Vassaf's History: the Mongol Ilkhans of Iran and their rivals

Vassaf (Shihab al-Din Abdallah of Shiraz, 1264 to c.1330) was a tax official who presented his history to the Ilkhans Ghazan and Uljaytu. It continues Juvaini from 1257 and covers the Ilkhans' wars with the Golden Horde and the Chaghadaids, the Yuan court in China and India. He knew Iran at first hand and relied on envoys and merchants for the other Mongol states. The corpus holds three BULAC manuscripts: MS.PERS.116 (1670), MS.PERS.64 (1856) and MS.PERS.65 (1840, part only). All are in nastaliq script, and the machine OCR of all three is unreadable.

How they knew

Part eyewitness

Who “Tartar” means here

Vassaf writes of the Mughul (Mongols) and their uluses; European readers later called the same rulers the Tartars of Persia. No passage could be read in this corpus copy to show his own usage.

Why read it

It is the main contemporary Persian narrative for the Ilkhanid court c.1300 and one of the few Persian sources on the Qipchaq steppe wars. Readers should use a printed edition or translation.

Watch out

The OCR of all three manuscripts is illegible and the handwriting cannot be searched, so no passage could be checked or quoted. Vassaf's prose is famously ornate even in good editions; the Bombay 1853 lithograph and the Hammer-Purgstall German translation of volume 1 (1856) are the usual ways in.