Mahmūd Ghāzān

Mongol il-khan of Iran (r. 1295-1304)

• Born: November 5, 1271
• Birthplace: Abaskun, Persia, Il-Khanid Dynasty (now in Iran)
• Died: May 11, 1304
• Place of death: Near Qazvin, Persia, Il-Khanid Dynasty (now in Iran)

The greatest of the Mongol il-khans of Iran, Maḥmūd Ghāzān was responsible for the conversion of the il-khanate to Islam and presided over the remarkable flowering of syncretistic Central Asian and Iranian culture.

Early Life

Maḥmūd Ghāzān (MAKH-mood GAHZ-ahn) ranks as one of the most important of the medieval rulers of his country. A descendant of Genghis Khan through the latter’s grandson Hülegü, he was the seventh in the line of the il-khans. These were the Mongol rulers of a khanate embracing what is today Iran, Iraq, part of Syria, eastern and central Turkey, the region of the former Soviet Union south of the Caucasus Mountains, and the greater part of Afghanistan. The word “il-khan” meant a subordinate khan, one who acknowledged the overlordship of the supreme khan, or khaqan, in distant Mongolia and China. Ghāzān seems, however, to have rejected this overlordship: Unlike his predecessors, he abandoned the practice of including the khaqan’s name and title on his coinage, which consequently came to resemble that of other Middle Eastern rulers. After his conversion to Islam (which was publicly proclaimed on June 19, 1295), his adopted Muslim name of Maḥmūd was added to his Mongol name on the coinage, and as Maḥmūd Ghāzān his name was thereafter read in the khutba, the invocation on behalf of the ruler included in Friday prayers in the principal mosques.

Only the first two il-khans, Hülegü (r. 1256-1265) and Abaqa (r. 1265-1281), had been outstanding rulers. Hülegü, following the sack of Baghdad and the extinction of the ՙAbbāsid caliphate in 1258, had founded the il-khanate. It was Abaqa who consolidated his father’s achievement. Abaqa’s son and Ghāzān’s father, Arghūn (r. 1284-1291), had been a ruler of fairly modest ability. Like Abaqa, he had sought the cooperation of the hard-pressed crusading states of the Holy Land and of various European rulers in the course of the Mongols’ life-and-death struggle with the Mamlūk rulers of Egypt, who were also bitter foes of the Crusaders. Although rulers of Christian Europe had hoped that Arghūn would become a convert to Christianity, he was by upbringing and inclination a Buddhist, and his eldest son, Ghāzān, was also brought up in the Buddhist faith. As governor of Khorāsān during the reigns of his father and his uncle, Gaykhatu, Ghāzān is known to have ordered the construction of Buddhist places of worship in Quchan and elsewhere.

During Arghūn’s reign, fighting among the Mongol nobles (noyons) and military commanders (emirs) seriously weakened the authority of the il-khan. At Arghūn’s death, his brother, Gaykhatu, was recognized as his successor; he was formally enthroned on July 23, 1291, at Akhlat, near Lake Van in eastern Turkey. Ghāzān was confirmed in the government of Khorāsān. The new il-khan’s extravagance and licentiousness, however, soon provoked resentment, and he was eventually murdered (March 26, 1295). His cousin Baydu, another grandson of Hülegü, was then enthroned as il-khan in April, 1295. Baydu’s reign proved exceptionally brief (from April to October, 1295), since Ghāzān immediately challenged his accession with the support of a would-be kingmaker, Nawrūz. This great Mongol emir had been commander-in-chief in Khorāsān at the time when Ghāzān was governor there. Nawrūz had once led a revolt against Ghāzān, but he now threw his formidable weight behind Ghāzān’s bid for the throne. A longtime Muslim, Nawrūz pressed on Ghāzān the political advantages of conversion to Islam, and no doubt the latter readily acknowledged the value of sharing the faith of the majority of his subjects. He may have been sincere in his conversion, but it seems more likely that, to paraphrase the famous quip attributed to Henry IV of France, Tabrīz was worth a namaz (formal Muslim prayer).

By the autumn of 1295, Ghāzān had gained the upper hand over his rival, who fled toward the north but was easily captured. On October 4, 1295, when Ghāzān made his triumphant entry into Tabrīz, henceforth the official capital of the il-khanate, Baydu was executed. On the same day, it was proclaimed throughout Tabrīz that Islam was now the official religion of the khanate and that Buddhist temples, Jewish synagogues, and Christian churches were to be destroyed. Court patronage of the minority faiths, hitherto normative, was now withdrawn in theory, if not always in practice. Yet it is a measure of the shallowness of Ghāzān’s conversion to Islam that, on departing from Tabrīz to winter across the Aras River, he married a woman who had formerly been a wife of his father and also of his uncle, an act utterly abhorrent to his Muslim subjects and forbidden by the Qur՚ān, although customary among the shamanistic Mongol rulers.

Ghāzān was ruthless toward all who opposed him. It was not long after his accession that he began to resent the arrogance and ambition of his erstwhile ally Nawrūz. A man in Nawrūz’s position had no lack of enemies, and some past double-dealing with the Mamlūk government in Cairo provided grounds for his being denounced to the il-khan, who now had a pretext to break with him. Although three of his brothers and his son were executed, Nawrūz himself escaped into Khorāsān and sought refuge with the ruler of Herāt, who owed him both his life and his position. Betrayed by his faithless host, however, Nawrūz was handed over in 1297 to a rival emir, who ordered him to be cut in half and his head sent to Baghdad, where it long adorned one of the city gates. Instrumental in the fall of Nawrūz and his family had been the principal prime minister of the il-khan, Sadr al-Dīn Zanjānī. Hitherto, this man had shown remarkable powers of survival, for he had been minister to Gaykhatu before coming over to Ghāzān. Nevertheless, in 1298 he too was denounced and executed. In their accounts of the inquiries that preceded his downfall, the sources mention for the first time the name of one of his subordinates, the historian Rashīd al-Dīn (1247-1318), a Jewish convert from Hamadān. Sadr al-Dīn soon became Ghāzān’s prime minister and trusted adviser, a position he would continue to occupy under Ghāzān’s successor, Öljeitü (r. 1304-1316). Meanwhile, the process of Islamicization had been gaining momentum. In November, 1297, il-khan and emirs together had formally exchanged their broad-brimmed Mongol hats, unsuitable for performing the Muslim prayers, for the traditional Middle Eastern turban.

Life’s Work

During the early part of his reign, Ghāzān’s prime concerns had been internal security and testing the reliability of his noyons and emirs. From 1299 onward, external relations and campaigning across the frontiers of the il-khanate became a major focus. The il-khanate was a formidable military power, but it was ringed by foes. To the northeast, there was the rival Chagatai khanate, ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan’s second son, Chagatai (d. 1241). The Amu Dar՚ya (Oxus) River served as the de facto frontier between these two aggressive neighbors, but raids into each other’s territories were frequent. In the northwest, the il-khans disputed hegemony of the southern Caucasus region with the khanate of Kipchak (which the Russians called the Golden Horde ), ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan (d. 1255). The khans of Kipchak had adopted Islam earlier than any of the other Mongol dynasties; they made common cause with the Egyptian Mamlūks, with whom they maintained important commercial and cultural contacts, against the il-khans of Iran. To the southwest, the region that later became northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria was a zone of perpetual conflict between the il-khans and the Egyptian Mamlūks, who since the time when the Mongols had first appeared in the Middle East in the 1250’s had strenuously repulsed the invaders along a broad north-south front extending from Diyarbakir through Aleppo, Hama, and Homs to Damascus.

Ghāzān now had to turn his attention to the danger of encirclement, made more immediate by a 1299 coup in Cairo that brought back as sultan Nāsir al-Dīn Muḥammad, a young man who had reigned briefly in the mid-1290’s and was to reign again from 1299 to 1340 (with a short break in 1309). In midsummer, 1299, a Mamlūk army crossed the Euphrates and penetrated as far as Mardin (now in southeastern Turkey), carrying off vast numbers of captives and leaving a path of devastation behind it. Ghāzān retaliated by invading Syria and, bypassing Aleppo and Hama, brought the Mamlūks to bay in the vicinity of Homs, where he won a crushing victory over them on December 22, 1299. He then captured Homs and Damascus (although in the case of the latter city, the Mamlūks held out in the citadel). In February, 1300, however, Ghāzān abruptly withdrew from Damascus, perhaps as a result of rumors of unrest in Iran or of incursions across the Amu Dar՚ya frontier, and the Mamlūks soon reoccupied all that they had previously forfeited.

In the autumn of 1300, Ghāzān embarked on a second invasion of Syria, again advancing well beyond Aleppo. This time, however, there was to be no direct confrontation between Mongols and Mamlūks; excessive rain, flooding, and extremes of cold seem to have kept the two armies apart. In February, 1301, Ghāzān recrossed the Euphrates, and later in the year there were diplomatic exchanges between the two governments, although neither side was sincere in its protestations of friendship. A desultory correspondence was also carried on with Pope Boniface VIII, attempting to organize a joint Mongol-Frankish attack on Syria. Ghāzān’s letter of April 12, 1302, to the pope still survives in the Vatican archives.

In the autumn of 1302, a third campaign was mounted against the Mamlūks. Ghāzān advanced into northwestern Iraq, sending an advance force under two trusted commanders, Qutlugh-Shāh and Amir Choban, to besiege Aleppo. Although the il-khan followed with the main army, he decided to relinquish the conduct of the campaign to his commanders, and he returned over the Euphrates in early April, 1303. Again, there may have been rumors of danger in the east, where his brother Öljeitü was governor of Khorāsān: Civil war was said to be raging in the Mongolian heartlands. Meanwhile, Qutlugh-Shāh had moved from Aleppo to the vicinity of Damascus, where Mamlūks and Mongols clashed in a bloody two-day battle in which the Mongols were overwhelmingly defeated (April 19-20, 1303). Qutlugh-Shāh himself was the first to inform the il-khan of the disaster, while Amir Choban brought up the rear with the wounded. An Egyptian source relates that Ghāzān was outraged at the news and that following a court of inquiry, Qutlugh-Shāh was punished and disgraced. Losses on this scale could not be made good at short notice, but the prestige of the il-khanate was at stake. Consequently, preparations began almost immediately for a fourth Syrian campaign. The plan was for the il-khan to winter in Baghdad and then advance to the front in the spring of 1304, but by now Ghāzān was a sick man, only able to travel by litter and for short distances at a time. He left Tabrīz for Baghdad in September, 1303, but early winter snow on the Zagros Mountains barred his way southward, and he passed the winter somewhere in western Iran. Perhaps sensing that his end was near, when spring came he ordered his entourage to head for Khorāsān. He died near Qazvin on May 11, 1304, having designated his brother Öljeitü as his successor, since he had no sons of his own. His body was then taken to Tabrīz for burial in the magnificent mausoleum he had built there as his final resting place.

Significance

Maḥmūd Ghāzān contributed decisively to the assimilation of the infidel Mongols into the traditional Islamic culture of the Middle East, although at the time of his death the process was still far from complete. He enjoyed a formidable reputation as a military leader, but his place in Iranian history rests more on his abilities as an administrator in carrying out far-reaching reforms in taxation and the system of landholding. These aimed at alleviating the suffering of the agricultural population while maximizing the yield of revenue to the government. He also issued stern edicts to protect merchants and encourage trade, enforcing a rough-and-ready justice on bandits and those villagers tempted to plunder passing caravans. Bridges were repaired and roads were kept in good order, weights and measures were standardized, the currency was improved, and customs posts were erected at the frontiers. That these measures were actually enforced is confirmed by the survival of a number of official letters and administrative directives written by his prime minister, Rashīd al-Dīn.

Even before the accession of Ghāzān, Tabrīz had become a major international emporium on which converged trade routes from the Mediterranean, the Russian steppes, China, and India. It is a measure of its commercial importance that both the Venetians and the Genoese maintained consular representatives at the il-khan’s capital. As part of his official policy of supporting Islam, Ghāzān was a munificent builder of mosques, theological colleges, and mausoleums for holy men, but it was his capital that received most of his attention. Adjacent to the west side of Tabrīz he laid out a vast suburb, known as Shenb or Ghazaniya, where his own mausoleum was located, and he enclosed both the suburb and the old city within massive new walls. Nothing now remains of these ambitious buildings. Only the shell of the mosque built by Öljeitü’s prime minister, Tāj al-Dīn ՙAlīShāh, at Tabrīz and Öljeitü’s magnificent mausoleum at SultŃāniyya indicate the scale of later Il-Khanid architecture.

Aside from architecture, the il-khans were great patrons of historical writing; under them, Persian historiography experienced a veritable golden age. This was especially true of the reigns of Ghāzān and Öljeitü, during which the great histories of Rashīd al-Dīn, Vaṣṣsāf, and Mustawfī were written. There is no reason to doubt that this flowering of historical literature owed much to the direct patronage of Ghāzān himself, whom contemporaries regarded as an authority on the history and traditions of the Mongols. Although as capable as any of his ancestors of ruthlessness and inhumanity, Ghāzān seems to have been, by Mongol standards, a man of some culture. He is said to have known several languages and to have possessed insatiable curiosity concerning a wide range of subjects. There can be no doubt that he had a more benign vision of the responsibility of the ruler toward his subjects than had any of his predecessors.

Bibliography

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamlūks: The Mamlūk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A detailed account and analysis of the conflict between the Mamlūk sultanate of Egypt and the Mongols. Also explores the Battle of Aīn Jalūt and other military battles of the time. Maps, bibliography, index.

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven, and David O. Morgan, eds. The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy. Boston: Brill, 1999. A wide-ranging examination of the Mongol Empire and its historical significance. Includes chapters on the making of the Mongol states during the early years of Maḥmūd Ghāzān, before his reign; Mongol nomadism; imperial ideology; and the letters of Rashīd al-Dīn. Genealogical tables, maps, bibliography, index.

Bartold, W., and J. A. Boyle. “Ghāzān.” In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by B. Lewis, C. Pellat, and J. Schacht. Vol. 2. 2d ed. Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965. A good, short account of the career of Maḥmūd Ghāzān. Other entries give helpful information regarding numerous aspects of Islamic theology, history, and culture. Illustrations and bibliographies.

Boyle, J. A. “Dynastic and Political History of the Īl-Khāns.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, edited by J. A. Boyle. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968. This chapter provides the reader with the most complete account available in English of the Il-Khanid period, including the reign of Ghāzān. Illustrations, maps, and bibliographies.

Lambton, Ann K. S. Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. This magisterial study of the political and social structure of the Il-Khanid (as well as the Seljuk) period is an excellent account of conditions in Iran during the lifetime of Maḥmūd Ghāzān. Maps, genealogical tables, bibliography, index.

Lambton, Ann K. S. Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration. 1953. Reprint. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Chapter 4 of this classical study of agrarian relations in Iran provides excellent background reading regarding Maḥmūd Ghāzān’s administrative reforms. Map, extensive bibliography, index.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987. A nonspecialist account of the Mongol Empire, this book is strongly recommended as introductory reading on the period. Maps, tables, bibliography, index.

Petrushevsky, I. P. “The Socio-economic Condition of Iran Under the Īl-Khāns.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, edited by J. A. Boyle. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968. This chapter discusses at length prevailing social conditions as well as the government’s economic policies under the Il-Khanid regime.

Roux, Jean-Paul. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Although focused mainly on Genghis Khan, this work also explores the Mongolian rulers who followed him, including Maḥmūd Ghāzān. Discusses the empire’s founding, its endurance, and its decline. Bibliography, index.

Wilber, Donald Newton. The Architecture of Islamic Iran: The Il Khānid Period. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Originally published in 1955, this is still the definitive study of the monuments of the Il-Khanid period (with a useful inventory to which only a few recently identified structures need to be added). This book illuminates Maḥmūd Ghāzān’s role as a patron and builder. Maps, plans, bibliography.