Lane - Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: a Persian Renaissance

The misconceptions concerning the rule of Hleg Khan and his immediate successors are due primarily to the dwarfing of this period by those decades preceding it and by the emphasis placed on the succeeding Il-Khans after Islam had been officially embraced. The traumatic invasions of the hordes of Chinggis Khan and Tolui Khan with the years of uncertainty, instability and anarchy which followed these irruptions, have dominated most reporting of the history of Persia in the thirteenth century and, by the emphasis which has been placed on the reign of Ghazan Khan and his so-called reforms so cleverly propagated by his chief vizier, Rashd al-Dn, it is the last four decades of the Il-Khanate which have come to represent the period of recovery from the initial Mongol onslaughts. Later historians, the politically driven, the religiously tempered, and outsiders with their own agendas have overlooked the reality of the years of early Il-Khanid rule and the attitude of the subject people to their new king and have instead painted this whole period in the dark colours of violent transition, extending the years of trauma and chaos to include the relatively stable, culturally vigorous and socially defining years of the early Il-Khanate merely on the grounds that it was nominally non-Muslim. Hleg Khan ruled with the apparent non-opposition and cooperation of his subjects. Many of those loyal subjects earned the approbation of their contemporaries and, since their passing, have had their virtues and talents subsequently eulogised by the chroniclers, the ulam and the learned. Rarely if ever has the charge of collaborator been levelled at these faithful servants of the infidel king and conqueror of Persia by either their peers or later Muslim historians and commentators.

A reappraisal of this whole period is long overdue. Whereas the violent advent of Chinggis Khan heralded the end of an era in the lands of Persia, the coming of his grandson, Hleg Khan, marked a new beginning. The relative ease and the leisurely pace which typified the drawn out journey from Qaraqorum to the pastures of Azerbaijan stand in sharp contrast to other earlier Mongol campaigns. Hlegs train was peopled by a large Persianised administration and from the first time he entered Khorasan, his party was joined by local princes, notables and amirs there to offer their homage and loyalty. Often these were people already acquainted with the Mongols with family and clansmen already integrated members of the ordus. The opposition was mainly from the widely detested and despised Ismls and his destruction of these perceived heretical blasphemers, for many, seemed proof of divine justice working its mysterious designs through the agency of Hlegs horde. The fall of the caliphate like that of Baghdad itself was a process which had been under way from long before the Mongols began stirring in the east. But the decline of the City of Peace and the transformation of its hinterland into marchlands were countered by the rise and prosperity of Azerbaijan. Baghdad was replaced by Marageh and then Tabriz as the capital and the hub of international trade in the region, and, cut loose from a degenerate and impotent caliphate, Islam was invigorated by transformation and cultural nourishment. This was manifest in the growth of Shiite sects, the influx of impassioned Turkish converts, the popularisation of Sufi orders, and the emergence of an emboldened and vocal Sunni