This chapter is an overview of the extant Middle Mongolian historical sources of the Mongol Empire, its documents arranged here according to their places of origin, the writing systems used, and their content and genres. They are described and evaluated in the following sections: extant and lost chronicles, Uighur script epigraphic monuments (edicts, epitaphs and other memorial inscriptions, graffiti, seal and coin inscriptions), Uighur script letters of Mongol rulers to foreigners, monuments from Qara-Qoto, Uighur script documents from the lands of the Ilkhans and their vassals and from the Turfan area and the Dunhuang Mogao caves, square-script monuments, and badges and xylograph fragments in square script or in Uighur letters. The notes also offer new interpretations of some passages of the monuments discussed.

Information about the Mongols in Syriac is found in chronicles, exegetical works, poems, colophons, and marginal notes on manuscripts and inscriptions, from southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, the territories of the Ilkhans, the lands of both the Syrian Orthodox (or West Syrian) Church and the Church of the East (East Syrian). The Mongols are first mentioned in a chronicle referring to 1218/1219 as “Huns” and “Tatars,” as the destroyers of Persia. The chapters on the history of the Mongols in the chronicles of Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) depend directly on Juwaynī’s work; more original insights are found in poetry, colophons, and inscriptions. In general, the Syriac sources inform us about the feelings and attitudes of Syriac people towards the Mongols, and their policy towards religions. In this respect and from the perspective of social and economic history, the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma offers most valuable original data.

The Ilkhanate was a Mongol-ruled state based in Iran and Mesopotamia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. Established by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, after 1258, it drew on previous decades of Mongol military and administrative intervention in the region. Throughout their eighty years in power, the descendants of Hülegü faced the challenge of governing a society and landscape foreign to Mongol traditional life and heavily scarred from previous waves of Mongol invasion. They met this challenge by employing indigenous administrative elites and adopting local customs. Most notable among these was Islam, which was increasingly becoming the majority religion in the Middle East at the time of the Mongol conquest and which the Ilkhans themselves adopted as part of their ruling ideology. The Mongols’ particular rapprochement with these indigenous practices established important institutions of royal ideology, land tenure, religious practice, and cultural patronage that persisted at Persianate courts in later centuries.

According to the Mongol imperial ideology, when the Mongols fought with neighboring nations, they not only expanded their empire by conquest but also fulfilled the heavenly task of establishing order throughout the world by subordinating it to Chinggis khan (r.1206–27) and his successors. Therefore, the Mongols demanded the subordination to their empire of all peoples without exception, regardless of whether they were nomadic or sedentary. To be at peace with the Mongols meant unquestioning obedience to them, and other nations could not hope for peace without the official recognition of this subordination.