Jalayirids

The Jalayirids were one of the successor dynasties that divided the territories of the defunct Ilkhanid empire. The name was first that of a Mongol tribe, discussed by Rashid al-Din in his Tarikh-i Ghazani, and in Islamic history it mostly means this dynasty. ¹ The article follows the spelling Jalayir used by al-Ahri, the dynasty's contemporary and probably official chronicler. ¹ Their rule centred on Baghdad and Tabriz and lasted from the collapse of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s until the 1410s, with a few princes surviving in lower Mesopotamia until 835-6/1432. ¹

Jalayirid genealogies usually begin with Ilka Noyan, a follower of Hulegu, which is why the dynasty is also called the Ilkani. They then run down to Hasan Buzurg, the founder, who held the office of Ulus Beg and was governor of Rum under Abu Said. ¹

When Abu Said died without heirs in 735-6/1335, the great chiefs struggled over the succession and raised three obscure Hulaguids in turn: Arpa, Musa and Muhammad. The last was the protege of Hasan Buzurg and ruled over as large a realm as Abu Said had. ¹ The break-up came when Hasan Buzurg was defeated, and Muhammad executed, by the Chubanid Hasan, called Kuchuk to tell him from the Jalayirid Hasan, in 738-9/1338. ¹ Hasan Kuchuk, ruling in the names of Sati Beg and Sulayman, could not control the whole realm. Hasan Buzurg and his followers established themselves at Baghdad and went on disputing Chubanid authority, as did Eretna in Rum and Tugha Timur in Khurasan. ¹ Hasan Kuchuk's attempts to subdue the Jalayirids in 741/1340-1 failed, and after his death in 743-4/1343 his brother Ashraf also failed to dislodge them from Baghdad in 748/1347-8. ¹

The article judges that Hasan Buzurg, though instrumental in the break-up, seems to have hoped for the empire's restoration on his own terms rather than its end. He used only the title Ulus Beg and acknowledged legitimate Chingizid sovereigns, or left sovereignty unattributed in 746-57/1346-56. ¹ See also Hulegu and the Ilkhanate.

Hasan Buzurg died in 757/1356 and left Jalayirid leadership to his son Uways. In the same year Sultan Janibek of the Golden Horde overthrew the Jalayirids at Baghdad, and they recognised him as their sovereign, but Janibek died in 758-9/1357 and the Mongol empire in Iran was not renewed. ¹ Uways took personal sovereignty in 759/1358 and set about annexing Azerbaijan. His first campaign failed, but after Muhammad ibn al-Muzaffar raided Azerbaijan in 760/1359 and weakened its ruler, the second invasion succeeded in 761/1360. ¹

There were further successes in 762-5/1361-4, especially in Fars, where the Muzaffarid princes Shah Mahmud and Shah Shuja' deposed their father and quarrelled over the succession. Uways helped Shah Mahmud hold Isfahan and take Shiraz. ¹ After 765/1364 a series of reverses ended expansion, and until about 770/1368 Uways was busy suppressing revolts by the Shirvanshah, by Khwaja Mirjan in Baghdad and by the Qara Qoyunlu Turkmen of the Diyarbakr region. ¹

Uways died in 775-6/1374 and his son Husayn succeeded after the great amirs murdered an unpopular elder son, Hasan. ¹ The article lists signs of decline in Husayn's reign of 776-86/1374-82: he depended entirely on the amir Adil for leadership, and his brothers Shaykh Ali, Ahmad and Bayazid were left at large and even given power. ¹ Shaykh Ali rebelled in 780/1378-9 and seized Baghdad in 782/1381. In 783/1382 Ahmad, seeing Husayn unprotected at Tabriz, gathered a force from his lands at Ardabil and killed him. ¹ Before Ahmad could consolidate his hold on Azerbaijan, the Golden Horde and then Timur drove him out. He retired to Baghdad in 787/1385, later fled before Timur to the Ottomans and then to Egypt. ¹

After Timur's death in 807-8/1405 Ahmad regained Baghdad and briefly reoccupied Tabriz, but was driven out by the Timurid Abu Bakr, who was in turn ousted by the Qara Qoyunlu. When Ahmad tried again to take Tabriz in 812-3/1410, the Qara Qoyunlu captured him and put him to death, on the pretext that he had broken an agreement, made while they were fellow exiles in Egypt, to cede Azerbaijan to Qara Yusuf. ¹

Baghdad fell to the Qara Qoyunlu in 814-5/1412, yet Jalayirid princes survived in lower Mesopotamia for some years. The last of them, Husayn II, fell during the Qara Qoyunlu siege of Hilla in 835-6/1432. ¹ The museum's record under the slug husayn-jalayir carries the same year of death for its prince, but the article does not give his patronymic, so the match is probable and not certain.

The article credits Jalayirid patronage with the khan and mosque of Mirjan in Baghdad, the poems of Salman Savaji and the miniatures of Shams al-Din. It adds that Ahmad was himself a poet who unsuccessfully offered his support to Hafiz, who would not leave Shiraz. ¹

The article is a single dynastic entry. It does not give the exact year the dynasty began, its coinage, or the administration in any detail, and this page does not either.