The Ilkhans in the Byzantine Sources

The Il-Khāns maintained close contacts with two Greek states: the Empire of Trebizond and Byzantium of the Palaiologoi. While the sources of the Empire of Trebizond were scanty and developed no image of the Il-Khāns as these might have been perceived in Trebizond, the Byzantine historical tradition, centered in Nicaea and then in Constantinople, was far richer and produced colorful literature descriptions of the rulers of the Mongol Īrān, from Hülegü to Ghazan. The ‘Mongol dossier’ of the Byzantine sources came from the milieu of mutual contacts between two states, both cultural and political. There was the political alliance between Byzantium and the Il-Khāns aimed at stability in Asia Minor and supported by the matrimonial links. This resulted in a special approach, which the Byzantines demonstrated towards the Il-Khānid state. The Byzantine tradition was famous for its archaizing method of description of the foreign nations, and the Mongols, whom the Byzantines called ‘Tokharians,’ ‘Scythians,’ and ‘Massagetae,’ did not avoid it. Yet the closer look at the Mongol ‘dossier’ in Byzantium shows that it was the Il-Khānid state, of all other parts of the Mongol Empire, which received a special attention as all those archaizing sobriquets suggested the territories of the Il-Khāns as springboard of the Mongol conquests per se. Two persons were responsible for the extraordinary richness of the Mongol ‘dossier’ and the special place of the Ilkhanid state in the Byzantine diplomacy: Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos and his daughter, ‘the Empress of the East’ Maria Diplobatatzina, wife of the Il-Khān Abaqa

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