Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan
Death of Ilkhan Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan at Qarabagh
The khan died with an enemy army approaching and no son, brother or uncle to succeed him — only an unborn child. Within five days, the vizier's faction enthroned a distant prince from another Chinggisid line.
November 1335: a sudden death on campaign
Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan, ninth ruler of the Mongol Ilkhanate, died unexpectedly at his military headquarters in Qarabagh on 30 November 1335 — Encyclopaedia Iranica's conversion of 13 Rabi' II 736, one day earlier than the traditionally listed 1 December. He was advancing to meet an invasion by Özbeg Khan of the Golden Horde when he died.
The succession vacuum was total. He left no living son, brother or uncle; his wife Dilshad Khatun was pregnant, but her child was not yet born — and the enemy army was still coming.
Was it really the plague?
Modern retellings have sometimes identified Abu Sa'id as an early Black Death victim. No contemporary or specialist source establishes plague as his cause of death, and recent scholarship holds that plague in Iran by 1335 remains unproved.
The earliest genetically confirmed Black Death burials — at Kara-Djigach in modern Kyrgyzstan — date to 1338–1339, three years after the khan was already dead. Current evidence does not establish that plague had reached Iran by 1335.
Five days to a contested crown
The vizier Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad moved fast, promoting Arpa Ke'un — a distant Chinggisid descended from Ariq Böke rather than from the Ilkhanate's founding line — who was formally enthroned at Qarabagh on 5 December 1335.
It bought time, not stability. Arpa's legitimacy was contested almost immediately, rival commanders began raising alternative khans, and the Ilkhanate slid into the fragmentation that would dissolve it — not overnight, as retellings compress it, but through years of staged struggle that began with one unexpected death.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 1 audit pass, 1 issue open Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1335-11-30.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The strongest specialist sources give 30 November 1335, not 1 December; the latter likely reflects a night-of-death or calendar discrepancy.
- No consulted specialist source establishes plague as Abu Saʿid’s cause of death. Poisoning was alleged, but that too remains unproven.
- Genetic evidence identifies Yersinia pestis in Kyrgyzstan burials dated 1338–1339—three years after Abu Saʿid’s death—so it cannot directly diagnose his 1335 illness.
- Scholars debate whether plague contributed to wider Mongol political crises in the 1330s, but that macrohistorical hypothesis is not evidence that this individual died of plague.