The Deed of Sale of Bint Toghrïl (666/1267): a First In-Depth Study of the Ilkhanid Private Documents from the Mausoleum of Shaykh Ṣafī in Ardabil.

This article is the first in-depth study of an Ilkhanid private document from the Mausoleum of Shaykh Ṣafī in Ardabil (North-Western Iran). It contains the critical edition, translation and commentary of an original deed recording the sale of half a village near Miyāna, in the south of the Iranian province of Azarbayjan, in 666/1267. The document is remarkable for its length, its highly literary wording, some formal oddities and also the identity of the parties. It shows that the seller, Bint Toghrïl, daughter of the last Saljuq sultan of Iran, whose life is documented by chronicles, managed not only to survive the Mongol conquests but also somehow to retain her economic base for several decades. The identity of the buyer and the qadi who legalized the act illustrates the strong presence of powerful Shafiʿi families in Mongol Iran (here the Qazwīnīs and Mākī Qazwīnīs). We compare this deed of sale with other unpublished items of the Ardabil corpus as well as similar documents from better-known medieval archival funds from the Near East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]