Michael Hope. Power, Politics, and Tradition in the Mongol Empire and the Īlkhānate of Iran

How did the Mongol Empire sustain itself as a dynastic entity following the death of its founder, Chinggis Khan, the empire’s main source of political authority and unity? Michael Hope attempts to answer this in Power, Politics, and Tradition in the Mongol Empire and the Īlkhānate of Iran by employing Weberian notions of charismatic community and the routinization of the charisma. In doing so, Hope recasts the political history of the Mongol Empire (1206–1259) and its regional successor state based in Iran and Iraq, the Īlkhānate (1258–1335), as a battle between two competing interpretations of Chinggis Khan’s legacy: the patrimonialists and the collegialists. While the patrimonialists believed that political authority lay primarily with the ruling khan, the collegialists advocated a communal approach to rulership, viewing the empire and its wealth as the shared inheritance of the political and military elite. Hope argues that collegial claims to authority were based on the Mongol political culture of consultative rule as embodied in Mongol law and tradition (yasak and yosun) first articulated by Chinggis Khan, and the institution of the quriltai, a council where the political and military elite of the empire would gather to elect new khans and deliberate state policy.

Ancient history · Battle · Charisma · Charismatic authority · Elite · Empire · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law