Mongols Sack Baghdad

In early 1258, a Mongol army under Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, besieged and captured Baghdad, ending the Abbasid Caliphate that had ruled much of the Islamic world from the city since the eighth century. The fall of Baghdad is often treated as a symbolic end to the Islamic Golden Age. It also marked a turning point in the Middle East, shifting political power away from Iraq and bringing Mongol rule to Iran and the surrounding region.

By the mid-thirteenth century the Abbasid caliphs had long since lost real imperial power, but Baghdad remained the spiritual center of Sunni Islam and one of the world's great centers of learning and trade. Its caliph, al-Musta'sim, controlled little beyond the area around the city. Meanwhile the Mongol Empire, after decades of conquest, was pushing westward. The Great Khan Möngke sent his brother Hulagu to subdue the remaining powers of southwest Asia, including the Nizari Ismaili strongholds in Persia and, if necessary, the caliphate. Hulagu demanded the caliph's submission, and al-Musta'sim refused or failed to respond in a way that satisfied him.

Hulagu's forces, which included contingents from allied and subject peoples such as Georgians and Armenians, approached Baghdad in the winter of 1257 to 1258 and surrounded the city. The siege was short. Mongol engineers used siege engines and reportedly manipulated the river and dikes, and the defenders were outmatched. The city surrendered in February 1258. What followed was a massacre and extensive looting over several days. Contemporary and later sources give death tolls ranging from tens of thousands to a million, but these figures are unreliable and likely exaggerated. The caliph was executed, though accounts of how he died vary, and the familiar story that he was rolled in a carpet is a tradition rather than a certainty.

The destruction of Baghdad's libraries and institutions was severe. Chroniclers describe books being thrown into the Tigris, and the House of Wisdom is often named as a casualty, though that earlier institution had probably declined well before 1258. Historians debate how much of the city's intellectual life was truly erased, since scholarship continued in Baghdad and flourished elsewhere, including Cairo, Damascus and Mongol-ruled Persia.

Hulagu went on to take Syria, but in 1260 the Mamluks of Egypt defeated a Mongol force at Ain Jalut, halting the advance. Hulagu founded the Ilkhanate, a Mongol state centered in Iran, whose rulers later converted to Islam. Baghdad survived but never regained its former prominence, and the Abbasid line was continued only as a ceremonial caliphate under the Mamluks in Cairo.