Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles)

Jami al-Tawarikh, usually rendered the Compendium of Chronicles, is a Persian history written by Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah, the physician and statesman of the Ilkhanid court. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says it is undoubtedly the most important single historical source for the Mongol Empire as a whole, and not merely for the realm of the Ilkhans. ¹ The article on its author says his enduring fame rests more on this work than on his career as an official. ¹

The article gives a brief life. Rashid al-Din was born in Hamadan into a Jewish family with a medical tradition, trained as a physician, and entered the service of the Mongol court under the Ilkhan Abaqa. He converted from Judaism to Islam at around the age of thirty. ¹ He reached high office in 697/1298 under Ghazan, as associate vizier, and stayed at the summit of state affairs for the rest of his life, though always with a colleague. Under Abu Said he was overthrown on a charge of having poisoned Oljeytu, and was executed together with his son Ibrahim in 718/1318. ¹

The article says the work was commissioned by Ghazan, who seems to have feared that the Mongols, settling down as Muslims in Persia, might in time forget who they were and where they had come from. It first contained an account of the Mongols and their steppe predecessors. That part became known as the Ta'rikh-i Ghazani and was presented to Oljeytu after the death of his brother and predecessor. ¹ Oljeytu then asked Rashid al-Din to continue the work, as a memorial to Ghazan, so as to give a history of all the peoples with whom the Mongols had come into contact. The article says it is this extension that justified J. A. Boyle's description of Rashid al-Din as the first world-historian. ¹ It also notes that there appears to have been an earlier, shorter version. ¹

As completed, the work consisted of several parts. The first treats the Mongol and Turkish tribes and the Mongols from Genghis Khan to the death of Ghazan. The second is a history of Oljeytu, of which no copy is known, although A. Z. V. Togan claimed to have seen one in 1923, followed by the "universal history": Adam and the patriarchs, the pre-Islamic kings of Persia, Muhammad and the caliphs, the dynasties of Persia in the Islamic period, the Oghuz and the Turks, China, the Jews, the Franks and India. ^{1 2} The remaining parts are a set of genealogies of the Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Franks and Chinese, unpublished but surviving in a Topkapi manuscript, and a geographical compendium of which no copy has come to light. The sections are very uneven in length, and the first is by far the largest. ²

In 1908 E. G. Browne proposed a scheme for a complete edition, organised more manageably than the original; the article says much, though not all, of it has since been accomplished. ² The bibliography of the article on the Mongols lists editions and translations of separate sections, from the volume on the tribes and the successors of Genghis Khan to the history of the Ilkhans, published in Moscow, Leiden, Baku, Paris and elsewhere. ³

The article stresses that the parts differ greatly in value and not all are primary. For the period after Genghis Khan's death, much of Rashid al-Din's material is lifted straight from his predecessor Juwayni and has limited independent significance. The "universal history" is, in the article's words, of undeniable historiographical interest because it shows so unprecedented an intellectual endeavour, but no one would go to it to learn what happened in China, India or Europe. ²

By contrast, the account of the life and career of Genghis Khan is of the first importance even though it was written a century after the events, because it derives from a now lost Mongolian chronicle, the Altan debter, whose contents appear to have reached the author through Chingsang, the representative in Persia of the Great Khan in China. The article says that, as far as one can judge by comparison with Chinese use of the same chronicle, the Persian version preserves the original accurately. ² For the historian the most important section is the history of the Ilkhans, the period of which Rashid al-Din was a contemporary and in much of which he held high office; the article thinks that position makes the history uniquely authoritative. ²

The article then names the limits. Rashid al-Din wrote as a Persian bureaucrat, whose assumptions need not have been those of his Mongol masters, so that the Mongols are almost always seen through Persian eyes. As both chief minister and in effect official historian to Ghazan and Oljeytu, he had an interest in painting the troubles before Ghazan in the darkest colours and Ghazan's reforms as a total success, and this should be treated with scepticism. ² The Ta'rikh-i Ghazani preserves the full texts of the reforming edicts, which the article calls vivid and convincing, but there is less reason to think the edicts were universally carried out. ² The article on the Mongols makes the same point about the edicts. ⁴ Its verdict on Rashid al-Din is that he was a remarkable historian of great importance but not an impartial one. ²

The authorship has been questioned. Togan argued, not very persuasively according to the article, that the work was a translation from a Mongol original. Abu al-Qasim Kashani, whose history of Oljeytu is the most important surviving contemporary source for that reign, maintained that he was himself the true author and that Rashid al-Din had taken the credit and the contents. The article finds it hard to judge the claim. It notes that Rashid al-Din was a busy man whose own scholarship must have been limited, and that he may well have used research assistants to collect material and make a first draft, of whom Kashani may have been one, which was the hypothesis of V. V. Barthold. ²

The articles read do not give a date for the completion of the Compendium, and the museum does not supply one. No copy of the part on Oljeytu is known, and no copy of the geographical section has come to light, so the work as it was planned is known only in part.