The Ilkhanate

¹ Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and brother of the Great Khan Kublai, led the Mongol army that sacked Baghdad in 1258 and executed the last Abbasid caliph, Al-Musta’sim, ending five centuries of Abbasid rule there. His westward advance was halted by the Mamluks of Egypt at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.

² Tekuder, who took the Muslim name Ahmad, was the first Ilkhan to convert to Islam, provoking a succession crisis with his still-shamanist or Buddhist relatives that ended in his overthrow and execution by his nephew Arghun.

³ Ghazan Khan's formal conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam in 1295 marked a decisive cultural turning point, aligning the Mongol rulers with the great majority of their Iranian subjects. His reign is also remembered for sweeping fiscal and administrative reforms and for commissioning the historian Rashid al-Din's monumental world history, the Jami al-Tawarikh.

⁴ Oljeitu, Ghazan's brother, later converted to Twelver Shi’a Islam and built the great blue-tiled mausoleum dome at Soltaniyeh — one of the largest brick domes in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.

⁵ Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan died in 1335 without a surviving direct heir, and the Ilkhanate immediately splintered among rival Mongol and Iranian noble factions — chiefly the Jalayirids in Iraq and western Iran, and the Chobanids and Muzaffarids elsewhere — none of which could reunify the whole empire.