Ilkhanate: Hulagu Khan's Mongol Realm in Persia (1256)

The Ilkhanate was the Mongol state founded in Iran by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, after his army entered Iran in 1256. For about eighty years Hulagu’s descendants, the Ilkhans, ruled Iran, Iraq, the southern Caucasus and much of Anatolia. Their realm began with the destruction of Baghdad and ended as a Muslim Persian monarchy that produced some of the finest art and historical writing of the Islamic world.

Background: Hulagu’s expedition

In 1251 Möngke became Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. He sent his brother Kublai against Song China and another brother, Hulagu, to the west with a large army drawn from all branches of the family. Hulagu’s tasks were to destroy the Nizari Ismailis of Iran and to force the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad to submit.

Möngke ordered that a share of the fighting men of every princely family should join the expedition, and he added about a thousand households of Chinese engineers skilled with siege engines and incendiary weapons. Hulagu left Mongolia in 1253 and advanced slowly, gathering supplies and allies as he went. He crossed the Oxus (Amu Darya) at the start of 1256. Within a year the Ismaili fortresses had fallen, including Alamut, and their imam Rukn al-Din Khurshah had surrendered. Historians usually date the start of the Ilkhanate to this campaign of 1256.

Conquest: Baghdad and Syria

The caliph al-Musta’sim refused to submit. In early 1258 Hulagu’s army besieged and sacked Baghdad, and the caliph was put to death (see Siege of Baghdad). The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, which had lasted five centuries, came to an end.

In 1260 the Mongols took Aleppo and Damascus. When news arrived that Möngke had died, Hulagu withdrew most of his forces east. The army he left behind under Kitbuqa was destroyed by the Mamluks of Egypt at Ain Jalut on 3 September 1260, the first major defeat of a Mongol army in the region. The Euphrates became the long-term frontier.

A khanate of its own

The death of Möngke and the war between Kublai and Ariq Böke broke the unity of the empire. Hulagu sided with Kublai, and in return his family’s rule over Iran was recognised. The title il-khan, often translated as “subordinate khan”, reflected this formal loyalty to the Great Khan in China.

The new state soon had enemies on two sides. From 1262 Hulagu fought his cousin Berke of the Golden Horde, a Muslim, over the pastures of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. In the west the Mamluk sultans, especially Baybars, defended Syria for decades. Hulagu died in February 1265 and was buried on an island in Lake Urmia.

Rulers and politics

Hulagu’s son Abaqa (1265-1282) consolidated the realm but was defeated by the Mamluks at Homs in 1281. His successors included Tekuder (1282-1284), who took the Muslim name Ahmad, and Arghun (1284-1291), a Buddhist who sent the Nestorian monk Rabban Sauma to Europe in 1287 to propose an alliance against the Mamluks. Gaykhatu’s attempt to introduce Chinese-style paper money in 1294 failed within weeks.

The most important ruler was Ghazan (1295-1304). In June 1295 he converted to Islam, and Islam became the religion of the dynasty and its Mongol elite. Ghazan and his vizier Rashid al-Din reformed taxation, coinage and land grants to restore an economy damaged by decades of exploitation. His brother Öljeitü (1304-1316) built a new capital at Soltaniyeh, crowned by a vast domed mausoleum.

Government and economy

The Ilkhans were few in number compared with their subjects, so they governed through Persian administrators. The Juvayni brothers were the best known: Shams al-Din served as chief finance minister for some twenty years, while Ata-Malik governed Baghdad and wrote a famous history of the Mongol conquests, the Tarikh-i Jahangushay (“History of the World Conqueror”).

The early decades were hard for the settled population. The conquests had wrecked irrigation systems, and Mongol princes and commanders levied taxes and requisitions with little control. Many villages were abandoned, and revenue fell. Ghazan’s reforms of the 1290s and early 1300s tried to fix tax rates, pay soldiers with land grants called iqta instead of plunder, and standardise coins, weights and measures.

Trade, by contrast, flourished. Tabriz became one of the great markets of Eurasia, where Venetian and Genoese merchants met traders from India, Central Asia and China. Envoys and goods moved along the roads between Iran and the Yuan court in China, and the two Mongol states exchanged physicians, astronomers and craftsmen.

Religion and the conversion to Islam

The first Ilkhans followed the traditional Mongol religion and favoured Buddhism, while protecting Christians and Jews. Hulagu’s chief wife Doquz Khatun was a Nestorian Christian, and Christian communities enjoyed favour for a time. Buddhist temples were built in several Iranian cities. Muslims, the great majority of the population, were treated as one community among many and lost the privileged position they had enjoyed under the caliphs.

Ghazan’s conversion in 1295, encouraged by the commander Nawruz, changed this. Buddhist temples were destroyed and churches and synagogues attacked in the years that followed, though Ghazan later tried to restrain the violence. His successor Öljeitü, who had been baptised a Christian as a child, became a Muslim, first as a Sunni and later as a Shia, a choice that foreshadowed the later Shia identity of Iran.

The Ilkhans also sought allies in Christian Europe against the Mamluks. Abaqa sent envoys to the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, and Arghun wrote to the kings of France and England. Letters from Arghun and Öljeitü to the French kings survive in Paris archives. No joint campaign ever took place.

Culture and science

The Ilkhanate linked Iran directly to China through the Mongol network. Chinese motifs such as dragons, phoenixes and lotus flowers entered Persian painting and ceramics, and Persian artists developed a new style of manuscript illustration.

In 1259 Hulagu founded an observatory at Maragheh under the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, which gathered scholars from across the Islamic world and beyond. Rashid al-Din’s Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) attempted a history of the whole known world. The Great Mongol Shahnama, made around the 1330s, is one of the most celebrated illustrated manuscripts of the Persian epic.

Collapse

Abu Sa’id (1316-1335) made peace with the Mamluks in 1323 at Aleppo. When he died in 1335 without a male heir, no candidate could command general support. Rival commanders raised puppet khans, and the realm fragmented among successor dynasties such as the Jalayirids in Iraq and the Chobanids in Azerbaijan. Later in the century much of the region fell to Timur.

Timeline

• 1253: Möngke sends Hulagu west with a large army.
• 1256: Hulagu enters Iran; the Ismaili fortresses surrender.
• 1258, February: Hulagu sacks Baghdad and ends the Abbasid caliphate there.
• 1259: Foundation of the Maragheh observatory.
• 1260, 3 September: Mongol defeat by the Mamluks at Ain Jalut.
• 1265, February: Death of Hulagu; Abaqa succeeds.
• 1295, June: Ghazan converts to Islam and soon takes the throne.
• 1323: Peace treaty with the Mamluk Sultanate.
• 1335: Death of Abu Sa’id; the Ilkhanate breaks apart.

Why it matters

The Ilkhanate began with one of the most destructive conquests in Middle Eastern history, yet it ended as a patron of Persian culture and Islamic learning. It fixed the frontier between Iran and the Mamluk world, connected Iran with China, and left lasting achievements in astronomy, history writing and the arts.