The Ilkhanate was the Mongol state that ruled Persia, Iraq, and the Caucasus directly, and held much of Anatolia as a tributary dependency through the vassal Seljuk sultans of Rum, from 1256 to 1335 — the southwestern quarter of the fractured Mongol Empire, founded by Hulagu Khan, whose armies destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in 1258 and whose later kings converted to Islam and presided over a brilliant age of Persian art and learning.
In 1258 the Mongol prince Hulagu Khan took Baghdad, executed the last Abbasid caliph, and ended a line that had claimed the leadership of Islam for five centuries. Barely forty years later his great-grandson Ghazan turned toward Mecca and declared himself a Muslim, and the dynasty that had gutted the caliphate was now paying for mosques, an observatory, and the most richly painted books Persia had ever produced. The conquerors had been captured by the civilization they set out to ruin.