᭿ First published in Central Asiatic Journal, Vol. 22, 1978, pp. 186–244

13

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE

P. Jackson

n 1251 a three years’ interregnum in the headship of the Mongol empire was ter- Iminated by the election as Great Khan (Mo. Qa’an < Qaghan) of Möngke, the eldest son of Chinggis Khan’s fourth son Tolui. That this event represented a political coup of the first order is clear from the reaction which it provoked. Previously the dignity of Great Khan had remained in the family of Chinggis Khan’s third son Ögedei (1229– 1241), who had been succeeded, after a long interregnum, by his own eldest son Güyüg (1246–1248). This branch of the imperial dynasty now took up arms against the new sovereign, only to be ruthlessly suppressed. They and their cousins, the descendants of the conqueror’s second son Chaghadai, were for the most part deprived of their posses- sions and suffered exile or death.1 By this means Möngke’s supremacy in the eastern half of the empire was assured. In the west the power of the ‘Golden Horde,’ ruled by the house of Jochi, Chinggis Khan’s firstborn son, was if anything enhanced: the chief of this branch, Batu, to whose support Möngke owed his election, exercised with the new Qa’an a sort of condominium, as may be seen from the narrative of the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who visited both princes in the course of his mission of 1253–5.2 Möngke followed the practice of his predecessors in launching a series of fresh military campaigns against those regions of Asia which remained unconquered. He himself devoted his main energies to continuing the subjugation of China, a process completed only in the reign of his brother Qubilai (1259–1294). Here we are concerned rather with events in Western Asia, where a vast expedition commanded by a third brother, Hülegü, overthrew the Assassins in their mountain strongholds south of the Caspian (1255–6), sacked Baghda¯d and murdered the Caliph (1258), and rolled onwards through Ira¯q into Syria. For a time it appeared that the entire Islamic world would succumb to this threat; then events further east supervened. Within a space of three years, the Mongol empire was torn apart by two major wars between members of the imperial family. Möngke’s death while besieging a fortress in China in 1259 unleashed a struggle for the succession on the part of Qubilai and Tolui’s fourth son, Arigh-böke, of whom the former was victorious only after a five years’ war which spread from Mongolia into Central Asia.3 At the same time the new Mongol power in Iran clashed with its neighbours beyond the Caucasus, the Golden Horde, now ruled by Batu’s brother, the Muslim convert Berke (1261). The rivalry of these two westernmost divisions of the empire was to last, with intervals, for almost a century. Its effect on the Mongol advance in the Near East, which had already been checked by the 316 THE HISTORY OF MONGOLIA

Mamlu¯k rulers of Egypt in two engagements, at Ain Ja¯lu¯t and at Hims, in 1260, was profound. Hülegü had withdrawn eastwards with the bulk of his army˙ ˙ in order, pre- sumably, to keep watch on the succession dispute in Mongolia, and these reverses were inflicted on the greatly depleted Mongol forces left in Syria and Palestine. In view of the threat from the Golden Horde, neither he nor the later monarchs of the dynasty he founded in Iran (the ‘I¯lkha¯ns’) were ever able to concentrate their efforts on the overthrow of the Mamlu¯ks, with whom Berke soon made an alliance (1263). The following study is an attempt to explain the halting of the Mongol advance around 1260–2 in terms of the history of the Mongols over the preceding decades. If we are to seek causes for the loss of momentum in the Mongol assault on the Islamic world, still reeling from the destruction of the Caliphate, we must look rather at circumstances within the empire than at local military factors such as the reverses in Syria.4 The two civil wars I have mentioned were, each in its own way, decisive events in the history of the Near East and of Islam. Yet the exact connection between them, and their own relationship to the previous growth of the Mongol empire, stand in need of some elucidation.

I

Secondary authorities for the history of the Mongols in the west have relied most heavily on two of our Persian sources, the Ta¯r¯ıkh-i Jaha¯n-Gusha¯ of Ala¯’ al-dı¯n Ata¯ Malik b. Baha¯’ al-dı¯n Muhammad al-Juwainı¯ (b. 623/1226, d. 681/1283) and the Ja¯mi al-tawa¯r¯ıkh of Rashı¯d al-d˙ ı¯n Fadl-alla¯h b. Ima¯d al-dawla Abi’l-Khair al-Hamada¯nı¯ (b. ca. 645/1247–8, d. 718/1318). ˙Both these works were composed under the I¯lkha¯ns by persons who ranked high among their administrative agents.5 We possess no source originating from the territories of the Golden Horde. The I¯lkha¯ns’ régime main- tained close contacts with the Toluid rulers of China, the victorious Qubilai and his descendants, whose influence is consequently to be discerned not only in the Chinese authorities (chiefly the Yüan Shih, the official dynastic history, complied after the end of Mongol rule in 1368, but from contemporary documents), but also in the Persian accounts of events in the Far East. This is especially relevant, for our purposes, to the succession disputes in Mongolia: we have access to no source which drew its inspiration from the defeated elements in these struggles, whether from Ögedei’s family or from Arigh-böke.6 The pronounced bias of our principal extant sources from within the Mongol empire was noticed by Blochet and by Grousset, though neither proceeded to examine it in detail.7 This task was left to a more recent scholar, David Ayalon, who has exposed the partisan character of Juwainı¯ and shown how the Mamlu¯k sources, composed under a régime which was hostile to the I¯lkha¯ns and allied to their enemies the Golden Horde, reflect a totally different bias and supply a much-needed corrective.8 Although Ayalon’s main concern is with the Yasa, or body of Mongol customary law as traditionally codified by Chinggis Khan, he has incidentally revolutionized our approach to the primary sources for the history of the Mongols in general. Juwainı¯ wrote only a few years after Möngke’s accession and the execution of most adult members of the lines of Ögedei and Chaghadai: as Ayalon suggests, had the latter been victorious a very different picture of the personalities and the rights involved would have come down to us. But his argument may be extended. Rashı¯d al-dı¯n’s work, similarly, which is largely based on that of Juwainı¯ for the early period of the Mongol