Rashid al-Din was born into a Jewish family of physicians in Hamadan. He converted to Islam as a young man, entered court service as a doctor, and rose on ability to become vizier under Ghazan Khan and his successor. It was he who carried out much of the tax reform and public works of that reign.
Ghazan ordered him to set down the history of the Mongols, and he went considerably further. The result, the Jami' al-tawarikh, covered not only the Mongols but China, India, the Arabs, the Turks and the Franks of Europe. He summoned scholars from those peoples to bring their own records and bound them into a single work. That attempt to place many civilisations side by side is why the book is called the first world history.
He founded a scholarly quarter outside Tabriz, the Rab'-i Rashidi, with copying rooms that produced fresh manuscripts each year to send to other cities. In 1318, caught in a court intrigue, he was accused of poisoning the khan and executed at seventy-one. The illustrated manuscripts made under him survive today in museums around the world.