Volume 145 / Number 1 / January–March 2025
ISSN 0003-0279
Articles
Vol. 145, No. 1
Uriel Simonsohn, Exploring the Liminal Characteristics of Muslim Converts: An Analysis of
Rabbinic and Ecclesiastical Legal References from the Early Islamic to Abbasid Periods . . . . . . . . . 1
Stefan Kamola, The First Draft of the First World History: Rashīd al-Dīn’s Initial Proposal for
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, Translating Tamil God into Sanskrit in Vedāntadeśika’s
Dramiḍopaniṣattātparyaratnāvalī . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Zhouyang Ma, Two Early Biographical Accounts of Atiśa Preserved in Tangut Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Jie Shi, A Normal Anomaly: Yang Ningshi’s Chive Flowers Letter and the Tampered Narrative of
Chinese Calligraphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Luke Waring, New Sources of Han Verse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Emanuel Pfoh, The Imperial Gaze in the Historiography of Amarna Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Beatrice Baragli and Saki Kikuchi, Hermeneutic Strategies of Mesopotamian Scholars . . . . . . . . . 155
Tania Notarius, Lexicon and Grammar in the Aramaic Land Description Ostraca from Idumea . . . . . 173
Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
January–March 2025
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Reviews
Liebrenz, Arab Traders in Their Own Words: Merchant
Letters from the Eastern Mediterranean around 1800 (Jane
Hathaway) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Dajani, Sufis and Sharīʿa: The Forgotten School of Mercy
(Fitzroy Morrissey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Rabbat, Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical
Project (Nancy Khalek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Osti, History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing
the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (Erez Naaman) . . . . 199
Arjomand, Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in
Medieval Islam (Hayrettin Yücesoy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Balbir, À la découverte du jaïnisme: Une tradition indienne
(John E. Cort) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Olivelle, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Richard
Salomon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Johnson, The Stage in the Temple: Ritual Opera in Village
Shanxi (Mengxiao Wang) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Balkwill, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism,
Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century
(Kevin Buckelew) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
https://doi.org/10.7817/jaos.145.1.2025.fm
Jin, The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and
Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850–1880 (Kangni
Huang) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Kelly, The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in
Early Modern China (Nathan Vedal) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Fleming, Strange Tales from Edo: Rewriting Chinese Fiction
in Early Modern Japan (David C. Atherton) . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
Levinson and Ericksen, eds., The Betrayal of the
Humanities: The University during the Third Reich (Gary
Beckman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Steele, Exploring Writing Systems and Practices in the
Bronze Age Aegean (Theodore Nash) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
de Ridder and Stein, eds., The Frau Professor Hilprecht
Collection of Babylonian Antiquities: Essays Dedicated
to Manfred Krebernik during the Colloquium Held on
March 17–18, 2022 at Friedrich Schiller University Jena
(Benjamin R. Foster) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
The First Draft of the First World History:
Rashīd al-Dīn’s Initial Proposal for Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh
Stefan Kamola
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb (d. 1318) has been called the “first world historian” because
of how foreign historical sources are treated in the second volume of his Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh. New manuscript materials have shown, however, that his contemporary courtier and historian, ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī, is likely the real author of much
of the Jāmiʿ. This article advances the discussion about the creation of Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh by describing and analyzing an alternate version of Rashīd al-Dīn’s
introduction to the collection. This alternate introduction, preserved in a single
manuscript in Munich, suggests that Rashīd al-Dīn initially had a very different
purpose in mind for his world history than what has come down to us, envisioning it not as an ecumenical description of the world but as a programmatic argument for his patrons’ sovereign legitimacy. Examining this alternate introduction
forces us to rethink Rashīd al-Dīn’s historiographical motive. It also helps answer
open questions about the structure of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, its production, and how
Qāshānī’s text came to be included in it.
Part One is a collection of histories of all the prophets, caliphs, kings, and other types of categories of people from the age of Adam until this time, which is the month _____ of the year
seven hundred ____ hijrī. Part Two is divided into histories of each nation of the nations of
the world that live in the inhabited quarter, despite the difference in their types and categories.
And even though portions of these separate histories have appeared in the previous section, still
most of it has not been included in that collected history, and [readers] would not understand
[these histories] even if they wanted to from what is given there. And other portions are those
that previous kings and historians of these lands have never acquired, and so did not know. In
this imperial age, in accordance with the royal sultanic order, books were selected from every
nation and the knowledgeable were summoned from every sect, and the results of the research
were written down to the extent possible. That is the history that has been given in this description and arrangement. 1
In this way Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb (d. 1318) describes a world history that he presented in
1307 to his patron, the Mongol Ilkhan Khudābanda Öljeitü (r. 1304–1316). Rashīd al-Dīn
Author’s note: Research for this project has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FwF), under grant numbers
Y-1232, “Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape,” and M-3187, “Rethinking History: Authorial Process in Mongol Iran.”
Material from this project was presented at the Tenth European Conference of Iranian Studies in Leiden in August
2023 and at the workshop “Misattributions and Forgeries in Middle Eastern Manuscripts” in Vienna in May 2024.
My thanks to the participants of those conferences, to Jonathan Brack, and to the two JAOS reviewers, all of whom
provided valuable feedback toward the final product.
1. Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, 4 vols., ed. M. Rawshan and M. Musāvī (Alborz, 1373sh [1994]), 1: 19–20,
hereafter cited as JT/RM. I have attempted to preserve the somewhat artificial and repetitive style of this passage,
which Wheeler Thackston’s translation tends to flatten (Thackston translates this passage in 146 words, compared to
182 words used here): cf. W. M. Thackston, tr., Classical Writings of the Medieval Islamic World: Persian Histories
of the Mongol Dynasties, vol. 3: Jamiʿu’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles (Tome 1) by Rashiduddin Fazlullah
(I.B. Tauris, 2012), 8, hereafter cited as Thackston. Thackston provides page numbers of JT/RM in his translation,
making it possible to easily compare subsequent citations from JT/RM with his translation.
JAOS 145.1 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.7817/jaos.145.1.2025.ar002
19
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JAOS 145.1 (2025)
had already written a dynastic history of the Mongols, which was commissioned by Öljeitü’s
brother and predecessor Ghāzān Khān (r. 1295–1304) and dedicated to him posthumously as
Tārīkh-i mubārak-i ghāzānī. Together, Tārīkh-i mubārak and the world history became Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh, the most recognized piece of historical writing from the period of Mongol rule
in Iran. A reader not already familiar with the second volume of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, however,
would have a hard time guessing at its contents from the description quoted above. Rashīd
al-Dīn, elsewhere a meticulous cataloguer of his own works, gives only the most impressionistic sketch of an unprecedented work of historical writing, a work that has been called
the “first general history of the world” and has earned Rashīd al-Dīn the title “the first world
historian.” 2
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh has received a lot of scholarly attention. Since the mid-nineteenth century Tārīkh-i mubārak has been considered the single most important source for the study
of the Mongol empire and the Ilkhanate, 3 and for almost as long, early deluxe copies of the
world history have provided rich material for studying the development of Persian book
painting. 4 The text of the world history has attracted less attention because it contains little original historical information. 5 Nevertheless, since the turn of the twenty-first century,
scholars have plumbed it for information about cultural exchange across Eurasia and the
ideology of knowledge production at the Ilkhanid court. 6
Despite the extensive attention paid to Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, uncertainties remain about its
form and formation. Such uncertainties concern the collection’s content (the number, nature,
and order of its volumes), the extent of its production during the Ilkhanid period, and its
authorship. For the most part, scholars look past these uncertainties, even if Rashīd al-Dīn’s
description of the world history is very imprecise and much of the work was written by his
contemporary ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī. 7 Why, then, revisit the composition of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh?
2. K. Jahn, “Rašīd al-Dīn as a World Historian,” in Yádnáme-ye Jan Rypka: Collection of Articles on Persian
and Tajik Literature (Academia, 1967), 79–87, at 81.
3. Already in the late seventeenth century, the elder François Pétis de la Croix used his son’s translation of a
fragmentary copy of Tārīkh-i mubārak for a biography of Chinggis Khān: Histoire du grand Genghizcan, premier
empereur des anciens Moguls et Tartares (Claude Barbin, 1710). However, it was with Étienne Quatremère’s partial
edition and translation, published with an extensive study of Rashīd al-Dīn’s life and work, that the text gained
widespread recognition; É. Quatremère, Histoire des Mongols de la Perse (Imprimerie Royale, 1836).
4. The most famous of these is a fragmentary Arabic copy, thoroughly studied by S. Blair, A Compendium of
Chronicles: Rashīd al-Dīn’s Illustrated History of the World (Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Press
and Oxford Univ. Press, 1995). See also M. R. Ghiasian, Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru’s
“Assembly of Chronicles” (Brill, 2018), chap. 3.
5. Karl Jahn published a series of studies and translations of sections from the world history in the mid- to late
twentieth century and, more recently, Muḥammad Rawshan has published most of the text in a series of editions. All
are easily found, and so are not listed here. It bears repeating that Rawshan’s edition of pre-Islamic history, which is
found in the first volume of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh: Tārīkh-i Īrān va Islām, 2 vols. (Mīrās̱̱-i Maktūb, 2013), and which is
purportedly from Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, is in fact a replacement text that Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū (d. 1430) composed de novo for
his Timurid patron Shāhrukh (r. 1405–1447).
6. Most recently, see F. Calzolaio and F. Fiaschetti, “Prophets of the East: The Ilkhanid Historian Rashīd
al-Dīn on the Buddha, Laozi and Confucius and the Question of His Chinese Sources,” Iran and the Caucasus 23
(2019): 17–34 (Part 1), 145–66 (Part 2); M. Natif, “Rashīd al-Dīn’s Alter Ego: The Seven Paintings of Moses in the
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh,” in Rashīd al-Dīn: Agent and Mediator of Cultural Exchanges in Ilkhanid Iran, ed. A. Akasoy,
C. Burnett, and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (The Warburg Institute, 2013), 15–37.
7. Qāshānī’s claim to be the real author of the world history was acknowledged and credited by Edgard Blochet
as early as 1910, but it was only seriously discussed a century later, leading to a general scholarly consensus that
Qāshānī in fact wrote much of the text that bears Rashīd al-Dīn’s name. See E. Blochet, Introduction à l’histoire des
Mongols de Fadl Allah Rashid ed-Din (E.J. Brill, 1910), 132–49; O. Otsuka, “Qāshānī, the First World Historian:
Research on His Uninvestigated Persian General History, Zubdat al-Tawārīkh,” Studia Iranica 47 (2018): 119–49;
S. Kamola, “Salghurid History in the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh: A Preliminary Exploration of Its Composition and Trans-
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
21
This article presents evidence that Rashīd al-Dīn wrote the description quoted above only
after he had appropriated the world history of Qāshānī, that this was a late addition to Jāmiʿ,
and that Rashīd al-Dīn initially imagined a significantly different world history for the second
volume of his collection. The vague nature of his description, the question about unfinished
volumes of the collection, and other strange loose ends that hang from Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh
manuscripts can be tied up if we look not just at the work of Qāshānī that Rashīd al-Dīn
appropriated, but also at the world history that he initially proposed.
This is made possible by examining two newly rediscovered manuscripts. The first is
a world history written by ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī, which is preserved in a manuscript in the
Tehran University Library and which validates Qāshānī’s claim to be the real author of much
of the world history of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. 8 The second is a copy of Tārīkh-i mubārak in the
State Library of Bavaria in Munich, which has escaped scholarly attention since its accessioning almost two centuries ago. 9 The Munich manuscript preserves an early version of the
general introduction to Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh that suggests Rashīd al-Dīn originally had a very
different vision for the collection than what has come down to us.
Read together, the Munich copy of Tārīkh-i mubārak and the Tehran copy of Qāshānī’s
world history provide a unique window into a moment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s scholarly program,
as he adjusted his output to meet the political and ideological demands of a new patron. By
1307, when Rashīd al-Dīn presented the full Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh to Khudābanda Öljeitü, he
had turned his intellectual efforts to the pursuit of Islamic theology. Zeki Velidi Togan has
distinguished between the matters of science and state that occupied Rashīd al-Dīn during Ghāzān’s reign and those of faith and philosophy that he pursued during the time of
Öljeitü. 10 To borrow Togan’s distinction, this article aims to show that the published introduction of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh is a product of Rashīd al-Dīn’s concern for faith and philosophy
during and after 1307, while the initial version found in the Munich manuscript aligns with
the concerns of science and state that occupied Rashīd al-Dīn during Ghāzān’s reign.
The introduction of the Munich manuscript is only subtly different from that of other
manuscript recensions, and the world history it describes looks at first glance much like
the world history that has survived. On closer inspection, however, important differences
emerge. First, the portion of the introduction that describes the world history is more precise
and detailed than the version quoted above, more in keeping with Rashīd al-Dīn’s otherwise
careful curation of his own works. Second, the world history it describes deviates from
the extant work in ways that speak to Rashīd al-Dīn’s compositional method. It mentions
chapters that have not survived but that probably would have been composed from scraps of
material gathered during the preparation of Tārīkh-i mubārak. Perhaps most significantly, the
Munich introduction suggests a very different attitude toward the merits of writing world history in the first place. In his shift from historical to theological writing, Rashīd al-Dīn formulated a novel disclaimer, in line with Islamic law, for the inclusion of foreign and unorthodox
historical material. This resolved an anxiety that appears much more viscerally in the Munich
manuscript concerning forms of historical writing produced in non-Islamic societies.
In the following I will first review the formation and finished state of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh,
highlighting some inconsistencies that invite further investigation. I will then turn to the
mission,” in New Approaches to Ilkhanid History, ed. T. May, D. Bayarsaikhan, and C. P. Atwood (Brill, 2021),
122–44, at 126–34; J. Z. Brack, “Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran” (PhD
diss., University of Michigan, 2016), 322–44.
8. Tehran University Library ms. 9067.
9. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek ms. Cod. Pers. 207.
10. Z. V. Togan, “Reşid-üd-Din Tabıb,” in İslâm ansiklopedisi (Maarif Matbaası, 1964), 9: 705–12, at 709.
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JAOS 145.1 (2025)
introduction preserved in the Munich manuscript to analyze Rashīd al-Dīn’s original proposal for the world history. This will simultaneously help explain why some aspects of the
final Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh are as messy and uncertain as they are and raise questions about
the role that the world history played in Rashīd al-Dīn’s larger scholarly program. In the
end, we will see that Rashīd al-Dīn’s plan for the world history changed during the early
years of Khudābanda Öljeitü’s reign, in step with his broader intellectual program. While the
final product—largely written by ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī but put into its final form by Rashīd
al-Dīn—might indeed be the first true world history, Rashīd al-Dīn originally had a more
polemic message in mind when he undertook to write a world history for his new patron.
A note about terminology is in order, since this article deals with two versions of a text
that has many levels of subdivision. In the interest of clarity, the term “volume” is used
here to refer to the main divisions of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. “Part” refers to major subdivisions of these volumes, and “chapter” to subdivisions within these parts. The term “section”
is reserved for the three divisions of the general introduction, which sits outside the two
volumes but is consistently copied and edited with the first volume. The three sections of
the general introduction are at the heart of this article, which compares the published general introduction found in most manuscripts with the alternate “initial” or “original” general
introduction, examined in depth here for the first time.
the world history as we know it
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh has survived as a two-volume work, containing a dynastic history of the
Mongols and a world history. Rashīd al-Dīn describes the process of its creation as follows: 11
Ghāzān Khān asked for a dynastic history to preserve the memory of the Mongol ruling
house, so that it not be lost with the passage of time. When Ghāzān died in the spring of 1304,
this work was essentially complete, but a clean copy was not prepared until some months
later, when it was presented to the new Ilkhan Khudābanda Öljeitü. The latter demurred taking credit for the work and had it titled with his brother’s name, Tārīkh-i mubārak-i ghāzānī.
He then commissioned the world history. Altogether, Rashīd al-Dīn concludes, the dynastic
history and the world history were given the title Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh.
According to Qāshānī, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh was presented to Öljeitü in April 1307. 12
Famously, Qāshānī claims that it was his work that Rashīd al-Dīn presented, stealing the
credit and reward that came with it. Qāshānī does not specify whether his claim pertains to
the entire Jāmiʿ or just a portion of it, but since the surviving manuscripts of his work only
contain a world history, and it is unlikely that he could have produced Tārīkh-i mubārak, 13
his claim of authorship is to be understood as referring only to the second volume of Jāmiʿ.
Appended to the beginning of the two volumes is a general introduction. It begins with a
very short invocation, covering just five lines of edited text, and then can be divided into three
sections. The first section describes the commission and production of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh; the
second gives Rashīd al-Dīn’s evaluation of non-Islamic historical sources; and the third is
an exposition of contents for the entire collection. In the interest of clarity, this article adopts
11. The following summary reflects JT/RM, 1: 34–37 and 8–9.
12. ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī, Tārīkh-i Ūljāytū, ed. M. Hambly (Bungāh-i Tarjama wa Nashr-i Kitāb, 1348 [1969]),
54–55.
13. In his review of Blochet, Introduction, V.V. Barthol’d dismisses Qāshānī’s claim of authorship on the
grounds that he would not have had the access necessary to compose Tārīkh-i mubārak; V. V. Barthol’d, review of
E. Blochet, Introduction à l’histoire des Mongols de Fadl Allah Rashid ed-Din, Mir Islama 1.1 (1912), republ. in
V.V. Bartol’d, Sochineniya, vol. 8: Raboty po istochnikobedeniyu (Nauka, 1973), 270–310.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
23
the shorthand of referring to these sections alternately as §1, §2, and §3 or as “commission,”
“evaluation,” and “exposition.”
The general introduction mentions the commission for a world history, but not its completion. This suggests that the general introduction was written after Tārīkh-i mubārak was
presented to Khudābanda Öljeitü in 1304 but before the world history was completed three
years later. Indeed, this article will show that the Munich manuscript preserves a version of
the general introduction written during or shortly after 1304, but that at some point after the
presentation of the two-volume Jāmiʿ in 1307, Rashīd al-Dīn had to modify the general introduction to accommodate his appropriation of Qāshānī’s world history and to reflect changes
in his patron’s royal titulature. 14
Per Rashīd al-Dīn’s description quoted at the beginning of this article, the world history falls into two parts. The first is a Perso-Islamic universal history, following a form
exemplified by Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) and revived in
the early Ilkhanate by Qāḍī Bayḍāwī (d. 1319). 15 Such works blend material from Iranian,
Hebraic, and Arabic sources to assemble an unbroken chronological narrative for the eastern
Islamic world from the time of the first man, Adam or Gayūmarth. The version found in
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh carries the narrative down through the dynasties of the Khwarazmshahs,
Salghurids, and Ismaʿilis, the main political powers in the Iranian world on the eve of the
Mongol conquest of the early thirteenth century.
Whereas this first part of the world history stitches various histories into a unified
chronology, the second part consists of five chapters, each translating material from one
society—the Oghuz Turks, China, the Jews, Europe, and India—and presenting it in isolation from the others. This turns the chronologically universal history of the first part into
a spatially universal work, expanding the world history to cover at least a hypothetically
total geography. 16
This, then, is Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh as it has come down to us: a dynastic history of the Mongols and a two-part world history that pairs a Perso-Islamic universal history of the eastern
Islamic world with five summary histories reflecting the reach of Eurasian exchange in the
Mongol period. Such a tidy summary of the creation of the work, however, disregards several
peculiarities about its final form. We turn now to those peculiarities, which open the door for
reconsidering Rashīd al-Dīn’s motives through the initial introduction found in the Munich
manuscript.
the problems of the world history
The story of the creation of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh becomes less credible the longer one works
with the text itself. Three discrete incongruities in the text and manuscript situation of the
world history complicate its study. The first incongruity concerns its structure: the vague
14. Note that this contradicts my previous assumption that any pre-1307 recension of Tārīkh-i mubārak would
not include the general introduction; S. Kamola, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh
(Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2019), 211. The hypothesized form of the α-recension described there remains unchanged.
The correction offered here is simply that a recension including the general introduction could have been, and probably was, prepared before 1307.
15. On the genre of Perso-Islamic universal history, see S. Kamola, “A Sensational and Unique Novelty: The
Reception of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History,” Iran 58.1 (2020): 50–61, at 53–54; on Bayḍāwī’s revival of the genre,
see C. Melville, “From Adam to Abaqa: Qāḍī Baiḍāwī’s Rearrangement of History,” Studia Iranica 30.1 (2001):
67–86.
16. Several of the chapters of the world history have been studied individually, and so their sources and structures need not be reviewed here. For a general overview, see Kamola, Making Mongol History, 187–204.
24
JAOS 145.1 (2025)
exposition of contents for the world history (§3) quoted above relates only poorly to the text
of the world history. This is particularly notable when we compare Rashīd al-Dīn’s practice
elsewhere. The exposition of contents for Tārīkh-i mubārak that immediately precedes this,
for example, describes that volume in exquisite detail: it is divided into two parts, which are
subdivided into four and two chapters, respectively, and the two chapters of part two are in
turn divided into ten and eighteen subchapters. The headers of each of these parts, chapters,
and subchapters are carefully listed in tabular form. This level of precision—seen also in
the content descriptions for several of Rashīd al-Dīn’s theological collections—makes the
nonspecific description of the world history seem all the more incongruous. 17
In addition to describing the world history in vague terms, §3 of the published Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh describes the world history as bookended with the story of Öljeitü’s life and
reign. According to this plan, the second volume would have begun with events in the life
of Öljeitü up to the time of the volume’s preparation and ended with further sections about
subsequent events. However, no extant copies of the world history contain any hint that
these portions ever existed. In fact, the world history as it has come down to us contains no
introduction of its own and no explanation about its content or organization, suggesting that
the two-volume Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh was hastily and untidily packaged.
Besides this lack of clarity about the contents of the world history, a second incongruity concerns the total number of volumes contained in Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh. On this question,
Rashīd al-Dīn seems to have changed his mind multiple times. The published introduction
mentions a third volume, a gazetteer of the world that has not survived. 18 In an autobiobibliography added to a collection of theological works in 1310, 19 Rashīd al-Dīn describes a
fourth volume of genealogical trees that would trace biologically the contents of the two
historical volumes, just as the gazetteer would have mapped them geographically. This has
indeed survived, but in a single stand-alone copy, known as Shuʿab-i panjgāna (discussed
below). 20
Strangely, when Rashīd al-Dīn describes the four-volume Jāmiʿ in 1310, he does not add
this volume of genealogical trees to the end of the three-volume collection he had already
described in the published general introduction but inserts it as the third volume, pushing
the gazetteer to the end of the collection. This could be due to the fact that the genealogical
trees had been prepared and the gazetteer remained unrealized. However, as we will see, the
Munich manuscript indicates that Rashīd al-Dīn did initially envision both a genealogical
tree and a gazetteer to appear in that order as parts of his world history.
In the endowment deed for Rabʿ-i Rashīdī, the complex of pious and intellectual institutions he founded on the edge of the Mongol capital in Tabriz, and in a series of appendices made to it, Rashīd al-Dīn leaves instructions for the scriptorium there to copy various
17. See, for example, the exemplar copy of his first four theological collections, where lists of contents regularly occupy several pages at a time: Rashīd al-Dīn, Majmūʿa-yi rashīdiyah, ed. H. Rajabzādah (Mīrās̱̱-i Maktūb,
2013). My thanks to Jonathan Brack for confirming the consistency and precision of Rashīd al-Dīn’s tables of
contents across his theological writings.
18. JT/RM, 1: 9, 20. There is little reason to believe this gazetteer was ever completed. For a discussion of
the evidence around this geographical volume, including a speculation that it may have survived into the Timurid
period, see H. Ono, “Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū’s Geographical Work, the So-called Jughrāfiyā: Its Significance and Evaluation
in Relation to Rashīd al-Dīn’s Works,” Journal of Asian History 49.1–2 (2015): 53–68.
19. Paris BnF ms. arabe 2324, fols. 248a–288b; Istanbul Aya Sofya ms. 3833, fols. 44a–76b.
20. This is Istanbul TSM ms. A.2937, discussed by İ. E. Binbaş, “Structure and Function of the Genealogical Tree in Islamic Historiography (1200–1500),” in Horizons of the World: Festschrift for İsenbike Togan, ed.
İ. E. Binbaş and N. Kılıç-Schubel (Ithaki, 2011), 465–544, at 489–94; Kamola, Making Mongol History, 127–30.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
25
works. 21 The final addendum, likely written in 1314, includes Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh among
the works to be reproduced. 22 However, in contrast to the autobiobibliography in which he
specified a four-volume Jāmiʿ, Rashīd al-Dīn here leaves it up to the administrator of the
endowment to determine how many volumes are appropriate. This may reflect the fact that
none of Rashīd al-Dīn’s plans for an expanded Jāmiʿ—in three volumes or in four—had ever
come to fruition.
The third incongruity concerns Qāshānī’s claim to be the actual author of the world history. From the surviving evidence, notably the Tehran University Library manuscript, it
seems that Qāshānī’s work contained essentially all of the extant material of the world history of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, as well as a number of small chapters on dynasties of Syria, Egypt,
and eastern Iran. When Rashīd al-Dīn took over Qāshānī’s world history, he removed these
(presumably because they duplicated material found in Tārīkh-i mubārak), along with any
mention of Qāshānī and the idea that the world history was originally written on the order of
Ghāzān Khān. In other places, however, he failed to hide his debt to Qāshānī. For example,
at the midpoint of the Perso-Islamic universal history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh includes a header
announcing the beginning of “part two of Zubdat al-tawārīkh,” retaining Qāshānī’s title for
his work. 23 The title Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh only appears in a few places that were demonstrably
rewritten by Rashīd al-Dīn, such as at the start of the histories of the Jews and of India.
Taken together, these incongruities present a world history that holds together only by
allusion and implication, in sharp contrast to the care with which Rashīd al-Dīn structured
and described his other works. But these incongruities begin to make sense when we examine the initial version of the general introduction composed between 1304 and 1307. This
early version represents Rashīd al-Dīn’s original idea for a world history, before he took
Qāshānī’s text as his own. Much of the messiness surrounding the world history can be
explained through his efforts to cover up that appropriation and smooth over the difference
between his original plan for the Jāmiʿ and its ultimate realization.
the munich manuscript and the initial introduction of jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh
Manuscript Cod. Pers. 207 of the Bavarian State Library in Munich was purchased in
1808, presumably in Tehran, by Joseph-Marie Jouannin (d. 1844), orientalist and translator for Napoleon’s government at the Qajar court, and accessioned in 1827. 24 It contains
essentially the entire text of Tārīkh-i mubārak, along with the general introduction to Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh, though not in the usual order. The bulk of the text was copied by ʿAlī al-Kātib
al-Sharīf al-Shīrāzī in 952h (1545f.). The narrative of the full Tārīkh-i mubārak continues
through the death of Ghāzān Khān in 1304, after which a final portion provides forty anecdotes about his life and reign. ʿAlī al-Kātib’s copy, however, breaks off two years before
Ghāzān’s death, at the end of his great quriltai in the early summer of 1302 ce, just before he
launched his final campaign into Syria. In all, the equivalent of twenty pages of edited text is
lost from the end of the main narrative. 25 In place of the forty anecdotes that normally come
21. See N. Ben Azzouna, “Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allāh al-Hamadhānī’s Manuscript Production Project in
Tabriz Reconsidered,” in Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz,
ed. J. Pfeiffer (Brill, 2014), 187–200, for the chronology of different phases of these instructions.
22. Ben Azzouna, “Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allāh,” 193–97.
23. Istanbul TSM ms. H.1654, fol. 51b.
24. On the Munich manuscript, see Kamola, Making Mongol History, 211–12; J. Aumer, Die persischen Handschriften der K. Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 1866), 69. On Jouannin, see
EIr, s.v. (M. Mousavi), https://doi.org/10.1163/2330-4804_EIRO_COM_362438 (updated June 17, 2021).
25. The text ends at the equivalent of JT/RM, 2: 1306, just before the header.
26
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after the main narrative, ʿAlī al-Kātib explains that they are long and complicated and available separately, and so he need not copy them. He provides only their titles and an abbreviated and highly defective version of one of them. 26 After this, the manuscript includes a
passage about Ghāzān’s death, restoring a bit over half of the lacuna from the end of the main
narrative. 27 It is not clear why ʿAlī al-Shīrāzī copied this where he did, unless the insertion
had already been made in his source manuscript. This strange case of the misplaced text of
Ghāzān’s death will be taken up in the final section of this article.
Sixty years later, in 1015h (1606f.), a certain ʿAlī al-Qāshānī copied the forty anecdotes
from a stand-alone copy of the final portion of Tārīkh-i mubārak and appended them to
the beginning of the manuscript now in Munich. 28 Thus, the first sixty-eight folios of the
manuscript contain the final portion of Tārīkh-i mubārak and they were the last to be copied.
Even when corrected for the disordered process of its creation, the text of the Munich
manuscript is unlike any other known manuscript of Tārīkh-i mubārak. It lacks episodes and
alterations added by Rashīd al-Dīn and others in the years after 1307, allowing us to establish
it as a reflection of the earliest surviving recension of the work. 29 The general introduction
alone points in this direction, as well, as it consistently refers to its patron as Khudābanda,
rather than Öljeitü, the name found in all other manuscript lines. In a passage of his 1307
theological treatise, Kitāb al-Sulṭāniyya, Rashīd al-Dīn describes encouraging Khudābanda
to adopt the throne name Öljeitü. 30 This has previously been treated as if it occurred shortly
after Khudābanda’s accession. 31 However, numismatic evidence suggests a different story:
between 1304 and 1309, almost all Ilkhanid coins were minted in the name of Khudābanda
Muḥammad. The name Öljeitü appeared only on limited special coin issues and diplomatic
correspondence, such as a letter written to Philippe le Bel of France (r. 1285–1314) in early
June 1305. 32
As explained above, the initial introduction to Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh could have been written as early as 1304 when, according to Rashīd al-Dīn, he presented Tārīkh-i mubārak and
Khudābanda commissioned the world history. The published introduction, however, reflects
a later point in time, by when the Ilkhan identified primarily as Öljeitü and Rashīd al-Dīn
had already taken over Qāshānī’s world history. The fact that the Munich manuscript still
refers to its patron as Khudābanda further suggests that it represents a version from early in
Khudābanda Öljeitü’s reign.
26. This is the thirteenth anecdote, containing the endowment deed of Ghāzān’s charitable foundation in Tabriz,
Abwāb al-birr (Munich, BSB ms. cod. Pers. 207, fols. 386b–387b; cf. JT/RM, 2: 1377–84; Thackston, 478–79).
27. Munich, BSB ms. cod. Pers. 207, fols. 387b–391a (= JT/RM, 2: 1316–26). Between the end of the main text
and this addendum, the Munich manuscript still lacks the text of JT/RM 2: 1306–15.
28. Munich, BSB ms. cod. Pers. 207, 1–68, equivalent to JT/RM, 2: 1327–1540.
29. For details on these changes, see S. Kamola, Making Mongol History, chap. 5.
30. Rashīd al-Dīn, Mabāḥis-i sulṭāniyah, ed. H. Rajabzādah (Mīrās̱̱-i Maktūb, 2015), 57.
31. See, for example, J. Z. Brack, An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (Univ. of California Press, 2023), 71.
32. Paris, French National Archives, AE/III/203. The letter has been edited and translated by A. Mostaert and
F. W. Cleaves, Les lettres de 1289 et 1305 des ilkhan Arγun et Ölǰeitü à Philippe le Bel (Harvard Univ. Press, 1962),
55–85. Early coin issues in the name Öljeitü, instead of Khudābanda, seem to have been limited to the mints of a few
major cities around the year 707h (1307f.); Ö. Diler, Ilkhanids (Matbaacilik, 2006), types 345 (minted in Tabriz),
355 and 357 (Amul), 356 (the mobile camp mint), 358 (Tabriz and Kashan), 359 (Maragha), and 360 (Arjish).
Otherwise, the name Öljeitü only begins to appear alongside Khudābanda in 709h and supplants it only in 713h. On
the political and economic considerations behind changes in Khudābanda Öljeitü’s coinage, see S. S. Blair, “The
Coins of the Later Ilkhanids: A Typological Analysis,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
26.3 (1983): 295–317.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
27
The initial introduction of the Munich manuscript contains the same three-section structure found in the later versions: a commission narrative (§1), an evaluation of foreign historical sources (§2), and an exposition of contents for the full Jāmiʿ (§3). Each section, however,
diverges from its corresponding part in the published introduction. This divergence is smallest in §1, where the dual commission of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh is described in the same way, save
for the use of the name Khudābanda. Toward the end of this section, where the published
introduction credits Öljeitü with the idea of adding a world gazetteer as a third volume, the
initial version makes no mention of a third volume. 33 Instead, as described below, the gazetteer is envisioned as part of the second volume, embedded within the world history.
The second section, containing Rashīd al-Dīn’s evaluation of foreign historical sources,
exhibits more variation. In the published introduction, this section fills more than five pages
of edited text, 34 in which Rashīd al-Dīn distinguishes between corroborated (mutawātir) and
noncorroborated (ghayr-i mutawātir) accounts, drawing the craft of historical writing into
the rhetoric of hadith scholarship. 35 The historian, he concludes, should not simply reject
disputed accounts out of hand, since nobody can be absolutely certain about any account and
true but disputed histories could in this way be lost forever. “Thus,” he writes,
It is the duty of the historian to preserve the stories and accounts of each nation and each sect, in
the way that they preserve them in their own books and relate and present them orally, from the
most widely known books of that nation and from the speech of the most famous among them. 36
In this way Rashīd al-Dīn justifies the inclusion of historical accounts that might be deemed
objectionable from a strictly Islamic perspective, and he excuses himself for his role in
transmitting such reports, explicitly stating that he did not have time or expertise to delineate
between correct and incorrect accounts in all cases.
This long passage from the published introduction justifying the diverse historical stances
and conflicting cosmologies has earned Rashīd al-Dīn his modern plaudits as a uniquely
modern thinker in a medieval time. 37 Unfortunately, it is almost completely missing from
the initial introduction found in the Munich manuscript. In its place, Rashīd al-Dīn gives just
one short paragraph:
Although the histories of some people, who are infidels and idol worshipers, are irrational vanities of imagination and falsehoods of storytelling, their perspective [has been quoted] so that
they might be known by people of insight and so that the people of Islam and faith may, by
studying them, become informed of the corrupt beliefs of those in error and of their bewilderment originating from ignorance and rise up against those ideas, in performance of obligation,
thanks to the blessing of guidance and the light of faith, which is beyond all divine graces and
blessings. God the Exalted is he from whom aid must be sought, and upon him is all reliance
and trust. 38
33. See specifically JT/RM, 1: 9, lines 5–6, 13–15, cf. Munich, BSB ms. cod. Pers. 207, fol. 79b, lines 7, 10.
34. JT/RM, 1: 9–14.
35. J. Pfeiffer, “In the Folds of Time: Rashīd al-Dīn on Theories of Historicity,” History and Theory 58.4
(2019): 20–42, at 28 n. 40.
36. JT/RM, 1: 11.
37. In addition to the passage by Karl Jahn quoted above, see C. Melville, “The Mongol and Timurid Periods,
1200–1500,” in A History of Persian Literature, vol. 10: Persian Historiography, ed. C. Melville (I.B. Tauris,
2012), 155–208, at 169–70; J. Pfeiffer, “The Canonization of Cultural Memory: Ghāzān Khan, Rashīd al-Dīn, and
the Construction of the Mongol Past,” in Akasoy, Burnett, and Yoeli-Tlalim, Rashīd al-Dīn, 57–70, discussing this
passage specifically at 64–66.
38. Munich, BSB ms. cod. Pers. 207, fol. 79b, lines 11–14.
JAOS 145.1 (2025)
28
This paragraph is retained in the published introduction, embedded near the end of Rashīd
al-Dīn’s long disclaimer about including foreign historical accounts, but with two modifications. 39 The first is probably a simple scribal error—the phrase “has been quoted” (īrād
karda-ast) is omitted from the Munich manuscript—but the second, the phrase “and their
bewilderment originating from ignorance” (taḥayur-i īshān dar ibtidā-yi jahālat), is found
only in the Munich manuscript and not in any later version, suggesting an intentional modification to the text.
Consisting as it does of this paragraph in isolation from the much longer legalist justification for preserving objectionable accounts, §2 of the initial introduction shines a very different light on Rashīd al-Dīn’s attitude toward non-Islamic historical sources. Here Rashīd
al-Dīn is strongly dismissive of the merits of foreign reports, which he likens to the preIslamic period of ignorance (jāhiliyya). Their preservation is justified only insofar as they
alert the reader to the many forms of error that exist among nonbelievers. Only after 1307
does he seem to adopt the legalist disclaimer from hadith scholarship. Following in the
tradition of earlier Arabic and Persian historiography, Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial introduction
centers an Islamic epistemology against which others are judged: his vision of history here is
exclusive rather than the ecumenical vision adopted in later versions and praised by modern
historians.
The third and final section of the general introduction provides an exposition of the contents of Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh. Here we see the greatest divergence between the Munich manuscript and all other manuscript lines, and this section will occupy us for most of the rest of
this article. In this exposition of contents, the first volume—Tārīkh-i mubārak—is described
in the Munich manuscript as it is in all others. However, unlike the vague description of
the world history quoted to open this article, the Munich manuscript also offers a detailed
exposition of contents for the second volume. This original proposal for a world history was
never realized, but its description in the Munich manuscript is detailed enough to allow us to
speculate on Rashīd al-Dīn’s original vision.
exposition of contents i: histories of “these lands”
The full text and translation of the exposition of contents in the Munich manuscript are
provided in an appendix below. Its structure is summarized in Table 1. At a glance, it appears
to follow the same basic pattern as the world history of the final Jāmiʿ. The opening passage describes two parts to the volume, consisting of the histories of these lands (īn diyār),
followed by those of the regions and climes of the world (aṭrāf va aqālīm-i ʿālam). Furthermore, it is to contain a gazetteer of the world, again covering “these lands” and other
“regions and climes.” This overview is then fleshed out in a detailed description of contents,
from which we can assess Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial view of world history.
39. Cf. JT/RM, 1: 13, lines 12–19.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
29
Table 1. Structure of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Original Proposed World History, the Second Volume
of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, According to Munich BSB MS. Cod. Pers. 207, Fols. 80b–81b
[Part 1] Groups that belong to the people of these lands
General history of kings from Adam to today
History of the lineages and nations of the Arabs
History of the Oghuz Turks and the nations of the Turkmen, etc.
History of the Ismaʿili caliphs who were in Egypt and the Maghrib
Assembled history in the form of a genealogy
History of the Jews and Christians . . . and of Christianity
[Part 2] Groups that belong to other nations
History of China
History of the Qipchaq
History of India
History of the Uyghurs
History of the Gur-Khans of Qara-Khitai
History of the Franks of the coasts of Rum and the Maghrib
The image of the world and routes and kingdoms
The first part of the world history described in the Munich manuscript concerns the people
of southwest Asia, and it begins to look like a Perso-Islamic universal history like that of the
published Jāmiʿ, with chapters on kings (pādishāh[ān]) “from the time of Adam” and the
Arabs. These are followed, however, by chapters on the Oghuz Turks, Ismaʿilis, and Christians and Jews. Since there is also a chapter on Mediterranean Franks in the elucidation of
part two, this chapter is probably meant to treat only the Syriac and other eastern Christian
groups indigenous to the region. All these groups—Oghuz Turks, Ismaʿilis, Christians and
Jews—are included in the published Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, but of them only the Ismaʿilis are
included in the first part of the version that has survived. The others are included instead
among the summary histories of part two of the world history. Their inclusion here alongside Iranian and Arab histories breaks the pattern of other Perso-Islamic universal histories
by including non-Islamic groups and overlapping chronologies, requiring us to reconsider
what Rashīd al-Dīn had in mind. I suggest that Rashīd al-Dīn initially intended part one of
the world history as a celebration of royal genealogy and monotheism as a way to further
legitimize his Mongol patrons in the same vein as he had already done in Tārīkh-i mubārak.
The model of the Perso-Islamic universal history was applied to this part only with the
appropriation of Qāshānī’s text.
Historical Precedents for the Mongols
The emphasis on genealogy and monotheism beginning the description of the chapter on
the Arabs emerges clearly. Unlike the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh that has come down to us, which
focuses on Muḥammad and the caliphate, here the emphasis is placed on “their lineages and
nations and kings.” Genealogy had been a dominant impulse in early Arabic historiography,
as members of the expanding community of believers worked to preserve the memory of
biological ties to Muḥammad’s earliest followers and converts. 40 However, it had not been
central to any major historiographical works since the time of al-Balādhurī (d. 892).
40. F. Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (E.J. Brill, 1968), 195–200.
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A focus on genealogies and tribal identity, however, aligns with Rashīd al-Dīn’s treatment
of the Arabs in Tārīkh-i mubārak, where he compares them to the Turko-Mongol nations of
Chinggis Khān’s empire. In the opening lines of Tārīkh-i mubārak, Rashīd al-Dīn compares
the landscape of Bedouin Arabia to that of the Inner Asian steppe. 41 Later, he invokes (real
or imagined) Arab nations as a sociopolitical formation analogous to the political fragmentation of the steppe before the time of Chinggis Khān. 42 Most notably, Rashīd al-Dīn returns
to the example of the Arabs in describing the descent of Mongol lineages from the legendary
ancestress Alan Qo’a to establish Chinggis Khān’s family as possessors of a unique genealogical record. “There is a custom among the Mongols,” he writes,
to remember one’s lineage from father and forefather, and to each child that is born they teach
and instruct [their] lineage, just as they do with everyone else of that community. In this way
there can be none among them who does not know his own origin and lineage. Other than the
Mongols, this custom does not exist among other nations, except the Arabs, who remember their
own lineage. 43
He returns to this idea and vocabulary a few pages later in his account of Tūmina Khān,
Chinggis Khān’s fourth-generation ancestor. In describing Tūmina’s descendants, Rashīd
al-Dīn asserts that,
The custom of the Mongols since antiquity is such that they remember their origin and lineage
[. . .] and they have always preserved the strength of this ordinance. Even now, this ordinance
is just as important to them, and also among the Arabs there is this same fixed and determined
practice. 44
Already in Tārīkh-i mubārak, Rashīd al-Dīn regards the Arabs as a historical analogy for
the Mongols, a way to integrate his patrons into the indigenous society of southwest Asia. 45
It is entirely fitting, then, that his original vision for world history would—after an abbreviated history of kings from Adam to his own time—feature a chapter on Arab genealogy and
nations.
Rashīd al-Dīn sharpens his focus on tribal monotheistic society in his depiction of the
Oghuz Turks, which follows immediately after the history of the Arabs in the exposition
of contents in the Munich manuscript. A history of Oghuz and the nations called after him
was ultimately included in Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. It is the earliest extant entry of what would
become a robust Oghuznāma tradition in Persian historiography. 46 A central and shared feature of Oghuznāma narratives, beginning with Rashīd al-Dīn, is the infant Oghuz’s embrace
of monotheism, even refusing to nurse at the breast of an infidel woman. In the short account
of Oghuz included in the start of Tārīkh-i mubārak, Oghuz’s monotheism is mentioned as the
reason for division within his family of origin. 47
The exposition of contents (§3) in the Munich manuscript suggests that the history of the
Oghuz Turks was initially envisioned not as one of several summary histories of Eurasian
41. JT/RM, 1: 39.
42. JT/RM, 1: 215.
43. JT/RM, 1: 223.
44. JT/RM, 1: 244–45.
45. The use of genealogical structures, including those related to Judeo-Arab traditions, is further explored in
S. Kamola, “History and Legend in the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh: Abraham, Alexander, and Oghuz Khan,” Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society 25.4 (2015): 555–77.
46. İ. E. Binbaṣ, “Oḡuz Khan Narratives,” EIr, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/oguz-khan-narratives
(updated April 15, 2010).
47. JT/RM, 1: 41.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
31
peoples, but as the second wing of a diptych of historical precedents: the Arabs and Oghuz
Turks are presented as two pastoral Eurasian peoples who preserved strong genealogical traditions and converted to Islam before the time of the Mongols. This sentiment again recalls
the opening pages of the dynastic Tārīkh-i mubārak, where Rashīd al-Dīn compares Ghāzān
Khān to the biblical patriarch Abraham and relates Abraham’s injunction to his descendants
to preserve a written record of their lineage. 48 In the Quran Abraham represents a model of
pre-Islamic monotheism. Abraham, and after him the Arabs and Oghuz Turks, show the way
for the conversion of Ghāzān that Tārīkh-i mubārak celebrates. This same celebration of
tribal monotheistic societies seems to have shaped the initial plan for a world history when
the idea of such a volume was raised in 1304.
Other Peoples of “These Lands”
If the Arabs and Oghuz Turks provide a pair of historical analogies for Rashīd al-Dīn’s
patrons, subsequent chapters listed for the first part of the world history in his initial §3 reinforce this focus on genealogy, even when they treat nonanalogous groups. The list includes
histories of the Ismaʿili caliphs of Egypt and North Africa and of the Jews and Christians,
separated by a chapter explicitly on the genealogies of kings and sultans and their contemporaries “in each period.”
The inclusion of the Ismaʿilis seems at first strange, though it could have served as yet
another monotheistic society that emphasized the genealogical legitimacy of its leaders.
Genealogical descent of Shiʿi imams was evidently one reason for Öljeitü to embrace that
creed in 709h (1309f.). 49 However, that was years after the initial introduction was written,
and the tone with which Rashīd al-Dīn introduces the Ismaʿilis “and the people of hypocrisy
associated with them” strongly suggests a negative depiction rather than a historical model.
Perhaps the history of the Ismaʿilis was intended as a counterexample to the historical precedents of the (Sunni orthodox) Arabs and Oghuz Turks, a genealogical society lost to Shiʿi
apostasy.
The history of the Jews and Christians presents another challenge, but it also helps unlock
Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial plan for the world history and how he adjusted that plan to accommodate Qāshānī’s work. In the published Jāmiʿ, both the Jews and Christians appear among
the summary history of the peoples of Eurasia. The history of the Jews is largely based on
Hebrew scripture and midrashic material and draws on Rashīd al-Dīn’s personal experience as a Jew by birth. The history of the Franks is based on the corresponding section of
Qāshānī’s world history. While Qāshānī’s work and the slightly modified version of it found
in the published Jāmiʿ treat both eastern and Latin Christian groups, Rashīd al-Dīn probably
initially intended only a history of the former in part one of his world history, since a separate
entry is listed for Mediterranean Franks in part two. When we separate out the “western”
portions of the surviving history of the Franks, we are left with a vision of Judeo-Christian
tradition that emphasizes genealogy, just as the chapters on the Arabs and Oghuz Turks
already discussed.
Qāshānī’s summary history of the Franks—and Rashīd al-Dīn’s version of it—is divided
into two parts, each with several chapters. 50 The first part is based on Taʾrīkh mukhtaṣar
48. JT/RM, 1: 23–31.
49. S. Kamola, “Beyond History: Rashid al-Din and Iranian Kingship,” in Iran after the Mongols, ed. S. Babaie
(I.B. Tauris, 2019), 55–74; J. Pfeiffer, “Conversion Versions: Sultan Öljeytü’s Conversion to Shi‘ism (709/1309) in
Muslim Narrative Sources,” Mongolian Studies 22 (1999): 35–67.
50. Tehran University Library ms. 9067, fols. 308a–328b; cf. Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, vol. 2: Tārīkh-i
afranj, pāpān va qayāṣira, ed. M. Rawshan (Mīrās̱̱-i Maktūb, 1384sh [2005]).
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al-duwal, an Arabic-language universal history by Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286). It begins with a
preface listing ten groups that ruled in succession, a translatio imperii from the Babylonians
of Nebuchadnezzar to the Romans. This is followed by a series of chapters telling of the
ancestry of Jesus from Adam, with chapter divisions around the figures of Noah, Abraham,
and David. In other words, this part contains a history that, though it looks ahead to the
appearance of Jesus, largely aligns also with Jewish tradition, and so could be considered a
history both of Jews and of Christians.
The second part of Qāshānī’s work evidently also originally contained a preface, but this
is not found in the sole manuscript of Qāshānī’s world history kept in Tehran. In its place
Rashīd al-Dīn includes a summary of Monophysite Christian doctrine, and it may be that this
material was originally found in the preface that is missing in Qāshānī’s work. The surviving
chapters of the second part of Qāshānī’s work tell of the geography of Armenia and Europe,
the history of the Ptolemies of Egypt, and the history of the Romans. This part ends with a
chronicle of popes and emperors in the Latin West. Rashīd al-Dīn divides the geographical
chapter in two and drops the chapters on the Ptolemies and Romans. Like the chapters of the
first part concerned with the history of the Franks, those on the Ptolemies and Romans are
taken directly from the work of Bar Hebraeus. The chronicle of popes and emperors is little
more than a translation of a work by the Dominican friar Martinus Oppaviensis, or Martin of
Opava (d. 1278). Karl Jahn has argued that the geography of Europe may have been based
on the kind of portolan map that was innovated in Genoa exactly during the first years of the
fourteenth century by the cartographer Giovanni da Carignano. 51
In short, the history of the Franks found in Qāshānī’s world history, and particularly the
version of it found in the published Jāmiʿ, can be roughly divided between an “eastern” part
one, limited in chronology to the period before Jesus, and a “Latin” part two, which features
leaders of the Western Christian world after the time of Jesus. The first part would fit with
Rashīd al-Dīn’s description of a history that covers both Jewish and Christian tradition and
was confined to “these lands,” and so it may resemble what he intended to include at this
point in his world history. The emphasis on the genealogy of Jesus, of course, fits exactly
with the other sections just described, on the Arabs, Oghuz Turks, and even the Ismaʿilis.
In the exposition of contents of the Munich manuscript, the history of Jews and Christians
is preceded by “an assembled history in the form of the genealogy of kings and sultans.” This
sounds a lot like the stand-alone volume of genealogical trees, the Shuʿab-i panjgāna that
Rashīd later produced and included in his 1310 description of the Jāmiʿ as a four-volume
work. Given the foregoing, it also makes a lot of sense in the context of the initial plan for
a world history, as it is embedded among text sections that emphasize genealogical descent.
Rashīd al-Dīn exhibits sustained interest in genealogical trees, both in his historical writings and in K. al-Sulṭāniyya of 1307. 52 The latter work includes a genealogy of JudeoIslamic prophets and caliphs, and in it Rashīd al-Dīn mentions researching the lineage of
prophets from Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and other sources at the time he was writing Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh. 53 It is to be remembered, however, that K. al-Sulṭāniyya was written three years
before the autobiobibliography in which Rashīd al-Dīn first mentions a stand-alone volume
of genealogies as part of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. This raises the possibility that, when he mentions
researching genealogies in K. al-Sulṭāniyya, Rashīd al-Dīn is in fact referring to the segment
51. K. Jahn, Das christliche Abendland in der islamischen Geschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1976), 9.
52. These are most fully treated by Binbaş, “Structure and Function of the Genealogical Tree,” 485–99.
53. Rashīd al-Dīn, Mabāḥis-i sulṭāniyah, 175–76.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
33
on genealogies listed in the first part of §3 of the world history in the Munich manuscript,
before the history of Jews and Franks.
Qāshānī’s world history, by contrast, contains no such genealogical trees. The initial
exposition of contents in the Munich manuscript aligns with Rashīd al-Dīn’s statement in
K. al-Sulṭāniyya that he had been researching the lineages of prophets already in 1304. By
1307, Rashīd al-Dīn had prepared a parallel genealogy for his theological work. The version
of this universal genealogy envisioned for the historical Jāmiʿ was evidently not complete—
as it is not mentioned in the published general introduction—but perhaps became a reality
by 1310.
exposition of contents ii: groups that belong to other nations
For the second part of the world history, the initial exposition of contents lists a sequence
of histories related to various peoples of Eurasia. Once again, this resembles the published
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh with its summary histories of areas outside of the Ilkhanid realm. However, comparison between the Munich manuscript, Qāshānī’s world history, and the world
history that finally made it into Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh allows us to speculate that Rashīd al-Dīn
intended something different with his original proposal. We have already seen that several
groups—the Oghuz, Jews, and Christians—that were eventually included in the geographically universal second half were initially counted among the people of “these lands.” Other
differences in this second part set the Munich manuscript even further apart from the final
Jāmiʿ.
The History of China
The first chapter listed in the second part of the initial §3 is a history of China. The history
of China that was eventually included in Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh is mostly a Persian translation
of a Chan Buddhist text of the early Yuan period, consisting largely of historical Chinese
dynastic lists. 54 The introduction to that chapter claims that a historical text was brought
from China to the court of Öljeitü and translated there into Persian by two Chinese scholars,
Litaji and Kamsun. This description is modified from Qāshānī’s introduction to his history
of China, where we hear that the translation of Chinese historiography had occurred already
during the reign of Ghāzān. 55
In the extant manuscript of Qāshānī’s work, the history of China begins abruptly with the
mention of Ghāzān’s commission. It thus lacks an “introduction” (muqaddima) found in the
final Jāmiʿ that describes Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s efforts to integrate Chinese calendrics into his
astronomical work at Maragha. 56 Of interest to us here, however, is approximately one page
of manuscript text in the published Jāmiʿ, found even before this description of Ṭūsī’s efforts,
which outlines the geography and various names of the regions of China. 57 In this opening
passage, Rashīd al-Dīn names the regions of China and East Asia in exactly the same order
and with the same terms as we find in the exposition of contents of the Munich manuscript:
the Mongol and Indian names of Khitai (north China) and Manzi (south China), then the
peripheral regions of the Jurchen, Qara Khitai, Tibet, and Qandahar. 58
54. This section has most recently been treated by Calzolaio and Fiaschetti, “Prophets of the East.”
55. Tehran University Library ms. 9067, fol. 370a.
56. Istanbul, TSM ms. H.1654, fols. 252a–253a.
57. Istanbul, TSM ms. H.1654, fols. 251b–252a.
58. The Munich manuscript adds Solanggha (Korea) to this list, which is not found in the published version.
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It is possible that Qāshānī included this geographical preface with his history of China
and it has simply become separated from the surviving manuscript. However, the fact that
Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial §3 seems to describe only this short preface raises certain questions.
The Mongol geographical terms found here—Ja’uqut for North China, Nankiyas for South
China, Jucha and Solanggha for Manchuria and Korea—also appear throughout Tārīkh-i
mubārak. Rashīd al-Dīn would have known them through the process of assembling the
dynastic history from Mongol- and Turkic-language sources. 59 Since the Munich exposition
of contents focuses on these and indexes them to their corresponding Indian terms, we should
probably understand that Rashīd al-Dīn’s knowledge of Chinese history and geography was
still quite limited at the time he first proposed his world history. There is no indication that
he envisioned a history of China based on Chan Buddhist sources, such as the one Qāshānī
produced. That could well have been a separate undertaking, possibly initiated by Ghāzān
and Qāshānī quite apart from Rashīd al-Dīn’s original historical project. With the appropriation of Qāshānī’s world history in 1307, Rashīd al-Dīn then simply added this geographical
preface and the introduction concerning Ṭūsī’s astronomical efforts.
Foreign Lands I: The Use of Native Sources
Other entries in the initial list of histories of Eurasian people do not give us as much
detail about their contents. However, two patterns emerge from their descriptions. The first
is already evident in the entry on China: the refrain that these various sections are based on
the books of history written by the subject cultures themselves. This is familiar also from the
final version of the world history, where it echoes Rashīd al-Dīn’s legalist disclaimer about
working with foreign accounts. For example, in the introduction to the history of the Jews in
the published Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, Rashīd al-Dīn writes:
Several other places I have restated and said that the work of the historian is to write the history
of each nation according to its own assertion, and to not elaborate or diminish it by one’s own
opinion, whether it is true or whether false, so that by citing the claims and assertions of each
sect, the responsibility for elaboration and diminution and truth and falsity is on [the sources],
and not on the historian. 60
While others have interpreted this noninterventionist inclusion of foreign accounts as
a sign of Rashīd al-Dīn’s enlightened attitude, we know from §2, the evaluation of nonIslamic historical accounts found in the Munich manuscript, that the Rashīd al-Dīn who
wrote the initial introduction did not necessarily consider foreign accounts as meriting serious consideration. Instead, they are the “corrupt beliefs of those in error,” of which “people
of Islam and faith” should be made aware in order to reject them. His anxiety about them is
evident in the final, published text: immediately after the passage just quoted, he continues,
“this position also implies the sense that whenever unacceptable and meaningless things
appear, do not censure this poor one, and do not scold him, but excuse him in that sense,
God willing.” Similarly, in the introduction to the history of India, he begs that, “should the
observant [reader] encounter faults and errors contrary to the beliefs and opinions of the
ancestors that no human endeavor can correct, the revelation and responsibility should not be
placed on the author and scribe, but the responsibility of truth and falsehood of it falls to the
59. The inclusion of Indian terms for regions of China introduces intriguing possibilities about Indian sources
for Tārīkh-i mubārak, a topic for another time.
60. Istanbul, TSM ms. H.1654, fol. 272b.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
35
transmitters.” 61 It is worth noting that Qāshānī does not employ such language: it is one of
Rashīd al-Dīn’s modifications to the text, made at the time that he appropriated it as his own.
The initial §3 employs less legalist and subtle language about the danger of foreign histories. In some places Rashīd al-Dīn makes exhortations for divine guidance: “God knows
what is right” (after the entries for China, the Gur-Khans, and Franks) or “peace be upon the
one who follows the guidance” (after the entry on the Uyghur). In several places the act of
quotation or direct transmission (naql) is emphasized, as if to absolve Rashīd al-Dīn from
any personal investment in the ideas contained in these sections. This almost apotropaic
emphasis on quotation in the initial introduction is replaced in the published version with the
rhetorical strategy drawing on hadith scholarship, which justifies the inclusion of unverified
reports as part of a process of scholarship and not as a reflection of the personal orthodoxy
of the scholar.
It is to be remembered that Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh was assembled during the years when
Rashīd al-Dīn was turning his attention toward matters of faith and philosophy. Indeed, it
may well be that this change in his own research program meant that he had neither time nor
interest to produce the world history he initially proposed, making it necessary by 1307 for
him to appropriate Qāshānī’s work. In his early theological works written during these years,
Rashīd al-Dīn exhibits a deep concern with establishing his own credentials as a theologian.
He describes dreams and interviews that encouraged him in his work and his first collection
is padded with long assemblages of endorsements (taqrīẓāt) from contemporary scholars
speaking to the orthodoxy of his work, many of them dated exactly to the year 706h (1306f.),
during which he apparently also presented Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh to Khudābanda Öljeitü. 62 The
shift from Rashīd al-Dīn’s early dismissal of foreign historical accounts to their integration in
a legalist Islamic framework may have been forced by the wide-ranging scope of Qāshānī’s
world history, but it was facilitated by the theological work with which he was then engaged.
Foreign Lands II: The Lost Turko-Mongol Tribal Histories
The second pattern that stands out from the initial §3, and the most obvious difference
between it and the final product, is the inclusion of several histories of individual TurkoMongol nations: the Qipchaq, the Uyghur, and the Gur-Khans of the Qara-Khitai. As was
the case for his knowledge of east Asian geography, Rashīd al-Dīn had access to extensive
historical information through the teams of translators from among these groups whom he
hired to prepare Tārīkh-i mubārak. 63 During that process, excerpts would have been selected
from available written and oral reports to help tell the history of the Mongols. The initial
§3 seems to suggest that he meant to reproduce these histories in full as part of the second
volume. That would have made the “world” history look very much like a history of the
peoples of the Mongol empire, constructed from histories indigenous to the people absorbed
into it. If this plan had been realized, it would have greatly expanded our understanding of
pre-Mongol steppe society. The eventual failure to do so, then, represents a great loss of his61. Istanbul, TSM ms. H.1654, fol. 329b.
62. These endorsements, and Rashīd al-Dīn’s anxiety about securing his position as a theologian, have been
discussed by J. van Ess, Der Wesir und seine Gelehrten: Zu Inhalt und Entstehungsgeschichte der theologischen
Schriften des Rašīduddīn Fażlullāh (gest. 718/1318) (Franz Steiner, 1981), 22–38. On their situation within the
production of Rashīd al-Dīn’s works, see S. Kamola, “Rashīd al-Dīn and the Making of History in Mongol Iran”
(PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013), 205–10; J. Brack, “Ibn Kammūna is Going to Hell! Muslim-Jewish
Polemics at the Ilkhanid Court,” forthcoming in Mamlūk Studies Review.
63. C. P. Atwood, “Rashīd al-Dīn’s Ghazanid Chronicle and Its Mongolian Sources,” in May et al., New
Approaches to Ilkhanid History, 53–121.
JAOS 145.1 (2025)
36
torical knowledge, regardless of Rashīd al-Dīn’s sectarian assessment of the relative merits
of the accounts involved.
This idea that Rashīd al-Dīn’s presentation of Turkic tribes in the world history was linked
to that of Tārīkh-i mubārak is strengthened when we compare the Turkic nations listed in
the initial §3 with the history of Turkic nations found in Tārīkh-i mubārak. Among the lineages that emerged from the Oghuz Turks mentioned in the first part of §3, Rashīd al-Dīn
lists the Turkmen, Qalach, Qarluq, Aghacheri, and others, as well as the Seljuq lineage. In
part two, the Qipchaq and Uyghur are said to have originated among the Oghuz but then to
have separated and produced their own histories. In Tārīkh-i mubārak, by comparison, the
Uyghur, Qipchaq, Qalach, Qarluq, and Aghacheri are among the groups included among the
Oghuz Turks, while later on, the Uyghur, Qarluq, and Qipchaq are also treated among the
nations that retained their own kingly accounts. 64 The treatment of these specific groups both
as part of the Oghuz confederacy and as independent royal lines is a striking parallel between
Tārīkh-i mubārak and the initial §3, suggesting that they draw on the same underlying body
of historical materials.
The final entry in Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial exposition of contents deserves special notice.
It promises an image of the world (ṣūrat al-aqālīm) and routes and kingdoms (masālik
al-mamālik) according to the geographical traditions of China, India, and elsewhere.
Undoubtedly, Rashīd al-Dīn would have also drawn on well-established Islamic accounts
of ṣūrat al-aqālīm and masālik al-mamālik for this section. As already mentioned several
times, the published general introduction envisions a gazetteer as a separate volume, and
it credits Öljeitü with the idea. Separating out the gazetteer as its own volume would have
become necessary once Rashīd al-Dīn appropriated Qāshānī’s world history, since that work
contained no such geographical chapter. The published exposition of contents retains the
promise of a gazetteer, though it was almost certainly never completed. The fact that the
exposition of contents found in the Munich manuscript includes a section on genealogies in
its first part and a gazetteer in its second may explain Rashīd al-Dīn’s decision in his 1310
description of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh as a four-volume collection to list the volume of genealogical trees before the gazetteer.
In sum, while Rashīd al-Dīn’s initial description of a world history exhibits many of the
same general features as that of the final Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, it holds at its core a very different vision of history. Rather than expand a Perso-Islamic universal history with the summary histories of other peoples of Eurasia, this proposed world history gives pride of place
to tribal monotheistic societies that preserve a strong genealogical identity, and it dedicates
significant space to the people integrated into Chinggis Khān’s nomadic confederation.
This makes it a more natural extension of the historical project of Tārīkh-i mubārak, which
had been written to preserve the genealogical continuity of Mongol rule and to celebrate
the conversion of the Ilkhan Ghāzān. It was to be concluded with a geographical treatise
rather than the history of Öljeitü, as described in the published expositions of contents of
the final Jāmiʿ. The eventual idea of including a history of Öljeitü, the decision to separate the gazetteer as a distinct volume, and the loss of the non-Oghuz Turkic histories can
perhaps be explained by returning now to the process of how Tārīkh-i mubārak became
Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh.
64. JT/RM, 1: 52–55, 138–41, 144.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
37
competing visions of the world
ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī’s world history—the one appropriated and adapted by Rashīd al-Dīn—
survives in a few fragments and one mostly complete manuscript. 65 From that manuscript,
we can see that the work largely resembled the form of world history that is familiar to us
from surviving copies of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. It is, namely, a Perso-Islamic universal history,
supplemented by regional histories of Eurasia made possible by transcontinental knowledge
transfer during the Mongol period. For a scholar like Qāshānī, well versed in Perso-Islamic
historiography, this arrangement for a world history is an entirely sensible extension of an
established genre, updated to reflect the contemporary state of historical knowledge. The initial description of a world history described in the Munich manuscript, by contrast, reflects
the idiosyncratic vision of an ideologue with a very peculiar pedigree as a historian, heavily
invested in the oral and written narratives of Inner Asian Turkic and Mongol societies and
comparatively unversed in the conventions of Perso-Islamic historiography—in short, the
vision of a man like Rashīd al-Dīn at the moment he presented his finished Tārīkh-i mubārak
and before his major shift toward theological scholarship.
We might imagine that Rashīd al-Dīn encountered or became aware of numerous historical narratives in the process of preparing Tārīkh-i mubārak. Some of these, like the histories
of the Qipchaq or the Uyghur, were harvested for information to enrich the history of the
Mongol royal family prepared for Tārīkh-i mubārak. Others, like Bar Hebraeus’s sequence
of dynasties or the historical geography of China, did not find space in Tārīkh-i mubārak yet
provided curious insights into the people of the Mongol world. The world history proposed
in §3 stitches such works together into a volume that emphasizes foremost the genealogical
continuity of the Mongol royal family. Other subject and neighboring peoples—the populations of unbelief of southwest Asia, including the Ismaʿilis; the Turkic nations subsumed into
the Mongol empire; and the major neighboring civilizations of China, India, and Europe—
are included to amplify the extent of the Mongol imperial accomplishment, not to expound
an inclusive vision of the world.
It may be that Qāshānī’s world history was a completely separate project from the one
that Rashīd al-Dīn proposed, or that Rashīd al-Dīn gave Qāshānī instructions along the lines
of the original proposal and the latter produced something quite different. In any case, in
1307, perhaps acknowledging that he would never complete the world history that he had
proposed years earlier, Rashīd al-Dīn reached for a world history that was available, namely,
the work of Qāshānī. He edited this to efface Qāshānī’s role in its production and Ghāzān’s
role in its commission, appended it to his Tārīkh-i mubārak, and presented the collection to
his sovereign. 66
As we now know, Qāshānī’s world history did not match the Mongol world history that
Rashīd al-Dīn had proposed for his second historical volume, and by 1307 the Khudābanda
Muḥammad who had commissioned the world history three years earlier was transitioning
into his more familiar persona as Öljeitü Sulṭān. So Rashīd al-Dīn had to revise his initial
general introduction. He redrafted it in the name of Öljeitü. He separated out his proposal
65. On the manuscript situation of Qāshānī’s work, see Otsuka, “Qāshānī, the First World Historian,” 125–27.
66. Some sections of the world history indicate more significant editing and even original composition on
Rashīd al-Dīn’s part, though they do not disprove the overall process of appropriation described here. See, for the
chapter on Seljuq history, A. H. Morton, ed., The Saljūqnāma of Ẓahīr al-Dīn Nīshāpūrī: A Critical Text Making Use
of the Unique Manuscript in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society (Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004), 23–32; for the
chapter on Salghurid history, Kamola, “Salghurid History”; and for the chapter on Ismaʿili history, S. A. Hajiani,
“Reconstructing Alamut: New Approaches to the Study of the Qiyāma and the Nizari Ismaʿili Polity in Iran” (PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2019), 238–57.
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for a gazetteer as a separate volume, since Qāshānī’s work included no such geographical
chapter. He softened his stance toward non-Islamic historiographical accounts, expanding
what had been a short and dismissive passage into a much longer and legalist justification for
including foreign reports. Finally, he rewrote the exposition of contents for the collection’s
second volume. In place of the clear list of chapters found in the Munich manuscript and
reproduced below, he penned the vague and ecumenical description quoted above, adding to
it the idea that a history of Öljeitü himself would bookend the history of the world. Perhaps
he intended to use Qāshānī’s developing material on that topic as well.
This new presentation of world history, and of Öljeitü’s place in it, reflects Rashīd
al-Dīn’s intellectual concerns at the end of the first decade of the fourteenth century. These
ideas, most clearly articulated in his theological works, extol Öljeitü as a universal sovereign,
the kind of ruler who might commission a world history but himself transcend it. 67 Rashīd
al-Dīn’s history of Öljeitü, of course, could not be written, as it included events that had not
yet happened. That did not matter, as Rashīd al-Dīn had by then found a more fitting outlet
for these ideas in the increasingly hagiographical pages of his theological treatises.
implications and conclusions
The analysis of the Munich manuscript offered here can help clarify some outstanding
questions about the nature of Rashīd al-Dīn’s scholarly output and its reception. First among
these concerns is the structure of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. In the published exposition of contents
found in most manuscripts, Jāmiʿ is described as a three-volume collection: one of dynastic
history, one of world history (bookended by the history of Khudābanda Öljeitü), and one of
geography. In his later autobiobibliography, however, Rashīd al-Dīn slips between the world
history and geographical volumes the suggestion of an additional volume of genealogical
trees. While this genealogical volume has indeed been preserved in a single late copy, no
hint of the history of Öljeitü or of the gazetteer survives, nor does any extant copy of Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh include the genealogical trees alongside any of the text volumes.
Seen in the light of Rashīd al-Dīn’s evolving scholarly projects, these peculiarities of the
work’s structure begin to make sense. The gazetteer and the genealogical trees were initially
intended as part of the world history, which Rashīd al-Dīn never produced to its original plan.
In his updated summary of contents, Rashīd al-Dīn separated out the geographical portion
as its own third volume and credited Khudābanda Öljeitü with the idea of producing it. The
genealogical trees of the fourth volume, by contrast, fit naturally into Rashīd al-Dīn’s shift
toward universalizing theological projects around the year 1307. It may be that he envisioned
the genealogy of prophets in K. al-Sulṭāniyya as a replacement for the genealogies he had
initially proposed for the Jāmiʿ, only to revisit the idea as a stand-alone volume to the historical collection a few years later.
Another possible implication of these ideas concerns the production of manuscripts of the
Jāmiʿ. We have, in fact, no material evidence that the collection was ever produced in any
multivolume format during the Ilkhanid period, despite Rashīd al-Dīn leaving instructions to
do so. All extant manuscripts that contain both volumes of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh are the result of
later Timurid- and Safavid-era reconstructions, uniting the dynastic and world histories from
exemplars of the individual volumes. 68 Notably, these manuscripts with the reassembled
67. On Öljeitü’s universalizing ideology, see Kamola, “Beyond History”; J. Brack, “Theologies of Auspicious
Kingship: The Islamization of Chinggisid Sacral Kingship in the Islamic World,” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 60.4 (2018): 1143–71, at 1153–59, 1162–68.
68. Kamola, Making Mongol History, 248–58.
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
39
two-volume Jāmiʿ place the world history before the dynastic history, and even before the
general introduction to Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. This applies an overall chronological structure
to Rashīd al-Dīn’s work contrary to his original design but in line with other Timurid and
Safavid universal historiographical projects. It may be that, in the face of the changing shape
of the world history, Rashīd al-Dīn never actually produced two-volume copies of Jāmiʿ
al-tawārīkh, and that production of the dynastic and world histories were conducted separately at his network of scriptoria across the Ilkhanate.
A third implication of the initial general introduction in the Munich manuscript concerns
the question of Qāshānī’s role in the creation of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. While we still await a full
edition of Qāshānī’s text and of Rashīd al-Dīn’s text of pre-Islamic history (see n. 5 above),
some of the differences between the two scholars’ world historical projects begin to make
sense when we recognize their different motivations and historiographical stances. Qāshānī
seems to have produced something like the ecumenical history that modern scholars praise,
though he does not take time to justify the inclusion of foreign sources the way that Rashīd
al-Dīn did once he appropriated Qāshānī’s work. Rashīd al-Dīn, on the other hand, originally
envisioned the world history as an extension of the ideological program of Tārīkh-i mubārak,
casting his Mongol patrons alongside the Arabs and Oghuz Turks as Muslim sovereigns with
a strong genealogical tradition.
Finally, one last peculiarity of the Munich manuscript should be addressed. It has already
been noted that the Munich manuscript omits the final section of the narrative of Ghāzān’s
reign, ending instead with the quriltai of July 1302, during which Ghāzān affirms the unique
grace (karāmat) that God granted him, feeds his people, bestows them with gifts, and then
crowns himself in an unprecedented display of royal pageantry before arraying his forces in
preparation for what became his final campaign into Syria. 69 Elsewhere I have argued that
Ghāzān’s commissioning of historical writing—not just of Rashīd al-Dīn, but also of Shihāb
al-Dīn Waṣṣāf and possibly Qāshānī—occurred early in the 1302 campaign. 70 His commission of Waṣṣāf came after the latter presented the first three completed volumes of his own
chronicle. That work culminated with the success of Ghāzān’s first campaign into Syria in
1299–1300, when he captured Mamluk Damascus.
Given that the Munich manuscript is a unique but relatively late copy of the pre-1307
recension and experiences significant later editorial intervention, it is impossible to prove the
exact shape of its exemplar. However, one intriguing possibility is that the original Tārīkh-i
mubārak-i ghāzānī ended at Ghāzān’s most blessed moment, the great quriltai of July 1302.
This hypothesis finds support in the initial introduction to Tārīkh-i mubārak, where Rashīd
al-Dīn mentions writing the work in the year 702h (August 1302–August 1303), a year or
so before Ghāzān’s death. 71 If this were the case, then Rashīd al-Dīn’s original work was
modeled even more closely than has been previously recognized on the work of Waṣṣāf: each
work ends with a moment of triumph for Ghāzān, followed by a catalogue of Ghāzān’s building projects and reforms. In this scenario, the later sections narrating Ghāzān’s failed final
campaign, illness, and death were a subsequent addition to Tārīkh-i mubārak, commissioned
perhaps by Khudābanda Öljeitü to complete his brother’s story.
Rashīd al-Dīn’s historical writing is a rare example of premodern historiography for
which versions exist from different stages of its production and reinvention. The bulk of
modern studies have focused on a few exemplary manuscripts, all of them containing the
69. JT/RM, 2: 1303–6.
70. Kamola, Making Mongol History, 73–78.
71. JT/RM, 1: 28.
‫)‪JAOS 145.1 (2025‬‬
‫‪40‬‬
‫‪text as it was produced late in Rashīd al-Dīn’s life, after numerous changes had been made‬‬
‫‪in several phases. The text of those late copies reflects Rashīd al-Dīn’s final historiographi‬‬‫‪cal vision and the fullest expression of book art from the Ilkhanate. However, manuscripts‬‬
‫‪capturing earlier moments of the process of making Mongol history can tell us much. Not‬‬
‫‪only do they reveal what information Rashīd al-Dīn had access to and when, but also how‬‬
‫‪his own engagement with the genre of historical writing changed over time. The Munich‬‬
‫‪manuscript, preserving as it does the only known pre-1307 recension of the text, offers us a‬‬
‫‪precious glimpse into the changing ideological landscape of the high Ilkhanate and the con‬‬‫‪tentious relationship between Rashīd al-Dīn and Qāshānī. And it shows us an early vision‬‬
‫‪of world history for and about the Mongols that Rashīd al-Dīn abandoned. The vision that‬‬
‫‪prevailed—the “first world history” that Rashīd al-Dīn appropriated from Qāshānī—was a‬‬
‫‪fortunate result, but it came with the loss of materials from Inner Asian Turko-Mongol peo‬‬‫‪ples subsumed into the empire, which Rashīd al-Dīn promised to reproduce and never did.‬‬
‫‪appendix‬‬
‫‪Text and Translation of Rashīd al-Dīn’s‬‬
‫‪Original Exposition of Contents for the World History‬‬
‫‪Munich BSB cod. Pers. 207, fols. 80b–81b. Words in boldface are written in red in the‬‬
‫‪manuscript.‬‬
‫مجلد دوم که شهنشاه اسالم سلطان محمد خدای بنده خلد هللا ساطانه انشا فرمود و بنام همایون او نوشته‬
‫میشود‪ .‬و ان مشتمل است بر مجمل تواریخ اهل دیار از ارباب ملک و ادیان و دیگر ساکنان اطراف و‬
‫اقالیم عالم بموجبی که در کتب یافته شد و هر قوم بر حسب معتقد خویش روایت کرده اند و در دفاتر‬
‫آورده‪ .‬و صوراالقالیم و مسالک الممالک چه مجمل تواریخ این دیار و ساکنان اطراف و اقالیم‪.‬‬
‫تبعه انچه باهل این دیار تعلق دارد و ارباب ملک و ادیان‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ عموم پادشاه[ان] که از عهد آدم علیه السالم تا این زمان بموجبی که در کتب تاریخ آمده بر سبیل‬
‫ایجاز و اختصار واقع شد‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اقوام اعراب و شرح شعب و قبایل ایشان و پادشاهانی که از آن اقوام بر خواسته اند با اخر عهد خلفا‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اتراک اوغوز و اقوام ترکمان و قلچ و قارلوق و اغاچری و غیر هم و دیگر سالطین آل سلجوق‬
‫شعب ایشان از آن اقوام است‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ خالفای اسماعلیه که در مصر و مغرب بودند و اقوام مالحده که بایشان منسوب بوده اند و ذکر اتباع‬
‫و انصار ایشان‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ مجمل در باب شجره ملوک و سالطین و کیفیت انشعاب هر طایفه ازیشان و ذکر معاصرانی که‬
‫ایشانرا در هر عهد بوده اند‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اهل کل از یهود و نصاری بموجبی که در کتب ایشان آمده و نصرانی در تاریخ خویش آورده است‪.‬‬
‫تبعه انچه بسایر اقوام تعلق دارد‬
‫تاریخ ختای که مغوالنرا جاوقوت گویند و هندوان چین و مزی که مغوالن آنرا ننکیاس میگویند و اهل هند‬
‫ماچین میگویند و اصلش مهاچین است یعنی چین بزرگ و جورچه و سولنگقا و قرا ختایی و تبت و قرا‬
‫جابک که ما آنرا قندهار میگویم {‪ }18‬و هندوان کندرقی منقول از کتب ایشان است و هللا اعلم با الصواب‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اقوام قپچاق و چون ایشانرا نیز شعبه از اوغوز مینهند هرآینه ذکر ایشان در تاریخ اتراک اوغوز‬
‫مجمل آمده باشد‪ .‬لیکن بعد از انکه منفرد گشتند کتابی در تاریخ ایشان نوشته اند‪ .‬از ان بعضی که مناسب‬
‫نمود نقل کرده شد‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اهل هند و کشمیر و ذکر بعضی از جمله معتقدات ایشان و شرح بعضی از ان والیات بموجب تفسیر‬
‫آن طایفه و نقل آن از کتب ایشان‪.‬‬
‫تاریخ اقوام اویغور‪ .‬و اگر انکه چه ایشانرا شعبه از اتراک اوغوز می نهند و ذکر ایشان در ان تاریخ داخل‬
‫باشد لیکن بوقتی که از انجمله منفرد کشته اند و قومی علیحده شده‪ .‬در باب احوال ایشان تاریخی جداگانه‬
Kamola: The First Draft of the First World History
41
‫ و بعضی از ان نقل کرده شده است و بدستور که از هر کس شنیده و از هر جا دیده و هر‬.‫نوشته اند‬
.‫مسوده از هر طرف جمع نموده و السالم علی من التبع الهدی‬
‫تاریخ گورخان که از قراختای بیرون آمد و بر والیت ترکستان و ماورآلنهر حاکم شدند و کیفیت اوضاع و‬
‫احوال ایشان در انجا بموجبی که در کتب و رسایل در امده است و از ان هر کس نقل کرده اند و هللا اعلم‬
.‫باالصواب‬
‫ب} و ذکر مبدا‬81{ ‫تاریخ اقوامی که سکان سواحل دریای روم و مغرب اند و ایشانرا افرنگ میگویند‬
‫ظهور ایشان کماینبغی و شرح کلیات احوال و اوضاع آن طایفه که در حد ذات خود چه حال داشته اند و‬
‫بچه منوال سیر کرده اند بموجبی که در کتب اقوام مسطور ست و از مردمان معتبر صحیح القول اخبار‬
‫کرده اند و هللا اعلم بااصواب‬
‫ و حکمای‬.‫صور[ت] االقالیم و مسالک الممالک بموجبی که در کتب حکمت و آیندگان علم هیات آورده اند‬
‫ختای و هندویی هر اقلیمی در کتب خویش و صحف نقل کرده و از سیاحان و مسافران جهان کرد برو بحر‬
‫ آلیعلم الغیب آالهو‬.‫عالم تفحص و تجسس رفته است و بعضی بطریق اجمال و بعضی بر سبیل تفصیل‬
‫ شعر‬.‫ چنانکه حضرت شیخ مصلح الدین سعدی الفارسی فرموده‬.‫عرض از تقریر انکه ذکر خیری باشد‬
‫سعد یا مرد نیکو نام نمیرد هر گز مرده آنست که نامش نیکویی نبرند‬
‫و السالم علی من اتبع الهدی‬
Volume two, which the Shahanshāh of Islam, Sultan Muḥammad Khudābanda—may God
perpetuate his sultanate—ordered, and which is written in his royal name. This is made up of
a collection of histories of [these] lands, 72 from the possessors of realms and religions and of
other inhabitants of the regions and climes of the world, according to what is found in books
and [what] each nation has narrated and preserved in notebooks according to the account of
their own belief. Also, an image of the world and routes and kingdoms, comprising a collection of histories of these lands and the inhabitants of regions and climes.
Groups That Belong to the People of These Lands [from] 73
the Possessors of Realms and Religions
A general history of king[s] from the time of Adam—peace be upon him—until this time,
according to what is found in books of history, made in the way of abbreviation and abridgement.
The history of the Arab peoples, and a description of their lineage, nations, and the kings
who commanded those people until the end of the age of the caliphs. 74
The history of the Oghuz Turks and the nations of the Turkmen and Qalach and Qarluq
and Aghacheri etc., and also the sultans of the Seljuq family, whose lineage is from those
nations.
The history of the Ismaʿili caliphs who were in Egypt and the Maghrib, the nations of
hypocrisy associated with them, and an account of their followers and supporters.
An assembled history in the form of the genealogy of kings and sultans and the nature
of the lineages of each of their group, and an account of the contemporaries who were with
them in each period.
The history of all people among the Jews and Christians, consisting of what is found in
their books, and of Christianity as presented by their own history.
72. Reading īn diyār in place of ahl-i diyār, in comparison to parallel formations given below.
73. Reading az in place of va, by comparison to the parallel formation above.
74. Reading bi ākhir in place of bā ākhir.
42
JAOS 145.1 (2025)
Groups That Belong to Other Nations
The history of Khitai, which the Mongols call Ja’uqut and the Indians call Chin, and of
Ma[n]zi, which the Mongols call Nankiyas and the people of India call Machin (the origin
of which is Mahachin, that is, Great China), and of Jurcha and Solangqa and the Qara-Khitai
and Tibet and the Qarajang, 75 which we call Qandahar [81a], and the Indians Gandhara, 76 as
is copied in their books, and God knows what is right.
The history of the nations of Qipchaq, and since they are also considered descended from
Oghuz, in any case an account of them will be included in the history of the Oghuz Turks.
But once they became separate, they wrote a book of their history. From it, parts deemed
appropriate have been quoted.
The history of the people of India and Kashmir and an account of some of their collection
of beliefs and a description of some of the lands, according to the interpretation of that sect
and quotation from their books.
The history of the Uyghur people. Even though they are considered a lineage of the Oghuz
Turks, and an account of them is appended to that history, but [only] up to the time they
became separate from that confederacy and became a distinct people. They have written a
separate history about their situation. Some of it has been quoted and [also] on the basis of
what is understood from all people and seen from all places and collected from every draft
from every place, and peace be upon the one who follows the guidance.
The history of the Gur-khan[s], who emerged from the Qara-Khitai and governed in the
regions of Turkistan and Transoxiana and the nature of conditions and their circumstances in
that place, according to what is reported in books and treatises and quoted by each person,
and God knows what is right.
The history of a people who inhabit the coasts of the sea of Rum and the Maghrib, who
are called the Franks [81b], and an account of the beginning of their appearance insofar as
necessary and a general description of the conditions and deportments of that sect, as to
what condition they have in their nature and what manner they inhabit, according to what is
described in the books of the nation and reported by reliable and truthful people, and God
knows what is right.
The image of the world and routes and kingdoms, according to what is preserved in
books of wisdom and the predictions of cosmology. Chinese and Indian sages have conveyed
descriptions of each clime in their own books, and [accounts] of sojourners and travelers
across the face of the oceans of the world have been scrutinized and examined, some in brief
and some in detail. One does not know the unseen, but it is a revelation from the narrative of
that one who makes a good remembrance.
As Ḥaḍrat Shaykh Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Saʿdī al-Fārsī has said:
Saʿd! A man of good name never dies
Dead is he whose name is not remembered well. 77
Peace be upon those who follow the right.
75. Reading qarājang for qarājabk.
76. Reading gandah.r for kndrqī.
77. This last verse of Saʿdī’s ghazal no. 20 also appears in the Tārīkh-i mubārak at the end of the chapter on
Ögödei (JT/RM, 1: 704). My thanks to Sara Mirahmadi for confirming that this is the only verse of Saʿdī that Rashīd
al-Dīn cites.