Doquz Khatun

Doquz Khatun, written Dokuz Khatun in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, was the Christian wife of the Mongol conqueror Hulegu, founder of the Ilkhanate of Persia. ¹ The article on the Ilkhans calls her Hulegu's favourite wife, says she belonged to the Nestorians, and gives her death as 1265. ² The Encyclopaedia has no article of her own. What is known here comes from three passages in three articles, and the Encyclopaedia gives nothing on her birth, her parentage or her family.

The article on Hulegu says that the Christian element among his subjects was particularly favoured by him, and especially by his Christian wife Dokuz Khatun, often to the detriment of the Muslims. ¹ This is the article's own assessment. The article on the Ilkhans widens the picture: the Christians, and above all the Nestorians to whom she belonged, were given preference, and she was also of assistance to the Jacobites and helped to win over the Christians of Syria to the Ilkhan cause. ² The same article links the favourable policy towards Christians to diplomatic relations with the Christian West, which had begun before Hulegu and became closer under his son Abaqa. ²

The article on the Christians of the Middle East places her at the sack of Baghdad in 656/1258. It says the Christians, and the Muslims who were able to take refuge with them, were systematically spared, on the insistence of the all-powerful Nestorian wife of the Ilkhan, Dokuz Khatun. ³ The same passage says that the caliphal palace known as Dar al-Duwaydar, the Dar al-Falak and a women's ribat were given to the Catholicos, who set up a church there and struck semantrons, the wooden or metal sounding-boards used to call Eastern Christians to prayer. It adds that Muslims took this as an impertinence. ³ The museum's page on the event is the Tatar sack of Baghdad.

The article also describes the mood of the Christians of that moment. A Jacobite gospel book of 1260 has an illustration showing a "new Constantine" and a "new Helena", responsible for the "triumph" of the Cross, and the article names Dokuz Khatun among those whose features they bear. ³ The author says Christian governors were installed in several towns, among them Mosul, Irbil and Jazirat Ibn Umar. ³

Dokuz Khatun died in 1265, the year of Hulegu's own death, according to the article on the Ilkhans. ² The article on Hulegu gives his death as 19 Rabi' II 663/8 February 1265. ¹ The Christians' hopes of that period did not last, the article on Christians says: the defeat at Ayn Jalut in 658/1260 was a first warning, and after the Islamisation of the Mongols in 694/1295 they fell once more into disfavour. ³

The Encyclopaedia gives no birth date, no tribal origin and no children for her, and it does not say whether she lived to see Hulegu's death or died before him. This page records only what the three passages say.