Sources

The sudden appearance of Yazd's sayyids in the arena of imperial administration during the Ilkhanid period, which stands at the centre of the events scrutinized here, must be examined using a combination of Ilkhanid-era documentary and narrative sources, particularly the famous general histories of Rashīduddīn Fażlullāh, Vaṣṣāf, Mustawfī Qazvīnī, Qāshānī, and Shabānkārahʾī.Footnote ⁶ However, the court-centred perspectives of these works are complicated when read alongside three local histories of Yazd, composed between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries ce. Although these Yazdī works were written later, during the Timurid, Turkoman, and Safavid periods, their chapters on the Mongol era help to clarify a Yazdī perspective on the Ilkhanid processes of acculturation, as they played out on the ground in a provincial centre of the realm.Footnote ⁷ In fact, the authors of these local histories characterize the peculiar rise of Yazd's sayyids during the Ilkhanid dispensation as a turning point in their history and present the strange affair surrounding the Ruknīyah's construction as the origin of their current order. Also, the aforementioned long-term shifts in the nature of the sayyids’ sanctity and the story of the diffusion of their charismatic patrimony among non-sayyid notables, which occurred after the Mongol period, can be discerned in these late local histories of Yazd. A close historiographical analysis of these Yazdī historians’ artful accounts of this period of initial encounter between local elites and Mongol agents reveals the changing ways in which Yazdī writers of later eras made sense of these earlier transformations vis-à-vis contemporary events and deployed them in new ways to negotiate their own places in rapidly evolving and competitive imperial systems.

Although varied in length and content, each of these three local histories of Yazd rehearses the history of the city from its origins in the ancient past to the author's present time, allotting much space to the events in Yazd during the Ilkhanid era. The first is Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad Jaʿfarī’s Tārīkh-i Yazd (hereafter TY), composed in the mid-fifteenth century and dedicated to a vizier in the local Timurid administration from a prominent local family, Żiyāʾuddīn Maʿsūd.Footnote ⁸ The author was a sayyid who worked in the vizierate of the Timurid governor of Yazd, Amīr Chāqmāq; he was a panegyrist of the governor and, in addition to the Tārīkh-i Yazd, composed two versions of a universal history, Tārīkh-i Kabīr, and Tārīkh-i Wāsiṭ, the latter of which he presented to the Timurid ruler, Shāhrukh, in 820/1417–18.Footnote ⁹ The second work is Aḥmad Kātib's Tārīkh-i Jadīd-i Yazd (hereafter TJY), composed no later than 872/1467–68.Footnote ¹⁰ Little is known about Aḥmad Kātib save his statement in his preface that he “has always girded the loins of his soul in service to the sādāt and ʿulamāʾ … [and] has been present in the assemblies of the elite men of religion and government”.Footnote ¹¹ If he was not a sayyid himself, the author certainly counted himself a devotee of the Prophet's house, and his Persian writing-style corroborates his claim to have travelled in elite circles of administration. Most likely he served in the dīvān under both the Timurid and Qarā Qūyunlū empires, and he reserved high, dedicatory praise in his book for Jahānshāh Qarā Qūyunlū.Footnote ¹² The last work, quoted above, is Muḥammad Mufīd's Jāmiʿ-i Mufīdī (hereafter JM), completed in 1090/1679–80.Footnote ¹³ Although Mufīd dedicated the work to the reigning Safavid monarch, Shāh Sulaymān (r. 1077–1105/1666–94), he wrote it while living in exile in India. Before his emigration, Mufīd had been a mustawfī in Yazd's vizierate, serving as the deputy (nāʾib) of the Safavid vizier of Yazd, Allāh Qulī Beg, nephew of the more well-known Amīr Kalb ʿAlī Khān.Footnote ¹⁴ Upon the vizier's sudden death at the end of 1079/1669, Mufīd took on the office of Nāẓir of the religious endowments (naẓārat-i awqāf), wherein he assumed supervision of “the holy sites (muqaddasāt), illuminated tombs (mazārāt-i munavvarāt) and blessed graves (buqāʾ-i khayrāt)”, as well as oversight of the sādāt and mustawfīs of the religious endowments.Footnote ¹⁵ Mufīd appears not to have been a sayyid himself, but, like each of his predecessors, promoted himself as a devotee of the sādāt and allocated a massive portion of his JM to biographies of men with Ḥusaynī lineages in Yazd. Each of these three authors’ livelihoods as functionaries of the local administration and the empire at large depended on the solvency of the endowments supporting the region's sacred sites, particularly those sites associated with the descendants of the Imāms and other saints. The success of these sites relied not only on the financial viability of their endowments, but also on their ability to attract pilgrims. This, in turn, required that the stories of the saintly figures entombed there continued to circulate and to excite the devotional sensibilities of visitors. Thus, in the religious economy of cities like Yazd, writing the history of the sayyids and the local families associated with them, served as a key, sacred, component of administration, alongside more mundane duties.

To this trio of sources, one should add another handful: the first is the fourteenth-century waqfīyah for the compendium of all the endowments made by Ruknuddīn Muḥammad and his son, Shamsuddīn Muḥammad, in Yazd and elsewhere, collected under the title Jāmiʿ al-Khayrāt (hereafter JK).Footnote ¹⁶ The second is Muʿīnuddīn Yazdī’s Mavāhib-i Ilāhī (hereafter MI).Footnote ¹⁷ This dynastic history of the Muẓaffarids was completed relatively close to the events in question, in 767/1365–66. It is not a local history of Yazd per se; it recounts the history of the Muẓaffarid dynasty from its origins under the Ilkhans until the apogee of Shāh Shujāʾ’s reign (759–786/1358–84). However, because its author was a leading Yazdī jurist and teacher, much of his narrative on the early Muẓaffarids and their entanglements with the Ilkhans revolves around the affairs of his home region, where the Muẓaffarids rose to power.Footnote ¹⁸ Another work, Tārīkh-i Āl-i Muẓaffar (hereafter TAM), completed during the Timurid period in 823/1420 by Maḥmūd Kutubī, comprises a reworking of Muʿīnuddīn Yazdī’s prolix history, which the author composed as a continuation of Mustawfī’s Tārīkh-i Guzīdah. Some manuscripts of Mustawfī’s work contain Kutubī’s additions.Footnote ¹⁹

Yazd, the Ilkhans, and imperial intermediaries

Even before the tumult that triggered the strange affairs in Yazd which opened this study, the city had developed a unique relationship with the Ilkhanid court, an arrangement that resulted largely from the machinations of the famous and powerful Rashīduddīn Fażlullāh Hamadānī, the Grand Vizier and physician who introduced important reforms during Ghāzān Khān's reign and composed numerous works, including the voluminous Jāmiʿ al-Tavārīkh.Footnote ²⁰ The Yazdī historians were quite focused on this figure's relationship with their home city. For this reason, consideration of Rashīduddīn's special connection to Yazd and its elite families is necessary.

Ilkhanid-era sources demonstrate that Rashīduddīn had deep financial investment in Yazd. His own waqf-nāmah for his complex in Tabrīz, Rabʿ-i Rashīdī, shows that he had made endowments of extensive properties in Yazd, more than in any other region.Footnote ²¹ But in addition to the vizier's well-documented material interests there, the Yazdī historians establish that Rashīduddīn cultivated personal relationships there too. They relate that in his early years, perhaps even before he converted to Islam from Judaism, Rashīduddīn had sojourned in Yazd in order to study medicine with one of the city's great notables from the Rażī family, Sharafuddīn ʿAlī al-Ṭabīb. Later, in honour of his former teacher, he built a madrasah in Yazd close to the Atābeg's madrasah, called the Rashīdīyah.Footnote ²² Rashīduddīn and his son, Ghiyās̱uddīn, who also rose to his father's rank of grand vizier, forged marriage alliances with Yazdī sayyid families. As a consequence of these entanglements in Yazd, the Yazdī historians provided father and son with substantial biographical notices in their local histories, as honorary townsmen.Footnote ²³

The Mongols had long attracted men like Rashīduddīn to court who were polylingual, learned men from the notable families of provincial urban centres. However, by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Ilkhans increasingly involved themselves in the affairs of provincial cities and reached out to the elites based there. Urban notables, like Rashīduddīn, who had already attained positions at the imperial dīvān, functioned as intermediaries and brokered new ties between the Mongol elites and the intellectual and spiritual powerhouses that were rooted in towns across the realm.Footnote ²⁴ The economic and professional ties with Yazdīs that had helped Rashīduddīn and his son build their wealth, prestige, and political careers, also served this interest of their imperial masters, who sought to bring closer to them the leadership of these provincial cities, like Hamadān, Baghdad, or Yazd. As will become clear below, in the case of Yazd, Rashīduddīn and his sons’ partnerships with local notables, and particularly with sayyids, became instrumental in the Mongols’ move to undermine defiant local military households, which had long possessed political power in the region. These were the Atābegs, who had been local mainstays of the old Saljukid order, who had ruled locally with a great deal of autonomy.Footnote ²⁵

Rashīduddīn did not always support the sayyids in all towns across the realm, as he did in Yazd; there are counter examples.Footnote ²⁶ His decision to favour some sayyids over others must be understood in the context of his larger programme of realpolitik, which hinged, in part, on an evolving rivalry between Sunnis and Twelver Shīʿah.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, overall, the administrators of the Mongol centre increasingly built relationships directly with local sayyid families and inserted themselves into their local affairs. In this regard, as Judith Pfeiffer has shown, Ghāzān Khān instituted a policy of support for the sayyids. Yazd's sayyids, in particular, benefitted from this outreach.

Rashīduddīn and his son, Ghiyās̱uddīn, were well positioned to broker a harmonious association between the centre and Yazd's sayyid families and to increase the latters’ local authority at the expense of the Atābegs. However, the Yazdī historians compressed what was in fact a rather complicated set of political and social transformations into a single, rather intriguing, narrative of events concerning one of these sayyid families, the Āl-i Niẓām, to which the Ilkhanid viziers would establish close ties. The reference here is to the curious narrative that opened this study. Ruknuddīn Muḥammad, who built his new madrasah beside the Atābegs’ complex, hailed from this Niẓām family. He and his son, Shamsuddīn Muḥammad, are the main protagonists of this story. The Niẓām line constituted one of the illustrious Ḥusaynī lineages of Yazd, that of the ʿUrayżī sayyids, who traced their ancestry to a brother of Imām Mūsā al-Kāẓim, named ʿAlī al-ʿUrayżī bin Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.Footnote ²⁸ ʿAlī al-ʿUrayżī’s descendant, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad, later settled in Yazd and consequently plays a major role in all three histories of Yazd.Footnote ²⁹

Since the era of the family's namesake, Niẓāmuddīn, long before the events in question, the Niẓāms had held the prestigious local posts of naqīb and raʾīs in Yazd. By the turn of the fourteenth century, however, this situation would change under the leadership of Ruknuddīn and his son, Shamsuddīn. The locus of the old Niẓām family domain had long been outside the city centre, around the Niẓāmīyah Khānqāh (built by Niẓāmuddīn), to the south of the city walls.Footnote ³⁰ Ruknuddīn chose to move to the centre of the city and establish a presence beside its entrenched institutions. There he built his new madrasah complex, the Ruknīyah. In the Yazdī historians’ telling, the resulting conflict over the city's skyline between Ruknuddīn and the sitting Atābeg, called Yūsufshāh, triggered a disturbance and, ultimately, a political reconfiguration of the city.

A city disturbed: tales of a father and son

In the Yazdī histories the contested erection of this new madrasah complex in the city centre, which would not be completed until 725/1324, forms the core event in Ruknuddīn and Shamsuddīn's biographies. This story is unique to the Yazdī histories. The authors describe the site as a monumental one, which, in addition to the madrasah itself, featured two minarets, a pharmacy, a mosque, a library, an observatory with an astronomical water-clock, and eventually a mausoleum for the founder.Footnote ³¹ The latter, like many tombs of the Imāms’ descendants (imāmzādahs) ultimately became sites of ritual visitation (ziyārat), where pilgrims would travel to offer supplications and to bind vows. This information about the complex's buildings is corroborated by Jāmiʿ al-Khayrāt, the collection of endowment deeds for all the works of father and son. This new site was situated in the quarter that came to be known as Vaqt o Sāʿat, directly beside the old Madrasah-i Maḥmūd Shāhī. The latter site had been named for the building's founder, Atābeg Maḥmūd Shāh (r. late seventh/thirteenth century), one of the early, benevolent Atābegs, whose father, Quṭbuddīn, had constructed the city-centre in Yazd, and whose mausoleum was nearby.Footnote ³² The succeeding Atābegs had their bodies entombed in the madrasahs that were built in close proximity to Quṭbuddīn's tomb; indeed, the area was a sacrosanct necropolis for the Atābegs. Kātib explains that Atābeg Yūsufshāh had refurbished the Madrasah-i Maḥmūd Shāhī just before Ruknuddīn decided to build his own complex beside it.Footnote ³³ The remaining strands of a rather tangled story then spring out from this tension between the sayyid and local sovereign, a competition for mastery of the city's skyline and holy ground. Each of the three authors presents the account of this conflict that unfolds around the Ruknīyah in relatively similar ways, save for a few key variations. Clearly, each successive account was penned with the previous ones at arm's reach.Footnote ³⁴

The narrative proceeds as follows: When Atābeg Yūsufshāh learns of Ruknuddīn's decision to build in the city-centre, he interprets the move as an affront to his own family's dignity and authority. The sayyid's choice to transfer the family's territory from outside the city walls into the centre and to build a large madrasah complex and mausoleum beside those of the ruling house was an audacious move. Perhaps he had been emboldened by the recent erection of Rashīduddīn's Rashīdīyah complex nearby. Nevertheless, in all three texts, the outraged Atābeg Yūsufshāh immediately plots to discredit the sayyid and ruin him. Here we return to Mufīd's eloquent prose that opened this article:

Desperate for some pretext to attack the sayyid, the Atābeg incriminates him in the murder of a wealthy Christian merchant who had recently been butchered in his home by a gang of thieves, an accusation the authors consider absurd.Footnote ³⁶ As Mufīd puts it, Yūsufshāh, “having planted the sapling of rancor for the sayyid in the field of his breast and having nourished it with the water of villainy and enviousness … implicated the sayyid in this heinous affair and caused the purity of the skirts of the sayyid's robe to be polluted with the stain of treachery”.Footnote ³⁷ Kātib goes as far as to have the Atābeg accuse the sayyid of plotting the murder and robbery of the Christian in order to recoup the extravagant madrasah's construction costs.Footnote ³⁸ In the end, the preposterousness of the Atābeg's testimony proves inconsequential. After a sham trial Yūsufshāh has the sayyid publicly tortured and tosses him into a dungeon outside the city.Footnote ³⁹

Not yet satisfied, the Atābeg trains his eye on the sayyid's son and successor, the fourteen-year-old Shamsuddīn, but the boy hides himself at the home of a loyal friend. As Yūsufshāh redoubles his search, the narrative slips into a more hagiographical register, wherein another devotee of Ruknuddīn, Khvājah ʿAlīshāh, encounters the Prophet Muḥammad in a dream. The Prophet directs the khvājah to Shamsuddīn's hideout and instructs him to smuggle the boy out of the city so that he can make his way to Ilkhanid court at Tabriz to seek intercession on the sayyids’ behalf against the Atābeg's tyranny. ʿAlīshāh follows the Prophet's instructions, and the young Shamsuddīn sets off through the desert.Footnote ⁴⁰

Along the way he arrives, perilously thirsty, at a ruin in the wilderness, but finds only fetid water. He nearly expires but is saved by a miraculous rain. Afterwards, the young sayyid magically makes his way in just a few days to Ūjān-i Tabrīz, where the Ilkhanid pādishāh, Abū Saʿīd, was holding court.Footnote ⁴¹ The scene changes abruptly, and we are taken into the bedchamber of the pādishāh's Grand Vizier, Ghiyās̱uddīn, the son and successor of Rashīduddīn. There, the Prophet appears in the vizier's dream. He tells Ghiyās̱uddīn about his blessed descendant, the exiled Shamsuddīn, calling him “my son” in Mufīd's version. He then explains where the boy is staying and requests that he brings him before the sovereign to ask for assistance. The vizier wakes up, locates Shamsuddīn, and presents him to the Ilkhan, Abū Saʿīd. The boy easily convinces the sovereign of Atābeg Yūsufshāh's villainy and of the innocence of his own father, and so Abū Saʿīd dispatches an emissary to Yazd to free Ruknuddīn.Footnote ⁴² Before presenting this segment of the story in detail, however, the texts explain that a close relationship meanwhile develops between the Vizier Ghiyās̱uddīn and Shamsuddīn. Moreover, Shamsuddīn receives a robe of honour from Abū Saʿīd, who appoints him the deputy of the vizier and supervisor of the realm's judges and endowments.Footnote ⁴³ Furthermore, the vizier gives Shamsuddīn his sister in marriage.Footnote ⁴⁴

The narrative then returns to Yazd. The Ilkhan's envoy arrives and dispatches a band of men to free Ruknuddīn from the dungeon. At this moment the reader encounters one final miracle. When the Ilkhan's soldiers peer into the chamber, they find Ruknuddīn protected by a venomous asp, neatly coiled upon the hem of his skirt. Recognizing these men as Ruknuddīn's liberators, the serpent vanishes, allowing them to escort the sayyid back to the city, where the populace welcomes him in jubilation.Footnote ⁴⁵

We are told that the envoy installs Ruknuddīn as the chief Qāżī of Yazd, and sets up a tribunal (majlis) within the Ruknīyah complex, where he brings those responsible for the injustice before the sayyid. Rather than exacting retribution, Ruknuddīn forgives all his former adversaries and returns the city to a state of peace.Footnote ⁴⁶ There is a kink in the narratives here: the texts say nothing of Atābeg Yūsufshāh's fate. As the instigator of the tyranny, one would expect either his arrest or at least some mention of his name among those oppressors whom the sayyid granted clemency. He simply disappears from the narrative.

The biography concludes with the sayyid's death and burial at the madrasah but first describes a number of his other major construction projects throughout the city and the realm at large, which he builds after making Ḥajj. The focus, though, is on a new subterranean canal (qanāt), which Ruknuddīn digs to conduct mountain water to the key religious centres of the city centre and to fund the endowments for his new madrasah and other institutions.Footnote ⁴⁷ It originates in Farāshāh, a village on the south side of the city near Taft. Farāshāh held special significance for the sayyids because it featured a qadamgāh marking a spot where the Eighth Imām, ʿAlī al-Riżā, stood on his way through Yazd to Khurāsān. This canal, named Āb-i Vaqfābād (also called Qanāt-i Taft), enters Yazd from the south, stops in the congregational mosque, and then passes into the Ruknīyah complex, before ultimately leaving the city walls, and terminating at the house of Ruknuddīn's teacher, Muḥammad Yaʿqūb, to the northwest. Jaʿfarī and Kātib specify that along the way the sayyid also channels this stream to the Rashīdīyah.Footnote ⁴⁸

Immediately thereafter, the histories describe the building projects of Ruknuddīn's son, Shamsuddīn, now brother-in-law of the vizier Ghiyās̱uddīn, and a high-ranking official of the Ilkhanid court. The crowning edifice, completed in 727/1326–27, is the Shamsīyah Madrasah, where he would ultimately be buried in 733/1332–33.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 724/1325 Shamsuddīn also begins a new congregational mosque, which he integrates into the old one without completely replacing the original structure.Footnote ⁵⁰ Clearly, at his point the Niẓāms could now confidently associate themselves with the most important religious monument of the city without fearing reprisal from the Atābegs. Mufīd also stresses that Shamsuddīn builds a Dār al-Siyādah, the first such hospice for sayyids in Yazd. Judith Pfeiffer has demonstrated that Ghāzān Khān advanced the building of Dār al-Siyādahs in major cities of the realm as part of his larger policy of promoting the sayyids above other classes of local religious and military elites, as the pre-eminent Muslim authorities in the empire.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, the Yazdī sources make clear that Shamsuddīn produced the plan for the complex while serving at the Ilkhanid court, and sent agents to Yazd to realize his plans.Footnote ⁵² This suggests that Shamsuddīn's construction programme was executed in coordination with the Ilkhanid policy towards sayyids that Pfeiffer describes. In the end, the later two Yazdī accounts attest that the mausoleums of the Ruknīyah and Shamsīyah madrasah complexes both served as places of ziyārat, even to Mufīd's day, in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵³

Meanwhile, we also discover that Ruknuddīn marries one of his daughters to Żiyāʾuddīn Ḥusayn Rażī, the son of Sharafuddīn ʿAlī al-Rażī, the man who had been Rashīduddīn's teacher of medicine in Yazd. Shamsuddīn's biography closes with mention of the marriage of his daughter, ʿIṣmatuddīn Arslān Khātūn (Rashīduddīn's granddaughter) to yet another illustrious Yazdī sayyid, Muʿīnuddīn Ashraf, who hailed from a different branch of the ʿUrayżī sayyid lineage.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, by the end of the notices on this father and son, the Yazdī authors neatly tie the various sayyid and local patrician family lines to one another. In doing so, they also link these families to the great vazīrī family of the Ilkhanid capital. Moreover, they present this new patronage network as being materialized in the new urban landscape of the city – a set of madrasah complexes, Ḥusaynī shrines, and a new congregational mosque, connected by a freshly dug canal, which provides both water and revenue for their endowments.

There is good evidence corroborating the Yazdī authors’ claims that Shamsuddīn did in fact become an extremely powerful and wealthy figure in the Ilkhanid administration, as Jean Aubin has demonstrated in his article on the Āl-i Niẓām.Footnote ⁵⁵ A passage at the end of Mustawfī’s TG singles out Shamsuddīn Muḥammad, praising him in sublime terms for his good works and effective management of the pensions of sayyids, qāżīs and the like. Mustawfī does not specify the title of the sayyid's office, but the activities he describes are consistent with those of the post that would later be called ṣadr.Footnote ⁵⁶

In an article on the family's endowments and benefactions, Akio Iwatake offers further evidence of Shamsuddīn's exalted status. He asserts that Shamsuddīn must have accompanied the vizier Ghiyās̱uddīn and the Ilkhan Abū Saʿīd in the royal urdū during its sojourn in Baghdad in the winter of 733/1332–33, an episode that is recorded in Aharī’s Tārīkh-i Shaykh Uvays.Footnote ⁵⁷ That text does not mention Shamsuddīn during that episode, but Iwatake concludes that just before he died in Tabrīz, Shamsuddīn must have been in attendance in Baghdad because it was at that time that the Grand Qāżī of the city, Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad al-Fażlī was the first to sign the compilation of the deeds for the family's awqāf, Jāmiʿ al-Khayrāt, verifying its authenticity.Footnote ⁵⁸ While this evidence does not explicitly confirm the title of Shamsuddīn's office, it implies that indeed Shamsuddīn had found his way into the highest echelons of the Ilkhanid society and had attained an exalted rank.

As Aubin noted, even stronger evidence of Shamsuddīn's high station can be found in Muḥammad ibn Hindū-Shāh Nakhchivānī’s administrative manual, Dastūr al-Kātib fī Taʿyīn al-Marātib. Muḥammad Nakhchivānī served in the dīvān-i inshāʾ and was a confidant and protégé of the vizier, Ghiyās̱uddīn. In fact it was Ghiyās̱uddīn who had suggested Nakhchivānī compose the Dastūr.Footnote ⁵⁹ In that work, the author explicitly names Shamsuddīn as Ghiyās̱uddīn's deputy (nāʾib), and specifies that in that office, he increased the pensions of the sayyids, qāżīs, ʿulamāʾ and the like.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nakhchivānī’s eyewitness testimony leaves little doubt that Shamsuddīn had indeed attained an extraordinarily high post in the imperial dīvān. Moreover, the Niẓāms’ endowment deeds attest that both father and son had acquired considerable capital and were able to build extensively in Yazd and other parts of the realm.Footnote ⁶¹ Taken together, these are clear signs that these sayyids possessed the means to cast their shadow over the buildings of the local Atābegs and far beyond Yazd's walls, as the Yazdī historians assert.

The high status of Yazd's ʿUrayżī sayyids as imperial actors and local benefactors continued into the Muẓaffarid period, where there was a close relationship between that ruling house and the line of Muʿīnuddīn Ashraf, who had married Shamsuddīn's daughter, as mentioned above. Like the Niẓām clan, the Ashrafīs constructed their own madrasah-shrine complex in the city centre, the Ḥusaynīyah, and they built and endowed many others. More importantly, Muʿīnuddīn's son, Ruknuddīn Shāh Ḥasan, became the Grand Vizier of the Muẓaffarid sovereign, Shāh Shujāʿ.Footnote ⁶²

The fact that the Yazdī sayyids rose to prominence during the rule of the Ilkhans is certain, but the Yazdī historians’ choice to situate the narrative of their emergence on the imperial scene in the context of a local conflict with the Atābegs reveals more about the authors’ objectives. The lesson that this story about Ruknuddīn and his madrasah was meant to convey in those Yazdī texts seems fairly straightforward: Yazd's prominence originated with blessed sayyids, whose knowledge, justice, and piety allowed them to develop their home city in ways that the Atābeg rulers could not, and, through the miraculous intercession of the Prophet himself, the sayyids managed to solidify close relationships with members of the imperial court. The story is highly reminiscent of common saints’ tales, and the Yazdī authors were likely drawing on an oral storytelling tradition for their accounts that was circulating around the Ruknīyah complex and other sayyids’ shrines. By the late fourteenth century, the tombs had already become the focus of ziyārat, and such stories would have furnished the kind of sacred mythology requisite for such shrines. Set to paper for the first time over a century after the events in question, the Yazdīs’ integration of this hagiographical story about the Niẓāms into a wider narrative about Ilkhanid politics constitutes an obvious compression of more complicated social and political transformations that had occurred at Yazd and at court.

The last Atābeg: tales of another father and son

There are certain hiccups in the story that give clues about what the Yazdī histories obscure and why. The first indication that the Yazdī narrative might be concealing some complexity has already been mentioned: the fate of Atābeg Yūsufshāh, the ringleader of the conspiracy, remains unexplained. The last Atābeg quietly drops out at the conclusion of the story. To make matters more complicated, it turns out that there are actually two contradictory stories about Yūsufshāh in all three of the Yazdī histories. The first narrative, which revolves around the Ruknīyah Madrasah, has just been recounted. Let us refer to this first narrative as “Narrative A”. It appears in the course of the authors’ notices on the two sayyids and their madrasahs. But in a separate, earlier, section of these works, the Yazdi histories each rehearse a full account of the Atābegs’ rule in chronological fashion, where they detail their eventual collapse during Yūsufshāh's reign.Footnote ⁶³ Let us call this “Narrative B”. These chronological accounts in Narrative B relate a completely different story about Atābeg Yūsufshāh that does not square well with the one that these same authors tell about the Ruknīyah madrasah. In fact, Ruknuddīn and Shamsuddīn do not even come up in this other Yūsufshāh story. It turns out that this second account, Narrative B, corresponds fairly well with the account of Yūsufshāh's fall in Muʿīnuddīn Yazdī’s history of the Muẓaffarids as well as with the fragmentary accounts of the Atābegs that appear in the earlier chronicles of Rashīduddīn, Vaṣṣāf, and Shabānkārahʾī, albeit with some variations. In any case, there is no trace of the Ruknīyah story or even of Ruknuddīn in any of these earlier works either.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Yazdī historians appear to have borrowed heavily from their predecessors for their chronological section on the Atābegs, but it is curious that they did not bother to reconcile that narrative with the other one about the Ruknīyah fiasco (Narrative A).

When we examine the Yazdīs’ Narrative B together with some Ilkhanid- and Muẓaffarid-era sources, we discover in all of them, first of all, that the chronology of the Atābegs’ dynastic succession is in disarray. No two works agree on the succession of rulers, the genealogy of the family, or the key events of their rule. The discrepancies are not only between the various works, but there are internal inconsistencies within them.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, when we compare the varied accounts of Atābeg Yūsufshāh's reign itself, we can discern essentially the same basic narrative schema in the Yazdī sources (Narrative B), and some of the universal Ilkhanid-era sources: these all begin with Atābeg Yūsufshāh's failure to send tribute to the Ilkhanid court. Some sources present the Atābeg as arrogantly challenging Mongol authority and embezzling local funds for his own enrichment; others claim that he was a benevolent and capable ruler, but had acted rashly, and had been goaded into rebellion by cunning rivals at court who were jealous of the Mongols’ trust in him.Footnote ⁶⁶ Regardless of his original intentions, in all accounts Yūsufshāh makes a grievous error when a Mongol amīr, called Yesüder, arrives in Yazd to force the payment of tribute. The Atābeg has Yesüder murdered while asleep in his camp and has his wives and children seized. When this news reaches the Ilkhanid court, the governor of Iṣfahān, Amīr Muḥammad Īdājī, receives an order to attack Yazd. Seeing the approach of Īdājī’s overwhelming force, Yūsufshāh flees for Sīstān with his family, together with the captured harem of Yesüder. Yūsufshāh's fate varies in the sources: in Muʿīnuddīn Yazdī’s, Kutubī’s, and Jaʿfarī’s accounts, the story simply ends with his exile in Sīstān (or Kirmān).Footnote ⁶⁷ Kātib has the ascendant figure of Sharafuddīn Muẓaffar, the progenitor of the Muẓaffarid dynasty, hunt him down and kill him.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nonetheless, the Yazdī sources agree that in the end, Amīr Muḥammad Īdājī appoints one of his lieutenants, a man called Bulghadar, as darūgah over Yazd, in the name of the Ilkhans.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus he brings an end to Atābegid rule. Mufīd sums up the affair with characteristic eloquence, saying: “Through foolishness and haughtiness (binādānī va gardan-kishī), the two-hundred-year-old sultanate of the Atābegs was left open to an outsider (bīgānah)”.Footnote ⁷⁰

A related and glaring inconsistency that demands our attention is that all the sources, including the Yazdī ones, set these events during the reigns of Arghūn (683–690/1284–1291) or Ghāzān (694–703/1295–1304). Now, we should recall that Narrative A, about Atābeg Yūsufshāh and his tyrannical treatment of Ruknuddīn was set during Abū Saʿīd's reign (716–736/1316–35), a good two decades later. This means that the Yazdī histories contain two completely different stories about Yūsufshāh and about the end of the Atābeg dynasty, set decades apart.

An explanation can be found in the Yazd-centred Muẓaffarid dynastic histories composed by Muʿīnuddīn Yazdī and Maḥmūd Kutubī. As has already been mentioned, both provide only the B-version of the Yūsufshāh narrative, which is set during Arghūn's reign, and which says nothing about Ruknuddīn or his son. Muʿīnuddīn makes a curious statement a few folios after his treatment of Yūsufshāh's ousting, where he mentions that in the year 707/1307–08, during Ghāzān's reign, Sharafuddīn Muẓaffar went to Yazd but found such bickering (naʿābīnī, literally “crowing”) and jealous wrangling (taḥāssud) going on among the notables that the place was overcome with a general malaise (malālatī); he became so fed up (saʾāmatī dāsht) that he simply left for Shīrāz.Footnote ⁷¹ One wonders whether these squabbles might have involved Ruknuddīn and his son. The timing is too late for Yūsufshāh, who has just been ousted, according to the author, and it is too early to correspond with the conflict between the Atābegs and sayyids recounted in Narrative A of the later local histories, which was set during Abū Saʿīd's reign. Was Muʿīnuddīn registering the beginning of a disturbance that eventually climaxed in the Ruknīyah affair? If so, which Atābeg would have remained in Yazd to push back against these new powerbrokers?

A possible answer appears a few folios later. In the course of narrating the early career of Mubārizuddīn, Sharafuddīn Muẓaffar's son, Muʿīnuddīn and Kutubī both relate a curious affair in Yazd that occurred at the start of Abū Saʿīd's reign and that is not mentioned in any of the other Yazdī sources. Muʿīnuddīn's and Kutubī’s accounts differ on many points but agree on the fact that Yūsufshāh was not actually the last Atābeg of Yazd after all. They explain that one more Atābeg, called Ḥājjī Shāh, the son of Yūsufshāh, was entrusted to oversee Yazd on behalf of the Ilkhans some time after the ousting of Yūsufshāh during Arghūn's reign.Footnote ⁷²

Muʿīnuddīn makes it clear that Ḥājjī Shāh was a bloodthirsty man who had forged a close friendship with the equally vicious Injuid Amīr of Fārs, Kay Khusrav, the son of Maḥmūd Shāh Injū.Footnote ⁷³ He narrates a curious but familiar tale: while Amīr Kay Khusrav is in Maybūd scheming to acquire one of the prize horses in the stable of Maybūd's Muẓaffarid governor, Mubārizuddīn, Atābeg Ḥājjī Shāh meanwhile has a dispute over a handsome boy who is an attendant of Amīr Kay Khusrav's deputy (nāʾib) in Yazd. A fight breaks out, and the nāʾib ends up dead.Footnote ⁷⁴ Learning of his deputy's slaying, Kay Khusrav marches together with Mubārizuddīn to Yazd. After a battle Ḥājjī Shāh flees. Muʿīnuddīn closes the account saying:

Kutubī makes an important modification to the text that reflects a Timurid-era perspective on the imperial centre's reach into local affairs, one that recalls the other sources’ treatment of Atābeg Yūsufshāh's situation, earlier. He scales up Muʿīnuddīn's account from a largely local affair into an imperial issue: in his version, Amīr Kay Khusrav conspires with Mubārizuddīn to send a report to the Ilkhanid ruler, Abū Saʿīd, to the effect that Ḥājjī Shāh's murder of the nāʾib had been a deliberate act of sedition, wherein he had specifically targeted the Amīr's deputy because he was in the service of the Ilkhans. The Pādishāh then orders Amīr Kay Khusrav and Mubārizuddīn to exact revenge.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the end, the last Atābeg flees. Neither Muʿīnuddīn nor Kutubī’s works say where Ḥājjī Shāh fled to, but one might guess that he made for Sīstān, as his father had done, to take refuge with the renegade Nikūdarīs.Footnote ⁷⁷ In any case, Muʿīnuddīn's and Kutubī’s works demonstrate that there were two humiliating finales to the Atābegs’ rule, rehearsed in the stories of both father and son. And, in Kutubī’s fifteenth-century reworking, the denouements of Yūsufshāh's and Ḥājjī Shāh's reigns share remarkably similar schemas that reframe Yazd's local affairs in terms of imperial ones:

1. 1. The Atābeg murders the Ilkhan's representative.

2. 2. The Atābeg's rivals portray the murder as an act of rebellion against the Ilkhans.

3. 3. The Ilkhan sends a force to punish the Atābeg.

4. 4. The Atābeg flees Yazd, probably for Sīstān, and vanishes.

Although the last two Atābegs’ stories might easily have been confused on account of their similarities, the later historians of Yazd certainly knew well the history of Muʿīnuddīn, their Yazdī predecessor; Mufīd even explicitly referenced him for material related to the Muẓaffarid period, where Ḥājjī Shāh appears.Footnote ⁷⁸ It seems that the Yazdī historians deliberately allowed this pair, father and son, to collapse into a single, ill-fated figure. They purposely left the chronology of events muddy, chose elements from the stories about both Atābegs’ inglorious demises, and linked them to some controversy surrounding the rise of the sayyids. The story about Yūsufshāh's ignoble fall at the hands of Ilkhanid forces, which was well known and widely circulated in the Ilkhanid-era histories, took place too early to fit with the Ruknīyah narrative. But no matter, his son Ḥājjī Shāh's equally inglorious downfall, which shared some key narrative elements, fits well with the chronology of the Ruknīyah affair; both took place during Abu Saʿīd's reign. The actual identity of the story's villain was unimportant to the Ruknīyah narrative, as was the historical accuracy of the details surrounding the dynasty's overthrow. The core message of the episode was the righteousness of the Āl-i Niẓām, the sanctity of their madrasah-tomb complex, and the inviolability of their alliance with powerful figures at the imperial court. Consequently, the presentation of the protagonists as both local saints and pillars of the imperial realm required that they were paired with a foil – a villain who was diabolical, tyrannous, disloyal to the ruling empire, and disdainful of the Prophet's progeny. The amalgamated figure of the overthrown Atābeg effectively executed that role and allowed the authors to transform his myopic rebelliousness in Narrative B into pure fiendishness in Narrative A.

Sanctifying sayyids and scribes

The fact that the Atābegs fell twice suggests that the assertion of more direct Mongol governance actually occurred over the course of a generation, not all at once at the hands of the Niẓāms. That complex history, in which Ruknuddīn's family played only a small part in a much larger tangle of evolving political relationships between powerful figures at the royal and provincial courts, did not constitute a useful enough narrative for the Yazdī historians. Moreover, the real story of the Niẓām family's ascent to high bureaucratic posts, which involved calculated marriage alliances, the strategic construction of branded monumental complexes, and probably considerable political scheming, would not have yielded a compelling narrative either. The Yazdī historians were concerned with presenting Yazd's sayyids as saintly partners of both the Ilkhans and the family of Rashīduddīn against a mutual, purely evil foe, whose rise to prominence within the imperial system was attended by miracles and divine intercession. These historians were endeavouring to transform Yazd's sayyids from the pious, munificent, and savvy bureaucrats that they were, into true saints. Of course, the Niẓāms had not attained their high level of wealth, power, and influence by political stratagem alone; their sacred lineage had already afforded them a degree of charismatic authority. But as the Yazdī historians wove the varied accounts they had inherited into seamless, timeless hagiography, they also transformed the type of sanctity these sayyids had possessed through lineage alone into a thaumaturgic variety of sanctity that was usually characteristic of Sufi saints.Footnote ⁷⁹

To be clear, the authors’ consecration of the narrative was not intended to exaggerate the extent of the sayyids’ power under the Ilkhans. Instead, it had the effect of reconfiguring the kind of authority, not the degree of power these sayyids were supposed to have wielded. Presenting the sayyids as thaumaturges legitimized their ascendancy in charismatic rather than in political or strictly genealogical terms. This ambition to sanctify the sayyids’ emergence upon the stage of imperial politics fits into a larger programme of narrative re-emplotment through which the Yazdī historians sought to transform and redeploy the memory of the sayyids’ power and authority during the Ilkhanid era into a sort of foundation myth that reflected contemporary concerns about the status of powerful notables in Yazd who could not necessarily claim sacred lineages. By exhibiting the origins of the Niẓām family's ties to empire in a saintly and charismatic register, the Yazdī authors’ narratives perform the work of legitimating the political and religious authority of Yazd's current notable families, both sayyid and non-sayyid.

This shift towards representing Yazd's sayyids as saints in Yazd's historiography occurred during the Timurid dispensation, when neither the ʿUrayżīs, nor any other sayyids from Yazd attained quite such a high bureaucratic office as had Shamsuddīn or the Ashrafīs. In fact, Yazdī sayyids would not ascend to such high official posts again until Yazd's Niʿmatullāhī sayyids, a Sufi family who hailed from a different Ḥusaynī lineage, intermarried with the Qarā Qūyunlūs and later, with the Safavids, becoming some of the most powerful actors in the early Safavid state.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nonetheless, during the Timurids’ reign, notable Yazdīs who were descended from non-sayyid lineages but were trained in the environs of the ʿUrayżīs’ madrasah networks, were beginning to become prominent actors at the courts of royal princes, not necessarily in high bureaucratic posts, but in influential roles, as poets, astrologers, mathematicians, and especially historians. These occupations proved crucial to the Timurids’ efforts to fashion programmes of sacred, imperial, legitimacy for themselves.

The career of Sharafuddīn ʿAlī Yazdī, the author of the massively important Timurid chronicle, Ẓafar-nāmah, and major benefactor in Yazd, is instructive. Sharafuddīn ʿAlī was not a sayyid, though he was the great-great grandson of Ruknuddīn through the marriage of that sayyid's daughter to a member of the Rażī clan of physicians, Żiyāʾuddīn.Footnote ⁸¹ Nonetheless, he had amassed enough capital and stature to build his own madrasah and khānqāh complex in central Yazd, the Sharafīyah, where he was buried after his death in 858/1454. Moreover, Sharafuddīn ʿAlī had risen to a high station during Shāhrukh's reign, serving as a poet, historian, mathematician, and astrologer to various Timurid princes. Although he may not have attained the high office that his great-great-uncle, Sayyid Shamsuddīn Muḥammad, had achieved, his influence at court as an esotericist and poet may have been greater. More importantly, it was his historical work on the Timurids, articulated in the language of conjunction astrology and esoteric science that provided sovereigns and their administrators with an effective model for communicating sacred legitimacy that would persist for centuries, among successor dynasties.Footnote ⁸²

It is suggestive then, that it was during the Timurid period, when notable Yazdī experts without sayyid lineages, like Sharafuddīn ʿAlī, were performing these functions at the imperial centre, that Jaʿfarī and Kātib chose to characterize Ruknuddīn and Shamsuddīn as saints and not just as key functionaries of the imperial administration. The histories of Yazd imply that Yazdī notables’ constellation of expertise in the natural and esoteric sciences and literary arts, which afforded them access to the imperial dīvān, was the patrimony of their blessed benefactors, Ruknuddīn and his son. While the livelihoods of Yazd's viziers, mustawfīs, and literary men were linked in a concrete way to the economic welfare of local sayyids’ madrasah-shrines, their prestige as pious men further depended on the degree to which they could demonstrate devotion to and affiliation with the holy descendants of the Prophet in the city. Without sacred lineages they realized this connection, in part, through acts of ritual devotion and patronage at shrines, but also through their adroit performances as accountants, historians, astrologers, and jurists. These occupations exploited fields of knowledge thought to be the Niẓāms’ bequest.

As a sayyid and member of the dīvānī class himself, Jaʿfarī’s own interest in promoting the role of Yazd's sayyids as saintly agents of imperial history and as the source of contemporary Yazdī’s success is fairly obvious. And while he is sure to praise the building projects of non-sayyids, it is the ʿUrayżīs’ works that take centre stage, as the potent relics of holy men. For him, the relatively recent success of Yazdīs on the imperial stage had emerged because of the rise of these sayyids above all local competitors in both political power and charismatic splendour. The work of Aḥmad Kātib who, like Sharafuddīn ʿAlī, was not a sayyid, is more nuanced. His preoccupation with the ʿUrayżīs and their participation in political affairs parallels his devoted coverage of the illustrious careers of Yazdīs without sayyid lineages too. Palpable is his determination to connect these figures to the local sayyids. For example, in his treatment of Sharafuddīn ʿAlī’s career, Kātib reminds readers of his ancestors’ ties with the Niẓāms and demonstrates his personal association with the contemporary Niʿmatullāhīs of Yazd. He is especially interested in illustrating how his astrological expertise, wisdom, and eloquent manners, which were the legacy of the Niẓāms and their madrasah complexes, had influenced politics at the imperial court.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, Kātib portrays the sayyids’ charismatic patrimony as having been apportioned among non-sayyid Yazdīs of later generations, like Sharafuddīn ʿAlī, who continued to mobilize vestiges of the ʿUrayżīs sacred knowledge in service of empire. There is a tacit implication that this patrimony is even shared among less illustrious servants of the empire, such as the author himself.

This sanctification of the non-sayyid notables and even rank and file members of the dīvān becomes more explicit two centuries later, in the work of Mufīd, who, like Kātib, was also not a sayyid. Even though he devotes a massive section of JM to the prominence of Yazd's sādāt, he also elevates the status of non-sayyid imperial functionaries to a new level of sanctity. For example, in his lengthy notice on Sharafuddīn ʿAlī, his description of the Sharafīyah madrasah complex and tomb, which does not appear in the earlier works, echoes his description of the Niẓāms’ monuments.Footnote ⁸⁴ And while Mufīd does not go so far as to imply that Sharafuddīn was a saint, the prominence of his monuments, presented alongside his influence at court as an esotericist, mathematician, and historian implies that his success was tinged with the sacredness of his sayyid predecessors.

Furthermore, Mufīd, who had personally witnessed a recent degradation of Yazd's madrasahs and the erosion of local sayyids’ power at the Safavid court, considered the sayyids’ charismatic patrimony available to Yazdīs of still less prestigious ranks and births. Indeed, Mufīd goes as far as to link even the pedestrian activities of the Yazdī bureaucrats of the empire to the sacred patrimony of Ruknuddīn. One last strange affair, which appears in Mufīd's eulogy for his own patron, the vizier Allāh Qulī Beg, provides a compelling illustration.Footnote ⁸⁵ He styles this vizier – a Qizilbāsh outsider who had lived in Yazd for forty years – as a pious patron of local sayyids, Sufis, and men of knowledge, and he presents the man's demise from a heart attack in 1079/1669 in the form of a quasi-hagiography. The disproportionately long anecdote begins when Allāh Qulī receives a letter from a friend who writes that after making ziyārat to the shrine of Mashhad, Imām ʿAlī Riżā appeared in a dream. The Imām, who was busy circumambulating the throne of heaven, looked up, saying, “Soon Allāh Qulī Vazīr will be present in this blessed place”. The devout vizier takes his friend's dream to be prescient and resigns himself to imminent death. He spends the next few days diligently wrapping up the affairs of his ministry, affixing his seal to important documents, and bidding farewell to all the meritorious people of the city. After three days, on Friday, 9 Ẕū al-Ḥijjah, the holy Day of ʿArafah, he dies, uttering the shahādatayn during Friday prayers among the notables and sayyids of the city.

Indeed, while the vizier was a pious man, he was no Sufi saint. After all, even the prescient dream with the Imām was a second-hand one. However, the particulars of the story leave no doubt that for Mufīd the vizier had some scent of holiness about him. Furthermore, while the account cleverly pairs proof of the vizier's piety with a display of his efficiency as an administrator, Mufīd takes this point a step further. He concludes the tribute by specifying that the notables carried the vizier's body to the Ruknīyah and buried him there.Footnote ⁸⁶ The ceremony at Ruknuddīn's grave effectively establishes that the author's benefactor, who served in the highest office of the imperial administration's local outpost, shared in the sayyids’ charismatic patrimony. This was an inheritance that had originated with Ruknuddīn's divinely sanctioned triumph over a tyrannous governor who had been the enemy of the Prophet's progeny. That was a story that began with the erection of the very madrasah where this pious and punctilious beneficiary of the sayyids’ legacy was ultimately buried, three centuries later. Mufīd, who took over much of his deceased patron's responsibility, must have thought himself worthy of this trace of sacred inheritance as well. That sense of entitlement only increased his bitterness during his frustrating exile in India.