ABSTRACT
Atâ-Malek Joveyni (1226–1283) was a member of a long-serving family of Persian bureaucrats from Khorasan in eastern Iran, a region that bore the brunt of the devastating Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan (d. 1227). Growing up in the immediate aftermath of these traumatic events, he entered the service of the Ilkhanid regime, which became fully consolidated in Iran after 1258, and completed his “History of the World-Conqueror” shortly afterwards, in 1260. Close to the administration, Joveyni travelled widely across the empire, including a mission to Qaraqorum, the Mongol capital, and ended his days as the governor of Baghdad. He was therefore faced, as a chronicler of his times, with the dilemma of reporting truthfully what he witnessed and learned of the disasters that beset his country, while seeking to come to terms with what had happened and to some extent justify it. He worked within the system in an attempt to moderate its worst impacts and seek positive elements in the situation: an archetypical view of the intellectual in defeat. In effect, his effort was to portray the defeat by the Mongols not so much a loss but as an opportunity to assert Iranian cultural values and extend the spread of Islam.
