Ghazan Khan

Ghazan converted in June 1295, in the middle of his struggle with Baydu. Amitai writes that it led to the widespread adoption of Islam among the Mongols who had not yet converted. Buddhist temples and many churches and synagogues were then destroyed, but Ghazan later returned to the tolerance of his forebears.

The motive is debated. Amitai says part of it “may have been” the wish to win over Muslim officers, and that the depth of his commitment “may be in doubt”. Yet he kept Muslim rites strictly to the end, and he also praised Chinggis Khan’s yasa. In other words, it was no clean break with Mongol tradition.

A ruler’s change of faith can be both belief and politics; the historian has to see both.

Rashid al-Din of Hamadan first entered Mongol service as a physician. Around 1298 he became Ghazan’s co-vizier with Sa‘d al-Din Savaji, and stayed in office until his dismissal early in Abu Sa‘id’s reign (1317). Ghazan entrusted him with a history of the Mongols; Öljeitü had it expanded into the Jāmeʿ al-tawāriḵ. Melville says its coverage has led it to be called the “first world history”. His end was bitter: in 1318 he was executed on a charge of poisoning Öljeitü.

The Jāmeʿ al-tawāriḵ is one of the most important sources for Mongol history, but it is not neutral. Amitai notes that Rashid al-Din favoured the house of Tolui, Ghazan’s ancestors; and that he is “virtually our only source” for Ghazan’s reforms, which he himself carried out. So both his picture of the ruin before Ghazan and his claims of success should be read with caution.

When the man who carried out a reform is also its only narrator, look for other evidence.

Amitai writes that Ghazan inherited a kingdom “on the verge of bankruptcy”: rapacious taxation, Gaykhatu’s extravagance and the failed paper money (chav). His reforms included closer control of officials, a regular and realistic tax schedule, paying the army through grants of iqta‘, land registration and a less predatory attitude towards the peasantry. State revenue rose somewhat. But Amitai also says the grants of land to Mongol soldiers were “not executed to any real degree”. And in 1318 Rashid al-Din’s own property was confiscated and even his pious endowments were plundered.

This is our reading: Ghazan’s reforms were an attempt to move the state from plunder to predictable taxation, so that a peasant knew what he owed and an official could not take whatever he liked. But Rashid al-Din’s own fate showed that property, even a vizier’s, was safe only as long as the ruler’s favour lasted.

Predictable taxes are the basis of prosperity; and property that depends on a ruler’s favour is not really property.