Ilkhanate

The Ilkhanate or Il-khanate was a Mongol khanate founded in the southwestern territories of the Mongol Empire. It was ruled by the Il-Khans or Ilkhanids (Persian: ایلخانان, romanized: Īlkhānān), and known to the Mongols as Hülegü Ulus (lit. 'people / state of Hülegü'). The Ilkhanid realm was officially known as the Land of Iran or simply Iran. It was established after Hülegü, the son of Tolui and grandson of Genghis Khan, inherited the West Asian and Central Asian part of the Mongol Empire after his brother Möngke Khan died in 1259.

The Ilkhanate's core territory was situated in what is now the countries of Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. At its greatest extent, the Ilkhanate also included parts of modern Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, part of modern Dagestan, and part of modern Tajikistan. Later Ilkhanid rulers, beginning with Ghazan in 1295, converted to Islam. In the 1330s, the Ilkhanate was ravaged by the Black Death. The last ilkhan, Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan, died in 1335, after which the Ilkhanate disintegrated.

The State of the Ilkhanate was known as the Ulus of Hülegü to the Mongols during that time, as their territory was derived from one of uluses allocated to Genghis (Chinggis) Khan's descendants. The Ilkhanid rulers, although of non-Iranian origin, tried to advertise their authority by tying themselves to the Iranian past, and they recruited historians to present the Mongols as heirs to the Sasanian Empire (224–651). Native intellectuals interested in their own history interpreted the unification by the Mongols as a revival of their long-lost dynastic tradition, and the concept of "Land of Iran" (Irān-zamin) was considered an important ideology and was further developed by the later Safavid Empire (1501–1736). Similar to the development in China under the Yuan dynasty, the revival of the concept of territorial unity, although not intended by the Mongols, became a lasting legacy of Mongol rule in Iran.