98

The Aḥmadīlīs

c. 516 to after 617/c. 1122 to after 1220

Marāgha and Rū’īn Diz in Azerbaijan

This line of Turkish Atabegs ruled in the restricted area of the town of Marāgha and the nearby fortress of Rū’īn Diz for almost a century, maintaining itself against much more powerful neighbours like the Eldigüzid Atabegs controlling the rest of Azerbaijan (see below, no. 99). Marāgha had been held in the early twelfth century by the Kurdish commander of the Seljuqs, Aḥmadīl b. Ibrāhīm, possibly a descendant of an earlier family in Azerbaijan, the Rawwādids (see above, no. 72), and Aq Sunqur Aḥmadīlī was presumably his freedman. This last became the Atabeg of the Seljuq prince Dāwūd b. Maḥmūd II, and supported him during his brief bid for the sultanate (see above, no. 91, 1). In the later decades of the century, the Aḥmadīlīs were drawn into the complex politics of Azerbaijan, involving the last Seljuqs, the Eldigüzids and other adjoining powers. Notices in the chronicles of this localised line of Atabegs are only sporadic, and numismatic evidence apparently non-existent, so that it is particularly difficult to reconstruct their chronology and genealogy; but they seem to have held Marāgha until 605/1209 and Rū’īn Diz somewhat longer, and a female member of the family, Sulāf a Khātūn, was again ruling in these places when the Mongols sacked Marāgha in 618/1221.

EI² Aḥmadīlīs’ (V. Minorsky); EIr ‘Atābakān-e Marāgā’ (K. A. Luther).

C. E. Bosworth, in The Cambridge History of Iran, V, 170–1, 176–9.