Page 14 - DILMUN NO 6

Ghazan was one of the ablest of Mangol with the Creation).
princes. A young man of twenty-four, he was
honest, intelligent and conscientious, anxious to
get Persia on her feet again, and resolved to
rule his kingdom in the interest of the Persians
an d not only of his fellow Mongols. To
conciliate his subjects, who were mostly
Muslims, he embraced Islam in 1295, thereby
abandoning the paganism of his ancestors. But
this by no means implied that he had foresworn
his Mongol past : on the contrary, Ghazan was
immensely proud of the achievements of his
people, and venerated the memory of the great
Genghis. He was highly educated for a king
cf his day; he had a thorough knowledge of
Mongol folklore and tribal genealogies, and he
was credited with the ability to speak and
understand Mongol, Turkish, Hindi, Persian and
Arabic, and was even said to know some
“Frankish” presumably either French or Latin,
He inherited an efficient bureaucratic machine,
staffed by members of a class of hereditary civil
servants, and he showed much insight in
his choice of ministers. In 1298 he appointed
Rashid al-Din grand vizier.
Rashid al-Din was born at Hamadan about
1247, and came from what in China would be
called a mandarin family. As a boy he lived
through the fierce invasion led by Hulegu
Khan, the grandsom of Genghis and brother of
Kubilai, which swept throught Northern Persia
and Iraq and culminated in the sack of Baghdad
and the murder of the last Caliph in 1258.
Even in those disturbed days, many upper-class
Persians contrived to get a good education,
and Rashid was trained as a physician, a calling
always held in high honour in the East and
often leading to a career in the public service.
The training was no.t narrowly professional, but
included courses in theology, literature and
history, designed to deepen the student’s
devotion to Islam in its totality. History
(ta’rikh in Arabic) was a traditional part of the
Muslim corpus of knowledge; basically it was
a study of the life of the Prophet and the
expansion of his community, the people of
Allah. (Similarly, history among contemporary
Christians was almost an outgrowth of the
study of the Bible and the history of the
Church - all medieval historical works begin
14
Educated Persians had a fair knowledge
of their past, though as usual the historical
stream became muddied with much legend and
fiction the further it receded into antiquity.
Ghazan was less concerned with the Persian
than with the Mongol past; he feared that the
ycungcr generation of his people would grow
up in ignorance of the mighty deeds of their
forebears, and that the small Mongol ruling
class would in any case soon be absorbed into
the Persian nation. To keep alive the tradi­
tions of his race and the memory of the great
conquests, he turned to his historically minded
vizier and urged him to set all this down in
writing for the instruction of posterity. The
result was an admirable history of the Mongols
in Persian, known as the Ta’rikh-i Ghazani,
“Ghazan’s History”, that is, the history commi­
ssioned by Ghazan.
The best historian can do little without
direct access to the sources# written or verbal.
Rashid was well placed in this respect, though
he never visited Mongolia. His sovereign was
himself an authority on Mdngol antiquities,
and in private conversation would tell him
much that could not be learnt from books.
Some Mongol writings he did have access tc,
but they were muddled and confused. Says
Rashid:
“An authentic chronicle, written in the
Mongol language and script, had been written
and brought up to date at intervals, and this
was deposited in the State archives; but in
this form it had no order or method in it, being
a collection of isolated and incomplete frag­
ments; it remained unknown and inaccessible
to students capable of extracting from it some
notion of the facts and events recorded in it,
and no one had received permission to make
use of it.”
He goes on to summarize the Khan’s
instruction:
“The. present writer was commissioned
to put these fragments of historical materials
in order after having made a scrupulous
examination of them; he was to digest them in
plain languge; and he was to bring these
hitherto inaccessible records to the light of day.
If there were any events that were treated too