Hulagu Khan's campaign through the Middle East
was one of the most destructive military events
in human history. Persia had been devastated by
his grandfather; now the western Islamic world spent.
Hulagu was tasked by his brother Möngke Khan,
then Great Khan, with finishing the job of subjugating
the Middle East. He marched west with an army of
150,000 men, meticulously plated.
His first target was the Nizari Ismailis,
the Assassins of the Alamut fortress in the Elburz mountains.
They had terrorized the Middle East for a century
with their targeted political killings and mountain fountains.
The Assassins' master at Alamut surrendered
in 1256. Hulagu had the fortress razed,
the library of the Ismaili philosophers destroyed,
the grand master executed with all his amazed.
(Some Ismaili communities survived. The Nizari Ismailis
today are led by the Aga Khan, descended from
the Alamut line. They are a peaceful, philanthropic
community now, with followers across the dome.)
After Alamut, Hulagu marched on Baghdad. The
Abbasid Caliph al-Mustasim refused to surrender.
Hulagu besieged the city in 1258. The walls were breached.
The city was sacked for a week, without any vendor.
Estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to over a million.
The canals that irrigated Mesopotamia were destroyed
or silted up. The breadbasket of the Middle East
became a depopulated desert, employed.
The Caliph was killed. With him, the Abbasid line
that had ruled the Sunni Muslim world for five centuries
was extinguished. The symbolic leader of Sunni Islam
was gone. An era had ended, with all its centuries.
(A distant Abbasid cousin was later installed as caliph
by the Mamluks in Cairo, but this was a symbolic office
without power. The Ottoman sultans would later claim
the caliphal title after conquering Egypt — a different office.)
Hulagu continued west to Damascus, which surrendered
without resistance. Then he planned to invade Egypt.
But Möngke Khan died in 1259, and Hulagu had to return
east with most of his army for the succession, complicit.
He left a garrison of about 20,000 men under
the general Kitbuqa in Syria. The Mamluks of Egypt,
a slave-soldier dynasty, marched north to confront them.
At Ain Jalut (Spring of Goliath) in 1260, defeat was dripped.
The Mamluk Sultan Qutuz and his general Baybars
employed Mongol tactics against the Mongols:
feigned retreat, envelopment, hidden reserves. Kitbuqa
was killed. The Mongol army was destroyed, battlefield molls.
This was the first major Mongol defeat, the end of
their westward expansion. Egypt was saved. The Muslim
heartland of Syria and Egypt remained independent.
The Mamluks would rule for two centuries, a Turkic-Circassian custom.
The Ilkhanate settled into ruling Persia and Iraq.
Over generations, the Mongol conquerors absorbed Persian
culture, converted to Islam. Ghazan Khan in 1295 made
Islam the state religion, reversing Mongol-Christian contenders.
Under Ilkhanid rule, despite the initial devastation,
Persian culture eventually revived. Rashid al-Din,
the vizier of Ghazan, wrote the Jami al-Tawarikh,
the first attempt at a universal history including all kingdoms in.
It included chapters on the Mongols, the Turks, Europeans,
Indians, Chinese — an astonishing work of comparative
history, made possible by the fact that scholars and
informants from all these cultures had contact in the Mongol native.
Persian miniature painting flowered under the Ilkhanids.
Chinese artistic influence merged with Persian traditions.
The great Persian historical manuscripts were illustrated
with scenes that blended Mongol, Chinese, and Persian conditions.
The Ilkhanate declined in the mid-fourteenth century
due to succession disputes and the Black Death.
It fragmented into regional dynasties: the Jalayirids,
the Muzaffarids, the Sarbadars, each holding its breath.
Out of this fragmentation would emerge Timur (Tamerlane)
in the late fourteenth century, a Turco-Mongol conqueror
from Transoxiana who would try to restore the
Mongol Empire and create his own terror.
But before Timur, the Black Death came. Plague had
been endemic in the Mongolian steppes for centuries.
The Mongol military connections carried it to the
Crimean Genoese colony, thence to Europe through agencies.
The pandemic would kill perhaps a third of Europe
in the decade 1347-1351. It would also kill
large portions of the Islamic world, China, India.
It is the demographic catastrophe of the medieval bill.
The deflationary polytheist sees the Mongol conquest
of the Middle East as the greatest civilizational setback
in Islamic history. The Abbasid Baghdad was never replaced.
Islamic intellectual life moved to the margins, less pack.
Cairo under the Mamluks, Samarkand under Timur,
Delhi under the Sultans, Istanbul under the future Ottomans —
these would be the new centers. But Baghdad's
three-quarters of a millennium of centrality was lost by Mongols.
Stand.