Arghun Aqa: Mongol Bureaucrat

Abstract

The question of who ran the Mongol Empire has long challenged historians, and various theories have emerged and retreated in answer to this problem. As far as the question of who ran the Persian part of the empire the answer has been made more elusive by the nature of the sources. Though excellent primary source material for this period abounds, for the most part it is written by the bureaucrats of the Il-Khanate themselves, most of whom were Persian. Very little Mongol material survives. It is this lack of Mongolian material that has prompted historians to speculate that perhaps none ever existed and thus that “the Mongols were happy to leave the tedious minutiae of government to those best qualified to cope with them.” In the case of Persia “those best qualified to cope” meant the traditional bureaucratic classes, and such individual luminaries as ᶜ Ata Malik Juvaini and Rashid al-Din and families such as the Qazvinis and Simnanis spring to mind.