Paper abstract:

The historical records of the Mongol invasion (1220-23) are full of emotion. Iranian poets, historians, and religious scholars, describe the event with a mixture of shock, sadness, and horror, which they often projected onto historical actors. Such literary expressions of emotion were a means for the survivors to process the experience of conquest and build new communities on the basis of shared values.

The same authors initially made very little effort to register the feelings of the Mongols, who were depicted as bestial creatures, devoid of human emotion. This ambivalence towards the Mongols reflects the cultural and political divide between the Mongol conquerors and their subjects, who formed two separate communities of feeling. Yet there are signs of growing familiarity between the Mongols and Iranian writers in the second half of the thirteenth century and by the fourteenth century, the Mongols were described with a rich emotional vocabulary. The historical texts celebrate love affairs between khans and khatuns; Mongol warriors were recorded mourning over deceased children; and feuds were pursued with boiling anger, as Persian authors came to view the Mongol Ilkhanid dynasty (1258-1335) as Iranian rulers.

The present study will chart when and how the Mongols began to show emotion in Iranian literature to gauge the rate of cultural exchange at the Ilkhanid court (1258-1335). It will be posited that this type of literary analysis may be used as yet another tool to advance our understanding of the religious, political, and social integration of the Mongols into Iranian society during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.