allāh al-‛Umarī (b. 700/1301; d.
749/1349), Masālik al-abs.ār fī mamālik al-ams.ār (‘The Paths of Observation
among the Civilized Regions’),139 which devotes an even more substantial
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section to the Mongols (and scattered references to them elsewhere).

Al-‛Umarī made considerable use of Juwaynī’s work. But as the head of the
Mamlūk Sultan’s correspondence office (dīwān al-inshā’), he was excep-
tionally well-placed to acquire intelligence about far-flung regions that
were in diplomatic contact with his master, including Muslim India and the
Mongol lands. In his introduction to the Mongol empire, and his four chap-
ters on the principal Mongol khanates, al-‛Umarī frequently drew on infor-
mation from merchants as well as envoys. Not his least valuable characteristic,
however, is that he reflects the perspective on Mongol history of the Sultans’
allies, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, which differed markedly from that
of the Ilkhans and which we should otherwise have lacked.

Information concerning one or two figures active in Mongol Iran can be

found also in the biographical dictionaries produced in the Sultanate,
notably the Wafayāt al-a‛yān (‘Obituaries of the Great’) by Ibn Khallikān
(d. 681/1282) and its continuation, Tālī kitāb Wafayāt al-a‛yān, by the
Christian author Ibn al-S.uqā‛ī (d. 726/1326). Rather more Mongol entries,
however, appear in the vast biographical dictionary of Khalīl b. Aybak al-
S.afadī (d. 764/1363), al-Wāfī bi l-wafayāt (‘The Entirety of Obituaries’), and
the same author’s shorter A‛yān al-‛as.r (‘The Notables of the Era’, confined
to figures who died within his own century): some were based on the Masālik
of his friend al-‛Umarī, although al-S.afadī also utilized the obituaries in
al-Dhahabī’s Ta’rīkh al-Islām and other, unknown sources. Like the work of
Ibn al-Fuwat.ī (p. 32 above), al-S.afadī’s two dictionaries not only include
Mongol khans who had embraced Islam – Ghazan, the Chaghadayid khan
Tarmashirin and the Jochid khan Özbeg, for instance – but also list infidels:
Chinggis Khan, Hülegü, Qubilai and Özbeg’s predecessor Toqto’a, and
Mongol military officers like Qutlugh Shāh.140 Al-Wāfī would in turn
be the basic source for the (more frequently quoted) fifteenth-century
biographical dictionaries of Ibn H.ajar al-‛Asqalānī and Ibn Taghrībirdī.
It is necessary to say a few words about Indo-Muslim historians.
The Muslim authors who recorded events within the independent Delhi
Sultanate regrettably fall short of contemporary Mamlūk historians in
various respects. After Jūzjānī’s work there are, apart from the historical
poems (mathnawīs) of Amīr Khusraw (d. 725/1325), no surviving narrative
sources prior to the Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī of D.iyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (758/1357),
and the slightly earlier Futūh. al-salāt.īn (‘Victories of Sultans’) of ‛Abd
al-Malik ‛Is.āmī, written around 1350 in the breakaway Deccan Sultanate;
both sources have been used for this book, although their treatment of
Mongol invasions is relatively limited. ‛Is.āmī’s work, in verse and modelled
on Firdawsī’s eleventh-century Shāh-nāma (‘The Book of Kings’), approxi-
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mates more closely to a conventional (if at times cursory) history. Baranī’s,

although ostensibly designed as a continuation of Jūzjānī’s T.abaqāt, is a far
more abstract work, which attempts to use the sultans’ reigns as the vehicle
for a philosophy of Islamic history.141
This section would be incomplete without the most celebrated Arab
Muslim traveller of the Middle Ages. Shams al-Dīn Abū ‛Abd-Allāh
Muh.ammad b. ‛Abd-Allāh al-Lawātī al-T.anjī, better known as Ibn Bat.t.ūt.a,
left his home town of T.anja (Tangier) in 725/1325 and visited a large part of
the Mongol world, namely the territories of the Ilkhanate, the Golden
Horde and the Chaghadayid khanate, before proceeding to the Indian
subcontinent, where he stayed for some years. His account of his travels,

Tuh.fat al-nuz.z.ār fī gharā’ib al-ams.ār (‘Gifts to Onlookers regarding the

Marvels of the Civilized Regions’), completed in 757/1356, greatly enriches
our knowledge of conditions in the two northerly Mongol khanates.142 But
the work is problematic. His aim – or the vicarious aim of Ibn Juzayy, to
whom, on the orders of the Sultan of Morocco, Ibn Bat.t.ūt.a dictated his
account following his return home – was to visit every region of the world
where Islam had penetrated. This led to a skewing of the narrative, with the
result that the chronology is at times internally inconsistent143 and the
authenticity of some of the journeys is deeply suspect. It is now certain that
Ibn Bat.t.ūt.a’s journey to Bulghār is spurious and that the itinerary from the
Volga to Constantinople, of which the stages are puzzlingly vague, includes
both authentic information (as on the semi-legendary dervish Sārī Salt.ūq)
and material that is purely fanciful.144 The section on Yuan China, too,
contains material that simply does not harmonize with the reality at the time
of his alleged stay. On the other hand, even the suspect portions of the narra-
tive incorporate details that ring true.145 Tuh.fat al-nuz.z.ār will be used here
only in those contexts where we have no reason to doubt its author’s veracity.

Historians writing in the Ilkhanid realm but outside the

Sunnī Islamic tradition
Among historians who represent minority communities within the Ilkhanid
empire, one group comprises two Shī‛ī authors, of whom the more famous
is the astronomer Nas.īr al-Dīn T.ūsī (b. 597/1201; d. 672/1274). Exchanging
the service of the Ismā‛īlī Assassins for that of Hülegü in 653/1255,146 he
witnessed the destruction of the Caliphate, of which he later wrote a short
account, Kayfiyyat-i wāqi‛a-yi Baghdād (‘The Particulars of the Fall of
Baghdad’). This is found appended to some manuscripts of Juwaynī’s
Ta’rīkh-i jahān-gushā, was also incorporated in the history drafted by
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Negübei b. Mas‛ūd, and can be seen in turn to have served as a source for
both the Mukhtas.ar of Ibn al-‛Ibrī (Bar Hebraeus; below) and Rashīd
al-Dīn.147 In terms that recall Juwaynī’s Möngke, T.ūsī’s Hülegü is described,
at the very beginning of the account, as ‘the bearer of security and tranquil-
lity (māda-yi amn-u amān)’.148 This was far from being merely conventional
sycophancy; for Shī‛īs, the end of the hated Caliphate was a matter for
rejoicing. During the advance on Baghdad, according to Rashīd al-Dīn,
T.ūsī had encouraged Hülegü with a forthright assurance that no dire conse-
quences would follow the capture of the city.149
The other Shī‛ī writer is S.afī’ al-Dīn Abū Ja‛far Muh.ammad b. ‛Alī b.
T.abāt.abā, known as Ibn al-T.iqt.aqā, who dedicated his Kitāb al-Fakhrī to the

Ilkhanid governor of Mosul, Fakhr al-Dīn ‛Īsā, in 701/1302. For our

purposes, the chief interest of this work, which is mostly concerned with
the history of the Caliphate down to 656/1258, is its meagre anecdotal
material on the Mongol epoch. On several occasions the author expresses
opinions about the conquerors, and about the ‛Abbasid regime prior to its
fall, that are balanced and judicious. It has been suggested that even as a
Shī‛ī he regretted the passing of the old order.150 But he was clearly not
without sympathy for the Ilkhans: it is he who tells us that following the
capture of Baghdad, Hülegü summoned the ‛ulamā and asked them for a
ruling whether a just infidel king was preferable to an unjust Muslim
Sultan.151
We gain a different perspective from the second group, namely Christian
writers. The Jacobite (Monophysite) Christian prelate Gregorius Abū
l-Faraj, better known as Bar Hebraeus or (to employ the Arabic form) Ibn
al-‛Ibrī (b. 1225–6; d. 1286), was metropolitan of Aleppo in 1260, when he
was briefly taken prisoner by the Mongols. Four years later he received
from Hülegü a puk.dānā (‘patent’, i.e. a yarligh) for the office of Maphrian
of the East. Master of a repertoire that embraced, inter alia, theology and
spirituality, dialectics, physics and astronomy, Bar Hebraeus composed
two historical works, one in Syriac and the other in Arabic. The Syriac
Maktbānūt zabnē, which was continued down to 1296 by his brother Bar
S.awma, is in two parts. The first (usually termed the ‘Chronography’) is a
world history from the Creation, though far less ambitious in its geograph-
ical scope than that of Rashīd al-Dīn. Bar Hebraeus made extensive use of
Juwaynī’s history, albeit with some significant alterations;152 but he also
recounts as an eyewitness a good many events that are not mentioned else-
where. The second part, the Chronicon ecclesiasticum, is primarily a history
of the Jacobite Church but includes the occasional detail relevant to the
history of the Mongol regime.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

In his Syriac work, Bar Hebraeus provides an insight into one aspect of
the early Mongol period – the reaction of a community that had been deliv-
ered from the restrictions of Muslim sovereignty and in some measure
emancipated. He notices how the Mongols spared the Christian population
during the massacre in Baghdad; and he mourns the death of Hülegü and
his chief wife, Doquz Khatun, calling them ‘two great lights, who made the
Christian religion triumphant’.153 Yet although his career coincided with
what might have appeared a golden age for eastern Christians, Bar Hebraeus
does not conceal episodes in which the Christians suffered under Mongol
rule.154 His continuator, Bar S.awma, is still less sanguine. Whereas Juwaynī
had complained that the Mongols used to hold Muslims in high regard but

did so no longer, Bar S.awma makes exactly the same observation about
their attitude towards Christians, on the grounds that the Mongols had all
converted to Islam (a reference to the recent conversion of the Ilkhan
Ghazan in 1295).155
Bar Hebraeus’ other historical work, the Mukhtas.ar ta’rīkh al-duwal
(‘The Abridgement of the History of States’), has a different slant. Since Bar
S.awma describes this as an uncompleted rendering into Arabic of the
Chronography, begun by his brother not long before his death at the request
of the Muslim community in Marāgha (the Mukhtas.ar goes down only as
far as 1284),156 it was long taken to be a mere Arabic abridgement of the
Syriac world history. But it has been demonstrated that the Mukhtas.ar not
only lacks some of the detail in the Chronography but also includes material
omitted from it – for instance, a version of Nas.īr al-Dīn T.ūsī’s account of
the fall of Baghdad.157 Where the Chronography, moreover, was a Christian
history modelled on that of Michael the Syrian (d. 1199), the Mukhtas.ar is
addressed to a Muslim readership and, in terms of literary style and
coverage, fits squarely into the traditional genre of Islamic historiography.158
A still more vivid image of shifting Christian fortunes in the early
Ilkhanid decades than that furnished by Bar Hebraeus’ Syriac history is to
be gained from Tash‛ītā d-mār Yahballāhā qātōlīkā d-madnhā wad-rabban
S.āwmā sā‛ōrā gawānāyā (‘The History of Mar Yahballāhā, Catholicos of the
East, and of Rabban S.awma, Visitor-General’). A Syriac biography of the
Nestorian Catholicos, Mar Yahballāhā III (d. 1317), who arrived in Iran
from the Qaghan Qubilai’s dominions in 1281 together with his friend and
mentor, Rabban S.awma (d. 1294), it incorporates an abridged version of
S.awma’s own account (in Persian and now lost) of his journey to Western
Europe in 1287–8 as ambassador for the Ilkhan Arghun. For our purposes,
Tash‛ītā is most useful when describing the privileged position of the
churches under the pagan Ilkhans and their tribulations at the hands of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

their Muslim fellow citizens both before and after the conversion. It has
recently been suggested that the author may have been Yahballāhā’s
successor, Mar Timotheos II, one-time metropolitan of Irbil, and that he
was attempting an apologia for Yahballāhā, whose policies had manifestly
borne no fruit.159
The Georgian Chronicle (K‛artʽlis ts‛chovreba), a compilation of texts
drafted by a series of anonymous annalists and assembled in the early
eighteenth century, contains some information useful for our purposes.
But Armenian historians make up a far more important group.160 Greater
Armenia, much of which had been subject to the Georgian kingdom
but which passed under Mongol overlordship in 1236–9, produced three

historians: Kirakos Ganjakets‛i (originating, that is, from the Muslim town
of Ganja in Arrān), who completed the first part of his work in 1241 but
continued writing until not long before his death in 1272; Vardan Arewelts‛i
(d. c. 1270); and Grigor Aknerts‛i, writing in c. 1313. The first two of these
authors provide a sober and measured account of events; Grigor’s material
is at times somewhat fanciful. A more tendentious view is presented by
Step‛anos Orbelian (d. 1304), from the ruling family of Siounia (Siwnik),
who tends to exaggerate the Mongol rulers’ Christian sympathies and to
magnify the influence of his own father and kinsmen with the Ilkhans.
Various sets of annals were produced within the kingdom of Lesser
Armenia, or Cilicia, whose monarch, Het‛um I (1226–70), was tributary to
the Mongols and visited Möngke’s court in 1254. One of these chronicles
goes under the name of the king’s brother, the Constable Smbat (d. 1269),
who had himself conveyed Het‛um’s submission to the Qaghan Güyüg
in 1246.
King Het‛um’s nephew and namesake, usually known as Hayton of
Gorighos, was an exile from Lesser Armenia who had become a canon in
the Premonstratensian Order and might therefore seem to belong in a
different category. Having arrived in Western Europe on a mission from the
kingdom of Cyprus, he was asked by Pope Clement V to draft a treatise
outlining the best course for a future crusade against the Mamlūks. Hayton’s
La Flor des Estoires de la Terre d’Orient (‘The Flower of the Histories of the
East’), completed in 1307 (a Latin version appeared later that year), includes
a survey of the history of the Mongol khanates. At first sight, Hayton’s
credentials appear unimpeachable. He tells us that for the period from
Chinggis Khan until Möngke’s accession he has used ‘Tartar’ histories; from
Möngke down to Hülegü’s death Hayton is reliant on what he has heard
from his uncle, Het‛um I; and from Abagha’s accession he is writing from
his own experience; at an earlier juncture he mentions having personally
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

taken part in the invasion of Syria by Ilkhanid forces in 1303.161 Yet the
work is deeply flawed. In the first place, some of the material is wrong and
some simply myth.162 Like Step‛anos Orbelian, Hayton engages in literary
nepotism, giving a greatly inflated account of the privileges that Möngke
had conferred on King Het‛um in 1254. But he also purveys a tendentious
version of Mongol history, glossing over Ghazan’s recent conversion to
Islam.163 This is because La Flor des Estoires was a work of propaganda,
designed to bring about the military alliance between the Mongols of Iran
and the Latin West that Hayton saw as the sole hope for his beleaguered
homeland.164 In other words, he was an Armenian noble first and foremost;
the crusade theorist and historian took second place.

Christian European observers

The final corpus of material to be surveyed here is the work of Christians
from Latin Europe.165 The Devisament du monde (‘The Different Parts of
the World’) associated with the celebrated Marco Polo, member of a
Venetian merchant family, is a problematic source. Polo accompanied his
father and uncle on their second journey to the Far East and was himself in
Qubilai’s service from c. 1274 until 1290.166 The book is not a travel account,
however, like those mentioned in the next paragraph, but a survey of the
known world; it is therefore not always clear when it is retailing personal
experience and when it relies on hearsay. The manuscript tradition, more-
over, is extremely complicated. It has been argued that Polo travelled no
further east than the Pontic steppe and hence was never in China, though
this view has now been totally discredited.167 Some useful observations can
nevertheless be gleaned from the Devisament. I have tried to confine myself
to information found in what is probably the earliest text, dating from the
first years of the fourteenth century, represented by the Paris ms. fr. 1116
and recently edited by Philippe Ménard.
More important are the members of the newly founded Mendicant
Orders of Friars, the Franciscans and Dominicans, visiting the Mongol
dominions either as accredited diplomatic envoys or as missionaries (or as
both) in the years 1245–55. Of the three embassies that Pope Innocent IV
despatched in 1245, one, led by the Dominican Ascelin, travelled to the
Near East and met with the Mongol general Baiju in Greater Armenia in
1247. Although the Historia Tartarorum written by one of its members,
Simon de Saint-Quentin, is lost, the lengthy excerpts preserved in the
Speculum historiale of a fellow Dominican, Vincent de Beauvais (c. 1253),
include precious material on Mongol dealings with the Saljuq Sultanate of
Rūm that is unavailable elsewhere.168 The Franciscan John of Plano Carpini
(Giovanni del Pian di Carpine), who headed another embassy, by way of the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Pontic steppe to the Qaghan Güyüg’s court in Mongolia (1245–7), has left
us one of the most important Western sources on the empire in his Ystoria
Mongalorum. A fellow Franciscan, who calls himself ‘C. de Bridia’ and who
composed a Hystoria Tartarorum (1247), commonly known as the ‘Tartar
Relation’, may have been one of Carpini’s companions who remained at a
Mongol encampment in the western steppe. The Itinerarium of a third
Franciscan, William of Rubruck, who visited Mongolia in a missionary
capacity, again by the northerly route across the steppe (1253–5), is a highly
detailed and vivid account of his experiences, addressed to the French King
Louis IX.169

Over the next century, further groups of Mendicants travelled within

the Mongol dominions. Although some served as papal ambassadors –
notably the Franciscan Giovanni di Marignolli, who headed an embassy
from Pope Benedict XII to the last Yuan Emperor Toghon Temür (reigned
as Shundi) in the years 1338–45 – the majority went in search of a harvest
of souls. They included the Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce, who was
active in the Near East in the 1290s. Among his works are a Liber peregrina-
tionis (‘Book of Pilgrimage’), which furnishes a description of the Ilkhanate
at this time, and five Epistolae ad ecclesiam triumphantem (‘Letters to the
Church Victorious’), produced in reaction to the loss of Acre (1291). To
underpin the Friars’ proselytizing activity, the papacy in the early four-
teenth century created two vast archiepiscopal sees, centred respectively on
the qaghan’s capital Khanbaligh (Dadu, formerly Zhongdu and close to the
site of modern Beijing) and on Sult.āniyya, in north-western Iran and one of
the residences of the Ilkhan Öljeitü. The second Archbishop of Sult.āniyya,
the Dominican Guillaume Adam, composed Tractatus quomodo Sarraceni
sunt expugnandi (‘How to Defeat the Saracens’) in 1318. Primarily a crusade
treatise, it furnishes a good deal of information on the contemporary
Ilkhanate, which Guillaume saw as a potential ally for the Latin West. Letters
written by Franciscans, lastly, supply us with useful material on the obsta-
cles to their Order’s missionary efforts in two of the Mongol polities that
were undergoing the process of Islamization: the Golden Horde in the
1320s and the Chaghadayid khanate in the years 1338–40.
Christian authors, and particularly those who wrote when Islam was
making great strides within the Mongols’ ranks, frequently betray an animus
against Muslims and their religion. Yet the light that such authors – and this
applies especially to Carpini and Rubruck – throw on Mongol beliefs and
customs makes them an indispensable supplement to the material found in
Muslim sources. They help us to stitch together, as it were, the canvas on
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

which the histoire événementielle of the Persian and Arabic sources is

embroidered.

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The Mongols and The Islamic World From Conquest To... - (1 MEDIEVAL AUTHORS On The MONGOLS)

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The Mongols and The Islamic World From Conquest To... - (1 MEDIEVAL AUTHORS On The MONGOLS)

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1

MEDIEVAL AUTHORS ON THE MONGOLS

I n her authoritative study of the Persian province of Fārs during the

Mongolian and other Far Eastern material

The only other Mongolian historical source known to have existed is

Muslim observers contemporary with the early Mongol invasions:

source to yield extensive information is al-Kāmil fī l-ta’rīkh (‘The Perfection

from one geographical location to another, sometimes, it seems, with the

l-Muz.affar Yūsuf b. Qizūghlī (b. c. 581/1185; d. 654/1256), commonly called

Muslim historians writing under the pagan Ilkhans:

Whereas Ibn al-Athīr had been ambivalent concerning Jalāl al-Dīn,

hearing of Ögödei’s mild reputation and seeking to submit to his rule.56 A

In this respect a yet more serviceable instrument lay to hand. Whatever

al-ikhwān (‘The Consolation of the Brethren’) Juwaynī himself described

point in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Of these, Bayd.āwī’s

strongly reminiscent of the Akhbār. As Dr George Lane has signalled,74 this

Muslim writers active in Iran following the conversion of the Ilkhans

Here again it is incumbent on us to be wary of the bureaucrat’s confidence

Rashīd al-Dīn’s background differed markedly from Juwaynī’s. If Juwaynī

of the Shengwu. True, the material is simply incorporated alongside passages

include the corresponding date in the Turco-Mongol twelve-year Animal

Ilkhan Abū Sa‛īd (716–36/1316–35). In 733/1332–3 Muh.ammad b. ‛Alī

furnishing information not available elsewhere.95 It was an abridged version

Local histories from the Ilkhanid territories

Mongol era. In other words, we do not have accounts written, say, by

Necklace of Eminence for the Exalted Court’; 715/1315–16) of Nās.ir al-Dīn

Non-narrative sources from the Ilkhanate

Jochid, Chaghadayid and Timurid sources

his Chaghadayid confederates that is provided by the Ilkhanid historians,

the Muntakhab al-tawārīkh-i Mu‛īnī of Mu‛īn al-Dīn Nat.anzī (817/1414).122

on Temür’s campaigns in Mughalistān, H.aydar relied upon oral sources. He

Authors writing after c. 1265 in the dominions of the Mongols’ enemies

in Cairo from 660/1262 a serviceable ‛Abbasid Caliph, articulated their

an anonymous work attributed to ‘Author Z’, includes an eyewitness account

section to the Mongols (and scattered references to them elsewhere).

Information concerning one or two figures active in Mongol Iran can be

mates more closely to a conventional (if at times cursory) history. Baranī’s,

Tuh.fat al-nuz.z.ār fī gharā’ib al-ams.ār (‘Gifts to Onlookers regarding the

Historians writing in the Ilkhanid realm but outside the

Ilkhanid governor of Mosul, Fakhr al-Dīn ‛Īsā, in 701/1302. For our

Christian European observers

Over the next century, further groups of Mendicants travelled within

which the histoire événementielle of the Persian and Arabic sources is

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