Abu Sa’id and the Collapse of the Ilkhanate

Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan (1305–1335) was the ninth Ilkhan and the last to rule the whole Mongol state in Iran. He came to the throne as a boy in 1316, broke free of his powerful regent Amir Chupan in 1327, and made a lasting peace with Mamluk Egypt. When he died suddenly in 1335 without a son or a named heir, the Ilkhanate split within a few years into rival states led by emirs and puppet khans.

A boy king and his regent

Abu Sa’id, son of Öljaitü, was born on 2 June 1305 and was eleven when his father died at Soltaniyeh in December 1316. Real power passed to the emirs, and from early 1318 above all to Amir Chupan of the Suldus tribe, a veteran commander who had served Ghazan and Öljaitü.

The new reign began with a political killing. In July 1318 Rashid al-Din, the elderly vizier who had served three Ilkhans, was executed on the charge of having poisoned Öljaitü. His rival Taj al-Din Ali Shah, the builder of the great mosque in Tabriz, became the first vizier of the Ilkhanate to die in office of natural causes, in 1324.

In 1319 the state faced a double crisis: Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, invaded Azerbaijan, and a group of emirs who resented Chupan rose in revolt. The young Abu Sa’id fought in person in the battle that crushed the rebels, and the title Bahadur, “the brave”, is said to date from this victory.

Peace with Egypt

The greatest achievement of the reign was diplomatic. Since Ain Jalut in 1260 the Ilkhans and the Mamluks had fought a long cold and hot war over Syria. Around 1322–1323 the two sides agreed a peace, often called the Treaty of Aleppo, that ended six decades of conflict. Trade and pilgrimage across the frontier became easier, and the Ilkhans gave up the old dream of taking Syria.

The fall of Amir Chupan

Chupan’s family came to dominate the state. His sons governed great provinces: Timurtash in Anatolia, Hasan in Khorasan, and Dimashq Khwaja at the court in Azerbaijan. Chupan married a daughter of Öljaitü. By the mid-1320s the Ilkhan was a grown man who resented the regent’s control.

The break came through a personal matter. Abu Sa’id wanted to marry Chupan’s daughter Baghdad Khatun, who was already the wife of another great emir, Hasan Buzurg of the Jalayir. Chupan refused. In August 1327, while Chupan was away in the east, Abu Sa’id had Dimashq Khwaja killed. Chupan’s army melted away; he fled to Herat, where the local ruler Ghiyath al-Din Kart had him put to death later that year. Timurtash fled to Egypt and was executed there. Abu Sa’id then married Baghdad Khatun.

The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta saw the young Ilkhan in 1327, first at Baghdad and then on the move with the royal camp to Tabriz, and he left a vivid description of the court on the march. The other key figure of the later reign was the vizier Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, Rashid al-Din’s son, who from 1327 ran the government and patronised scholars and artists. The Great Mongol Shahnameh, the most ambitious painted book of the period, is often dated to these years (see Ilkhanid art and manuscripts).

Sudden death in Karabakh

In 1335 Özbeg of the Golden Horde again threatened the Caucasus frontier. Abu Sa’id marched north and died in his camp in Karabakh on the night of 30 November 1335, aged thirty. His body was carried back to Soltaniyeh for burial.

The cause is unknown. Ibn Battuta, who was no longer in Iran, reported the rumour that Baghdad Khatun had poisoned him out of jealousy, because he had turned to her niece Dilshad Khatun; Baghdad Khatun was killed soon after. Some modern historians have suggested an epidemic in the camp, possibly an early outbreak of plague, but this is a hypothesis without firm evidence (see The Black Death and Iran).

How the Ilkhanate broke apart

Abu Sa’id left no son. Hulagu’s male line had been thinned by decades of purges, and the emirs now chose khans to suit themselves.

1. 1335 The vizier Ghiyath al-Din raises Arpa Ke’ün, a distant descendant of Genghis Khan’s son Tolui, to the throne.
2. 1336 Arpa is defeated by Ali Padshah, governor of Baghdad, and executed; Ghiyath al-Din is killed.
3. 1336–1338 Hasan Buzurg, the Jalayir emir, and his rivals set up and remove a series of short-lived khans.
4. 1338 Hasan Kuchak, Chupan’s grandson, takes Tabriz and governs through puppet rulers, including Öljaitü’s daughter Sati Beg.
5. 1340s The Jalayirids hold Baghdad; the Chobanids hold Azerbaijan; local dynasties rule Fars, Kerman, Herat and Sabzevar.
6. 1357 Jani Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, takes Tabriz and kills the Chobanid Malik Ashraf. The last Ilkhanid claimant in Khorasan, Togha Temür, had been killed in 1353.

Out of this break-up came the dynasties covered in the next era: the Chobanids and Jalayirids in the north-west, the Injuids and Muzaffarids in Shiraz and Yazd, the Kartids of Herat and the Sarbadars of Sabzevar. Iran stayed divided until Timur’s invasions from 1381.

Why the state collapsed

Historians point to several causes. The dynasty lacked adult princes, so no candidate had the authority to unite the emirs. The great military families, such as Chupan’s descendants and the Jalayirs, had built up their own followings, lands and revenues. Charles Melville’s study of the decade after 1327 traces how the destruction of Chupan removed the one figure strong enough to hold them together while leaving the families themselves in place. Some scholars also stress economic strain after Ghazan’s reforms faded. The peace with Egypt, ironically, removed the outside enemy that had kept the emirs united.

Abu Sa’id himself is remembered kindly in Persian sources as a cultured ruler who wrote poetry and music and practised calligraphy. His reign was the last period of order before half a century of fragmentation.