The Ilkhanate was a Mongol-ruled state based in Iran and Mesopotamia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. Established by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, after 1258, it drew on previous decades of Mongol military and administrative intervention in the region. Throughout their eighty years in power, the descendants of Hülegü faced the challenge of governing a society and landscape foreign to Mongol traditional life and heavily scarred from previous waves of Mongol invasion. They met this challenge by employing indigenous administrative elites and adopting local customs. Most notable among these was Islam, which was increasingly becoming the majority religion in the Middle East at the time of the Mongol conquest and which the Ilkhans themselves adopted as part of their ruling ideology. The Mongols’ particular rapprochement with these indigenous practices established important institutions of royal ideology, land tenure, religious practice, and cultural patronage that persisted at Persianate courts in later centuries.