Zakariya al-Qazwini, who wrote a geographical dictionary around 1275, seems to have known Maragheh well. He described its mineral springs, a cave which probably corresponds to the later Chay-Baghi, a mountain called Zanjaqan with its calcareous spring, and the "impregnable" fortress of Ru'in Dez. In 1304, the Ilkhanate ruler Öljaitü () appointed Nasir al-Din Tusi's son as the new head of the observatory. In 1306, the prominent Sufi poet Awhadi Maraghai settled in Maragheh, living there until his death on 6 April 1338. In 1312, Qara-Sunqur, the former amir al-umara of Aleppo, was appointed ruler of Maragheh by Öljaitü. This event is described by the 14th-century Maghrebi scholar Ibn Battuta, who also reports that Maragheh was called "Little Damascus". Qara-Sunqur died in 1328. Writing 1340, Hamdallah Mustawfi described Maragheh as the capital of a tuman which included all the southern portion of Azerbaijan. It bordered the tumans of Tabriz on the north and Khoy on the west; to the east was Iraq-e Ajam and to the south was Kurdistan. Among the cities underneath Maragheh were Dih-i Khwaraqan, Leylan, and Pasveh. He also described six districts that belonged to Maragheh, some of whose readings are uncertain: Sarajun, Niyajun, Duzakhrud, Gavdul (at the confluence of the Leylan and Jaghatu rivers), Behestan, and Hashtrud. He also mentioned Anguran as a dependency of Maragheh. Mustawfi reports that inhabitants of Maragheh spoke pahlavī-e moḡayyar ("modified Pahlavi"), i.e. the vernacular of northwestern and central Iran. Modern era The 17th century Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi mentioned that the women or the "female society" in Maragheh mostly conversed in Pahlavi. According to Mortaza Firuzi, Hossein Hassanpashaei, and Sanaz Rahkarfarshi, some sources either falsely disregard this language or deem it as the dominant language of Maragheh, which was most likely Turkman based on the account of Evliya Çelebi. According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the current inhabitants speak Azeri Turkish, but in the 14th century, they still spoke “arabicized Pahlawi," an Iranian dialect of the north western group. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, Maragheh was governed by the Moqaddam family. Geography Maragheh is situated in a narrow valley running nearly north and south at the eastern end of a well-cultivated plain opening towards Lake Urmia, the world's sixth-largest saltwater lake, which lies 30 km to the west. It lies at the southern foot of Mount Sahand, which separates it from the city of Tabriz to the north.