Under the Ilkhanate (1260–1335), the Mongol state in West Asia, a number of cities and buildings were newly constructed. While some Islamic religious buildings such as mosques and tombs of religious figures have survived as functioning buildings or as ruins above ground, the capital cities and secular buildings established by the Ilkhans have been almost entirely lost, despite extensive contemporaneous information on them. Nevertheless, the remarkable progress in archaeological research since the twentieth century has unearthed several of them, as well as rock-cut structures. Such sites include the observatory in Maragha; three rock-cut structures in western Iran; the Ilkhanid summer quarters at Takht-i Sulaymān; the eighth Ilkhan Öljeitü’s capital city, Sultaniyya; and the charitable foundation called Rabʿ-i Rashīdī founded by Rashīd al-Dīn in the eastern suburb of Tabriz.

Although Mongol authority built its empire through military might and administration, the cultural construction of empire happened through artistic exchange. Visions of desire, beauty, and power – as well as the materials that made creativity possible – were essential to the ideological projects of Mongol imperial reach. As governors of a Eurasian-wide commercial empire, Mongol rulers required effective visual representations of their power that could easily be understood by diverse audiences. This could be achieved through widespread dissemination and integration of material culture. Reliance on already recognizable symbols of authority that could be adapted and repurposed for contemporary political goals was both expedient and effective.

Arabic sources written in the Mamluk Sultanate, in the territories controlled by the Mongols, and elsewhere play an important role in reconstructing the history of the Mongol world empire and its successor states and of their relations with nearby countries. While some of these sources have been known and used since the early nineteenth century, Arabic-language works have became more significant in the study of Mongol history in the last half-century or so, and especially in the last generation, with the proliferation of proper editions of many of these texts. This article surveys the large – but perhaps not fully appreciated – corpus of Arabic works related to Mongolian studies, in the following order: works written before the establishment of the Ilkhanate (c. 1260), those composed in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, books originating in Arabic-speaking countries beyond the Mamluk Sultanate, and finally compositions from Mongol-controlled regions, mostly in the western Ilkhanate.

This chapter provides an overview of the copious material production that occurred during the centuries when the Mongols dominated much of Asia. Co-authored, the essay offers a fully integrated study that focuses on common themes rather than regional differences. It begins by assessing the sources available for study in order to underscore some of the problems in using them. It then shows that the process of commodity and exchange across the Mongol domains resulted in a shared material culture and in the emergence of a new visual language marked by three features: an interest in perspective and the opening up of space, the cultivation of monumental size in which importance was demonstrated through scale, and a concern for allover surface patterning, often with raised, pierced, or multilevel carving.

Georgian narrative and documentary materials represent a significant source for the analysis of the relations between Mongolians and Georgians and for a thorough study of the history of the Mongols. This chapter mainly considers the voluminous work called The Centennial Chronicle compiled by an anonymous fourteenth-century author known as the Chronicler. It is important not only for the history of Georgia and Mongolia, but also for the history of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Central Asia, and Asia Minor, conveying the history of their development from the 1220s to the 1320s. The material provided in The Centennial Chronicle is a reliable source for studying the socioeconomic history of the Near and Middle East in the period of Mongol domination. The chapter also discusses other Georgian narrative and documentary materials providing, information on some issues concerning the relations between the Mongolians and Georgians (taxes and other obligations).

In the first half of the thirteenth century, Mongol forces launched raids into areas that are now parts of Iraq and Syria. Raids turned into conquest with Hülegü’s movement into the region in the mid-1250s. Baghdad was taken in 1258, and by spring 1260, much of Syria was overrun by Mongol forces. A small Mongol army, however, was defeated by the Mamluks from Egypt in northern Palestine later that year. After a clear border was established along the Euphrates, for sixty years the Mamluks and Ilkhanids struggled for regional supremacy in major battles, frontier warfare, and diplomatic démarches. Around 1320, this conflict ended after negotiations, with peace agreements in place until the breakup of the Ilkhanate after 1335. Although ultimately unsuccessful in conquering lands beyond Iraq, the impact of the Mongols on greater Syria, Egypt, and Arabia was significant, not only militarily, but in the realm of demography, culture, and economy.

Gender relations on the Mongolian steppe were crucial to Mongol military successes and the rise of the world empire. Women’s labor within nomadic camps freed up men for wartime mobilization. Elite women were directly involved in policy decisions at the highest levels, and, like elite men, might control large armies and estates. Some were Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, and served as patrons of these religions for their nomadic followers and for conquered people. Royal women also influenced public affairs through their marriage ties, and could thereby empower their male and female relatives for generations. The first section of this chapter discusses women and gender relations during the expansion of the United Empire, including marriage practices, women’s work, women’s participation in politics, and examples of powerful women in Mongol history. The second section covers women in the western khanates, and the third looks at women and gender in China during the Mongol Yuan dynasty.

The Mongol advance is described from an unusual viewpoint in the Hebrew sources. The writers either witnessed Mongol activity, as in the Jewish communities of Iraq and Armenia, or heard of it from afar, as in Sicily, Provence, Spain, and Morocco. The texts, scant in number yet diverse in nature, are traced according to genre – letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, eschatology and Kabbalah, exegesis, and sermons. They touch the early Mongol raids in Iraq and the vast invasion of Eastern Europe, the conquest of Baghdad and the advance into Syria, and the activity of the Ilkhanate and its conflict with the Mamluk Sultanate. Since the Jews had neither state nor army, they were not considered a target or a threat, and their texts therefore provide a sort of neutral, and often positive, description of the Mongols as a raiding force, a conquering army, and a state.

The Mongol invasions of Iran and the collapse of the ʿAbbasid hegemony gave a great impetus to Persian historical writing in the late thirteenth century, expressed both in the patronage of the rulers and senior ministers of the court, and in the provincial centers on the peripheries of the Iranian plateau. After surveying the Persian histories of the Mongol invasions and early Ilkhanate, the chapter covers the rich literature that evolved following the conversion of the Mongols to Islam. The history of the period was also written by later authors, sometimes drawing on sources now lost, or consolidating the information provided by their predecessors but now presented with a new underlying narrative, with the benefit of looking back on the more distant past. The survey concludes with the work of some historians of the Timurid period, who narrate the history of the Ilkhanate in the longer perspective of Persian history.

The Sultanate drew upon concepts of martial skill, valor and aggression attributed to the Mongol Imperium and its unprecedented conquests. While idealizing these traits, Mamluk Sultans exploited them to thwart Mongol expansion into their territories. They welcomed renegades from Mongol armies (Wafidiyya) to mimic their prowess while limiting their aggression. Mamluk cadets were imported initially from the Qipjaq Steppe in Central Asia, subsequently from Circassia in the Caucasus, with numerous other regions represented. They were instructed in Arabic, Turkish and Islam prior to being trained in arms. The Mamluk military hierarchy consisted of elite Mamluks imported as cadets in the Sultan’s service, Mamluks of senior officers, soldiers of former rulers restive over their loss of status, and descendants of 1st-generation Mamluks who served as infantry and assimilated into Arabic civil society (awlad al-nas). Advancement through the military hierarchy was marked by endemic factional rivalry in which conspiracy was expected not repudiated. Whether conspiracy enhanced the Sultanate’s military prowess or destabilized its governance remains a debated issue.

An experiment in state-building during the medieval Islamic period, the Sultanate emerged in consequence of a junta by Mamluk slave-soldiers against their patron, the Ayyubid ruler al-Salih (647/1249). A junta participant, al-Zahir Baybars (r. 658/1260-676/1277), consolidated the coup into a stable government. His successor, al-Mansur Qalawun (r. 678/1279-689/1290), sustained the regime, but it was Qalawun’s son, al-Nasir Muhammad (3rd r. 709/1310-741/1341), who oversaw the Sultanate’s halcyon era. Egypt, Syria and the Red Sea were united as the leading imperial power of the central Arab lands. Al-Nasir terminated rivalry from the Sultanate’s main opponent, the Mongol Il-khanate in Iran. His descendants presided over the Sultanate as a quasi-dynasty until an officer of Circassian origin, al-Zahir Barquq (r. 784/1382-801/1399) restored the rule of 1st-generation Mamluks. Barquq and his prominent successors, al-Muʾayyad Shaykh (r. 815/1412-824/1421)and al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 825/1422-841/1438) upheld the regime’s sovereignty against resistance from insurgents in Syria and eastern Anatolia, while enhancing its role as a key participant in commerce with South and East Asia via the Red Sea. They also initiated policies of extraction and monopolies over lucrative commodities that met the fiscal demands of the military hierarchy but compromised the economy long-term. The Sultanate’s final rulers: al-Ashraf Qaʾitbay (r. 872/1468-901/1496) and Qansawh al-Ghawri (r. 906/1501-922/1516) continued these policies until the regime’s defeat by the Ottomans.

This chapter considers the changes wrought by the Mongol invasions. It first examines briefly the development of Muslim politics and literature in the pre-Mongol period, demonstrating how until the middle of the thirteenth century textual productionfocused largely on the Seljuq court. It then looks at the impact of Mongol rule, concentrating in particular on the political and religious consequences - the crisis of legitimacy caused by the Seljuq collapse and, the position of the Mongols before and after their conversion, and the persecution of Christians that intensified under Mongol rule.As a result, political discourse was infused with a new concern with unbelief, absent in the Seljuq period.