The Ilkhanate was the khanate of the Mongol world that ruled over Persia, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and parts of Anatolia from 1256 to 1335. It was the westernmost of the four major khanates of the Mongol Empire, and it was the one most directly engaged with the Islamic world. It was founded by Hulagu Khan, a son of Tolui and a brother of the Great Khan Möngke (and, by extension, of Kublai), and it was one of the most important states in the medieval Middle East. Its name — ilkhan, “subordinate khan” — comes from the title used by its early rulers, who were theoretically subordinate to the Great Khan in Beijing.
This page is a complete overview of the Ilkhanate and the Mongol rule in Persia. The narrative below is drawn from the chronicles of Persian historians such as Juvaini, Rashid al-Din, and Wassaf, from the chronicles of Armenian historians such as Kirakos Gandzaketsi, from the testimony of European travelers such as Marco Polo, and from the modern scholarship that has reshaped our understanding of the Ilkhanate in the last fifty years.
The Founding of the Ilkhanate
The Ilkhanate was founded in 1256, when Hulagu Khan — a son of Tolui, and a brother of both the Great Khan Möngke and Kublai Khan — was sent west by Möngke to conquer the Islamic world. The campaign was launched in 1253; it culminated in the sack of Baghdad in February 1258 and in the establishment of a Mongol state covering Persia, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and parts of Anatolia. The sack of Baghdad was one of the most consequential events of the thirteenth century, and it marked the end of the Abbasid Caliphate, which had been a major power in the Islamic world for five centuries. (The Mamluk Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, founded in 1250, became the principal surviving Islamic power.)
The founding of the Ilkhanate was a major political event. The state was based on a synthesis of Mongol, Chinese, and Persian administrative traditions — the jarghuchi (judge), the bitigchi (scribe), and the yam (postal relay) from the Mongol tradition; the divan (chancery) and the iqta’ (land grant) from the Persian. The Ilkhanate was a major factor in the political, cultural, and economic life of the Middle East for the next century, and it was the first state in the Islamic world to use a Mongol ruling dynasty as its head.
The Reign of Hulagu (1256-1265)
Hulagu was the founder of the dynasty, not its longest-serving ruler. He held the title for nine years (1256–1265), during which he established the Ilkhanate as a recognized state — not just a Mongol army of occupation. The two major instruments of state he created were the jarghuchi (judges, drawn from the Borjigin line and answerable to the Ilkhan) and the bitigchi (scribes, drawn from the semu — the Central Asian, Uighur, and Chinese officials he brought with him). He also built the Maragheh Observatory (1259), the most important astronomical facility of the medieval world; it was directed by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who produced the Zij-i Ilkhani (the “Ilkhanic Tables,” 1272), a set of planetary tables that remained standard for two centuries.
Hulagu remained a Buddhist, a follower of his mother’s family, the Tibetan Nikaya tradition. After his death in 1265, his son Abaqa (r. 1265–1282) maintained the same religious pluralism: Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish officials served at his court, and his consort Doquz Khatun — a Nestorian Christian — was a major political figure in her own right.
The Conversion to Islam
The most important of the changes in the Ilkhanate was the conversion of the ruling class to Islam in 1295, when Ghazan Khan (r. 1295–1304) converted on his accession. The conversion was largely a political decision, taken in order to win the support of the Muslim majority of the population, to settle a divided Ilkhanid court, and to break with the Buddhist and Christian factions that had dominated the reign of Abaqa (r. 1265–1282) and Arghun (r. 1284–1291). Ghazan’s vizier Rashid al-Din — himself a Jewish convert to Islam — was the principal architect of the policy. Ghazan’s successor Öljeitü (r. 1304–1316) wavered between Sunni, Shia, and Christian, before settling on Shia Islam in 1310. After Öljeitü, the Ilkhanate was a Muslim state.
The conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam did not end the wars with the Mamluks. The Mamluks and the Ilkhanids had been at war since 1260, and they remained at war for the rest of the Ilkhanate’s existence. Ghazan invaded Syria in 1299 (taking Damascus briefly) and 1303; Öljeitü invaded in 1312; Abu Sa’id (r. 1316–1335) fought the last major Mamluk–Ilkhanid war in 1323. The two powers were not allies, in any sense, after Ghazan’s conversion; the standard narrative that the conversion produced a Mamluk–Ilkhanid rapprochement is wrong. What the conversion did produce was a realignment within the Mamluk–Ilkhanid–Golden Horde triangle: the Ilkhanate, now Muslim, joined the Mamluks in opposing the Golden Horde, which remained non-Muslim until the 14th century. The Mamluks, in turn, did not change their fundamental hostility to the Ilkhanate.
The Reign of Ghazan (1295-1304)
Ghazan Khan’s reign was the high-water mark of the Ilkhanate. He inherited a treasury in poor shape after Arghun’s war with the Golden Horde (the Berke–Hulagu war of 1262 had not ended, and the Ilkhanate was fighting on two fronts), and he used the conversion to Islam to consolidate power at home. His principal reforms were:
- A new tax assessment based on a census of agricultural land (the 1303 jibal survey), the first systematic land survey in Persia since the Seljuks.
- A new coinage in silver (the dirham) and copper, replacing the chaotic paper-money experiment of Geikhatu (1294).
- A new postal relay (yam) covering the main routes from Tabriz to Baghdad, to Sultaniyya, and to the Caucasus.
- A new patronage of learning, principally through his vizier Rashid al-Din, who assembled the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles), c. 1300–1311 — the first world history in any language.
Ghazan’s wars with the Mamluks were, by his own measure, the limit of his success. He took Damascus briefly in 1299, and won the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar ( Marj al-Saffar, 22 April 1303) against the Egyptian Mamluk army, but failed to hold Syria and could not press on into Egypt. He died in 1304, of an illness contracted during the 1303 campaign.
The Fall of the Ilkhanate
After Abu Sa’id’s death in 1335 without a clear heir, the Ilkhanate fragmented. The competing factions (the Chobanid and the Jalairid, the Muzaffarid, the Kartids of Herat, the Sarbedars of Khorasan) ruled for the next 50 years. The Jalairid dynasty (1335–1432), founded by Hasan Buzurg, took Tabriz and continued the line of Ilkhanid culture; the Timurid conquest of Tabriz in 1385–1395 effectively ended any centralized rule. The last Ilkhanid pretender, a puppet, was killed in 1353. The successor states ruled Persia for the next century, and were absorbed by the Timurid and then the Aq Qoyunlu and Safavid empires in turn.
The Legacy of the Ilkhanate
The Ilkhanate left the deepest imprint of any of the khanates on the political culture of the modern Middle East. The Ilkhanid coinage remained the standard in Iran and Iraq for 200 years after the dynasty’s fall; the Ilkhanid land-tenure categories (iqta’, soyurghal) became the standard categories of the Jalairid, Timurid, and Ottoman administrations; the Ilkhanid divan (chancery) was the direct ancestor of the Safavid divan of the early 16th century.
The cultural legacy is at least as deep. The Jami’ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din is the model for all later Persian world histories, and it is the first world history to give equal weight to Chinese, Indian, Persian, and European traditions. The Maragheh Observatory and the Zij-i Ilkhani are the foundation of Persian mathematical astronomy. The Ilkhanid Rab’-e Rashidi (Rashidi Quarter) in Tabriz — a planned academic and medical quarter founded by Rashid al-Din in the early 14th century — was one of the first planned academic institutions in the Islamic world.
The legacy is also negative. The Ilkhanate’s frequent wars with the Golden Horde (1262–1317) and the Mamluks (1260–1323) weakened all three of the western Mongol states; the sack of Baghdad in 1258 destroyed the Abbasid caliphate and, with it, the symbolic center of the Islamic world for centuries. The modern state of Iran does not descend from the Ilkhanate in any administrative line; it descends from the Safavid (1501–1736), which was a fresh Persian imperial project in a different family. The legacy of the Ilkhanate is real, but it is also complicated.
Sources
- Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (London: Pearson Longman, 2005).
- Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- David Morgan, The Mongols (2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), ch. 5.
- George Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).
- Linda Komaroff, ed., The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002) — the catalogue of the major Ilkhanid exhibition.
- John Andrew Boyle, trans., The History of the World Conqueror by Juvaini (2 vols., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958).
- W. M. Thackston, trans., A Critical Edition of the Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1998–1999).
- George Lane, Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule (Westport: Greenwood, 2004) — for the broader Mongol context.
- Reuven Amitai, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) — the standard treatment of the early Mamluk–Ilkhanid wars.