Jalayirid Sultanate

What 1335 left

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)formation

The Ilkhanate ended in 1335 without a conqueror. Abu Sa'id died without an heir, the Mongol state in Iran stopped functioning, and what remained was its army: Mongol and Turkmen amirs commanding contingents, holding revenue assignments, and each in possession of a piece of a machine that no longer had an operator.

None of them could take the throne. The rule that had governed Central Asian politics since Chinggis still held — only a descendant of Chinggis could be khan — and none of these men was one. So they did the only thing available: each found a Chinggisid, put him on a throne, ruled in his name, and fought the others. There were at least half a dozen such puppets in the two decades after 1335, several of them raised and deposed by the same amir.

The two houses that mattered were the Jalayir and the Chobanids. The Jalayir were a Mongol tribe that had come west with Hulegu; Hasan Buzurg — Big Hasan, so called to distinguish him from his rival Hasan Kuchak, Little Hasan of the Chobanids — was their leader. The two Hasans fought over Azerbaijan through the late 1330s, and Hasan Buzurg lost.

Losing Azerbaijan is why the Jalayirids exist. He went south, and in 1340 took Baghdad, which nobody else particularly wanted: it had been sacked in 1258, it was no longer a capital of anything, and it was a long way from the pastures the amirs were fighting over. What it had was the tax revenue of Iraq. Within fifteen years the Chobanids were finished and the man who had taken the consolation prize was the strongest power in the region.

That sequence — an amir who cannot be khan, a rival who wins the prestigious ground, and a state built out of the settled revenue nobody was contesting — is worth holding on to. Timur is thirty years away and will do the second half of it on a much larger scale.

Baghdad and Tabriz

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)expansion

The Jalayirids ended up holding the two cities that mattered in the west, and the way they got them explains what kind of state it was.

The amir who did not claim the throne

Hasan Buzurg — Big Hasan, to distinguish him from a rival of the same name — was a Jalayir amir of the Ilkhanid establishment, married into the Chinggisid house, who came out of the scramble after 1335 holding Baghdad and Arab Iraq.

He did not claim to be the ruler of anything. He raised a Chinggisid puppet, issued in that man's name, and governed. So did his rivals; for about twenty years the wars of post-Ilkhanid Iran were fought between amirs each of whom had a Chinggisid of his own, because the one thing everybody agreed on was that the throne belonged to a lineage none of them was in.

That arrangement is the reason the Jalayirids started with an advantage. Baghdad still had the Ilkhanid divan in it — the registers, the assignment system, and the Persian secretarial families who had been running the province for eighty years. A man who took Baghdad and did not disturb the office got a functioning government with the paperwork included.

Tabriz

Tabriz was the other half and it was harder, because Tabriz was the prize everybody wanted: the Ilkhanid capital, the terminus of the trade from the Black Sea, and the seat from which Azerbaijan was governed.

It changed hands repeatedly through the 1340s and 1350s among the Chobanids, the Jalayirids and eventually the Golden Horde, whose khan Jani Beg took it in 1357. Hasan Buzurg died the same year. It was his son Shaykh Uways who took Tabriz back in 1359 and held it, and from that point the Jalayirid state is a two-capital arrangement — Baghdad in the winter, Tabriz in the summer, Arab Iraq and Azerbaijan under one administration for the first time since the Ilkhanate.

What that made them

By the 1360s the Jalayirids were the largest of the successor states, and the only one that had inherited both a capital and a chancery rather than building either.

It is worth being clear that this was not a conquest empire. They took two cities and the machinery that came with them, dropped the Chinggisid fiction when nobody was left who cared, and spent the rest of their existence defending what they had against the Muzaffarids in the south, the Kara Koyunlu on the Anatolian flank, and eventually Timur.

Everything they are remembered for was made in those two cities in the fifty years they held both.

The nearest thing to a restoration

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)peak

Shaykh Uways succeeded his father in 1356 and was, by the assessment of the sources and of modern scholarship, the ablest ruler the dynasty produced. In 1360 he took Tabriz from the last Chobanid and held it, which put the Ilkhanate's two capitals — Baghdad and Tabriz — under one man for the first time since Abu Sa'id died.

For the fourteen years he lived, the Jalayirid state was the nearest thing to a restoration of the Ilkhanate that anybody managed. It ran Iraq and Azerbaijan, took tribute from Shirvan, campaigned into eastern Anatolia and against the Muzaffarids of Fars, and it did so with the Ilkhanid divan still functioning underneath it: the tax registers, the Persian secretarial class, the assignment system.

That is the whole explanation of the dynasty. The Jalayirids did not build a state. They inherited the working parts of one and kept them running for three generations, which nobody else who picked over the Ilkhanate managed for more than a decade.

Uways also dropped the puppet. After about 1356 the Jalayirids stopped raising Chinggisid figureheads and ruled as sultans in their own name, which is a straightforward admission that the rule everyone had been observing since 1335 had stopped meaning anything in Iran. It had not stopped meaning anything in Transoxiana, where Timur was at that moment building his career around observing it scrupulously — the difference between the two halves of the former Mongol world in the same decade, and one worth noticing.

Tabriz in this period is the largest commercial city in western Asia, the point where the routes from Iran and Central Asia met the routes to Trebizond and the Mediterranean, and Genoese and Venetian merchants were resident in it. The customs on that traffic are half the reason the dynasty could afford the painters.

Where Persian painting turns

Drafted from Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (1989)aside?What aside means

The Jalayirids matter for a small number of books.

Persian painting before them is the painting of the Ilkhanid workshops: the great Shahnama manuscripts, Chinese-derived landscape, figures arranged in registers, an art of illustration in the strict sense. Persian painting after them is the Timurid and then the Safavid tradition — the high horizon, the deep gold-flecked sky, the architecture drawn so that the reader looks into and around it, figures who occupy a place rather than stand in front of one. The change happens in Jalayirid Baghdad and Tabriz in the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

Two manuscripts carry most of the argument. The Khamsa of Nizami made in the late 1380s, and the Divan of Khwaju Kirmani copied at Baghdad in 1396 for Sultan Ahmad, whose paintings are signed by Junayd — one of the earliest Persian painters whose name is attached to his own work rather than inferred. Lentz and Lowry's catalogue treats the Jalayirid court as the direct ancestor of the Timurid kitabkhana rather than as a preface to it: the personnel, the formats and the pictorial conventions move from Baghdad and Tabriz to Herat and Samarkand, in some cases with the painters themselves, when Timur takes the cities and deports the craftsmen.

That deportation is the transmission mechanism, and it should be stated plainly rather than admired. Samarkand was built by craftsmen taken from Delhi and Damascus; the same policy was applied to Baghdad and Tabriz. The Timurid court style that three later empires worked from was assembled substantially out of workshops that had belonged to somebody else and were moved at swordpoint.

Sultan Ahmad, who commissioned the 1396 Divan, was himself a poet and by several accounts drew. He spent the last twenty years of his life losing cities. Political weight and cultural output come apart everywhere; this is the version where the output was physically carried off by the winner.

A sultan who kept his exits open

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)contraction

Uways died in 1374 and his sons fought over the inheritance. There was no partition and no rule of any kind — only brothers contesting the whole of it, which is not a succession system but the absence of one. Sultan Ahmad came out of that in 1382, having had his brother killed, and ruled for twenty-eight years, of which a substantial proportion was spent outside his own territory.

Timur came west in 1393 and took Baghdad; Ahmad fled to the Mamluks in Cairo, and came back when Timur left. That was not an unusual outcome and it was not the disaster it looks like. A ruler in this region could be beaten out of his territory without being destroyed, because Timur took submissions and plunder and went home, and Qara Yusuf of the Kara Koyunlu was doing the same thing in the same years, often in the same places and sometimes in the same refuge.

What the arrangement required was somewhere to go, and a great deal of Ahmad's reign consists of maintaining relations with people who might have to shelter him. He was a poet, a musician and a painter, and the courts he cultivated were the ones where that counted. It is not obvious how much of this was policy and how much was temperament, and by 1400 the distinction had stopped mattering, because he needed all of it.

O ravening dog named Timur

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)contraction

Timur took Baghdad on 20 June 1401 and this time he did not leave a governor in it.

The siege had cost him a number of senior officers, and the massacre was explicitly revenge for them. Every soldier was ordered to bring in a head; Ibn Arabshah says the army numbered twenty thousand and the order was two heads each. Sharaf al-Din Yazdi, writing for the conqueror's own house and therefore not inclined to minimise it, describes the day in the register of a market report: the market of retribution became so brisk that the broker of death sold at one price the old man of eighty and the child of eight, and the oven of wrath was so enkindled that it consumed the corporeal vestiture of the wealthy plutocrat and the wretched pauper alike. Browne's summary of what was left is three words: a smoking charnel-house.

Sultan Ahmad was not in it. He had gone west again, as he had gone to Cairo in 1393, and this time to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid — and what followed is the best-documented thing in the whole Jalayirid record, because the letters survive.

Timur wrote to Bayezid in Arabic demanding that no shelter be given to Qara Yusuf the Turkmen or to Sultan Ahmad, in terms Browne calls peremptory, and warning him against disobedience. Bayezid's reply, also in Arabic, opens after the doxology: Know, O ravening dog named Timur. It then dares him to advance. Browne, who did not much like the Ottomans, notes that refusing to surrender a guest was a thing the Turks had always done, and that this particular refusal was phrased in a manner little calculated to calm anybody.

Ahmad's own letter is in the same collection, written in Persian to Bayezid. In it he reports what he has done since losing Baghdad and the two Iraqs: he withdrew to Malatya and Sivas as instructed, waited for Qara Yusuf, and the two of them together attacked the Uzbek troops forming Timur's vanguard and annihilated them. He adds that he expects the main army to come for them as soon as the news reaches it. Bayezid's answer says that on the strength of this report he has made peace with the Byzantine emperor and moved up to Tokat to help hold the invasion.

That is a dispossessed sultan, living on other people's ground, successfully persuading the Ottoman empire to break off the siege of Constantinople and turn east. It worked, in the sense that Bayezid came. At Ankara in 1402 Timur destroyed the Ottoman army and took Bayezid prisoner, and Byzantium got another fifty-one years out of it.

Timur died in February 1405 and Ahmad came back and retook Baghdad, and then, with Qara Yusuf, Tabriz — and then quarrelled with Qara Yusuf over which of them Tabriz belonged to, marched against him in 1410, and was defeated and killed.

The proportions are worth holding. Over nine years one man was driven out of his capital twice, sheltered by two empires, corresponded with a third, contributed materially to the destruction of the Ottoman army and the survival of Constantinople, recovered his city, and was then killed in a dispute with the Turkmen chief who had been his fellow refugee — and whose confederation had been hired cavalry to Ahmad's father thirty years earlier.

Basra

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)end

The house did not end in 1410. What was left of it held Basra and the lower Euphrates for another twenty-two years, under a succession of claimants who appear in the record mainly when somebody attacks them, until Husayn II was killed in 1432 and the Kara Koyunlu took the last of it.

So the dynasty has two ending dates, twenty-two years apart, and both are defensible: 1410 is when the Jalayirids stopped being a power and 1432 is when they stopped existing. That gap is the ordinary fate of these houses. They are rarely exterminated. They are reduced, over decades, to whatever could not conveniently be besieged — a delta, an island, a fortress on a rock — and then somebody finally bothers.

It is also a standing trap for anybody writing about the period. Qara Yusuf took Baghdad and killed Sultan Ahmad in 1410, and it is easy and wrong to say that he finished the Jalayirids, because for another twenty-two years there was a Jalayirid at Basra.

What they leave is the transmission. The Ilkhanid administrative apparatus reached the Turkmen confederations and then the Safavids through them rather than directly, and Persian painting reached Herat the same way. Ninety-seven years, two capitals, nobody afterwards claiming to be their heirs, and a manuscript in the British Library that changed what the rest of the tradition looked like.

The sultan who drew

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)afterlife

Sultan Ahmad ibn Uways lost Baghdad three times, spent years as a refugee in Cairo and in Anatolia, was restored twice, and was finally killed by Qara Yusuf in 1410. He is also the only ruler of his century whom the sources describe as a practising artist.

What he was

Browne's description of him is a list of accomplishments, given in passing while discussing somebody else: Sultan Ahmad ibn Uways the Jalayirid, the accomplished Ilkhani ruler of Baghdad, himself a poet, a musician, a painter and an artist.

Set that against his political record, which is a catalogue of losing cities to Timur, and the two do not obviously belong to the same man. They belong to the same court, though, and the court is the point. Between about 1380 and 1400 the workshops at Baghdad and Tabriz were producing manuscripts — his own divan among them, illustrated in 1396 — in which Persian painting stops being a diagram and becomes a landscape with weather in it.

The one thing he could not buy

He wanted Hafez, and he could not get him.

Ahmad wrote repeatedly to Shiraz inviting the poet to Baghdad. Hafez declined every time, and the refusal became one of his best-known couplets: the zephyr-breeze of Musalla and the stream of Ruknabad do not permit him to travel or wander afield.

He did send verses. He praised the sultan's justice, called him a khan and the son of a khan and a king of kingly descent, and added a line that must have been maddening to receive — that no rose-bud of delight had bloomed for him from the earth of Fars, and that he sighed for the Tigris of Baghdad and its spiritual wine.

A ruler who was himself a poet, a musician and a painter wrote to the greatest lyric poet in the language and was answered with a compliment, a lament for Baghdad, and a refusal.

What Timur took

The afterlife proper is the part Ahmad had no say in.

When Timur took Baghdad and Tabriz, the workshops went east with everything else portable. The Timurid court style that was assembled at Samarkand and then at Herat — the style three later empires worked from, in Iran, in Turkey and in India — was built substantially out of craftsmen and manuscripts taken from Jalayirid cities.

So the transmission ran through a defeat. Everything the Jalayirids had made reached the fifteenth century in somebody else's collection, credited to somebody else's patronage, and the dynasty that had paid for it held Basra for another twenty-two years and then stopped.

Ahmad's own divan, illustrated in his workshop in 1396, is in the British Library. It is the earliest surviving manuscript in which the landscape does what Persian painting afterwards always did, and the man who commissioned it spent the last fourteen years of his life being chased around western Asia.