The Middle East and North Africa in the Early Fourteenth Century

CLIMATE CHANGE and PLAGUE in the FOURTEENTH CENTURY HIST 1301 | History The Middle East and North Africa in the Early Fourteenth Century The Mongol Empire's centre was China, but by the early 14 century, the Mongols had spread into central Asia and the Middle East. In the surviving khanates, political instability and deteriorating ties with conquered peoples became more prevalent. For instance, by the early 1300s, the style of Mongol leadership had changed from detached detachment to integrated assimilation in the Il-Khanate, a region of the Mongol Empire that stretched from the eastern edge of Anatolia in modern Turkey to the northern boundary of the Indian subcontinent. Hulagu, the grandson of Chinggis Khan, led the Mongols in parts of the Middle East and went by the title il-khan, which means "lesser khan." As a result, his kingdom came to be known as the Il-Khanate. The Il-Khanate was established in 1256 and was mostly centred on Persia. Its rulers revived the term "Iran" for this part of their territory, where they attempted to uphold Mongol nomadic practices while largely ignoring the khanate's financial well-being. Early Mongol rulers paid little regard to the cultural customs of their subjects and instead imposed their customs and traditions as the prevailing culture. Many peasants found the early decades of Il-Khanate rule to be financially catastrophic in addition to suffering this cultural estrangement, since they lost their farmlands and animals to Mongol nomads. But once the IlKhanate's seventh emperor, Mahmud Ghazan, converted to Islam in 1295, the il-khans assimilated further and deeper into the Muslim populations they oversaw. Ghazan's conversion to Islam may have been motivated only by religious conviction, but it also gave him the opportunity to gain support from the expanding populations of Muslim Mongols and Persian aristocracy. Intermarriage between Mongols and Muslims had already started in the Il-Khanate, but it became much more common as the Mongols' cultural differences with the Muslims grew. The Mongols' cultural identity underwent a dramatic change as a result of this transition; they finally stopped acting as military conquistadors and assimilated more and more into the sedentary communities they had conquered. Eventually, the IlKhanate's interests changed as they went from being foreign invaders to being completely assimilated into the population. Ghazan and his successors concentrated on restoring the agricultural infrastructure in the southern parts of their domain, which included the Iranian provinces of Fars and Khuzistan, despite the fact that the northern areas of the khanate had suffered significant damage in the early years of Mongol invasions. They directed funds into building bazaars, mosques, and schools in an effort to revive the empire's economy and multicultural urban environment. These measures strengthened the cultural ties between the Mongol emperors and their Persian people while also fostering the growth of Islamic knowledge and culture. Even if early attempts to revive the empire's economy were successful, the IlKhanate started to collapse in the middle of the fourteenth century due to power disputes following the death of the khan Abu Sa‘id in 1335. In the end, conflicts between Turkic, Arab, Persian, and Mongol factions led to the division of the old Il-Khanate into many successor nations. After the Yuan dynasty was overthrown in 1368, the Mongol Empire ceased to exist as a single political entity, even if some of its remnants, like the Golden Horde, continued to exist in name until the sixteenth century. One of the Il-Khanate rule's main adversaries, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, gained more power in the eastern Mediterranean as the IlKhanate regime started its gradual collapse in the fourteenth century. Established by previously enslaved warriors of Turkish descent who initially rose to prominence as skilled combatants under the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk Sultanate finally emerged in the fourteenth century as the preeminent hub of Muslim knowledge and science. Muslims all throughout North Africa and the Middle East respected the Mamluks for their military skill, particularly when they drove back the Mongol army in the Battle of Ain Jalut in Syria in 1260, thereby halting the Mongols' southwest expansion. Then the Mamluks took control of Egypt and Syria under the leadership of their military commander, Baybars. They succeeded in defending their dominion against later Mongol invasions and significantly aided in the Islamization of Africa at this time. Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Sultanate, rose to prominence as a centre of Muslim intellectual culture and architecture between 1260 and 1341, attracting a large number of intellectuals and traders who were escaping Mongol invasions in their native Iraqi and Persian regions. The death of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad in 1341 marked the end of the Mamluk era of wealth and prominence, and was followed by a period of instability made worse by the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late 1340s. A era of severe decline had begun for the Mamluks, even though they would continue in power until the Ottomans defeated them in the sixteenth century.