The Court of the Il-khans, 1290-1340.

• Author: Jackson, Peter (New Zealander movie director)
• Position: Review

Edited by JULIAN RABY and TERESA FITZHERBERT. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. 12. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 218.

The six papers in this collection are the fruit of a conference held in Oxford in 1994 on the intellectual and artistic life of the Ilkhanate. Thomas T. Allsen surveys the career of Bolad Ch'eng-hsiang, once - as Po-lo in Chinese sources - erroneously identified with Marco Polo. Sent to Persia in 1283 by Qubilai Qa'an in an embassy to the Il-khan, he remained there until his death thirty years later. It has long been known that Bolad was the source of much of the historical information on the Mongols found in Rashid al-Din's great compendium, Jami al-Tawarikh; but Allsen demonstrates that he also played a pivotal role in the transmission to western Asia of Chinese knowledge and of knowledge about the Middle Kingdom. The material concerning Rashid al-Din himself to be gleaned from Mamluk sources is the subject of a paper by Reuven Amitai-Preiss. In particular, the long entry on the celebrated wazir in al-Safadi's biographical dictionary, al-Wafi bi l-Wafayat, throws fresh light on intellectual activity at the Il-khan's court during the early fourteenth century. Sheila Blair examines Rashid al-Din's artistic patronage, as evidenced in tomb-complexes and illustrated manuscripts, part of a genre that declined with the collapse of the Ilkhanate in the 1340s. Charles Melville provides an assessment of a figure of a rather different stamp, the Mongol amir Chupan (d. 1327), a Muslim but also "a military man ill at ease in politics" who dominated the Ilkhanate for much of the reign of Abu Sa id. His relations with successive wazirs - he presided over Rashid al-Din's downfall - and with the Il-khan himself show how susceptible Chupan was to the intrigues of his subordinates.

The use of illustration as a gloss upon historical narrative is investigated by Teresa Fitzherbert, who traces this phenomenon back into the late thirteenth century by dint of focusing on the depiction of the last Khwarazmshah, Jalal al-Din, in two Paris manuscripts of Juwayni's Ta rikh-i Jahan-Gusha. This theme is developed further in a paper by Abolala Soudavar that takes up over half the entire volume: "The Saga of Abu Sa id Bahador Khan: the Abu-Sa idname" (pp. 95-218). Here the argument is that each illustration in the Demotte copy of the Shah-Nama (as reconstructed in 1980 by Grabar and Blair) was designed to have a dual representation, in...