Oljeitu

Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Khar-Banda, later Khuda-Banda, Oljeitu Sultan was the eighth Mongol Ilkhan of Persia and the penultimate direct descendant of Hulagu to rule, from 704 to 716, that is 1304 to 1316. He was born in 680/1282 and was, like his predecessor Ghazan, a son of Arghun, the fourth Ilkhan. ¹ He succeeded his brother without serious difficulty. ¹

The article calls his reign unusually peaceful by the standards of the dynasty. Oljeitu does not appear to have been a soldier, and the reign saw only three major expeditions. In 706/1307 he attempted, at considerable cost, to bring the Caspian province of Gilan, which had remained independent, into the Ilkhanate by force. In 712/1312-13 he mounted the last Ilkhanid invasion of Mamluk territory and besieged Rahba on the Euphrates without success. In 713/1314 he had to march east to ward off an invasion of Khurasan by forces from the Chaghatay Khanate. ¹

The early years of the reign saw an attempt, successful for a time, to restore peace and harmony between the various khanates of the Mongol Empire. The article refers to a Mongolian letter of 1305 from Oljeitu to King Philip the Fair of France. ²

At home there was considerable continuity with the previous reign, and the reform programme associated with Ghazan stayed in force, perhaps pursued with less vigour. ² The wazir and historian Rashid al-Din held office throughout, though not without trouble. His colleague Sa'd al-Din Sawaji fell from power and was executed in 711/1312 and was succeeded by Taj al-Din Ali-Shah. Relations between Rashid al-Din and Taj al-Din became so poor that the empire was divided into two administrative spheres, Rashid al-Din taking the centre and south and Taj al-Din the north-west, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Early in the next reign, that of Oljeitu's son Abu Said, Taj al-Din engineered Rashid al-Din's fall and execution in 718/1318. ²

Rashid al-Din presented to Oljeitu his history of the Mongols, which Ghazan had commissioned and which formed the first part of the Jami' al-tawarikh. Oljeitu asked him to continue it as a memorial to Ghazan, and the continuation contained accounts of all the peoples the Mongols had met, the unique world-history sections of the work. ²

The article calls Oljeitu's personal religious pilgrimage complex even by the standards of the day, taking in at one time or another almost every available faith. A residual shamanist, he had been baptised a Christian in infancy with the name Nicholas, in honour of Pope Nicholas IV, with whom his father had negotiated. He later became a Buddhist, and after Ghazan's decisive conversion to Islam he became a Sunni Muslim, dallying in turn with the Hanafi and Shafi'i schools. Thereafter, the article says, he became a Shi'i. ² It does not say which Shi'i school, and the museum records only what the article states.

For much of the reign work continued on a new capital, Sultaniyya, on the plain south-east of modern Zanjan. The city had been founded by Arghun and was completed in 713/1313-14. Because Oljeitu kept the nomadic habits of his ancestors, moving between summer and winter quarters, the article suggests Sultaniyya should be called his chief seasonal residence rather than his capital, following C. P. Melville's study of his itineraries. ²

It is said that he wished to move the remains of the Shi'i imams Ali and Husayn to a new shrine at Sultaniyya. The mausoleum became, instead, his own. It still stands, the only important building of the new capital to survive and, the article says, the most striking positive memorial of the Mongol period. ²

The article names Abu al-Qasim Kashani's Tarikh-i Uljaytu as the most important primary source, along with Wassaf, later Timurid-period works and Mamluk authors such as al-Umari. ²