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History and legend in the Jāmi` al-tawārikh: Abraham, Alexander, and Oghuz Khan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2015

STEFAN KAMOLA
STEFAN KAMOLA*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, skamola@princeton.EDU
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Abstract

This article explores the historical writings of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318) as part of a programme of political legitimisation for the Mongol Ilkhans of Iran. By considering both volumes of the Jami` al-tawārikh alongside one another and in their political context, it reveals aspects of the text that get lost when the dynastic and world history are treated in isolation. Rashid al-Din's presentation of legendary figures of communal identity from Perso-Islamic and Turko-Mongol traditions responds to immediate political conflicts between his patrons and their neighbours, the Jochid Mongols of the Volga region and the Mamluks of Egypt. In the relative absence of documentary evidence, court-sponsored narrative chronicles can in this way inform our understanding of ruling ideology during the period.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 2015, pp. 555 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2015 

Ever since Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318) wrote his dynastic history of the Mongols, the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni (Blessed history of Ghazan), for the Ilkhan Ghazan (1295–1304), the work has been a key source for the study of the Mongol past. As early as 1330, Hamd Allāh Mustaufi lists it among his sources for the Tārikh-e gozida (Select history), and a century later Hāfez-e Abru took Rashid al-Din's work as the basis for his own universal historiographical projects.Footnote 1 Modern Western scholars have embraced Rashid al-Din's history with equal eagerness ever since the French ambassador to the Ottoman court, Gabriel de Guilleragues, sent a manuscript of the work to Louis XIV (1643–1715). In 1710, the senior François Pétis de la Croix, based on his son's translation of the Guilleragues manuscript, called Rashid al-Din “the most learned historian of his age”, but it took another century for any portion of the work to appear in print in the West.Footnote 2 Since then, European and American historians have relied on the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni for all narrative histories of the Mongols.

This dynastic history formed only the first volume of a larger historical compendium, the Jāmi` al-tawārikh (Collection of histories), that Rashid al-Din assembled on the instruction of Ghazan's brother and successor Öljeitü (1304–16).Footnote 3 The second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh contained a world history spanning both time (with a universal history in the Perso-Islamic tradition) and space (with summary histories of other parts of Eurasia).Footnote 4 This second volume has not received the same attention as a historical source as has the dynastic history, since it consists mainly of translations from sources in various languages, many of which are known.Footnote 5 Instead, Rashid al-Din's world history has become the playground of art historians, in large part due to two manuscripts – one Arabic and one Persian – which featured prominently at a series of exhibitions of Persian art in London and the United States in the 1920s.Footnote 6 Since then, while the dynastic history of Volume One continues to inform studies of Mongol history, Volume Two has been central to identifying and studying an international style of book painting that developed at the scriptorium that Rashid al-Din endowed to reproduce and distribute his works.Footnote 7

This article is an initial attempt to bridge certain gaps in existing scholarship on the Jāmi` al-tawārikh that have arisen from the habit of scholars to consider the two volumes in isolation from one another and their text in isolation from visual and material aspects of their manuscript witnesses. Two impulses drive this study: first, that the dynastic history of the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni can shed light on book culture in the years before the creation of deluxe copies of the larger compendium, and second, that the world history of the second volume addresses specific political concerns at the Ilkhanid court. Given the paucity of documentary evidence from Ilkhanid Iran, this article aims to demonstrate how court-sponsored narrative chronicles, our richest set of sources for the Ilkhanate, can augment our understanding of ruling ideology during the period.Footnote 8

At issue here is how Rashid al-Din redeploys legendary histories of communal origin and identification from Judeo-Islamic, Hellenistic, and Turko-Mongol traditions to construct a meaningful history for his patrons. While explicitly an aide de memoire of the Mongol past, the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni confronts urgent questions of the period such as the cosmological acceptability of the Mongol conquest of Islamic lands and the ongoing conflicts between the Ilkhans and their Mamluk and Jochid neighbours.

This article will deal most extensively with Rashid al-Din's treatment of Oghuz Khan, the legendary eponymous ancestor of the Oghuz confederacy of Turks that included the Qınıq clan of the Saljuqs. The early history of the legend of Oghuz, known since the time of Ibn al-Dawādāri (d. after 1335) as the Oghuznāma, is outlined below.Footnote 9 Rashid al-Din engages this legend in two places in the Jāmi` al-tawārikh. The first is a short summary of Oghuz's life situated early in the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, where it serves to fit the Mongols into a universal world genealogy traced back to the pre-Islamic prophets.Footnote 10 The second is the earliest lengthy prose elaboration of the legend and appears as part of the world history of the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh. There, Oghuz's life becomes a historical precedent and justification both for Hülegü's conquest of the Middle East and Ghazan's ongoing claims to superiority over the Jochid Mongols of the Volga basin and the Mamluks of Egypt.

Alexander the Great plays a (for him unfamiliar) subordinate role in the discussion of heroic legend in the Jāmi` al-tawārikh. Like Oghuz, he appears in two places in the compendium. His presence is felt in the Oghuznāma through a number of exploits attributed to Oghuz Khan but originating in the Alexander Romance tradition. While others have noted Rashid al-Din's debt to the Romance tradition, the mechanics and significance of Alexandrine stories in Mongol historiography have not been adequately treated.Footnote 11 Alexander also appears exactly where we would expect him in a Perso-Islamic universal history, situated in the narrative of kings after the last Kayānian Dārāb.Footnote 12 Like other portions of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, the pre-Islamic history is largely derivative, but in its presentation of this material it can cast significant light on Ilkhanid uses of the past.

Also treated here are two origin stories generally considered indigenous to the world of Inner Asian pastoral nomadism. The first of these is the story of Alan Qo’a, ancestress of the Mongol tribes, who according to the Secret history of the Mongols gave birth to three sons after being impregnated by a divine light.Footnote 13 The second is the Turkic story of Ergene Qun, according to which two families escaped the destruction of their tribe by taking refuge in a mountain enclosure, where they flourished until the time came that they could emerge once again.Footnote 14 This story had been a motivating mythic structure among the Turks as early as the sixth century ce.Footnote 15 As Christopher Atwood has shown, Rashid al-Din had access to the myth from a Mongol dynastic history, the Yeke tobchiyan (Great history) from the second half of the 1290s that also informed three surviving Tibetan histories.Footnote 16 This was just one of several versions of the Mongol past that were current in the late thirteenth century and to which Rashid al-Din had access, and Atwood meticulously demonstrates how surviving witnesses to these versions reveal deep discontinuity in how stories such as those of Alan Qo’a and Ergene Qun were told at the time.Footnote 17 Rather than treat the stories of Alan Qo’a and Ergene Qun as the ‘native’ histories of the Mongols into which Rashid al-Din introduces foreign stories from the Islamic cultural realm, I aim to show that the stories of Alexander and Oghuz, like those of Alan Qo’a and Ergene Qun, were part of a flexible body of founding myths available to Mongols of the imperial period. In short, this article does not present a story of Islamisation of the Turko-Mongol tradition. Instead, it shows how Turko-Mongol traditions, as well as those from Islamic and other contexts, were redeployed to formulate a new history pertinent to the circumstances of Ilkhanid rule.

Rashid al-Din emphasizes that, before he wrote the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, the records of Mongol history were disorganised and in the process of being forgotten.Footnote 18 This assertion serves to edify his patron Ghazan's decision to commission a dynastic history and thus should be read with some suspicion. However, it is at least clear that at the turn of the fourteenth century the memory of the Mongol past had no fixed form and could, therefore, have been told with reference to any combination of various bodies of mythic origin accounts then current in Eurasia. In addition to propagating Mongol history, I argue, the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni played an important role in establishing an official version of that history, one that has been transmitted to us through the work of Hāfez-e Abru, Pétis, and others. This seductive authenticity, however, should not blind us to the heterogeneous histories that informed the collective memory of the Mongols at the time of Rashid al- Din.Footnote 19 Just as Atwood has warned against “Secret history fundamentalism” in our reconstructions of the pre-imperial Mongol past, so too should we be wary of seeing in Rashid al-Din the definitive or inevitable account of Mongol dynastic history.

Historical background: Ilkhans, Jochids, and Mamluks

The Mongol conquest of the Middle East progressed unevenly over the space of forty years and three generations, from Genghis Khan's retributive raid of 1219–23 to Hülegü's stately mission of pacification and domination in the late 1250s.Footnote 20 Beginning in 1231 with the military occupation led by Chormaghun Noyan (d. 1241), the region of Arran and Azerbaijan, with its ample pasturage, became the centre of Mongol political activity in Southwest Asia. In subsequent decades, control of the region was increasingly contested between the Jochid Mongols established on the Qipchaq steppe and the Ögedeid and Toluid branches of the royal family.Footnote 21 The Jochids claimed the region as theirs according to the dispensation of territory by Genghis Khan among his sons, as preserved in the writings of Juvayni and `Umari.Footnote 22 The Ögedeids, and later the Toluids, who held the throne of Great Khan from the Mongol capital at Qaraqorum, asserted central imperial claims over the region's administration and taxation.

Hülegü's arrival in the Middle East marked a fundamental change in the governance of the region from an appointed military and civil administration to an imperial centre under the direct command of a member of the Chinggisid family. The events of his campaign established the geopolitical and diplomatic framework for the Ilkhanid dynasty that he initiated. Hülegü's establishment of a capital at Marāgha and the death of three Jochid princes who had accompanied his campaign crystallised the conflict between Toluid and Jochid claims to the region of Azerbaijan. This conflict was only further exacerbated by Hülegü's killing of the last Abbasid caliph shortly after the rise of the Muslim convert Berke to the Jochid throne.Footnote 23 In addition to these rising animosities with the Jochids of the north, the crushing defeat that the Mamluks inflicted on Hülegü's deputy Ket Buqa at `Ayn Jālut in 1260 initiated a war with Egypt that lasted almost as long as the Ilkhanate.Footnote 24 As Charles Halperin has shown, the Ilkhans obsessively prosecuted this war in the face of repeated military defeat, driven on by the maddening combination of the Mamluks’ battlefield superiority and their status as slaves both a priori as Mamluks and by virtue of their origins among the Qipchaq Turks, whom the Mongols claimed were a subordinate people of their empire.Footnote 25

These two conflicts – with the Jochids over Azerbaijan and with the Mamluks over Syria – were the defining struggles of Ilkhanid foreign policy. (A series of lesser conflicts along the eastern border with the Chaghatai Khanate had markedly less impact on Ilkhanid ideological or political expressions.) Significantly, direct Ilkhanid patronage of historiography emerged within the context of the Mongol-Mamluk war. While Persian histories (including those of Juvayni and Baydāwi and the anonymous Akhbār-e moghulān) had appeared under the earliest Ilkhans, these were all written for non-royal audiences.Footnote 26 Only in 1302, as Ghazan Khan embarked on the last of his series of campaigns into Mamluk Syria, do we see direct evidence for a royal interest in a history written not only about the dynasty, but for the dynasty.Footnote 27 While on campaign, Ghazan received the first three books of Shihāb al-Din Vassāf's continuation of Juvayni's history and he commissioned Vassāf to continue writing the history of the Ilkhanid dynasty.Footnote 28 Vassāf, like Juvayni and Baydāwi before him, had undertaken his work privately: it marks the bridge between early private (though elite) historical production and the royal patronage that marked the generation of Rashid al-Din. Rashid al-Din and Hamd Allāh Mustaufi each also connect the commission and composition of the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni to 1302.Footnote 29 We might also look to this moment as a commissioning date for a universal history that `Abd Allāh Qāshāni claims he wrote under Ghazan's direction and that Rashid al-Din later appropriated without attribution as the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh.Footnote 30

Thus, while Rashid al-Din's dynastic history is frequently treated as the apogee of Persian historiography under the Mongols, it should be understood within the immediate context for its commission, alongside the works of Vassāf and probably Qāshāni as well. All of these were part of Ghazan's effort to define his dynasty's ideological space in the face of Mamluk claims as protectors of Islam. The assembly of the second volume, containing but not limited to the universal history that Qāshāni had largely already written, had its own political context, namely the increasingly universalising ideology of Öljeitü. That stage of Rashid al-Din's historiographical work is not the primary subject of this essay. Instead, the following sections show how the historical works commissioned as part of Ghazan's fruitless march into Syria engaged the legendary figures of Alexander the Great and Oghuz Khan within Ilkhanid efforts to assert their military and ideological superiority over their Jochid and Mamluk rivals.

Oghuz and Alexander in Turko-Mongol historiography through the thirteenth century

At the time of the Mongol conquests, the Islamic world had recent experience of being ruled by a foreign nomadic elite. Since the mid-eleventh century, the descendants of Seljuq b. Duqāq enjoyed a gradually dissolving hold on secular power (saltanat) over Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia. These Seljuqids belonged to the Qınıq tribe of the Oghuz confederacy of Turks that migrated from Mongolia to Western Asia in the ninth century, and from there into Iran at the end of the tenth.Footnote 31 Any stories or traditions relating to the Oghuz confederacy would therefore have affected, or been affected by, the Seljuqs’ role as Sultans of the eastern Islamic world.

The presence of the Oghuz, or Ghuzz, Turks as an identifiable group in the written record over a long period has made this confederacy a focus for modern attempts to reconstruct the early tribal origins of modern Turkic peoples.Footnote 32 However, textual evidence for the Oghuz predating the Jāmi` al-tawārikh gives no evidence that origin myths existed for the confederacy before the early fourteenth century. The eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions and contemporary accounts from Tang China list the Oghuz among the peoples subject to the second Türkic Qaghanate of the seventh and eighth century. From these sources, it seems that the term oghuz at that time meant little more than “tribe” or some other unit of nomadic society. Early sources refer to the Uyghur as the toquz oghuz (Nine Oghuz), for which Chinese sources offer as a calque, jiu xing (Nine Clans/Surnames).Footnote 33

This limited meaning of oghuz as ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’ is seen as late as the eleventh century in Mahmud al-Kāshghari's dictionary of Turkic dialects, the Diwān lughāt al-tūrk. He calls the oghuz simply “a tribe of the Turks”, equating them with the Turkmen and specifying that they include the Qınıq tribe “to which our present [Seljuqid] Sultans belong”.Footnote 34 Elsewhere, Kāshghari offers a folk etymology for “Turkmen”, though he never offers any further explanation for the origin of the word oghuz.Footnote 35 Little over two centuries after Kāshghari, Rashid al-Din's account shows that a narrative history had supplanted this simple definition of oghuz with an origin myth of an eponymous ancestor named Oghuz Khan. Later versions of the legend clearly follow Rashid al-Din's account, so it has received probably the most attention of any section of the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh.Footnote 36

Within the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, the story of Oghuz comes just after the Perso-Islamic universal history and first among the various summary histories of the peoples of Eurasia.Footnote 37 Karl Jahn interprets this placement as an attempt to locate the history of Oghuz and his descendants in proximity to the Turkic dynasties that close out the Perso-Islamic universal history without including it among the Islamic dynasties of that narrative.Footnote 38 However, it is to be noted that, at the end of his first short summary of Oghuz's life, Rashid al-Din promises to include an extended version of the history of Oghuz as an appendix (dhayl) to the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni. While it is impossible to know whether the Oghuznāma that appears in the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh is identical to the dhayl that Rashid al-Din intended for the first volume, several characteristics of the text support such a reading. It is a primary goal of this article to show how the ideological connotations of Rashid al-Din's Oghuznāma support a reading of it as an appendix to the Mongol dynastic history.

The implications of reading Rashid al-Din's Oghuznāma as a supplement to the dynastic history of the Mongols become clear when we contrast it to a very different example of the legend of Oghuz. This is a verse version in Uyghur script found in a unique manuscript in Paris.Footnote 39 While disagreement exists over the dating of the manuscript, this versified text is notable since the version of the Oghuznāma it presents follows the contours of Turkic folklore. The newborn Oghuz matures with miraculous speed (§§1–2), nursing only once before requesting solid food (et ash sorma), speaking from the cradle, and reaching maturity after forty days. His body is described zoomorphically: “his feet like the feet of an ox, his wrists like the wrists of a wolf, his back like the back of a sable, his breast like the breast of a bear” (§2). Indeed, Oghuz's entire body is hairy, one of the better known features of Turkic origin stories appropriated into various cultural settings.Footnote 40 Oghuz's two wives come to him from a ray of light and from a lake, and on his campaigns of conquest he is led by a gray male wolf (§16 et al.), all common motifs from Turkic folklore.

The single manuscript of the Uyghur-script verse version of the Oghuznāma is almost certainly later in date than Rashid al-Din. It would be irresponsible to consider it a direct source for Rashid al-Din, though it has been treated that way.Footnote 41 The story that it presents, however, emerges from a Turkic cultural milieu that was far less Islamised than that of the post-Seljuq Middle East. Given that the basic contours of the two versions are the same, we can at least accept that they originate from a common body of folklore rooted in Turkic nomadic society. With this in mind, by noting key differences between the Uyghur-script verse narrative and Rashid al-Din's prose account of the Oghuznāma, we recognise the latter as a powerful commentary on contemporary events in Ilkhanid history. For example, Rashid al-Din replaces Turkic motifs with Islamic ones: in his rendering, the infant Oghuz refuses to nurse not in favour of solid food, but rather so that his mother might embrace monotheism.Footnote 42 Later, Oghuz demands the same commitment from his two cousin-wives, who both refuse. A third woman who does accept his request becomes his favourite wife, triggering a war between him and his spurned and infidel relatives.Footnote 43 By casting Oghuz as a proto-Muslim monotheist, Rashid al-Din supports the Islamising programme of Ghazan Khan, just one aspect of the geopolitical and ideological programme that he advances with his dynastic history.

Significantly less complicated to determine are Rashid al-Din's sources for the life and career of Alexander the Great. Stories of Alexander have long been part of the Islamic tradition. These fall roughly into two types: heroic legends of the Alexander Romance tradition, and references to the figure of Dhu’l-Qarnayn from the sura of the cave (Q. 18.83–102), long associated with Alexander.Footnote 44 Both of these images of Alexander appear in Rashid al-Din's writings, mediated through different source texts. In addition to the sura of the cave, Dhu’l-Qarnayn seems to have served between the eleventh and thirteenth century as the central figure in a number of etiological stories current among nomads of Central and Inner Asia. From Kāshghari, we learn that the Turks had, by the eleventh century, adopted the Alexander Romance tradition and the name Dhu’l-Qarnayn into folk etymologies of tribal names, toponyms, and at least one type of food.Footnote 45

Rashid al-Din follows a well-established tradition of Perso-Islamic universal historiography by including a version of the Alexander Romance in his narrative of Persian kings. Outside of the Islamic cultural world, the Mongols of the imperial period were aware of the Alexander Romance, as evidenced by the remarkable survival of a version of the legend in a fourteenth-century Mongolian manuscript.Footnote 46 Thirteenth-century Christian reports of the Mongols regularly attribute Alexandrine exploits to Genghis Khan. In his report on the Mongols to Pope Clement IV, the Armenian historian Het’um gives a version of the origin of the Mongols that resonates with the Turkic story of enclosure in Ergene Qun.Footnote 47 Het’um, however, attributes the story to the history of Alexander, probably in reference to the legend of the wall that Alexander purportedly built to contain the tribes of Gog and Magog.Footnote 48 Marco Polo lists the Land of Darkness among Genghis Khan's conquests.Footnote 49 John of Plano Carpini claims that Genghis Khan conquered the Dog-men, an account significantly elaborated in the “Tartar relation” version of his travel report.Footnote 50 Kirakos Gandzakets’i reports that King Het’um had heard of Dog-men on his trip to Batu and Möngke's courts in 1255.Footnote 51

Read individually, these Latin and Armenian accounts can be – and have regularly been – dismissed as their authors’ independent recourse to the Alexander Romance tradition to enhance the attraction of their works. However, given the survival of the Mongol text of the Romance, we must at least consider the possibility that the Romance provided material for thirteenth-century Mongols to explain their own collective identity. The Armenian authors Het’um and Kirakos offer indirect evidence for this. Het’um names “the histories of the Tartars” as the source for his account of their origins, including presumably the story of their enclosure behind a mountain and, possibly, its association with Alexander.Footnote 52 Kirakos reports that an Armenian nobleman he was associated with “heard it from one of their great nobles named Ghut’un-noyin one day while he was instructing small children” that Genghis Khan had been conceived by a “light from the unseen” that visited his mother through the smoke hole of her yurt.Footnote 53 This story has clear resonance with that of Alan Qo’a, but it also reflects the earliest Greek and Armenian versions of the Alexander Romance pertaining to the birth of Alexander, as well as that other great Hellenistic etiology, the Christian Gospels.Footnote 54

In the mid-thirteenth century, we must remember, the Secret history of the Mongols was, as far as we know, still a secret, the proprietary cultural property of the family of Chinggis Khan. Popular and heterogeneous folk histories could have easily circulated among the Mongols outside of the central court, and these would have naturally drawn on the widely circulated Alexander Romance tradition. Paired with the evidence from Kāshghari for Turkic uses of Dhu’l-Qarnayn as a marker of communal origins, it comes as little surprise that Rashid al-Din presents an account of the history of Oghuz that draws on both the heroic and the quranic strands of the Islamic tradition of Alexander. In Rashid al-Din's Oghuznāma, as in Carpini's account of Genghis Khan, Oghuz Khan campaigns against the race of Dog-men, whom Rashid al-Din calls the Qil Barāq.Footnote 55 More notably, Rashid al-Din has Oghuz Khan enter the Land of Darkness, just as Marco Polo reports for Genghis Khan.Footnote 56 These actions establish Oghuz as an Alexandrine figure in the tradition of the Romance. Oghuz's practice of naming of the eponymous ancestors of various Turkic tribes, meanwhile, places him within the tradition of folk etymologies that Kāshghari attaches to the figure of Dhu’l-Qarnayn.

Other than noting the association with Alexander the Great, scholars have not traced the mechanics of this analogy and its ideological function. In the following sections, I show how Rashid al-Din uses Turko-Mongol and Islamic notions of genealogy and social status, as well as geographic and institutional markers of state to turn the related legends of Oghuz Khan and Alexander the Great into legitimising texts for his Ilkhanid patrons against the counter-claims to sovereignty made by the Jochids of the north and the Mamluks of Egypt.

The Mongols in the Islamic world

Rashid al-Din's first task in assembling his dynastic history was to establish Ghazan and the Ilkhanid dynasty as legitimate sovereigns in the Islamic world. He does this in two ways, each of which turns the story of Oghuz's conquests into an analogy for Mongol kingship in the wake of the caliphate. By showing the Mongols as a privileged group through their preservation of genealogical records and by establishing a precedent for Mongol conquest within a mythic framework that held currency in the region during the Seljuq period, Rashid al-Din bridges the gap between Mongol dynastic tradition and the Islamic civilisation that his patrons increasingly embraced.

Genealogy and sovereignty

As with other origin myths from nomadic Inner Asia such as that which occupies the early sections of the Secret history of the Mongols, the primary purpose of the legend of Oghuz Khan is to provide tribal etiologies for the Turkic confederacy that bore his name. In the Uyghur-script verse version described above, various champions from Oghuz's army become the eponymous founders of the Qipchaq, Qarluq, Qalach, and Qangli tribes, while the grandson of the hostile Urus Beg (“Russian Prince”) is named Saklap, the progenitor of the Slavic peoples. At the end of his life, Oghuz hosts a great feast, at which he performs an enigmatic ceremony of tying gold and silver birds and white and black sheep to two trees erected on either side of this throne, a ritual that establishes the division between two sub-confederations of his descendants, the boz oq and uch oq – grey arrows and three arrows.Footnote 57

Rashid al-Din's use of the story of Oghuz is also concerned with tribal origins, and it includes etiologies for the same tribes described in the verse version of the Oghuznāma. In both places where Rashid al-Din discusses Oghuz Khan, furthermore, Turko-Mongol concerns for remembering the origins and for preserving the hierarchies of nomadic tribal society provided him a convenient hook for inserting his patrons into the cultural landscape of the Islamic world. This is facilitated by the fact that genealogy had been a driving impulse of early Islamic historiography.Footnote 58

Rashid al-Din invokes the Islamic setting for genealogy in the opening passage of the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni with a comparison between his patron and the prophet Abraham.Footnote 59 At the end of this comparison, Rashid al- Din notes that Abraham enjoined his progeny to preserve a written record of their genealogy, establishing written history – and particularly genealogy – as a primary mode for expressing sacred and secular legitimacy. The Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni then arrogates for the Mongols a privileged position under the Abrahamic injunction to record genealogical history. For example, in opening his account of Genghis Khan's ancestors, Rashid al-Din invokes the significance of genealogy for the Arab tribes as a marker of Mongol exceptionalism:

And many lineages and tribes came from Alan Qo’a, and their numbers reach such an extent that if they were all counted they would exceed a million, and all of their lineages are clear and lucid. There is a custom of the Mongols that they remember their descent from their fathers and ancestors, and they teach and instruct each child his lineage, just as they do with all the others of that nation. And for this reason there is none among them who does not know his lineage and descent. And besides the Mongols, there is no such custom among other tribes except the Arabs, who preserve their own descent.Footnote 60

Rashid al-Din thus explicitly connects the genealogical memory of the Mongols with an equivalent practice in early Islamic society.

Rashid al-Din returns to the theme of genealogy when he introduces his first account of Oghuz into his dynastic history. Here, as mentioned above, Rashid al-Din gives a highly condensed synopsis of the birth of Oghuz and his struggles against his infidel relatives, which establishes a unified stemma of Inner Asian nomadic tribal origins. Within the course of his dynastic history, however, Rashid al-Din presents an account of Mongol history largely aligned with early Mongol history as known from the first fifty-eight sections of the Secret history and the Chinese Yuan shi.

To synthesise these two etiological traditions and bring the Mongols into the fold of tribes associated with Oghuz, Rashid al-Din employs the story of Ergene Qun from the Yeke tobchiyan tradition of Mongol history.Footnote 61 As with the Oghuznāma, the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni provides the earliest elaboration of the myth of Ergene Qun, and the lack of known precedents makes it difficult to pin down specific narrative innovations. It does not make a comfortable match with the preceding story of the totemic Wolf and Doe ancestors, and Rashid al-Din is forced to anthropomorphise these to create a feasible biological link to the residents of Ergene Qun.Footnote 62 The result, however, is a way to link the history of the Mongols to Turkic tribal history and to explain the other non-Mongol and non-Oghuz tribes that had become part of Genghis Khan's confederacy.

To draw together the histories of these many tribes, Rashid al-Din conflates the idea of intertribal warfare found in the Ergene Qun myth with the conflict between Oghuz and his idolatrous uncles.Footnote 63 In this rendering, the Mongol Ur-ancestors constitute one group of the descendants of the biblical Japheth. This group fell into conflict with another group of Turks, leading to their near annihilation and flight to Ergene Qun. The fact that the Mongols retain their tribal history, Rashid al-Din asserts, suggests that this division from the main line of Oghuz history happened relatively late; he dates the flight to Ergene Qun to “more or less two thousand years ago”.Footnote 64 To explain the lack of a coherent historical tradition among other nomadic tribes of Inner Asia, Rashid al-Din pushes the point of their break with the Oghuz back to a more distant point in time, before they were able to record their own history.Footnote 65

Thus, by fitting the Mongol mythic past familiar from other texts into the genealogy of Oghuz Khan, and by nesting the latter into the tradition of the sons of Noah as the progenitors of the various peoples of the earth, Rashid al-Din creates a stemma for understanding the entire Turko-Mongol world within the broader contours of Judeo-Islamic prophetic tradition. The Abrahamic injunction to record genealogy is an effective conceit to situate non-Mongol tribes within this genealogical tradition, even when no recorded history survives for them. Within this scheme, Genghis Khan and his descendants appear not as the creators of a new world empire, but as the re-unifiers of the descendants of Japheth. Three groups, namely the Arabs, Oghuz Turks, and Mongols, stand out for preserving their tribal genealogies in compliance with the Abrahamic injunction to do so. From this assertion, Rashid al-Din weaves a coherent system for explaining the fact of Mongol rule within the contours of Perso-Islamic and Turko-Mongol tradition.

The itinerary of the king

Beyond integrating the Mongols into the genealogical framework of the Islamic tradition, Rashid al-Din uses the Oghuz legend to establish a historical precedent for the fact of Mongol conquest over the eastern Islamic lands and to sketch out the ideal geographical and institutional shape of the Ilkhanate. Here, too, a valuable contrast can be drawn to the Uyghur-script verse version of the Oghuznāma. There, Oghuz Khan campaigns from Inner Asia across the Volga against the Roman Emperor (urum qaġan) and his younger brother, the Russian Prince (urus beg), then back to the east into the plain of Jurjet and North China before venturing into “India and Tibet and Syria” and then returning to Inner Asia. Such an itinerary can be sustained only in the geography of legend, where narrative consistency takes a back seat to tribal etiologies.

By contrast, Rashid al-Din's Oghuz begins his world conquest with a series of legendary exploits, some of which are familiar from the Alexander Romance tradition, but reordered into a coherent itinerary of conquest across Asia. After campaigning against India and the various regions of China, Oghuz returns to Inner Asia and then decides to cross the Amu Darya. From this point, his itinerary, while still somewhat mythic, can be easily mapped onto the geography of Western Asia. Oghuz first sends embassies to the regions of Ghur and Ghurchestān, then moves against the tribe of the Qil Barāq. While the location of this tribe is not specifically named in the narrative, the broader itinerary places it north of the Caucasus. Oghuz's next exploit is into the Land of Darkness, after which he finds himself between the Qil Barāq and the Itil (Volga) River. From here, he moves south through the pass of Darband, where he sends more ambassadors to the Caucasus before moving into the region of Arrān and Mughān. He next dispatches further embassies to Baghdad, Georgia, Diyar Bakr, and Raqqa. After spending three years bringing order to the mountains of Kurdestan, Oghuz moves on to Diyar Bakr and receives the submission of the people of Irbil, Mosul, and Baghdad. After sending his sons against the Franks and the Seljuqs of Rum, Oghuz proceeds against Damascus, then on to Egypt before returning to Baghdad and Basra and finally to the southern Caspian littoral before returning to Inner Asia after a half century of conquest.

Thus, after entering the Islamic world from the Land of Darkness, Oghuz's campaigns describe a broad circle from Azerbaijan across upper Mesopotamia, through Syria and Egypt, and back across the regions of Baghdad and eastern Iran. Along this route, locations of central importance to Ilkhanid court activity receive special attention. Oghuz is said to name the important Mongol summer camp of Alatāq and to build a mound at Ujān and name it Azerbaijan – presumably a reference to the elevated calcinating spring at the site of the Ilkhanid palace known as Takht-e Soleymān.Footnote 66 By contrast, Rashid al-Din has Oghuz's sons to receive the submission of peripheral regions of the Ilkhanate, such as Anatolia and southern Iran, rather than including them on Oghuz's main itinerary. Most notably, Oghuz is said to receive the submission of Damascus and then to campaign against Egypt, clearly an aspirational statement in light of Ghazan's repeated failure to gain a secure hold over any part of Northern Syria in his ongoing war against the Mamluks.

Over the course of these campaigns, Oghuz further marks his conquests as a forecast of the Ilkhanid state by implementing Mongol governing and administrative institutions. After defeating the army of Ghur, Oghuz assumes the title of aqa, a Mongol honorific designation for an elder respected male applied frequently to Batu b. Jochi and to Arghun, the last governor of the Mongol Middle East before the arrival of Hülegü. (For more on Arghun, see the excursus, below.) At the same time, he gains the support of ninety thousand households of Turks, called the “Nineteen Oghuz,” for whom he establishes a yasa, or Turko-Mongol law code. When Oghuz meets Qarasuluq, who advises him on his campaigns, he grants to him the title of yurtchi, establishing him in a fictional keshig, or household guard, like those formed by Chinggisid rulers and princes. Throughout his campaigns, Oghuz appoints governors (shihna) of conquered cities and regions, establishes laws (yasamishi), and distributes honours (soyurghamishi) to his advisors and generals. At the end of his campaigns, he names Qarasuluq his grand vizier and rewards him with a land grant (eqtā’) around Samarqand.

Through his use of the Oghuz legend, Rashid al-Din thus creates space for his patrons within the social, physical, and institutional geography of the Islamic Middle East by recasting a legend which may have been previously associated with the Seljuqs so that it refers indirectly to the Mongols. Beyond the challenge of legitimising his patrons within the Islamic Middle East, however, Rashid al-Din wrote in response to the Ilkhans’ ongoing political conflicts with the Mamluks and Jochid Mongols mentioned above. It is to these conflicts, and Rashid al-Din's treatment of them, that we now turn.

The Ilkhans between Mamluks and Mongols

Rashid al-Din employs the legends of Oghuz and Alexander to address the key geopolitical tensions of Western Asia in the early fourteenth century. As discussed above, these included an ongoing contestation with the Mamluks of Egypt over Syria and another with the Jochid Mongols of the Volga basin over Azerbaijan. While the Mamluks and Jochids joined forces in their efforts against the Ilkhans, Rashid al-Din took distinct approaches to discredit the two powers. The difference in approach was necessary because of the respective status of the Mamluks and the Mongols in the tribal social order of pastoral Inner Asia. In this, the Mamluks had two disadvantages, namely their slave status and their origins among the Qipchaq Turks, whom the Mongols claimed as a subordinate people. By contrast, the Jochid Mongols were unimpeachably Chinggisid, and so their claims to Azerbaijan required a different response. Rashid al-Din applies the legends of Oghuz and Alexander in different ways to address these two circumstances. To discredit the Mamluks, Rashid al-Din evokes questions of genealogical legitimacy from Chinggisid and Arab tradition; regarding the Jochids, he applies a body of Perso-Islamic tradition casting the people of the north as an existential threat to Islamic lands.

Slave kings of Egypt

Notions of slavery, or of individual or group subservience, hold an important place in the fabric of Mongol society.Footnote 67 Consanguineous members of a tribe or band were designated as uruq, to distinguish them from various foreign elements of society, such as exsanguinous wives and slaves. While a clan included members of all groups, the uruq, who all descended from a single forefather (ebüge), retained a distinct position of privilege.Footnote 68 With the rapid expansion of Mongol tribal organisation during the thirteenth century conquests, the terminology for slavery also expanded, though the distinction between slaves (boghol) and uruq remained intact.Footnote 69

Throughout his account of Genghis Khan's conquest, Rashid al-Din refers to conquered and subordinate tribes as qaum, to distinguish them from the royal urugh (< Mong. uruq) of Genghis Khan. He employs this vocabulary again in his account of Ghazan's conquest of Damascus during his first invasion of Syria at the beginning of the year 1300. On 3 January, Rashid al-Din reports, the people of Damascus presented themselves to Ghazan at his camp outside the city, where the Ilkhan interrogated them:

The Pādeshāh of Islam [Ghazan] asked them, “Who am I?” They agreed that [he was] Shāh Ghazan, son of Arghun Khan, son of Abaqa Khan, son of Hülegü Khan, son of Tolui Khan, son of Chinggiz Khan. Then he asked, “Who is Nāser [Mohammad I b. Qalāwun]'s father?” They said, “Alfi.” He said, “Who was Alfi's father?” They all drew a blank and then they realised that the sovereignty of that tribe (qaum) was an on account of accident (ettefāqi) and not of merit (estehqāqi), and they were all slaves to the renowned clan (urugh) of the Pādeshāh of Islam's ancestor.Footnote 70

By establishing the contrast of subordinate qaum and ruling uruq between the Mamluks and Ghazan Khan, Rashid al-Din marks each dynasty's relative status within the socio-political world of Inner Asian nomadism and within a genealogically conscious Arab world. This contrast is further emphasised by the rhetorical flourish of rhyming ‘accident’ with ‘merit’ – ettefāqi with estehqāqi – to describe Mamluk and Ilkhanid claims to sovereignty. Here ‘merit’ is defined in its contemporary Turko-Mongol context, namely as membership in the ruling uruq of Genghis Khan; the Mamluks, whose tribal affiliations were stripped from them by the fact of their slave origins, were simply accidental sovereigns.

Whether Rashid al-Din faithfully reports a historical event, or whether this is a later interpolation into the historical record (Vassāf does not report the scene), this episode demonstrates the role that genealogy and tribal dependence came to play in Ilkhanid claims to legitimacy. The Mamluk chronicles provide further witness to Mongol uses of this line of argument. One of Ghazan's letters addressed to the people of Syria and preserved in the Zubdat al-fikra of Baybars al-Mansuri emphasizes Ghazan's right to rule the region in part based on his descent from sultans (awlādu salātin).Footnote 71 Here the operative notion of divine descent draws more on Islamic notions of kingship than on Turko-Mongol concepts of tribal subordination, but the two expressions are variants of the same genealogical argument, framed for their respective audiences.

Within the Oghuznāma, these Mongol notions of dependence undergird one of Rashid al-Din's most dramatic departures from the verse version of the story. This relates to Oghuz Khan's actions in putting down a revolt by the Qil Barāq people of the Qipchaq steppe. In the verse version, Oghuz establishes one of his begs over the region and names him Qipchaq after he devises a bridge for crossing the Volga. In place of this in Rashid al-Din's account, the wife of a soldier in Oghuz's army gives birth to a son after her husband is killed in battle. Oghuz names this orphan child Qipchaq because the child had been born in the hollow of a tree (Tr. qobuq). After returning to his homeland, Oghuz sends Qipchaq to put down the rebellion and to govern over the land of the Qil Barāq and Darband.Footnote 72

By making Qipchaq an orphan in Oghuz's camp, Rashid al-Din establishes him as a subordinate figure in the ruler's household. Since, as Rashid al-Din specifies, “all the Qipchaq tribes were born from [Qipchaq’s] progeny”, the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, all of whom originated as Turkic captives from the Qipchaq steppe, become by extension collectively subordinate to the ruling line of Oghuz Khan. Paired with the analogy drawn between Oghuz and Genghis Khan and mediated through the figure of Alexander the Great, this creates a mythic etiology for understanding the Mamluks as hereditary subordinates to the Ilkhans, reinforcing the relationship between boghol and uruq established in Ghazan's interview with the dignitaries of Damascus.

Infidels of the north

In contrast to the Mamluks of Egypt, who could be considered subordinate both as Qipchaqs and as Mamluks, the Jochids of the Volga basin shared the same Chinggisid origins as the Ilkhans. In addressing the long established conflict over the region of Azerbaijan, therefore, Rashid al-Din was forced to apply different historical arguments. Here, too, he puts the heroic tradition to work, using the well-established legend of Alexander's wall to mark Azerbaijan specifically as Ilkhanid territory. In the centuries leading up to the Mongol conquest, this legend had increasingly come to be associated with a series of ancient fortifications in the region of Darband, north of the contested pasturage.Footnote 73 Events in the latter half of the thirteenth century made it an especially attractive landmark for Rashid al-Din to identify the boundary between Ilkhanid and Jochid lands.

The fortifications of Darband, culminating in a massive complex of fortified harbour and defensive wall at Darband traditionally attributed to Khosrow I Anushirwan (531–79), were originally built to protect the Sasanian realm from the Hunnic and Turkic peoples of the north.Footnote 74 Under the Abbasids, Darband, known in Arabic as Bāb al-abwāb (The gate of gates), was held by the Hāshimid dynasty as a fortified bastion against the Khazars and Rus’ of the Volga Basin.Footnote 75 As early as the tenth century, Muslim authors began to associate the people of the north with the tribes of Gog and Magog. Ibn Fadlan, who led a mission from Baghdad to the Bulghars of the upper Volga in the early 930s, reports on a giant body found floating in the river that some believed to be from the tribes of Gog and Magog; elsewhere he mentions that “some believe that [Gog and Magog] are the Khazars”.Footnote 76

For Muslim writers writing before the Mongol conquests, the association of the people of the north with Gog and Magog was facilitated by the fact that the region around Darband was, in fact, the frontier between Islamic and infidel lands. Writing in the mid 1270s, however, the Arabic cosmographer and geographer Zakariyā’ Abu Yahyā Qazvini fails to describe Darband as a boundary marker between Islam and the outside world.Footnote 77 This is due, perhaps, to the ongoing process of Islamisation within the Mongol and Turkic elite of the Golden Horde in the mid-thirteenth century. The ascension of the Muslim Berke and arrival of the infidel Hülegü had inverted the familiar geo-religious order underlying the association of Darband with the wall of Alexander as protection of the Dar al-Islam from the northern infidels.

For the half century following the death of Berke in 1267, the Jochid ulus was once again ruled by non-Muslim Mongols, while the Ilkhanid elite underwent its gradual shift towards Islam, culminating with the conversion of Ghazan in 1295. The Jochid ulus was not definitively identified as an Islamic state until the rise of Özbek in 1312. Writing during this period in which an Islamic dynasty in the Middle East once again looked out at a north ruled by infidels, Rashid al-Din revived the memory of the Volga basin as the land of Gog and Magog.

In 1302–03, as Ghazan prepared for his final invasion of Syria and commissioned the history of his dynasty, the Jochid Khan Toqto’a (1291–1312) sent an embassy to the Ilkhan with a message reasserting his family's claim to the region of the southern Caucasus.Footnote 78 According to Vassāf, Toqto’a expressed this claim in terms of the original Chinggisid dispensation, claiming that it was Genghis Khan's will that Jochi and his successors should rule over the southern Caucasus region. While this claim is consistent with the terms of Genghis Khan's dispensation of territory as preserved by Juvayni, Vassāf offers an alternate description of the dispensation that repudiates the Jochid claim. Vassāf explains that Jochi's initial realm had stretched only as far as Darband and that his successors had wintered south of this boundary and pursued further operations into the Southern Caucasus regions of Azerbaijan and Arran.Footnote 79

In the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, Rashid al-Din reinforces this view by presenting a specific version of the lives of Alexander the Great and Oghuz Khan to counter Toqto’a's claim. By locating the Land of Darkness between Oghuz's campaign against the Qil Barāq and his entry into the Middle East through the pass of Darband, Rashid al-Din connects it with the land of the Jochid ulus. In his account of Alexander in the pre-Islamic portion of his universal history, he makes very clear that the wall of Darband is the same as Alexander's wall, tying together the various strands of association seen in earlier Islamic versions of the story:

The compiler of these documents heard a story from the companions of a merchant that Eskandar entered the [land of] darkness and appeared at the region of Gog and Magog and that they were a tribe (qaum) in rebellion there. But it is more accurate that they were a tribe (qaum) of Safāli and numerous Turks, from whom nothing comes but ruination and corruption. And in the region that is adjacent to them they cause great harm and burden. Eskandar wanted to uproot their corrupted essence from other lands and he erected a strong rampart across the narrow distance between the two mountains which were between them the two lands and across their path which lay between these two mountains. A mention of it is preserved in the sura of the cave. Indeed, this is the wall of Darband on the side of the region of Shirvān and Lakzi and the Sasanians built this entirely. It was finished in the days of Khusrow Parviz and it will be mentioned in its time.Footnote 80

The immediate source for this passage is evidently Ibn al-Athir, who calls the people of Gog and Magog “numerous and warlike Turks”.Footnote 81 Rashid al-Din adds the mention of the Safāli tribe, one element of the Bulghar confederation of the seventh to the thirteenth century.Footnote 82 The Bulghar and Khazar states had of course since been replaced by the Mongols and Turks of the Jochid ulus, yet Rashid al-Din invokes the association of the former with the apocalyptic Gog and Magog to delegitimise Jochid claims to territory south of Darband.

Immediately after the passage just quoted, Rashid al-Din describes the Volga basin, listing the major cities of the region as “Bolghar and Sarai, which they call the capital city there, and Saqsin”, thereby confirming his conflation of the Golden Horde with the former Khazar and Bulghar states.Footnote 83 Furthermore, Rashid al-Din clearly specifies the location of the boundary marked by Alexander's rampart: it is the wall of Darband on the side of the region of Shirvān and Lakzi. For Rashid al-Din, writing for a Muslim sovereign facing the threat of an infidel power from the north, the numerous associations in earlier literature of Darband as a boundary provide ample justification for the Ilkhanid usurpation of the Southern Caucasus from the Jochids.

Sasanian history offers Rashid al-Din further opportunities to draw Azerbaijan and Armenia into the Ilkhanid orbit and away from the Jochids to the north. In his pre-Islamic history, Rashid al-Din elaborates two episodes that demonstrate the Sasanian dynasty's investment in and control over the region. Where Baydāwi only briefly mentions the visit (ziarat) of Bahram Gur (421–438) to the fire temple of Azerbaijan, Rashid al-Din elaborates on the site now known as Takht-e Soleyman:

At that time, [the Sasanians’] temple (ma’bad) and place of pilgrimage (ziaratgāh) was the fire temple of Azerbaijan, which is at Siah Kuh and which they call Hesabdāran, and which the Mongols call Safurluq, between Marāgha and Hamadan by the side of a lake (daryāche). The Mongol Padshāhs have assumed the throne there and it has flourished . . . And continuously the Maji, for whom the fire temple was their qeble, came from all directions by way of pilgrimage (be esm-e hajj) to the fire temple.Footnote 84

Here Rashid al-Din describes Zoroastrian religious practice using two parallel vocabularies, one Iranian and the other Islamic, and associates historical and contemporary ruling families by mentioning Ilkhanid activity in the region within the history of Bahram Gur. In another passage, Rashid al-Din spends a great deal of time describing the efforts of Khosrow I Anushirwan to reestablish sovereignty over the regions of Azerbaijan and Armenia, which had turned away from the Sasanian dynasty and become friendly with the Qipchaqs and Khazars of the north.Footnote 85 By locating ancient Iranian and contemporary Ilkhanid religious and royal ceremony at the site of Takht-e Soleyman, conflating the vocabulary from Zoroastrian and Islamic practice, and emphasizing Anushirwan's successes at retaining the loyalty of the various regions of the Caucasus, Rashid al-Din establishes a Sasanian precedent for his patrons’ claim over the region.

One final example comes again from Rashid al-Din's history of Khosrow I Anushirwan but relates to court iconography, rather than geopolitics. Baydāwi mentions four golden thrones at Khosrow's court: one each for his vizier Buzorgmehr, the Roman Caesar, the King of China, and the King of Qipchaq.Footnote 86 Rashid al-Din also mentions the four thrones, but since the Ilkhans continued to recognise the pro forma suzerainty of the Great Khans in China, it was politically inexpedient to portray the king of China as a tributary to the Persian court. Instead, Rashid al-Din ascribes the fourth throne to the King of the Turks. While listing both the Qipchaq and the Turks as subordinate people risks sounding redundant, it provides Rashid al-Din a way to assert Ilkhanid supremacy over both the Jochids, who controlled the Qipchaq steppe and the Turkic Mamluks in Egypt.

Conclusion

The sustained reverence for and reuse of canonical stories in Persian literature makes any analysis of specific texts a dangerous endeavour. Any particular witness to the stories of Alexander, Layla and Majnun, Bahram Gur, or another of the Persian literary canon stands as one wall in a discursive hall of mirrors, reflecting and being reflected by other accounts, not all of which have survived to allow us to reconstruct or understand their relationship to one another. That said, when a surviving account demonstrates a sustained concern for certain things – geography, dynasty, etc. – it merits attention as a point of access for the preoccupations of its author, patron, and audience. Rashid al-Din's use of legendary heroes of communal origin from divergent traditions – Oghuz Khan and Alexander the Great – reveals an ideological impulse behind his historical writing. This impulse seeks on the one hand to integrate his Mongol patrons into the Perso-Islamic cultural world and on the other to use the literary resources of that world to address specific political concerns of the Ilkhanid dynasty. In this regard, we see Mongol and Persian cultural worlds working to influence one another within the space of Rashid al-Din's text.

In the past three decades, the study of Persian historiography has increasingly appreciated the literary qualities of its material.Footnote 87 The recognition of narrative patterning and aesthetic considerations in Persian chronicles brings with it an increased skepticism about their historicity. However, these same elements make these chronicles valuable witnesses not for the periods they report, but rather for the contexts of their composition. In this regard, the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, as a hybrid literary-historical work assembled in a dynamic period of contested authorities, offers us a commentary on the political struggles that embroiled the Mongols of the Middle East with their Mamluk neighbours in Egypt and their Jochid cousins on the Qipchaq steppe. It is hoped that, with such an appreciation of the work, scholars will begin to treat the Jāmi` al-tawārikh as a whole text – or rather as a whole project, including text, illustration, and production. In this effort, the second volume of the Jāmi` al-tawarikh, long dismissed on textual grounds as a derivative and historically uninteresting work, promises to provide further information, not about the history of the world, but about political and ideological concerns from the reigns of Ghazan and Öljeitü.

Excursus: the loyalty of Arghun Aqa

The conflict with the Jochids over control of the rich pasturage of Azerbaijan predated the formation of the Ilkhanate. Since 1231, when the Great Khan Ögedei, son and first successor to Genghis Khan, sent an army under the command of Chormaghun to subdue the resurgent Khwārazmian prince Jalāl al-Din Mingubirni, there had existed a tension between Jochid claims to the region based on the territorial dispensation of Genghis Khan and efforts by the central court at Qaraqorum to manage the region through military occupation.

Jochid concerns were promoted by a string of Central Asian administrators from the moribund Khwārazmian state and by Mongol generals loyal to Batu, Jochi's son and successor. Against these, Ögedei, and after him his widow Töregene and their son Güyüg, deployed a series of alternate candidates loyal to themselves.Footnote 88 The pivotal figure in stewarding the Middle East away from the orbit of Batu and towards Qaraqorum was an Oyirat Mongol named Arghun, whom Töregene appointed as civilian governor of the region to replace Körgüz, the Uyghur dependent of Batu. Arghun had previously served at the Chaghataid court; he had played a central role in the delegation sent to investigate the administrative power struggle that led to the downfall of Körgüz, though he is best remembered as the governor who finally established durable Mongol fiscal policies in the Mongol Middle East.Footnote 89

At the time of Arghun's appointment, Jochid dependents were confirmed as chief secretary (ulugh bitikchi) and at the head of military operations in Anatolia. Despite this continued Jochid representation in the Mongol governance of the Middle East, Arghun made clear his preference for central imperial authority in 1246, when he travelled to Qaraqorum to lavish Güyüg and his courtiers with gifts, winning confirmation in his position at the head of the government of the Middle East directly from the new Great Khan.Footnote 90 Arghun repeated this journey in 1252 after Möngke's election as Great Khan, signalling the administrative realignment of the region he governed by declaring his allegiance to Möngke and the Toluid family as the new holders of imperial grandeur.Footnote 91 Four years later, when Hülegü crossed the Oxus River, Arghun met him and performed obeisance (tikishmishi), then travelled once again to Qaraqorum, leaving the Middle East in Hülegü's hands.Footnote 92

As a significant figure in the administration of the post-Khwārazmian Middle East, we might expect Arghun to feature prominently in Juvayni's history of the early Mongol period, though even here material on the Oyirat governor is frustratingly spare.Footnote 93 Juvayni, who worked as a personal secretary to Arghun from 1243 until 1256, portrays his patron as the son of Taichu, a prominent Oyirat and leader of a minggan, or a thousand troops.Footnote 94 For early Mongol administrative history, Rashid al-Din largely follows Juvayni, though he introduces an interesting variation concerning Arghun's tribal origins. Writing a half century after the rise of the Toluid family to the imperial throne, Rashid al-Din twice relates how Arghun's father traded him for a leg of beef to the Jalayir commander Ilüge Qada’an, who was attached to Ögedei.Footnote 95 Boyle and Lane each note this discrepancy between Juvayni and Rashid al-Din's accounts, but neither attempts to explain how or why the change was introduced.Footnote 96 Read in the context of concern for tribal genealogies and status discussed above, Rashid al-Din's account can be read as an explanation for Arghun's prominence that downplays a possible counter-allegiance to the Jochid ulus.

Of interest in Rashid al-Din's story of Arghun's origins are the terms of the exchange, which recall an episode from early Mongol history which Rashid al-Din also imports from the Yeke tobchiyan.Footnote 97 In the Yeke tobchiyan and in the Secret history, Genghis Khan's ancestor Dobun Mergen exchanges the thigh of a deer for the son of a member of the Ma’aliq Baya’ut tribe.Footnote 98 Just as the orphan Qipchaq does for Oghuz in Rashid al-Din's account, this boy becomes a dependent member of Dobun Mergen's clan. In both Mongol texts, this etiology explains the Baya’ut tribe's later status as hereditary servants (ötegü boghol) of the family of Genghis Khan. Rashid al-Din's seemingly apocryphal story about Arghun casts the young Oyirat as a dependent of the Ögedeid family by reshaping his personal history along the contours of the paradigmatic example of hereditary subservience from early Mongol history. By the time that Rashid al-Din wrote, the Toluids had assumed the imperial seat from the Ögedeids, and so they could claim Arghun as their own ötägü boghol by virtue of translatio imperii, having inherited the Ögedeids’ dispensation as successors to Genghis Khan.

Rashid al-Din's purpose in emphasizing Arghun's status as ötegü boghol under the Ögedeids and, subsequently, the Toluids might be found in the divided loyalties of Arghun's tribe of origin, the Oyirat. According to the Secret history, the Oyirat leader Quduqa Beki submitted to Genghis Khan in 1207 and was rewarded by having his sons marry into the Mongol ruling family. One of his sons married Genghis Khan's daughter Checheyigen and the other married a daughter of Jochi.Footnote 99 Rashid al-Din lists the descendants of these marriages.Footnote 100 From Checheyigen, three sons and their families remained in the patrimony of Tolui. The eldest, Buqa Temür, served prominently under Hülegü during his campaign in the West, while the other two served at the same time in China under Qubilai. Of the four daughters born to Checheyigen, one married Batu's son Toqoqan, another was Orghina Khatun, chief wife of Chaghatai, and the other two married Hülegü. All the descendants from the other marriage, between a son of Quduqa Beki and a daughter of Jochi, remained within the Jochid ulus, where they rose to command four Jalayir hazaras (units of 1,000 troops).

From this, it follows that the princes of Arghun's birth clan, the Oyirat, had, since the time of Genghis Khan, been divided between two lines, each of them descended agnatically from Quduqa and cognatically from Genghis Khan. One of these lines, born of Checheyigen, served under the sons of Tolui; the other served the house of Jochi. Furthermore, we know from Rashid al-Din that Quduqa was left in command of the entire Oyirat army as a result of his willing surrender and that after his death, his command was divided between his sons.Footnote 101 Rashid al-Din suppresses this prominent family history, instead portraying Arghun as the son of an obscure family dependent on the uruq of Genghis Khan. Such a portrayal might result if Arghun's father, Taichu, and his minggan had been assigned after the death of Quduqa to an Oyirat prince who served Jochi. (Or, less probably, if he was attached to Orghina Khatun when she married Chaghatai.) Juvayni, who knew Arghun before the antagonism between the Jochid and Toluid families escalated into war, faced no dilemma in reporting his patron's origins as he knew them. The account of Rashid al-Din, who was born during the governorship of Arghun but came into Mongol service only after his death, makes sense as an official whitewashing of Arghun's past propagated after the rift that drove apart the formerly allied Jochid and Toluid branches of the royal family.

Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference, Montreal, August 2014. Many thanks to fellow panelists and to audience members, notably Evrim Binbaş and Devin DeWeese, who offered important feedback at that time.

1 The relationship between the Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni and the works of Hāfez-e Abru has still not been fully untangled. For an overview, see Rosen, Baron Victor, Les manuscrits persans de l’institut des langues orientales (St. Petersburg, 1886), pp. 52–111 ; Soudavar, A., Art of the Persian courts: selections from the Art and History Trust collection (New York, 1992), pp. 64–65 (cat. no. 22); Leoni, F., “A folio from a Timurid historical manuscript in the Princeton University Art Museum”, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University (2009), lxviii, pp. 63–64 .

2 de la Croix, F. Pétis, Histoire du grand Genghizcan (Paris, 1710), p. 539 . The younger Pétis's translation never came to print, an oversight that attracted notice as early as 1726: Khan, Abu’l Ghazi Bahador, Histoire généalogique des Tatars (Leiden, 1726), p. 79 n. Print editions of sections of the text began with Quatremère, É., Histoire des Mongols de la Perse (Paris, 1836).

3 Given the significant attention already paid to the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, a detailed overview hardly seems necessary here. For a valuable survey, see C. Melville, “Jāme` al-tawārik ,” EIr.

4 Volume Two also originally included a history of Öljeitü's life and reign. This has not survived, though a fragment attached at the end of some manuscripts (Istanbul Topkapı Palace Museum ms. R.1518, 686–687; London British Library ms. Add. 16,688, 291a-293b) may preserve part of it, and `Abd Allāh Qāshāni's History of Öljeitü may have been prepared as or in conjunction with it. In a later description of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, Rashid al-Din indicates that the collection came to include two further volumes: a genealogical tree of the peoples and a gazetteer of the places described in the first two volumes. The genealogical tree survives as the Shu’ab-e panjgāna (Five lineages) in a single manuscript in Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum ms. Ahmet III 2937, discussed by Binbaş, İ.E., “Structure and function of the genealogical tree in Islamic historiography (1200–1500),” in Horizons of the world: festschrift for İsenbike Togan, (ed.) Binbaş, İ.E. and Schubel, N.K. (Istanbul, 2011), pp. 489–494 . The gazetteer has not survived; Karl Jahn rightly calls it “the most grievous missing portion” of Rashid al-Din's oeuvre: Jahn, K., “The still missing works of Rashid al-Din,” Central Asiatic Journal (1964), ix, p. 119 .

5 Karl Jahn published a series of studies and translations of sections of the world history in the 1960s and 70s, and Mohammad Raushan has recently edited most of the second volume. Jahn and Raushan each discuss the source texts of the various summary histories that they treat. Only the section dealing with the the Salghurid dynasty of Fars has not yet been edited.

6 The partial Arabic manuscript survives in two fragments divided between Edinburgh University and the collection of Nasser D. Khalili. See Blair, S., A compendium of chronicles: Rashid al-Din's illustrated history of the world (London, 1995), pp. 16–27 . The Persian manuscript, described in publications and museum catalogues until the 1960s as an early fourteenth century copy of the Jāmi` al-tawārikh, was in fact assembled by Hāfez-e Abru (see n. 1).

7 For more on these paintings, see S. Blair, “Jāme` al-tawārik ii. Illustrations,” EIr; M.R. Ghiasian, “The ‘historical style’ of painting for Shahrukh and its revival in the dispersed manuscript of Majma` al-tawarikh,” Iranian Studies online 17 June 2014. For a recent reassessment of book production at Rashid al-Din's scriptorium, see Azzouna, N. Ben, “Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allah al-Hamadhānī's manuscript production project in Tabriz reconsidered”, in Politics, patronage and the transmission of knowledge in 13th-15th century Tabriz, (ed.) Pfeiffer, J. (Leiden, 2014), pp. 187–200 .

8 In her valuable survey of the ideological contests between Mongol and Mamluk courts, Anne Broadbridge admits to an “abashedly Cairo-centric view” by virtue of available documentary evidence: Broadbridge, A. F., Kingship and ideology in the Islamic and Mongol worlds (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 3–4 .

9 On the Oghuznāma tradition, see İ.E. Binbaş, “Oḡuz Khan narratives,” EIr.

10 al-Din, Rashid, Jāmi` al-tawārikh, (ed.) Raushan, M. and Musavi, M. (Tehran, 1994), pp. 48–52 ; hereafter Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni.

11 Dankoff, R., “The Alexander romance in the Diwān lughāt at-Turk ,” Humaniora Islamica (1973), i, p. 242 n. 28.

12 London British Library ms. Add. 7628, 27b-29a; ms. I.O. Islamic 3524, 27a-28a. This article was prepared before Mohammad Raushan's edition of the pre-Islamic period and caliphate became available: Jāmi` al-tawārikh: tārikh-e Irān va Islām, (ed.) M. Raushan (Tehran, 2013).

13 de Rachewiltz, I., The secret history of the Mongols: a Mongolian epic chronicle of the thirteenth century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 3–5 (§§17–22) and commentary, esp. pp. 263–265. Perhaps indebted to Christian motifs, this story came to have powerful significance as a mechanism for legitimising non-Chinggisid Mongols as spiritual descendants of `Ali: Moin, A. A., The millennial sovereign: sacred kingship and sainthood in Islam (New York, 2012).

14 For more on the myth, see Aigle, D., “Les transformations d’un mythe d’origine: l’example de Gengis Khan et de Tamerlan,” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (2000), lxxxix–xc, pp. 151–168 ; DeWeese, D., Islamization and native religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and conversion to Islam in historical and epic tradition (Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 273–275, with additional bibliography.

15 Pelliot, P., “Neuf notes sur des questions d’Asie Centrale,” T’oung Pao (1929), xxvi, pp. 201–266 ; DeWeese, pp. 275–277.

16 Atwood, C. P., “Six pre-Chinggisid genealogies in the Mongol Empire”, Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi (2012), xix, pp. 15–23, 49.

17 Atwood, passim.

18 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, p. 25.

19 By comparison, even a century later, after the collapse of the Ilkhanate, different claimants to the Mongol heritage in the Middle East promoted different versions of Mongol history: Manz, B. F., “Mongol history rewritten and relived,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (2000), lxxxix–xl, pp. 129–149 .

20 The best survey of this whole period remains Boyle, J. A., “Dynastic and political history of the Il-Khāns”, in The Cambridge history of Iran. Vol. 5: the Saljuq and Mongol periods, (ed.) Boyle, J. A. (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 304–352 , though this will presumably be replaced by D. Morgan's chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge history of the Mongol Empire.

21 Jackson, P., “The dissolution of the Mongol Empire,” Central Asiatic Journal (1978), xxii, iii-iv, pp. 186–244 .

22 Jackson 1978, pp. 208–210.

23 Boyle 1968, pp. 152–154; Jackson 1978, pp. 220–227.

24 On this war, see Amitai, R., Mongols and Mamluks: the Mamluk-Ilkhānid war, 1260–1281 (Cambridge, 1995) and various articles collected in idem , The Mongols in the Islamic lands: studies in the history of the Ilkhanate (Ashgate, 2007). For the concomitant diplomatic struggle, see Broadbridge 2008, esp. pp. 27–137.

25 Halperin, C. J., “The Kipchak connection: the Ilkhans, the Mamluks and Ayn Jalut,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (2000), lxii, ii, pp. 229–245 .

26 Melville, C., “From Adam to Abaqa: Qādi Baidāwi's rearrangement of history,” Studia Iranica (2001), xxx, pp. 67–86 . Juvayni states that he was encouraged to write his history while at the Mongol capital of Qaraqorum: Juvayni, Alāʾ al-Dīn `Atā-Malik, The Ta’ríkh-i-Jahán-Gushá of `Alá’u ‘d-Dín `Atâ-Malik-i-Juwayní, (ed.) Qazvini, M. M. (London, 1912–1958), i, pp. 2–3 ; idem, The history of the world-conqueror, translated by J. A. Boyle (Manchester, 1958), pp. 4–5. The Akhbār is anonymous, but was probably composed by Qutb al-Dīn Shirāzi while he was in Anatolia in the mid-1280s, perhaps as an effort to ingratiate himself with the administration of Arghun Khan: S. Kamola, “Rashīd al-Dīn and the making of history in Mongol Iran” (Ph.D. Diss: University of Washington, 2013), pp. 75–78.

27 Writing that same year, Ibn al-Tiqtaqā asserts that historical anecdotes and biographies, such as the kind that he was engaged in writing, were the most important field of study for rulers, and then blames the Ilkhans for dismissing all scholarship not directly contributing to affairs of state: al-Tiqtaqā, Ibn, al-Fakhri, (ed.) Farhūd, A.`A. and `Māyū, A.M. (Aleppo, 1997), pp. 13, 25.

28 Vassāf, Shihāb al-Dīn `Abd Allāh, Tajziyat al-amsār wa tazjiyat al-a`sār (Bombay, 1853), pp. 405–406 .

29 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, 28; Hamd Allāh Mustaufi Qazvini dates the commission of the Blessed history to the first year of Ghazan's new Ilkhanid age, which began on the spring equinox of 1302: Zafarnāma von Hamdallāh Mustaufi und Šāhnāma von Abu’l-Qāsim Firdausī (Tehran and Vienna, 1999), p. 1414.

30 Qāshāni, Jamāl al-Din Abu’l-Qāsim, Zubdat al-tawārikh. Baksh-i Fātimiyyān va Nizāriyyān, (ed.) Dāneshpazhuh, Mohammad Taqi (Tehran, 1987), pp. 3–4 , discussed also in Morton, A. H., The Saljūqnāma of Zahir al-Dīn Nishāpūri (Chippenham, 2004), pp. 23–25 .

31 For a valuable historical and historiographical survey of the early Seljuq dynasty, see Peacock, A. C. S., Early Saljūq history: a new interpretation (London, 2010).

32 See, for example, Sümer, F., Oǧuzlar (Türkmenler) Tarihleri – boy teşkilâtı – destanları (Ankara, 1967).

33 Tekin, T., A grammar of Orkhon Turkic (Bloomington, 1968), p. 231 et al. ; Liu, M., Die chinesischen Nachrichten zur Geschichte der Ost-Türken (T’u-küe) (Wiesbaden, 1958), pp. 158, 591 n. 831. See also Sümer, pp. 1–3.

34 al-Kāšγari, Mahmūd, Compendium of the Turkic dialects (Diwān luγāt at-Turk), edited and translated by Dankoff, R. and Kelly, J. (Cambridge, 1982), i, pp. 101–102 (ms. 40–41).

35 Kāšγari, i, pp. 362–363 (ms. 623–25).

36 For example, see Barthol’d, V.V., Four studies on the history of Central Asia. Volume 3: history of the Turkman people (Leiden, 1956), pp. 121–145 ; Turan, O., “Rashid üd-dīn et l‘Histoire des Turcs,” in Majmū’a-ye khitābe-ha-i tahqiqi dar bare-ye Rashid al-Din Fazl Allāh Hamadāni, (ed.) Nasr, S. H. et al. (Tehran, 1971), pp. 68–80 ; Togan, A. Z. V., Oǧuz destanı (Istanbul, 1972).

37 al-Dīn, Rashid, Jāmi` al-tawārikh. Vol. 3: Tārikh-e Oghuz, (ed.) Raushan, M. (Tehran, 2005), hereafter Tārikh-e Oghuz ; Jahn, K., Die Geschichte der Oġuzen des Rašid ad-Dīn (Vienna, 1969).

38 Jahn, K., “Zu Rašid al-Dīn's „Geschichte der Oġuzen und Türken”,” Journal of Asian History (1967), i, i, pp. 45–46 ; idem, Die Geschichte der Oġuzen des Rašid ad- Dīn (Vienna, 1969), p. 7.

39 Paris BnF ms. Supplément turc 1001, catalogued by Blochet, E., Catalogue des manuscrits turcs (Paris, 1933), ii.125 and available online through www.bnf.fr. The reading of this manuscript was the subject of an exchange between R. Nour and P. Pelliot between 1928 and 1931. It has most recently been interpreted by M. Ölmez, “Commentary of OGHUZ-NAMA,” Commentary Project of the Center for Central Eurasian Civilization Archive, http://cces.snu.ac.kr/com/15ogze.pdf, with comprehensive bibliography, including previous editions.

40 DeWeese, pp. 323–331.

41 Togan, p. 148.

42 Tārikh-e Oghuz, p. 2.

43 Tārikh-e Oghuz, p. 3–4.

44 To survey the entire literature on Alexander the Great, or Eskandar/Sekandar, in the Islamic tradition would be a Herculean task. For an overview of the Alexander tradition in Persian literature and associated bibliography, see W. L. Hanaway, “Eskandar-nāma,” EIr. For an overview of the Romance in the many languages in which it appeared, see Ross, D. J. A., Alexander historiatus: a guide to medieval Illustrated Alexanderromans (Franfurt, 1988). For the quranic Dhu’l-Qarnayn, refer to W.M. Watt, “al-Iskandar,” EI2 .

45 Dankoff, passim. For the survival of the Alexander Romance and other legends among later Turkic peoples of Western Eurasia, see Frank, A. J., “Historical legends of the Volga-Ural Muslims concerning Alexander the Great, the city of Yelabugha, and Bāchmān Khān”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (2000), lxxxix–xc, pp. 89–107 .

46 Poppe, N., “Eine mongolische Fassung der Alexandersage,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländische Gesellschaft 107 (1957), pp. 105–129 ; Cleaves, F. W., “An early Mongolian version of the Alexander Romance,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1959), xxii, pp. 1–99 .

47 Het’um the historian, History of the Tartars, translated by R. Bedrosian, Chapter 16: http://rbedrosian.com/hetum3.htm#16.

48 For the story of Alexander's wall, discussed as well below, see van Donzel, E. J. and Schmidt, A., Gog and Magog in early eastern Christian and Islamic sources (Leiden, 2010).

49 Polo, Marco, The book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian concerning the kingdoms and marvels of the East, edited and translated by Corbier, Henri (New York, 1903), pp. 484–485 .

50 John of Carpini, Plano, “History of the Mongols,” translated by Christopher Dawson in Mission to Asia (Toronto, 1980), pp. 30–31 ; Painter, G. D., “The Tartar relation,” in The Vinland map and the Tartar relation, (ed.) Skelton, R. A. et al. (New Haven, 1965), pp. 70–72 .

51 Gandzakets’i, K., Kirakos Gandzakets’i's history of the Armenians, translated by R. Bedrosian (New York, 1986), p. 307 ; Boyle, J. A., “The journey of Het’um I, King of Little Armenia, to the court of the Great Khan Mongke,” Central Asiatic Journal (1964), ix, pp. 186–187 .

52 Het’um the historian, translated by Bedrosian, Chapter 46: http://rbedrosian.com/hetum4.htm#46.

53 Gandzakets’i, translated by Bedrosian, 235. For more on this passage, including possible identifications for Ghut’un-noyin, see Boyle, J. A., “Kirakos of Ganjak on the Mongols,” Central Asiatic Journal (1963), viii, p. 203, n. 29.

54 Rachewiltz, p. 4 (§21), cf. Pseudo-Callisthenes, , The Greek Alexander romance, translated by Stoneman, R. (London, 1991), pp. 37–43 ; idem., The romance of Alexander the Great, translated by A. M. Wolohojian (New York, 1969), pp. 25–30.

55 Tārikh-e Oghuz, pp. 13–14.

56 Tārikh-e Oghuz, pp. 16–18.

57 An alternate reading to “arrow” sees in the name of these sub-confederacies the basic element of oghuz, namely oq, meaning “tribe” (c.f. the On Oq, etc. of the Orkhon inscriptions): Sümer, p. 1.

58 On the genealogical impulse among early Muslims, see Rosenthal, F., A history of Muslim historiography, second revised edition (Leiden, 1968), pp. 95–100 .

59 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 23–31.

60 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, p. 223.

61 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 147–149; Atwood, pp. 17–19.

62 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, p. 218.

63 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 42–45.

64 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 147–48.

65 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 42–44, 147.

66 Tārikh-e Oghuz, pp. 22–23.

67 The best survey of the Mongol institution of slavery remains Vladimirtsov, B., Le régime social des Mongols. Le féodalisme nomade, translated by M. Carsow (Paris, 1948), pp. 73–89 ; for further bibliography, see Rachewiltz, pp. 505–507.

68 Vladimirtsov, pp. 89–99.

69 Vladimirtsov, p. 86.

70 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 1293–1294.

71 al-Mansuri, Baybars, Zubdat al-fikra fi ta’rikh al-hijra, (ed.) Richards, D. S. (Berlin, 1988), p. 334 .

72 Tārikh-e Oghuz, pp. 13–15, 54.

73 For an overview of where Islamic sources locate Alexander's wall, see van Donzel and Schmidt, pp. 73–74, 89–93.

74 Frye, R., “The Sasanian system of walls for defense,” in Studies in memory of Gaston Wiet, (ed.) Rosen-Ayalon, M. (Jerusalem, 1977), vii –xv, pp. 11–12 . On the dating of this wall, see Gadjiev, Murtazali, “On the construction date of the Darband fortification complex”, Iran and the Caucasus (2008), xii, pp. 1–16 .

75 Bosworth, C. E., The new Islamic dynasties (New York, 1996), pp. 143–144 ; D. M. Dunlop, “Bāb al-Abwāb,” EI2 ; Frye, R., Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia: a tenth-century traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River (Princeton, 2005), p. 105 .

76 Frye, 2005, pp. 58, 77. For later accounts in the same vein, see van Donzel and Schmidt, pp. 98–109.

77 D. M. Dunlop, “Bāb al-Abwāb,” EI2 .

78 Vassāf, p. 398.

79 Vassāf, p. 50.

80 London, British Library mss. Add. 7628, 28b; IO Islamic 3524, 27b.

81 al-Athir, `Izz al-Din Ibn, al-Kāmil fi al-ta’rikh, (ed.) Tornberg, C. J. (Beirut, 1965–67), i, p. 288 .

82 “Safāli” conforms to the ethnonym preserved in Latin sources as Savali. In other Arabic and Persian sources, it is given as Suwar, Suvar, or Sabir. The form Safāli, which is clear in both manuscripts consulted for this study, suggests that Rashid al-Din had access to Latin sources on the Volga Bulghars.

83 London, British Library mss. Add. 7628, 28b; IO Islamic 3524, 27b.

84 Add. 7628, 42b; IO Islamic 3524, 41a; c.f. Baydāwi, Qadi, Nizam al-Tawārikh, (ed.) Muhaddes, M. H. (Tehran, 2003), p. 44 .

85 Add. 7628, 47b-38a; IO Islamic 3524, 46a.

86 Baydawi, p. 49.

87 This began in earnest with Waldman, M. R., Toward a theory of historical narrative: a case study in Perso-Islamicate historiography (Columbus, 1980) and is exemplified in the publication of Melville, C., Persian historiography (London, 2012) as part of the “History of Persian Literature” series.

88 Aubin, J., Émirs mongols et vizirs persans dans les remous de l’acculturation (Paris, 1995), pp. 12–17 ; Jackson 1978, pp. 212–215.

89 On Arghun, see Lane, G., “Arghun Aqa: Mongol bureaucrat”, Iranian Studies (1999), iv, pp. 459–482 ; Aubin 1995, pp. 15–17; Kolbas, J., The Mongols in Iran: Chingiz Khan to Uljaytu (London, 2006), pp. 121–189 .

90 Juvayni, (ed.) Qazvini, ii, pp. 245–246; idem, translated by Boyle, pp. 508–509.

91 On this embassy, see Juvayni, (ed.) Qazvini, ii. pp. 251–256, iii. p. 74; idem, translated by Boyle, pp. 514–519, pp. 597–598.

92 When Arghun eventually returned to the Middle East, he had been invested with the honorific title of aqa, lacking executive authority but continuing to exercise important judicial and military functions under Hülegü and his son and successor Abaqa (1265–82) until his death in 1275. See Aubin 1995, p. 20.

93 One manuscript of Juvayni's work includes a space equivalent to seven or eight lines of text at the end of the chapter dedicated to Arghun, suggesting that, had the work been completed, we might know more than we do. See Juvayni, (ed.) Qazvini, ii, p. 262 n. 1; idem, translated by Boyle, p. 525 n. 26.

94 Juvayni, (ed.) Qazvini, ii, p. 242; idem, translated by Boyle, p. 505.

95 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 68–69, 103.

96 Juvayni, translated by Boyle, p. 505; Lane, p. 460.

97 Allsen, pp. 18, 50.

98 Rachewiltz, p. 3 (§§14–16) and commentary on pp. 258–259; Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 179–181. On the father's near-total command over the fate of his children in Mongol society, see Ratchnevsky, P., “Die Rechtsverhältnisse bei den Mongolen im 12.-13. Jarhundert,” Central Asiatic Journal (1987), xxxi, i-ii, pp. 69–80 .

99 Rachewiltz, p. 164 (§239) and commentary on pp. 854–856.

100 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, pp. 99–102; Shu’ab-i panjgāna, Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum ms. Ahmet III 2937, 106b. Rashid al-Din switches the names of the sons of Quduqa from the Secret History, though this has no effect on the structural relationship established by the story.

101 Tārikh-e mobārak-e ghāzāni, 597.

* A version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference, Montreal, August 2014. Many thanks to fellow panelists and to audience members, notably Evrim Binbaş and Devin DeWeese, who offered important feedback at that time.