INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS

XIII. THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS

A. THE HISTORIAN'S ANGLE OF VISION

B. THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF THE FACTS OF HISTORY

C. THE IMPULSE TO INVESTIGATE THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE FACTS OF HISTORY

I. CRITICAL REACTIONS

II. CREATIVE RESPONSES
(a) MINUSCULA
(b) PAULLO MAIORA
1. Inspirations from Social Milieux
Clarendon, Procopius, Josephus, Thucydides, Rhodes
Polybius

Josephus and Ibn al-Tiqtaqā

{XII.C.II.(b) 1, p. 66} The opportunity, which Polybius found and seized, of making his conquered fellow-countrymen acquainted with their Roman conquerors was equally open to Josephus, who repaired to Rome some 236 years after Polybius had been deported thither; but the account of Roman institutions and policy which Josephus was so well qualified to write for the instruction of an Aramaic-reading Jewish public might not have found a market among the remnants of a shattered yet still Zealot-minded Jewry, in whose eyes the victorious Romans were still the same uninterestingly abominable Gentiles that they had always been, and in whose judgement the victory of Roman over Jewish arms was due, not to any notable human strength or virtue in the Roman Commonwealth, but to the inscrutable will of an omnipotent Yahweh. Josephus did emu-
{p.67} late Polybius in turning to good account his intellectually advantageous footing in two culturally diverse camps, but the use that Josephus made of his opportunity was to address himself, as Polybius had done, to an Hellenic public whose curiosity was still insatiable. The supplementary question that Josephus took up after he had responded to the question raised by the Great Romano-Jewish War of A.D. 66-70 was, not 'Who are these Romans who have crushed an insurgent Palestinian Jewry?', but ‘Who are these Jews who have brought this fate upon themselves by daring to challenge the might of an oecumenical empire commanding all the resources of a politically united Hellenic World?' This was the question that Josephus answered by writing, for an Hellenic public, The Ancient History of the Jews.

In this work Josephus commemorated, for the instruction of their conquerors, the history and êthos of a Jewish advance-guard of the Syriac Society which had gone down to disaster in a forlorn hope in one of the many engagements in the course of a one-thousand-years-long struggle between a post-Cyran Syriac and a post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization; and what Josephus had thus done for a Palestinian Jewry was done for the Syriac Society as a whole, in the last phase of its history, by the Shī‛ī Muslim historian Ibn al-Tiqtaqā of Hillah¹ (natus circa A.D. 1262).

Ibn al-Tiqtaqā had been born in the metropolitan province of a reintegrated Syriac universal state on the morrow of the extirpation of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate and incidental devastation of ‛Irāq² by the Mongol war-lord Hūlāgū in A.D. 1258. The question presented to him by his social milieu was: 'How has this world in which I have grown up—a world in which ‛Irāq is economically derelict and politically subject to the rule of a Eurasian Nomad barbarian war-band—come out of the world in which my forefathers lived from one generation to another over a Time-span of more than five hundred years: a world in which ‛Irāq was the garden and granary of the Oikoumenê in which an ‛Abbasid oecumenical government ruled from Baghdad a universal state extending north-eastward to the Jaxartes, northward to the Caucasus, westward to the Atlantic, and southward to the Arabian and Sindī shores of the Indian Ocean?' The supplementary question that arose for Ibn al-Tiqtaqā, as it had arisen for Josephus, was: 'What have been the history and the êthos of this society that has met with this disaster?’ And, in Ibn al-Tiqtaqā’s generation, as in Josephus’s, this was a question that was of some interest to the alien conquerors by whose hands the disaster had been inflicted; for Ibn al-Tiqtaqā lived to see a militarily subjugated Dār-al-Islām begin to take its savage Eurasian Nomad conquerors captive.³

¹ ‘Ibn al-Tiqtaqā’, 'the son of a chatterbox', was an onomatopoeic nickname for Jalāl-ad-Dīn Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Tāji’d-Dīn Abi’l-Hasan ’Ali, the spokesman of the Shi’ī community in the Shi’ī holy cities—Hillah, Najaf, and Karbalā in an ‛Irāq that was to remain the stronghold of Shī’ism (see the note by Professor H. A. R. Gibb, printed in the present Study, I. i. 400-3) until the forcible conversion of Iran by Shah Ismāl‛īl Safawī. See the notice of Ibn al-Tiqtaqā by Clement Huart in the Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. ii, (Leiden 1927, Brill) , pp. 423-4. According to E. G. Browne’s English version Of Mīrzā Muhammad b. ‛Abudi’l-Wahhāb-i—Qazwīni’s edition of ‛Alā-ad-Dīn ‛Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī’s Ta’rīhh-i-Jahān Gushā (London1912, Luzac) , p.ix, Ibn al-Tiqtaqā’s name was Safiyu’d-Din Muhammad b. ‛Ali b. Muhammad b.Tabātabā.
² See IV. iv. 42-45.
³ See Horace: Epistulae, Book II, Ep. i, 1.156.

{p.68} After the Mongol conqueror Hūlāgū son and second successor Ahmad Takūdar (dominabatur A.D. 1252-4) had paid for his conversion to Islam by losing both his throne and his life at the hands of his outraged pagan Mongol comitatus¹ Hūlāgū’s sixth successor Ghāzān Khān embraced Islam in the year of his accession, A.D. 1295, without suffering his great-uncle Takūdar's fate;² and this definitive conversion of the House of Hūlāgū inaugurated a change of attitude on the converts' part towards a religion and culture that had now become theirs as well as their subjects'.³ The question 'What have been the history and êthos of this society that is now captivating its conquerors?' was answered by Ibn al-Tiqtaqā in a history of Islam from the epiphany of the Prophet Muhammad down to the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in A.D. 1258, and a work that has become celebrated as Al-Fakhrī obtained its title from the name of Ghāzān Khān governor of Mawsil, Fakhr-ad-Dīn‛Isā, to whom the book was dedicated by the author. In this answer to the supplementary question that the historian's social milieu had presented to him, Ibn al-Tiqtaqā has succeeded in recapturing and reproducing something of the freshness and radiance of a dawn in which the Primitive Muslims Arab, as they went 'from strength to strength',⁴ had found it 'bliss to be alive'⁵ under a new dispensation in which the long despised and rejected⁶ Children of Ishmael were fortified by the conviction that they had been chosen by God to become the instruments of His will and purpose in place of the Jewish and Christian People of the Book.

’The same stone which the builders refused is become the headstone in the corner. This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.'⁷

¹ See Browne, E. G.: A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii (Cambridge 1928, University Press), pp. 25-26.
² See I. i. 363.
³ On the 4th Sha'bān, 694 (the 19th June, 1295), Ghāzān 'and ten thousand Mongols made their profession of faith in the presence of Shaykh Sadr-ad-Dīn Ibrāhim, the son of the eminent doctor Sa‛d-ad-Dīn al-Hamawī. Nor did Ghāzān lack zeal for his new convictions; for, four months after his conversion, he permitted [the Mongol amir] Nawrūz [, a previous convert who had been instrumental in converting Ghāzān,] to destroy the churches, synagogues, and idol-temples at Tabrīz. He also caused a new coinage bearing Muhammadan inscriptions to be struck, and by an edict issued in May 1299 prohibited usury, as contrary to the Muhammadan religion. In November 1297 the Mongol amirs adopted the turban in place of their national head-dress’ (Browne, E. G.: A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii (Cambridge 1928, University Press), pp. 40-41).

Ghāzān Khān’s conversion secured for Islam not merely its survival but the recovery of its supremacy in the Il-Khāns' dominions, which included Iran, Armenia, and Eastern Anatolia, as well as ‛Irāq. On this occasion the anti-Islamic reactions in the converted Il-Khān's pagan Mongol comitatus were successfully repressed (see Browne, op. cit., p. 41); and Ghāzān's brother and successor Khudābandah, alias Ūljaytū (accessit A.D. 1305), who had been converted to Islam by his wife, promptly confirmed his predecessor's re-establishment of Islam as the official religion of this Mongol successor-state of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate (see Browne, op. cit., p. 48), though his Christian mother had had him baptized as a child under the name Nicholas (op. cit., p. 46).

The tragic losing battle fought by the Nestorian Christian Church in the Il-Khāns’ dominions against a refluent tide of Muslim fanaticism, which the triumphant conversion of Ghāzān Khān had let loose, is graphically described in The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sāwmā, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khāns to the Kings of Europe, and Markōs who, as Mār Yahbhallāhā III, became Patriarch of the Nestorian Church in Asia', translated from the Syriac by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge under the title The Monks of Kūblāi Khān, Emperor of China (London 1928, The Religious Tract Society).

⁴ Psalm lxxxiv. 7.
⁵ Wordsworth, W.: The French Revolution, as it appeared to Enthusiasts = The Prelude, Book XI, I. 108.
⁶ Isaiah liii, 3.
⁷ Psalm cxviii. 22-23.

{p.69} In this portrait of Primitive Islam, painted by a scion of the House of ’Alī, on the morrow of the death of a pre-Mongol Islamic commonwealth, to satisfy the slayers' posthumous curiosity about their victim, there is a touch of the serenity that comes over a human countenance when the hand of Death smoothes away the lines drawn there by the struggles of life.

‛Alā-ad-Dīn Juwaynī and Rashīd-ad-Dīn Hamadānī

{XII.C.II.(b) 1, p. 69} The ‛Irāqi historian Ibn al-Tiqtaqā's attractive history of the pre-Mongol Muslim Commonwealth in his own Arabic tongue was not the only notable historical work that was written under a Eurasian Nomad domination in the eastern half of Dār-al-Islām, on the morrow of the catastrophe of A.D. 1258, in response to questions raised by this harrowing experience; nor was this the only historical motif that was suggested by the spectacle of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate's fatal collision with an erupting Mongol Eurasian Nomad Power.

One of the incidental and undesigned effects of the overthrow of the ‛Abbasids and devastation of ‛Irāq was, as we have noticed already in an earlier context,¹ the birth, in a ci-devant Syriac World's now derelict north-eastern provinces, of an Iranic Muslim Civilization, affiliated to the Syriac, in which, for most purposes other than the exposition of Islamic theology, a New Persian language and literature were to supplant the Arabic language and literature that had been dominant in all provinces of Dār-al-Islām during the six centuries intervening between the overthrow of the Sasanids by the Primitive Muslim Arab ghazis and the overthrow of the ‛Abbasids by the pagan Mongols. When a previously oecumenical Arabic culture retreated westwards before the face of the oncoming Mongols into a fastness in Egypt with a glacis in Syria and an eastern frontier at the western elbow of the River Euphrates, a New Persian literature that, by this time, had been on the rise for some three hundred years now at last came fully into its own; and this was perhaps the only creative cultural activity in the conquered and devastated half of Dār-al-Islām that benefited from the disaster on the very morrow of it. During the lifetime of the survivors of a generation in Dār-al-Islām that was old enough to have completed its education in a classical Arabic language and literature before the catastrophe of A.D 1258, the cultivation of the New Persian language and literature was already relieved of the incubus of the cultural ascendancy of Arabic without being yet impoverished by being cut off from the living sources of Arabic literary inspiration. The period of Mongol domination in Iran and ‛Irāq (currebatt A.D. 1258-1337) was an age in which the leading Persian men of letters were still bilingual in the full sense of still being able not merely to read Arabic but also to write in it, as well as in their native Persian tongue;² and it was also an age which produced

¹ See I. i. 71, with n. 3.
² This point is made by Browne in op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 62-65. The historian Rashīd-ad-Dīn (vivebat circa A.D. 1247—1318), for example, made it his practice to arrange for the translation of his Persian works into Arabic and the translation of his Arabic works into Persian. Rashīd-ad-Dīn’s own account of these arrangements of his is quoted verbatim, from man arabe No. 356, foll, i et seqq, in the Bibliothèque Nationale [ci-devant Royale] in Paris, by E. M. Quatremère in his life of Rashīd-ad-Dīn prefixed to his edition of part of Rashīd-ad-Dīn's Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh ('A Comprehensive Collection of Histories'), Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, vol. i (Paris 1836, Imprimerie Royale), pp. cxxxiv-cxxxvi. A student of History will be reminded of the cultural situation in Italy under an Ostrogoth domination (durabat A.D. 493-535), when the leading Italian men of letters were still conversant with Greek as well as with their native Latin.

{p. 70} incomparably eminent Persian historians,¹ in contrast to both the previous and the subsequent age, in which the brightest stars in the firmament of a New Persian literature were, not historians, but poets.²

The ascendancy of the historians in the intervening Il-Khānī Age is significant; and it is no less significant that the two greatest members of this pleiad—‛Alā-ad-Dīn ‛Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī (vivebat A.D. 1226-83) and Rashīd-ad-Dīn Fadlallāh Tabīb al-Hamadānī (vivebat circa A.D. 1247-1318)—were also eminent civil servants in the Mongol Il-Khāns' service, and that two of the lesser lights, Wassāf-i-Hadrat ‛Abdallah b. Fadlallāh of Shīrāz and Hamdallāh Mustawfī of Qazwīn, both of whom were protégés of Rashīd-ad-Dīn's, were officials of the Il-Khānī Government's Internal Revenue Department.³

The pagan barbarian conquerors of Iran and ‛Irāq, who held out for thirty-seven years (A.D. 1258-95) after their conquest of Baghdad before succumbing to Islam themselves, had found themselves from the outset unable to dispense with the services of their newly acquired Muslim subjects; for the conquerors' purpose in invading Dār-al-Islām and overthrowing the Caliphate had been to step into the Caliph's shoes; and the only means by which these interloping barbarians could ensure that, after they had extinguished the Caliphate, the Caliph's government should be carried on for their benefit was by drawing upon an existing panel of native Persian Muslim professional administrators. The historian ‛Alā-ad-Dīn ‛Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī ‘s brother, Shams-ad-Dīn Muhammad Juwaynī, managed the administration of Hūlāgū's appanage for the conqueror and for his first two successors during twenty-one years (A.D. 1263-84) of the Il-Khānī régime as their sāhib-dīwān,⁴ and the two brothers were the sons of a mustawfi’l-mamālik (minister of finance) and the grandsons of a prime minister of a by then already fainéant) ‛Abbasid Caliphate's Khwārizmian successor-state in the north-eastern marches of Dār-al-Islām, over against the Eurasian Steppe, on which the Mongol storm had broken in its full fury in A.D. 1220⁵ at the fiat of a world-conquering Chingis.

The grandfather had accompanied the last of the Khwārizm Shahs, Sultan Muhammad, and his indomitable son and successor Jalāl-ad-Dīn Mankubirnī, when they had 'gone on the run', fighting rear-guard actions as they went.⁶ The father, who had lingered in Khurāsān, had

¹ See Browne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 62 and 65.
² The pre-Mongol age of New Persian literary history had been made illustrious by Firdawsī (vivebat circa A.D. 932-1020/1) and by Sa‛di (vivebat circa A.D. 1184-1292); the post-Mongol age was to be made illustrious by Hāfiz (obiit A.D. 1389) and by Jāmi (vivebat A.D. 1414-92). See I. i. 360, n. 1, and II. ii. 77, n. 1.
³ See Browne, op. cit., pp. 67 and 87.
⁴ For the dates, see Browne, apud Juwaynī, ed. cit., pp. xxix and xlvii-xlviii.
⁵ See II. ii. 142, with n, 2.
⁶ See Browne, E. G., in Mirzā Muhammad Qazwīnī’s edition of ‛Alā-ad-Dīn Juwaynī’s, Ta’rīkh-I-Jahān Gushā (London 1912, Luzac), p. xxi

{p. 71} been rounded up at Tūs by the Mongol governor Jintirmūr and taken, willy nilly, into the Mongols' service in A.D. 1232-3,¹ and his two sons, Shams-ad-Dīn and ‛Alā-ad-Dīn, had followed in his footsteps. Shams-ad-Dīn had been in the service of Chingis grandson and Qūbilāy's brother Hūlāgū, the commander of the Mongol forces on an anti-Islamic front in the Khwārizm Shahs' already conquered domain to the north-east of the Caspian Gates, two years before his Mongol master's extirpation of the Ismā‛īlī Shī‛ī Assassins at Alamūt in A.D. 1257, and three years before his sack of Baghdad in A.D. 1258.² Shams-ad-Dīn's brother ‛Alā-ad-Dīn, the historian (natus A.D. 1226), had entered the Mongol public service before he was twenty years old³ as the protégé of his father's Mongol patron Arghūn, who had been the governor of the Mongol Empire's anti-Islamic march before Hūlāgū Khān's arrival on this front in A.D. 1256,⁴ and he was one of three commissioners to whom Arghūn had entrusted the administration of Khurāsān when he had handed over his own command to Hūlāgū,⁵ ‛Alā-ad-Dīn Juwaynī had then accompanied Hūlāgū Khān on his campaigns (gesta A.D. 1256-8) against the Ismā‛īlī Power in Central and Western Iran and against the remnant of the ‛Abbasid Power in ‛Irāq;⁶ he was appointed governor of Baghdad by Hūlāgū in A.D. 1259, within a year of the conquest;⁷ and he continued—save for a few months in A.D. 1281-2, when he was under a cloud⁸—to hold this responsible administrative post till his death in A.D. 1283.⁹ The historian Rashīd-ad-Dīn, who gained his first access to the II-Khānī Court as a professional physician during the reign of Hūlāgū's first successor Abāqā Khān (dominabatur A.D. 1265-82),¹⁰ was taken by Abāqā into the public administration, was appointed Grand Vizier by Ghāzān Khān (dominabatur A.D. 1295-1304),¹¹ and was retained in this post throughout the rest of Ghāzān’s reign and the whole of his successor Khudābandah Ūljaytū (dominabatur 1305-16). Both Shams-ad-Dīn Juwanyī and Rashīd-ad-Dīn Hamadānī obtained important posts in the public service for their sons and other relatives. One of Shams-ad-Dīn 's sons, Bahā-ad-Dīn, had made his mark as governor of ‛Irāq-i-‛Ajam (the Jabal) and Fars before his death at the age of thirty;¹² and Rashīd-ad-Dīn 's son Ghiyāth-ad-Dīn was appointed to his father's post of Grand Vizier¹³ by Abu Sa‛īd (dominabatur A.D. 1317-34), the last effective ruler of the Il-Khānī line.

Public service proved to be as dangerous a trade for Persian men of

¹ See Browne, ibid., pp.: xxi-xxii.
² See Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii, p. 20.
³ See Browne, apud Juwaynī, op. cit., p. xiii.
⁴ See Browne, ibid, p. xxv.
⁵ See Browne, ibid., p. xxvi.
⁶ See Browne, ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii,
⁷ See Browne, ibid., pp. xxviii-xxix, eundem: A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii, p. 20, n. 1.
⁸ See Browne, apud Juwaynī, ed. cit., pp. xxxix-xliv.
⁹ Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii., p. 66.
¹⁰ See Quatremére, E. M., in his life of Rashīd-ad-Dīn prefixed to his edition of part of Rashīd-ad-Dīn’s Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh (‘A Comprehensive Collection of Histories'), Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, vol. i (Paris 1836, Imprimerie Royale), p. viii.
¹¹ See Quatremére, ibid.
¹² See Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii, p. 21. Another of his sons Sharaf-ad-Dīn, was a poet.
¹³ See Quatremére, op, cit., p. ilvii.

{p. 72} letters under a Mongol régime in Iran and ‛Irāq as it had been for Roman men of letters under an Ostrogoth régime in Italy. The historian-governor ‛Alā-ad-Dīn 'Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī, after his fall in A.D. 1281 and reinstatement in A.D. 1282, was so fortunate as to die, as Cassiodorus had died, in his bed; but Boethius's fate overtook first the historian's brother, the sāhib-dīwān, and then Rashīd-ad-Dīn and Rashīd-ad-Dīn's son, Ghiyāth-ad-Dīn, in turn. Shams-ad-Dīn Muhammad Juwaym and his surviving sons were Ahmad Takūdar Khān's fellow-victims in the anti-Islamic émeute among the II-Khān's pagan Mongol comitatus that was provoked by Takūdar's rashly premature conversion to Islam.¹ Rashīd-ad-Dīn, after having been dismissed from office by Ūljaytū Khān's successor Abu Sa‛īd Khān in October 1317, was put to death, with his young son Ibrāhim, on the 18th July, 1318, at the age of seventy-three, as the penalty for his having incautiously allowed himself to be persuaded to resume office.² Ghiyāth-ad-Dīn and a surviving brother of his met their deaths by violence in A.D. 1336, in the anarchy in which the Mongol régime in Iran and ‛Irāq foundered after the death of Abu Sa‛īd.³ In a Mongol Iran, as in an Ostrogoth Italy, the civil service was thus a hazardous occupation⁴ for a man of letters, but it was also a stimulating one.

The Persian civil servant historians of the Il-Khānī Age were stimulated by their social milieu to ask Polybius's questions as well as Josephus's and their own Josephan-minded Arab contemporary Ibn al-Tiqtaqā's.

Like Josephus, ‛Alā-ad-Dīn ‛Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī has commemorated, in the history of the Khwārizm Shahs that constitutes the second part of his tripartite Ta’rīkh-I-Jahān Gushā (‘A History of the World-Conqueror Chingis Khān),⁵ the forlorn hope of an advance-guard of his society that had put up a valiant resistance to the onslaught of an overwhelming alien power, while Rashīd-ad-Dīn in his Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh

¹ See Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii, pp. 27-29.
² See Quatrèmere, op. cit., pp. xxxix-xliv.
³ See ibid., p. lii.
⁴ In both situations the danger arose from the interaction of two untoward factors. One of these was the barbarian rulers' proneness to suspect disloyalty in alien subjects whose professional services were indispensable to them because the intricacies of a civilized administration were beyond their own comprehension. The second untoward factor was the mutual rivalry and jealousy of the native professional civil servants themselves, who found it difficult to resist the temptation to further their own careers by denigrating their colleagues in the eyes of their ignorant and therefore credulous barbarian masters. Under the Il-Khānī régime the principal Persian officers of state were almost driven into falling foul of one another by the practice—introduced, no doubt, by the Mongol rulers deliberately, as a safeguard against possible abuses of power on the part of their Persian employees—of appointing a pair of Grand Viziers, equal with one another in status, without any demarcation, either territorial or functional, between their respective competences (see Quatremére, op. cit., pp. xxxii-xxxiii).
⁵ An edition by Mirzā Muhammad b. ‛Abd-al-Wahhāb of Qaswīn has been published in the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, No. xvi, in three volumes (London 1912, Luzac). See also Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. iii, pp. 65-66. This work, which was completed in A.D. 1260, stops short of the fall of Baghdad in A.D. 1258, but tells, in the third of its three parts, the story of the fall of Alamūt in 1256. The whole of this Part III is devoted to the history of the Isrna'ilis down to Hūlāgū's overthrow of their last Grand Master, Rukn-ad-Dīn Khurshāh, in Kuhistan and the Elburz. Juwaynī's work has been continued in Wassāf ‘s, who has carried the regional history of Mongol rule in Iran and ‛Irāq on from A.D. 1257, where Juwaynī's history stops, down to A.D. 1328 in his Tajzīyat-al-Amsār wa Tazjīyat-al-A‛sar (see Browne, op. cit,, vol. iii, pp. 67-68).

{p.73} ('A Comprehensive Collection of Histories') has commemorated the history and êthos of the whole of the Syriac Society to which the Mongol invaders had given the coup de grace that the Western Christian Crusaders had previously tried and failed to deliver. Moreover, in this part of his work, Rashīd-ad-Dīn has taken a broader view of the Syriac Civilization than has been taken by Ibn al-Tiqtaqā in Al-Fakhīr. The ‛Irāqi Sayyid's historical vision is limited to the history of a pre-Mongol Islamic Commonwealth, whereas Rashīd-ad-Dīn treats the history of the Caliphate, from Abu Bakr to Musta‛sim, merely as the second of three chapters of an essentially Iranian story in which the first chapter runs from a mythical dawn down to the fall of the Sasanian Dynasty, while the third chapter is occupied with the histories of the ‛Abbasid Caliphate's Persian and Turkish successor-states down to the bursting of the Mongol Nomad tornado that has swept them all away.¹ The history of the same Syriac Civilization, seen from the same Iranian angle of vision, and presented within the same framework on the same lines, is the subject of the whole of Mustawfī's Ta’rīkh–i-Guzīdah ('A Select History'),² in which the author thus shows himself to be, on this point, Rashīd-ad-Dīn 's disciple as well as his protégé.

Moreover, for Rashīd-ad-Dīn, the history of a Syriac Civilization that has fallen a victim to the Mongols is not, even on the broader lines on which the Persian historian approaches it, either a whole in itself or an end in itself, as it is for the contemporary Arab historian Ibn al-Tiqtaqā. In Rashīd-ad-Dīn's work the history of his own civilization is introduced as an integral part of Universal History, and he has included Universal History in his 'Comprehensive Collection’ because he has undertaken to answer the three questions that have likewise been the inspirations of Polybius's Oecumenical History:³ 'How has this revolution in human affairs come about?’ 'Who are these previously obscure barbarians who have suddenly made their mark by conquering the World in our time?’ 'What is the intelligible field of historical study?’ According to Rashīd-ad-Dīn's own account of his intellectual history, he had begun to study the history of the Mongols on his own initiative;⁴ but he had not thought of writing history⁵ till he was commanded by his master Ghāzān Khān to write the history of the Eurasian Nomads⁶ (the part of his work corresponding to Polybius's account of the institutions and policy of the Romans), and thereafter, by Ghāzān’s successor Khudābandah Ūljaytū, to write a Universal History and Geography⁷ (corresponding to the remainder of Polybius's work). Rashīd-ad-Dīn implies

¹ See Browne's arrangement of the component parts of Rashīd-ad-Dīn's 'Comprehensive Collection’ in op. cit., vol. iii, p. 74. In this Iranocentric presentation of Syriac history the Arab Caliphate is treated, as will he observed, as the successor of the Iranian Empire of the Sasanidae, and not of the Arabian principality established by the Prophet Muhammad. Since Muhammad's career was contemporary with the last days of the Sasanian régime, his biography finds its place in this part of Rashīd-ad-Dīn's 'Comprehensive Collection', as a postscript to the volume devoted to the Sasanidae.
² See the table of contents of Mustawfī's 'A Select History', as reproduced by Browne in op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 90-94.
³ See pp. 64-66, above.
⁴ Rashīd-ad-Dīn: Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh, preface, pp. 80-81 in Quatremére's edition and French translation of the Persian text.
⁵ See Rashīd-ad-Dīn, preface to the Jāmi‛ Quatremere's translation, p. 47.
⁶ See ibid., pp, 7-9,47, 51, 75, and 81.
⁷ See ibid., pp. 37-39 and 59.

{p.74} that he might have shrunk from embarking on this vast scholarly and literary enterprise in the narrow margin of leisure left to him by his exacting official duties if he had not felt it to be part of these duties to obey, as best he could, these royal commands in a field outside the normal range of a civil servant's activities.¹ The credit due to the two Mongol princes for having thus set Rashīd-ad-Dīn to work is proclaimed in the titles given by the author to the two parts of his 'Comprehensive Collection’. His special history of the Mongols and Turks is called the Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī,² while his General History of Mankind is dedicated to Ūljaytū.

The historian's elemental intellectual question 'How has this come out of that ?' presented itself in Rashīd-ad-Dīn's social milieu in the same terms as in Polybius's, 'What', this social milieu inspired the Persian historian to ask himself, 'has been the process by which almost the whole World has fallen under the undisputed ascendancy of the Mongols within a period of less than fifty-five years ?'³ And this question has been put by Rashīd-ad-Dīn in the preface to his A Comprehensive Collection of Histories in terms reminiscent of the corresponding passage⁴ in Polybius's preface to his Oecumenical History.

'The beginning of every new religion or new empire constitutes a distinctive new era (Ibtidā-i-har milleti wa har dawlati ta’rikh⁵-i-mu‛ayyan bdshād). Now what fact or event has ever been more memorable than the beginning of the dynasty of Chingis Khān, or has better deserved to be taken as marking a new era? The fact is that, within the span of a small number of years, this monarch . . . subjugated a great number of the kingdoms of the World and conquered and exterminated a host of unruly people.... When world-wide dominion devolved upon Chingis Khān and his noble kinsmen and illustrious descendants, all the kingdoms of the Oikoumenê—Chīn and Māchīn (South China), Khitāy (North China), Hind and Sind (India), Transoxania, Turkistan, Syria, Rūm, the Ās (Alans), the Russians, the Circassians, Qipchāq, Kalār (?),⁶ the Bashkirs—or, to put it in one word, all the countries within the four quarters of thecompass—submitted to these princes and became subject to their ordinances ... [Chingis Khān] gave the whole Universe one and the same physiognomy and instilled identical feelings into all hearts. He purified the domains of the empires by delivering them from the domination of perverse usurpers and from the oppression of audacious enemies. He handed his empire on to his illustrious kinsmen and noble descendants.'⁷

¹ See Rashīd-ad-Dīn, preface to the Jāmi‛, Quatremére's translation, pp. 47-51.
² The second volume of the Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī, covering the history of the Mongol Khāqāns from the accession of Chingis' son Ogotāy to the death of Qūbilāy's grandson Timūr, has been edited by E. Blochet in the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, vol. xviii (London 191 J, Luzac). The chapters on the career of Hūlāgū Khān in the third volume, which covers the history of the Il-Khāns of Iran and ‛Irāq down to the death of Ghāzān, have been edited, together with the preface to the whole of the Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh, by E. M. Quatremére in Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, vol. i (Paris 1836, Imprimerie Royale).
³ i.e. from the overthrow of Wang Khān the Karāyit by Chingis Khān the Mongol in A.D. 1203 (see II. ii. 237-8) to the overthrow of the ‛Abbasid Caliph Musta‛sim by Chingis’ grandson Hūlāgū in A.D. 1258.
⁴ Quoted on p. 64, above.
⁵ In the two preceding sentences the author has pointed out that 'new era’ is one of two meanings of the word ta’rikh, the other meaning being 'chronicle’.—AJ.T.
⁶ See Quatremére's learned but inconclusive note 88, in op. cit., p. 72, on this enigmatic name.
⁷ Rashīd-ad-Dīn, ibid., pp. 60-63 and 70-73.

{p. 75} This epoch-making revolution in the World's affairs raised, in minds that had grown up on the morrow of it, the two Polybian supplementary questions 'Who are these conquerors of the World?' and 'What is this World that they have conquered ?' Rashīd-ad-Dīn addressed himself to the first supplementary question at Ghāzān’s instance, and to the second at Ūljaytū’s. In taking up the first of the two, Rashīd-ad-Dīn had been anticipated by ‛Alā-ad-Dīn ‛Ata Malik-i-Juwaynī; for the Ta’rīkh-I-Jahān Gushā was finished in A.D. 1260,¹ forty-six years before the Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī was presented by Rashīd-ad-Dīn to Ghāzān’s successor Ūljaytū on the 14th April, 1306,2 and the first of the three parts of Juwaynīs work deals with the history of Chingis Khān, his predecessors, and his successors down to his son Chaghatāy, whose appanage lay in Transoxania and the Zungarian Gap ('Mughalistan').³ It was, indeed, only to be expected that a Persian Muslim historian whose father and grandfather had been in the public service of the Khwārizm Shahs should have written his answer to the question 'Who are these irresistible Mongol invaders ?' forty-six years before the same question was answered by a Persian Muslim historian whose birthplace was Hamadān; for the Mongol storm had broken upon the Kwārizrnian march of Dār-al-Islām as early as A.D. 1220, while Western Iran had not been exposed to it till A.D. 1256, when the Mongols forced the passage of the Caspian Gates in their campaign of that year against the Ismā‛īlīs.

The purpose of the special history of the Mongols and Turks which Rashīd-ad-Dīn wrote in accordance with Ghāzān Khān's instructions was, in the author's own Herodotean words, 'to make sure that the memory of the extraordinary events and important facts that have signalized the epiphany of the dynasty of the Mongols should not be obliterated and annihilated by lapse of Time... nor suffer the fate of remaining concealed under an impenetrably thick veil [of ignorance]';⁴ and the civil servant historian proceeds to explain the grounds of his royal master's anxiety on this score. The history of the Mongols before and during their conquest of the World was by this time already unfamiliar to all but a few of Ghāzān Khān's subjects; it could be foreseen that the rising generation in the Il-Khān’s Mongol comitatus would cease to feel any interest in their own family histories and in their ancestors' achievements; and it would be particularly disgraceful to allow oblivion thus to overtake the deeds of Chingis Khān and his Mongol companions, who had achieved, in their day, the unique feat of conquering the World. Reading between Rashīd-ad-Dīn's lines, we can surmise that Ghāzān had instructed his Persian Muslim civil servant to put on record the history of the pagan Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe because he had realized that his own ci-devant Nomad retainers—who had

¹ See p. 72, n. 5, above.
² See E. Berthels’ article on Rashīd-ad-Dīn in the Encyclopaedia of Islam vol. iii (Leiden 1936, Brill), pp. 1124-5.
³ See II. ii. 145.
⁴ Rashīd-ad-Dīn, ibid., pp. 78-79. Compare the opening words of Herodotus's preface: 'Herodotus of Halicarnassus presents the results of his researches in the following work, with the twofold object of saving the past of Mankind from oblivion and ensuring that the extraordinary achievements of the Hellenic and Oriental worlds shall enjoy their just renown—particularly the transactions which brought them into conflict with one another’.

{p.76} migrated from 'the Desert' to 'the Sown' forty years before the date of his own accession in A.D. 1395,¹' and who, in the act, had changed their trade by becoming herdsmen of human cattle in place of their former ungulate livestock²—would have been bound in any case soon to become assimilated to their more highly cultivated sedentary subjects and were destined to lose their Eurasian Nomad social heritage all the more quickly now that of Ghāzān himself had accelerated their assimilation by his policy of conversion to Islam. Ghāzān Khān had become a devout Muslim without having ceased to be a patriotic Mongol and a proud Chingisid; and, in commissioning Rashīd-ad-Dīn to write in the New Persian language a history of the Mongols and Turks, of Ghāzān was seeking to reconcile his new loyalty with his old one.

Rashīd-ad-Dīn—in constant attendance, as he had to be, upon his Il-Khānī masters in North-Western Iran in an age in which the Central Government of the Mongol Empire no longer had the power to summon the administrators of such outlying appanages to the Khāqān's Court to account to him there for their stewardship—had not enjoyed the opportunities, that had been thrust upon Juwaynī,³ of visiting Mongolia and

¹ The expeditionary force with which Hūlāgū made his conquests west of the Caspian Gates had left Qāraqorum in July 1252 and had left the Steppe behind for ever upon entering Transoxania in A.D. 1255, one season before the campaign of A.D. 1256 against the Ismā‛īlīs (see Browne, E. G.: A Literary History of Persia, vol. ii (London 1906, Fisher Unwin, pp. 452-3)). Thus, by the date of Ghāzān’s accession, they had been vegetating for forty years in a demoralizing Land of Milk and Honey.
² The social unhealthiness of this change in a Nomad horde's way of life has been noticed in III. iii. 22-25.
³ Both ‛Alā-ad- Dīn Juwaynī and his father Bahā-ad- Dīn Juwaynī before him had travelled more than once from Khurāsān to Mongolia and back in the course of their official duties in the Mongol public service. Bahā-ad-Dīn had been sent in A.D. 1235-6 by his captor and patron Jintimūr to the court of the Khāqān Ogotāy, who had confirmed the appointment to the post of sāhib-dīiwān which Jintimūr had conferred upon him (Browne, apud Juwaynī, ed. cit., p. xxii); and he had been taken to Qāraqorum again by Arghūn, Jintimūr's second successor in the government of Khurāsān (see Browne, ibid). ‛Alā-ad-Dīn 'spent some ten years of his life in these journeyings to and fro' (Browne, ibid., p. xxiv); and his third journey in Arghūn's company (peregrinabantur A.D. 1251-4, during the reign of the Khāqān Mangū) gave him the inspiration to write his history. On this occasion, he arrived at Qāraqorum on the 2nd May, 1252, and did not set out on his journey back to Khurāsān till September 1253.

‘It was during this stay of a year and five months at the Mongol capital that it was suggested to our author by some of his friends... that he should compose this history to immortalize the great deeds and conquests of the Mongol sovereigns. A certain diffidence as to his capacity for this task at first prompted him to refuse, but he was ultimately convinced that he possessed certain almost unique qualifications for it, to wit his extensive acquaintance with the Mongol Empire and its most notable administrators, the free access to the most authentic sources of information permitted to him by the high official position which he held, and his first-hand knowledge of many important political events. He therefore finally agreed to undertake the task, which he began in A.H. 650 and concluded inA.H. 658 (A.D. 1252-60).’—Browne, apud Juwaynī, ed. cit., p. xxv.

A similar journey to the ordu of the Mongol Khāqān Mangū, in the heart of the
Eurasian Steppe, inspired a notable work of Medieval Western Christian literature, the Itinerarium Fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis, de Ordine Fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno Gratie 1255, ad Partes Orientales. Friar William of Rubruck arrived at Mangū's court some three months after the date of *‛Alā -ad-Dīn Juwaynī 's departure, and he attended on the Khāqān from January to June, inclusive, A.D. 1254.

Such journeys right across the breadth of the Old World were made possible by the
Mongols' organization of what was certainly the farthest-flung—though it was perhaps also the shortest-lived—of all the imperial postal-services known to History (see VI. vii. 99). See Marco Polo's account of it in The Description of the World, ed. by Moule, A. C.,and Pelliot, Paul, vol. i (London 1938, Routledge), pp. 342-7. The experience of travelling post-haste from the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe to the high plateau was as fatiguiing as it was inspiring. See William of Rubruck, op. cit., chaps. 23, 24, and 55: ‘In the space of two months and ten days, we did not rest except one single day, when we could not get any horses' (chap. 55). Friar William's predecessor, Friar John of Piano Carpini,... who had made the journey in A.D. 1245—47, paints the same picture: Tassing through Comania we rode most earnestly, having change of horses five times or oftener in a day.'—Libellus Historicus Joannis de Plano Carpini, qid missus est Legatus ad Tartaros A.D. 1246, chap. 21.

{p.77} collecting information about the Mongols at the fountain-head; yet in many respects the sources made accessible to Rashīd-ad-Dīn within the bounds of the Il- Khāns’ dominions could bear comparison with those towhich Juwaynī had had access at Qāraqorum.

'An authentic chronicle, written in the Mongol language and script,¹ had been written and been brought up to date at intervals, and this was deposited in the [Il-Khānī] archives; but in this form it had no order or method in it; it was an assemblage of isolated and incomplete fragments; it remained inaccessible and unknown to any students who would have been capable of extracting from it some notion of the facts and events recorded in it; and no one had ever received authorisation or permission to make use of it....

‘Ghāzān Khān. . . conceived the idea of having these state papers brought together and put in order..„ and the author... was instructed to collect the facts concerning the origins and genealogies of all the Turkish peoples in contact with the Mongols and to put into writing [in the Persian language], article by article, the historical records relating to these peoples, part of which is in the Imperial Archives, while the remainder is to be found in the hands of the [Mongol] amirs and [other] members of the [Il-Khānī] Court.

'Down to that time, no one had been in a position to collect these records or been so fortunate as to have it in his power to put them in order and make a systematic history out of them; and those authors who had [previously] made the attempt to write the history of part of these events had had to do their work without possessing an exact knowledge of the facts.² They had been reduced to collecting oral narratives from the mouths of plebeians, along lines dictated by their own preconceived ideas; and no one could count on these traditions being true or exact.

‘The present writer was commissioned to put these fragments of historical materials in order after having made a scrupulous examination of them; he was to digest them in plain language; and he was [thus] to bring . . . these hitherto completely inaccessible records to the light of day. If there were any events that were treated too summarily, or in too little detail, in these historical documents, he was instructed to fill the lacunae by collecting information on these subjects from the savants and doctors (dānīyān wa hukamā) of Khitāy [North China], India, Uighurland, Qipchāq and other countries—considering that representatives of all the peoples in the World are to be found at His Il-Khanian Majesty's Court.

¹ As Quatremére points out in op. cit., p. lix, Rashīd-ad-Dīn must have been able to speak Mongol in order to transact official business with the Il-Khān and his comitatus. He had also written several works in Mongol, according to a statement of his own which his French editor cites from man. arabe 356, fol. 213 r.—AJ.T.
² Is this an allusion to Juwaynī 's Ta’rīkh-I-Jahān Gushā If so, its depreciatory innuendo recoils on Rashīd-ad-Dīn’s own head; for Rashīd-ad-Dīn 'included in his great history... practically the whole contents of the three volumes of the Jahān-Gushāy, condensing some portions (such as the history of the Mongol governors of Khurāsān and other provinces of Persia, and the history of the Khwārazm Shahs), expanding others (such as the history of Chingiz Khān's youth and of his sons and grandsons, and the history of the Assassins), and leaving others (such as the history of Chingiz Khān 's conquests in the domains of the Khwārazm Shāhs and in Persia, and the anecdotes of Ogotāy Khān's domes) almost unchanged’ (Browne, apud Juwaynī, ed. cit., pp. lix-lx).—AJ.T.

{p.78} 'First and foremost, he was to consult... Pūlād Chingsang,¹ who has a unique . . . knowledge of the genealogies of the Turkish peoples and the events of their history—particularly the history of the Mongols.'²

These were the oral and documentary sources that Rashīd-ad-Dīn had at his disposal for carrying out Ghāzān Khān instructions to write a Persian history of the Mongols; but, as the Persian historian tells us, Ghāzān’s successor Khudābandah Ūljaytū Khān, when he read Rashīd-ad-Dīn's Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī, found the historian's answer to Ghāzān’s question 'Who were these Mongol conquerors of the World ?' raising in his mind the further question 'What is this World that the Mongols have conquered?' And Rashīd-ad-Dīn 's new employer also had the acumen to perceive that at least one of the sources of information on which the historian had drawn in answering Ghāzān question could also be turned to account for answering Ūljaytū's own. After having read the Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī, Ūljaytū pointed out to the author, so Rashīd-ad-Dīn tells us, that, hitherto, no one had ever written a comprehensive history of the whole Oikoumenê and all the peoples in it, but that an unprecedented opportunity for producing a work of this scope had arisen

'now that the Oikoumenê, from end to end, is subject either to us or to [other] Chingisids, with the result that doctors, astronomers, savants and historians

(hukamā wa munajjimān, wa arbāb-i-dānish wa ashāb-i-tawā-rīkh), representing all religions and sects (adyān wa milel)—natives of Khitāy, Māchīn, Hind, Kashmir, Tibet, Uighurland and other nations, Turk, Arab, and Frank—are assembled in large numbers under Our eyes, and considering that each of them possesses books which set out his country's history, chronology, and religious beliefs, and has at least a partial acquaintance with these different subjects.'³

With these considerations in mind, Ūljaytū Khān, who had piously refused to have the dedication of Rashīd-ad-Dīn 's Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī, covering the history of the Eurasian Nomads, transferred from his dead brother's name to his own,⁴ now commanded the dynasty's Persian civil servant historian to enlarge the Ta’rīkh–i-Ghāzānī into a Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh, by adding two new parts—a universal history and a universal geography⁵—which were to bear Ūljaytū's name. In this supplementary

¹ See Quatremére's note 95 ibid., pp. 77-78. Pūlād was a Mongol of the Durban tribe. His father had been Chingis Khān's cook' (i.e. a confidential officer in his household). Pūlād himself had entered the service of Chingis' grandson and Hūlāgū's brother Qūbilāy, and had been invested by him with the Chinese title chingsang in addition to his hereditary Mongol title baurji, the Mongol word for 'cook*. He was the permanent diplomatic representative of the House of Qūbilāy at the Il- Khān Court. In the Il-Khāns' own Mongol comitatis there was also a wealth of historical tradition to be harvested; for, as Rashīd-ad-Dīn records in his history of Hūlāgū Khān (see Quatremére's edition, pp. 130-3), Hūlāgū's brother the Khāqān Mangū, when he sent Hūlāgū to enlarge the bounds of the Mongol Empire south-westwards, reinforced Hūlāgū's existing comitatus by making for him a special levy of two men out of every ten in the war-bands of all the other Chingisid princes. 'This is why in our countries [i.e. in the II-Khān's dominions] there always have been, and still are, [Mongol] amirs who are descendants and relations of each of the ajnirs of Chingis Khān, and each of these still holds his hereditary office.’
² Rashīd-ad-Dīn: Preface to the Jāmi‛-al-Tawārīkh, Quatremére's edition: Persian text on pp. 74-7S; Quatremére's translation on pp. 75-79.
³ Rashīd-ad-Dīn, ibid., pp. 38-39.
⁴ See ibid., pp. 36-37,
⁵ No manuscript of Rashīd-ad-Dīn's universal geography was extant as far as was known at the time of writing.

{p.79} work, which was duly completed in A.D. 1310-11,¹ the universal history fills four volumes. The first three are those presenting the history of the Syriac Civilization in terms of Iranian history which have already been mentioned.² The fourth breaks new ground³ by bringing Turkish, Chinese, Israelite, Frankish, and Indian history into the picture.

Rashīd-ad-Dīn was exceptional among his co-religionists in the II-Khānī dominions in his day in being psychologically as well as intellectually well qualified for carrying out his second and major historical task. The majority of his fellow Muslims had been exasperated by the temporary favour which a local Christian and Jewish minority had been enjoying during the first phase of a revolutionary régime in which the barbarian conquerors had remained, not merely pagan in their practice, but also positively anti-Muslim in their feelings. The fanatical mood consequently prevalent in the Persian Muslim community is in sharp contrast with Rashīd-ad-Dīn 's respect and sympathy for non-Muslim scholarship.

'Although [he ventures to write in his preface]⁴ the tradition of the Muslims is greatly superior to that of the other peoples, all the same we cannot take it as our guide in dealing with the history of the non-Muslim peoples. It goes without saying that the facts which, in the traditions of any people, have been transmitted through a continuous chain of authorities have to be accepted as authentic,'

and he informs us that, in compiling his geographical gazetteer, he has lived up to his own principles.

'In his endeavour to draw on all available sources and to verify his results, the author, in this volume, has not been content merely to assemble everything that has hitherto been known in this country and has been described or delineated in [our] books; he has supplemented this existing information with the facts which, in this fortunate age, the doctors and savants (hukama wa damydn) of Hind, Chīn and Māchīn, Frankland and other foreign parts have found in their books and have certified as being authentic after having scrupulously verified them.'⁵

A Persian Muslim theologian-historian, Nāsir-ad- Dīn al-Baydāwī, who was Rashīd-ad-Dīn's contemporary, records6 that, when Rashīd-ad-Din was setting out to write his section on the history of Khitāy (North China), he consulted two Chinese scholars at Ūljaytū’s Court—Li Ta-chi and Mak Sun—who were authorities on Far Eastern medicine, astronomy, and history and who had brought with them, from China, books dealing with these subjects. On the strength of their recommendation, Baydāwī tells us, Rashīd -ad- Dīn based his account of Chinese history on a compendium, written by three Chinese Buddhist monks, which,

¹ See Browne, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 72.
² On p. 73, above.
³ Rashīd-ad-Dīn had, however, had at least one predecessor in this exotic field. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (natus A.D. 973) had not only published, circa A.D. 1000, A Chronology of Ancient Nations; he had also taken the opportunity, opened up for Persian Muslim scholars by Mahmūd of Ghaznah's conquests in India, to publish, soon after A.D .1030, his Indica (see Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. ii, p. 101).
⁴ In Quatremére's edition, pp. 44-45.
⁵ Rashīd-ad-Dīn, ibid., pp. 58-61.
⁶ See Quatremére in his life of Rashīd-ad-Din, p. lxxviii. Baydāwī’s historical work was still unpublished at the time of writing.

{p.80} his two Chinese consultants assured him, had been verified, approved, and passed for the press by a consensus of Chinese litterati.

The oecumenical outlook with which Rashīd-ad-Dīn was thus inspired by the social milieu of the Il-Khānī Court was transmitted by him to at least one disciple, Abū Sulaymān Dā’ūd of Banākat in Transoxania, who enjoyed the same intellectual advantages in virtue of being Ghāzān Khān’s poet laureate.

'His information about the Jews, Christians, Indians, Chinese, and Mongols, though largely directly borrowed, often in the same words, from the pages of Rashīd-ad-Dīn, was nevertheless undoubtedly supplemented by what the author learned orally from representatives of the peoples in question. In no Persian history before the Mongol period, and in few after it, do we find so many references to places, people, and historical events beyond the ken of most Muslim writers: places like Portugal, Poland, Bohemia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Catalonia, Lombardy, Paris, and Cologne; people like the Roman Emperors, from Romulus downwards, and the Popes from Saint Peter to the Pope contemporary with the author, who is said to be the two hundred and second in succession; and events like the different church councils, the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the time of Pope Eleutherius, the Nestorian heresy, and the like.’¹

¹ Browne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 101-2,