The Persianate World

A total overhaul of the post-Ilkhanid world, 1337–38

Abu Saʿīd died in November 1335 and the house of Hülegü died with him. What the base game makes of this is two "hordes" squatting on the map and a generic collapse. What actually happened is one of the strangest political experiments in medieval history: an empire whose army, treasury, chancery, and provinces all survived, but whose sovereignty evaporated, because the one rule everyone agreed on was that only a descendant of Chinggis Khan could reign, and the supply of powerful descendants was running out.

This mod is about that world. The collapse is a system, not just flavor — and very much a work in progress.

Mod Wiki[iranshahr.lat]

The Jalayirids and Chobanids are not hordes. They are chancery states run by warlord-regents, each holding a puppet Borjigin khan in whose name the coins are struck and the Friday khuṭba is read. In the mod this is a government reform, and it is a trap with excellent terms: enormous legitimacy from day one, the amirs satisfied, the realm stable. The catch is that none of it is yours. Your country is localized as a faction. Your ruler is titled regent. Your prestige is capped, because the renown accrues to a puppet in a tent.

And puppets die. When yours does, you choose: enthrone his son and take a stacking "the charade continues" penalty, because each khan is a little less convincing than the last (the historical sequence ran from a genuine princess to a final puppet of frankly dubious parentage), or end the fiction and discover what a realm with no legitimacy doctrine feels like. There is no neutral option. The khutba is read in someone’s name every Friday, and a realm that names no one is in a fault state the game punishes until you pick a sovereignty and pay for it.

The exits are the other two Age 1 reforms. Caliphal investiture from the refugee Abbasid in Cairo, which comes with a built-in contradiction the mod does not hide: you are proclaiming holy war in the middle of Iran, where there is no infidel within a month’s ride, so your first wars will be waged against Muslims you have first declared bad Muslims.

Or the farr, the royal glory of Iran, the kingship the men of the pen praise in every mirror for princes. Unfortunately, it is not something you, a minor lord minted by the Mongols, naturally possess. Claiming it is a project, not a coronation: your legitimacy bleeds, every regency state on the map gains a casus belli against you, and you climb out by winning the wars your declaration provokes and making it to the next age alive. Fortune is the evidence of farr.

Under everything runs one axis: the societal value between the Türk and Tāzīk poles, the men of the sword and the men of the pen. It is not a culture or ethnicity slider. It is a question about what kind of state you are, and nearly every mechanic in the mod reads or writes it: which estates trust you, which integration tools you may use, which reforms you can take, whether the steppe confederations will answer your summons.

The base game’s single noble estate is replaced by two that genuinely behave differently. The amirs are the Turco-Mongol military aristocracy: they pay little in tax proportionally, but provide you with military service. They want iqṭāʿ grants and tribal autonomy, and their privileges erode your control, especially in the villages, because every grant is a piece of countryside the state is no longer sending regular taxmen to.

The diwan are the Persian scribal class. because their wealth is ledger-visible and militarily defenseless, and their entire privilege suite is one repeated transaction: we will squeeze the realm harder, and exempt ourselves a little more. Tax efficiency on everyone else up, their own exposure down. They will even build their wealth into family waqf endowments — pious, inviolable, and conveniently hereditary — until a large fraction of your economy is fenced off in shelters that are also, maddeningly, genuine public goods.

Each estate also holds a categorical prohibition the other can buy its way across. By default the diwan cannot command armies and the amirs cannot sit in the cabinet. There is a privilege that licenses each transgression, and they will not be happy to watch it happen.

The parliament is not a parliament. Persianate political theory has no horizontal legitimacy: no oath that binds the ruler, no body of notables whose recognition constitutes him. Justice flows downward. So the parliament slot is occupied by the mazālim court, the king sitting in judgment over the excesses of his own officials, and it works backwards from every parliament you have played: you do not go there to ask the estates for money, you go there to prosecute them, and the crown gains capital by disciplining its own apparatus under the banner of justice. Protecting the subject from the very machine that extracts from him is what a Persianate king is for. The court is where you do it, and where you fund yourself doing it. And no, the elite do not altruistically like being disciplined.

The pen has a ladder: provincial diwan offices, one per province, that project control outward like a governor’s seat; the regional Dīwān-i Mamlakat; and at the top, capital-only and kingdom-rank, the Dīwān al-Mamālik, the realm-grand chancery itself. Exactly one exists at game start, in Tabriz, and the opening wars are partly about who possesses it. The sword has the iqṭāʿ grant, the mirror institution: cheap, fast, cavalry now, and the registers close behind it. More rungs are coming to represent soyurghals and tuyuls, the hereditary reformulation of iqṭāʿ.

Religion gets its own infrastructure as well.

Also, Iranic nations no longer build everything out of timber they do not have. There is a kiln now. The plateau builds in brick, as geography intended.

Persianate states do not field mass peasant armies, and the mod stops pretending they do. The sedentary population is demilitarized at the baseline; your levies draw from exactly two reservoirs, and your third force is bought. The iqṭāʿ class is a true military caste, men whose tax contract is their salary and whose job is showing up mounted and armored at the muster review. The tribes are a manpower ocean you can draw on at rates no settled society can match, if your Türk legitimacy is high enough that they answer AND you have the demographic base for it. And the treasury, especially for Tāzīk-leaning states with their formidable fiscal machinery, converts gold into mercenaries, ghulams, slave soldiers and royal retinues — the path that eventually breaks the tribal aristocracy if you live long enough to walk it.

Wars resolve in battle. The Mongols razed the walls of Iranian cities and forbade rebuilding anything except token ones, so the fourteenth-century plateau is a landscape where the field battle is the verdict and the cities ratify it. Do not bring a European siege game here. Bring cavalry.

The setup represents the world as the dust settled, 1337–38, not the literal April 1337 snapshot: the Chobanids already hold their territory, the Sarbadars already hold Sabzavar. Scripting this proved fragile.

The men of the pen are writing. The men of the sword are mustering. The dervishes of Sabzavar are preaching that the order of kings is ending, and every ruler in Iran agrees the experiment is an abomination, which is the surest sign it threatens them.