Öljaitü

Öljaitü (24 March 1280 – 16 December 1316), who reigned under the Muslim name Muhammad Khodabandeh, was the eighth Ilkhan of the Ilkhanate, ruling from 1304 to 1316. The third son of Arghun and brother and successor of Ghazan, he completed the building of Soltaniyeh and made it his capital; its dome, raised as his mausoleum, is among the monuments of Islamic architecture. His reign is also the story of a ruler who crossed four religious worlds in one life: baptised a Christian, raised a Buddhist, converted to Sunni Islam, and finally an adherent of Twelver Shi'a Islam — with a reported return to Sunnism at the very end. ^{1 2}

He was born in 1280 while his father Arghun was viceroy of Khorasan under Abaqa Khan; the Arabic and Urdu articles and Wikidata agree on the year and the day, 24 March, while the English article gives the same day in 1282 — both years are recorded in his record. His birth name was Kharbanda, "mule-driver" in Persian, perhaps given as a protective name after the deaths of his elder brothers; his mother renamed him Öljaitü, Mongolian for "auspicious/blessed". Arghun made him viceroy of Khorasan in 1296, and on Ghazan's death in 1304 he succeeded at Tabriz, taking the throne name Muhammad Khodabandeh. ^{1 2 3}

At Tabriz he was met by emissaries of the Yuan emperor Temür, carrying a message that the Mongol khanates should keep the peace; he answered with letters to Philip IV of France, Rudolf I of Bohemia, Edward I of England and Pope Clement V proposing a common front against the Mamluks of Egypt — envoys who in Paris and elsewhere attracted attention, though the alliance never materialised. In 1307 he completed his father's conquest of Gilan, an operation directed by his vizier Sa'd al-Din Savaji and commander Qutlughshah, in which Qutlughshah was killed; that same year, campaigning from the frontier, he took the fortress of Herat from the Kartids. In 1312 he invaded Mamluk Syria, besieged Rahbat without success and withdrew in 1313; afterwards he left the eastern frontier's defence to his son Abu Sa'id, whose army won a victory on the Murghab in 1315. He moved his capital to Soltaniyeh, the city he had completed near Zanjan, building its citadel, its mosques, schools and hospitals, and the great dome under which he would be buried — an octagonal structure fifty metres high, its turquoise dome ringed by eight minarets, often read as an ancestor of the Taj Mahal. ^{1 2}

No Ilkhan's religious life is more layered. His mother Uruk Khatun was a Keraite Christian, and in 1291 the child was baptised and named Nicholas, after Pope Nicholas IV. He was nevertheless raised a Buddhist, in the tradition of the Ilkhanate's first rulers, and studied Buddhism in Khorasan. With Ghazan's conversion he became a Sunni Muslim, taking the name Muhammad and the Hanafi school of his brother, at a court in which Sufis such as Sa'd al-Din Hamuyi also formed him. After his accession, the Shi'a theologians al-Hilli and his pupil Maitham al-Bahrani drew him toward Shi'a Islam, and in 1310 he changed his school formally to Twelver Shi'ism; the change carried policy with it — coins struck in the names of the Twelve Imams and Shi'a notables advanced — and the English article records that Öljaitü had al-Hilli's remains transferred to the shrine he built for him at Soltaniyeh (al-Hilli outlived the sultan, dying in 1325, so the transfer itself belongs to the years after). The ending is contested: the Arabic article records both that he remained a Shi'a until his death and that, on the report of the qadi of Shiraz, he returned to Sunni Islam in his final year; the English article cites al-Safadi for a return to Sunnism in Ramadan 716 AH, on the 10th of that month. Because the final phase itself is read two ways by the texts, this museum keeps his affiliation unsettled — unknown — with every phase preserved in his record rather than any one of them promoted to the value. ^{1 2}

Al-Suyuti, in Tarikh al-Khulafa', calls him "Khudabanda, king of the Tatars", and says he proclaimed Rafd in his lands and ordered the preachers to mention in the Friday sermon only Ali ibn Abi Talib (may God be pleased with him), his two sons and the Prophet ﷺ's household, which continued until he died in 716 AH. ⁴

He died at Soltaniyeh on 16 December 1316 — the English article's death section says the 17th, a one-day discrepancy the record preserves — and was buried beneath his dome. Rashid al-Din, the great vizier-historian of the previous reign, was accused of poisoning him and executed two years later. His young son Abu Sa'id succeeded him, the last effective Ilkhan. Modern judgement, as the Arabic article summarises it, treats Öljaitü as a significant figure of the middle Ilkhanate: he built, he corresponded with Christendom, and his court was the theatre of the most remarkable royal religious journey in Mongol history — a journey this record presents whole, and declines to settle. ^{1 2 5}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.