Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran

A Persian Renaissance

George E. Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134431021
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

An account of the re-emergence of Persia as a world player and the reassertion of its cultural, political and spiritual links with Turkic Lands, this book opposes the way in which, for too long, the whole period of Mongol domination of Iran has been viewed from a negative standpoint. Though arguably the initial irruption of the Mongols brought little comfort to those in its path, this is not the case with the second 'invasion' of the Chinggisids. This study demonstrates that Hülegü Khan was welcomed as a king and a saviour after the depredations of his predecessors, rather than as a conqueror, and that the initial decades of his dynasty's rule were characterised by a renaissance in the cultural life of the Iranian plateau.

1
THE SOURCES

After being proclaimed Great Khan of the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppe lands Chinggis Khan and his progeny went on to establish the largest ever, continuous land Empire on earth. At its apogee in the mid-thirteenth century this empire was to stretch from the China Sea and Manchuria in the east to the Carpathians and Anatolia in the west, from the Sind valley in the south to the lands of the Bulghars and the Ural Mountains in the north. The Mongols’ advent was so resounding and sudden that their impact has been recorded in the history books of all the lands and cultures they overran. A Persian witness has summarised this initial impact in one harrowing sentence, ‘They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed’.² In Russia a chronicler from Novgorod who was unfortunate enough to have witnessed the legendary reconnaissance trip of the Mongol generals, Subedai and Jebe, in 1222, expressed the stunned and horrified bemusement of the peoples of the Russian steppes when he wrote:

No one exactly knows who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is . . . God alone knows who they are and whence they came out.³

If nothing else the legacy of the Mongol decades is a wealth of rich source material fully expressive of the impact they created on all whose paths they trampled.

The lands of Persia and Anatolia became one of the divisions of this great Empire and it was these western lands that were supposedly royally bequeathed to Hülegü Khan, a grandson of Chinggis through his son Tului, by his brother, Möngke. The effects of the Mongol-led nomadic movements into Persia and the west were profound and this has been reflected in the prodigious output of superior histories and chronicles as well as other literary and artistic expressions which have become a hallmark of the Il-Khanate years of ascendancy, from Hülegü’s destruction of the Ismāīlīs at Alamūt in 1256 until the death of Aba Saīd in 1335. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the marked contrast between the initial in-roads of the Mongol armies and military governors into Iran and the later advance of the armies under Hülegü Khan and the establishment of a Mongol-dominated administration. The initial encounters between the advancing tribes of Turan and the population of Iran were often hostile and aggressive. When, over a generation later, Hülegü led his host southward the meeting was, in contrast, one between a king and his subjects and for the most part one of welcome. The Il-Khans did not come as conquerors nor did they come as aliens. The ordus in which the Mongol princes were nurtured were not the rough camps of the steppe but were more akin to mobile cities. These cities were alive with the life of the empire, intellectual, cultural and political. The élite of the Persian city-states were no strangers to the Mongol ordus. For the Turco-Persian establishment, the Mongols were in many ways welcome allies in their struggle to regain the glory of a Persian past. The reigns of Hülegü and his son and successor, Abaqa, reflected this changed relationship.

Though source material for the Mongol invasion and their subsequent rule of Western Asia is hardly scarce and can be found both extant and indirectly in a number of languages including Persian, Arabic, Chaghataid Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac as well as eastern languages such as Mongolian and Chinese, what is sadly lacking is the type of administrative documentation which to this day continues to delight and excite the historians of the Ottoman Empire. The extant source material for the Mongol invasion and the rule of the Il-Khans for the most part was written by high ranking politicians, leading clerics, literary figures and ranking administrative notables rather than anonymous bureaucrats filling royal cellars with the minutiae of the kingdom’s daily life. Much that would have been recorded must have been lost. Unlike the Mamluks whose capital, Cairo, remained a continuous and principal city throughout their own rule and, after their demise, continued until the present day as a capital city, the Il-Khanid capital changed from the original site at Maragheh, today a leafy, provincial market town, to Tabriz and then to, now largely abandoned, Sultaniyya over the eight decades of their rule. It was only the most valued of their written material which was able to survive the ravages of Persia’s very turbulent history and often harsh climate. Even the enormous lengths to which the Grand Vizier, Rashīd al-Dīn went in order to ensure that his work was saved for posterity, failed to preserve more than a fraction of the manuscripts that he had copied of his writings.⁴ Though these chronological sources are rich with the flavour of their times and alive with the political intrigues of the feuding royal courts their content is invariably subjective to varying degrees in a way in which dry lists of figures and sackfuls of uncommented upon data would never be. It is the lack of hard administrative data and the subjective nature of much of the narrative material which can act as both a boon and a bane to the historian. A boon in the sense that the sources are extremely conducive to speculation and interpretation but a bane in that so much speculation and clever interpretation can rarely be backed up by hard statistical data and reliable figures.

Persian had become an important medium of communication for much of the Mongol Empire by the mid-thirteenth century and Persian merchants, bureaucrats and administrators could be found throughout the Mongol dominated lands. The Persian histories written from this period onward reflect this universality and the great Persian chronicles have become sources not only for knowledge of local events but for the study of the medieval world as a whole. Two early histories of this period are the Tārīkh-i Jahān Gushā (History of the World Conqueror) of Aṭā Malik Juwaynī completed around 1260 and the żabaqāt-i Nāsirī⁵ of Minhāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī similarly completed around 1260. They were written by unacquainted authors writing from radically different circumstances but whose subject matter was often convergent. They are representative of other histories composed at that time in that, although partisan, the direction and influence of this bias is not difficult to detect and compensate for and for the most part the histories are reliable. These two particular histories clearly demonstrate this reliability in that one was composed by a leading member of Hülegü’s administration and someone obviously sympathetic to the Toluid cause while the żabaqāt was completed in the Delhi Sultanate by an exile from the west who held no love for the Mongols and blamed them for the destruction of his homeland and who was also beyond their reach, and yet both histories are in agreement over the basic chronology and accounts and sometimes even their assessment of those turbulent years.

Juwaynī (1226–83) came from a distinguished line of high court officials who had reputedly served under rulers from the Abbāsids, the Saljuqs and the Khwārazmshāhs before excelling themselves under the Il-Khans. He had been brought up after the horrors of the initial Mongol invasions of Persia in the royal ordu with presumably other nobles of Mongol, Turk and Persian background and spent his whole working life in the service of the Mongol rulers of his homeland. He wrote with a unique insider’s knowledge of the Mongol administration and society and of many of the events he came to describe. Before entering Hülegü Khan’s service in c.1255 Juwaynī by his own account had oft travelled east.⁶ Appointed to Hülegü’s service by Arghun Aqa, the former Mongol administrator of Iraq ‘Ajam and Anatolia, Juwaynī was to accompany his King on the triumphant march across Khorasan to the new capital at Maragheh in Azerbaijan and was an active witness to the destruction of the Ismāīlī strongholds in the Elborz mountains in 1256. It was Juwaynī’s hand that drafted the Fath-nameh of Alamūt,⁷ the official account of the final fall of the Imam of the Assassins, the young Rukn al-Dīn Khurshāh. Juwaynī was crucial to the negotiations which brought about the surrender of the ‘Heretics’’ fortresses and it was Juwaynī who was first given access to the famed libraries of Alamūt to salvage whatever was his want. After the fall of the Abbāsid caliphate in 1258 he was made governor of Baghdad, a post he held almost until his death. Juwaynī has often come under attack for his supposed sycophancy to his masters with historians from the nineteenth-century d’Ohsson who considered Juwaynī and his like, ‘the most corrupt persons, taking service under these ferocious masters, obtained, as the price of their vile devotion, wealth, honours and the power to oppress their countrymen’⁸ to the modern scholar David Ayalon berating him for his ‘servile flattery’⁹ not only to the Mongols but to his master’s particular branch of the Chinggisid family. This dismissal of Juwaynī as a ‘partisan panegyrist’¹⁰ of the Tului Chinggisids and Ayalon’s ‘nauseous’¹¹ reaction to Persian ceremonial politeness is vastly overstated and imbues literary filigree with undeserved gravity. Even E. G. Browne’s half hearted defence of the man ‘whose circumstances compelled him to speak with civility of the barbarians whom it was his misfortune to serve.’¹² does grave injustice to an able administrator, an astute historian, a gifted writer and moreover a man who gained the praise and respect of his compatriots and co-religionists then and in succeeding generations and whose family has been revered in Iranian literary tradition prior to and subsequent to his time.¹³ David Morgan’s partial rehabilitation of Juwaynī’s reputation¹⁴ is to be welcomed in that it has at least started a trend not only of re-examining the historians and bureaucrats of the Il-Khanate but also of reappraising the nature of Mongol and in particular Il-Khanid rule itself.

The existence of an independently written parallel history with which to contrast and compare Juwaynī’s work has done much to strengthen the credibility of the Jahān Gushā. Minhāj al-Dīn Sarāj Jūzjānī’s żabaqāt-i Nāṣirī is basically a history of the Ghūrids of central Afghanistan, though it purports to be a universal history, and it is broken into twenty-three sections opening with an account of Adam and the patriarchs and closing with a long section on the Mongols until 1260. Jūzjānī was born and then entered service under the Ghūrids (c.1000–1256).¹⁵ He was witness to the excesses of the Mongols and was forced to flee his native lands in 1226 and seek refuge in the Sultanate of Delhi. His attitude towards the conquerors of his homeland is never left in any doubt. Throughout the section detailing the irruption of the Mongols in Islam, Chinggis’s name is repeatedly coupled with the epithet ‘mal‘ūn’ or ‘the Accursed’ and Mongols and their soldiers never merely die but are invariably ‘consigned to Hell’ in contrast to Muslim casualties who always ‘attained martyrdom’. Jūzjānī delights in recording the gory details of the atrocities committed by the Mongols though he is usually careful to cite the sources of his information and his own assessment of their reliability. The basic outline of both accounts of the initial Mongol invasion and the subsequent arrival of Hülegü Khan are in agreement in both histories which reflects credit on both chroniclers and more importantly provides a reliable framework upon which to judge other sources as to their accuracy and impartiality.

Though, with understandable reasons, Jūzjānī remains openly antagonistic toward the Mongols this does not blind him to any virtues that they might have possessed. Where praise was due, such as in matters of military prowess and discipline, Jūzjānī does not hold back.

The Chinggis Khan moreover in [the administration of] justice was such, that, throughout his whole camp, it was impossible for any person to take up a fallen whip from the ground except he were the owner of it; and, throughout his whole army, no one could give indication of [the existence of] lying and theft.¹⁶

Nor does he refrain from treating Chinggis Khan’s son and successor, Ögödei Qa'an, who was generally credited with having shown compassion and great sympathy for his Muslim subjects, with respect and positive treatment. For his part Juwaynī did in no way attempt to whitewash the effects of the Mongol invasions and he made no attempts to conceal the horrors which his masters rained upon those who were foolish enough to oppose them. Juwaynī’s history in particular became a major source for the subsequent historians who were to write about the Mongol years and, regardless of these later writers’ attitude to the subjects of their pens, their view of the historian and Mongol administrator, Juwaynī, is generally one of the greatest regard.

What quickly becomes evident when dealing with the source material which relates to this period of the early Il-Khanate is that not only an assessment of the actual material is important but that an assessment of the compiler of the material and his situation and circumstances is also of crucial significance. A later, perhaps better known historian of the Il-Khanate was the Grand Vizier of Ghazan Khan (1295–1304), Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318), whose remarkable Collection of Histories¹⁷ was commissioned by his king to ensure that the glorious history of the Mongols would not fade from men’s memories, demonstrates this point. Though he made extensive use of Juwaynī’s Tārīkh-Jahān Gushā, Rashīd al-Dīn as chief minister and official historian of the Il-Khanate, had access to a vast wealth of material from Mongol and Chinese sources as well as from the rich libraries of the domains under his own control. He wrote in a straightforward, unadorned Persian and it is this plain factual presentation of his subject matter, in such glaring contrast to other Persian writers of the time, that has lent his work such authority and given his interpretation of events their general acceptance by so many subsequent historians. A great deal of his history concerns his own time and the administrative reforms of his master Ghazan Khan which he had been instrumental in formulating. Ghazan was the Il-Khan who made Islam the official religion of the Mongols of Persia and ended the so-called interregnum¹⁸ of infidel rule in Persia. Rashīd al-Dīn details at great length the ambitious programmes of reform that his sovereign, the Pādishāh of Islam, would implement in order to put to an end the grave injustices, the widespread anarchy and corruption, and the chronic economic plight of the country that existed on his ascension of the Il-Khanate throne. Edicts, proclamations and legal rulings are given verbatim and, of course, since it was Rashīd al-Dīn himself who was responsible for drawing up, planning and implementing these laws these documents are undoubtedly the genuine articles. On the basis of these histories with their unique documentary contents and unembellished style, the picture of Ghazan that emerged and has persisted is that of the king who saved Persia from barbarian rule, re-established Islam in its rightful place in the life of the country, and lifted the exploitative, wealth draining and destructive taxation practices of Mongol oppression. However, as David Morgan has pointed out,¹⁹ Rashīd ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• TRANSLITERATION
• 1: THE SOURCES
• 2: DIVINE PUNISHMENT OR GOD’S SECRET INTENT?
• 3: BAGHDAD AND ITS AFTERMATH
• 4: THE UNEASY BORDERS
• 5: THE PROVINCES
• 6: THE JUWAYNĪS
• 7: KHWĀJA NAṢĪR AL-DĪN ṬŪSĪ
• 8: POETS, SUFIS AND QALANDARS1132
• 9: RETURN OF A KING
• APPENDIX: MAPS
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY