Baghdad 1258

For the Mongols that was half the problem solved. Now they could turn their
attention to the rest of this part of the world: The Abbasid Caliphate, and its centre
Baghdad, with which they had unfinished business, having tried and failed to take it
in 1238.

In a sense, Hulegu had an easy target. The Abbasid caliphate was already a spent
force, divided against itself in innumerable sects- Nusayris, Druzes, Qarmatians,
Takhtajis, Zaydis, Sufis. Turks fought Persians, both fought Arabs. Syrians still
resented the Abbasid conquest almost 500 years before, and yearned for a messiah
to free them. To the east, the great Silk Road cities, Khwarezm- Bukhara,
Samarkand, Urgench, Merv- were in ruins from the Mongol assault of 1219-22. At
the centre, the royal line of the Abbasids was debilitated by luxury. Rather like the
Roman Empire, as Phillip Hitti says in his History of the Arabs, ‘the sick man was
already on his deathbed when the burglars burst open the doors’.

In September 1257 Hulegu, advancing 400 kilometers from the Elburz mountains,
sent a message to Baghdad telling the caliph to surrender and demolish the city’s
outer walls as a sign of good faith. The Caliph, al-Mustasim, must know the fate
bought upon the world by Genghis Khan, wrote Hulegu.

What humiliation by the grace of eternal heaven, has overtaken the dynasties of
the Shahs of Khwarezm, the Seljuks, thekings of Dylam [the region where the
Assassins had been entrenched]...Yet the gates of Baghdad were never closed to
any of these races... How then should entry be refused to us, who possess such
strength and such power?

The Caliph, a lacklustre character whose predecessors had been puppets dancing in
the hands of their Seljuk masters, could only hope that this menace would pass, as
the Seljuk menace had. He was after all spiritual head of all Islam; God was surely
on his side. ‘O young man’, he foolishly blustered, ‘do you not know that form the
East to the Maghreb, all the worshippers of Allah, whether kings or beggars, are
slaves to this court of mine?’ Empty words, as it turned out. Of all the caliph’s
‘slaves’ not a beggar, let alone a king, came to help him.

In November the Mongol army, leaving their families and flocks behind, started their
two months advance on Baghdad from several hundred kilometres away. They
came in three columns. One, under Baiju, veteran of the 1238 assault on Baghdad,
approached from the north, having crossed the Tigris near Mosul, 325 kilometres
upriver. The second was commanded by one of these army’s greatest generals,
Kitbuqa, who was not a Mongol but a Naiman, one of the tribes blotted by Genghis
50 years before. His group, the most southerly, advanced due west from today’s
Lorestan in Iran, while in the centre came Hulegu himself. Descending from the
Iranian highlands along the Alwand river, Hulegu ordered his catapult teams to
collect wagon loads of boulders as ammunition, since it was known that there was
no stones around Baghdad. There was scant opposition. A Muslim force on low-lying
ground near Ba’qubah, some 60 kilometres north-east of Baghdad, met with
disaster when the Mongols opened irrigation channels, flooded them out, then
moved in on the Tigris, aiming to take the newer eastern section of the city, with its
Abbasid palace, law college and 150 year-old walls, and then the two bridges that
straddled the river of pontoons.

By 22 January 1258, Baghdad was surrounded. With the Tigris blocked upstream by
pontoons and downstream by a battalion of horsemen, flight was impossible; one
official who tried to escape downriver in a small fleet was turned back by a barrage
of rocks, flaming naphtha and arrows that sank three of his boats and killed many of
his entourage. The assault began a week later. Rocks form the Mongol catapults
knocked chunks of the walls, littering their bases with rubble. To gain better vintage
points, the Mongols gathered the rubble and built towers into which they hauled
catapults, the better to aim at the buildings inside. Amid a steady rain of arrows
that forced the inhabitants under cover, boulders smashed roofs and pots of flaming
naphtha set houses on fire. By 3 February, Mongol forces had seized the eastern
walls.

Inside Baghdad, panic reduced the caliph to mush. ‘Truth and error remained
hidden from him’, in Juvaini’s scathing words. He tried sending envoys to sue for
peace: first his vizier, along with the city’s catholicos, the leader of its Christians, in
the hope of appealing through Hulegu’s Nestorian wife, the Kerait princess Doquz,
cousin of his Nestorian mother Sorkaktani. Doquz was renowned for both her
wisdom and for her stout defence of her faith, the outward sign of which was the
tent-church she transported wherever she went. Hulegu, with an eye for his
powerful, match-making mother, had a healthy respect for his wife and her creed,
so when she interceded for the Christians of Baghdad, he listened. In messages shot
into the city attached to arrows, Hulegu promised that the qadis- scholars and
religious leaders- including Nestorians, would all be safe, if they ceased resisting. A
second embassy sued for peace, and a third; Hulegu ignored them both. The
caliph’s vizier reported that there was no hope, telling his master that the efforts of
his ‘hastily gathered rabble are as ineffective as the twitching of a slaughtered
animal’. In the circumstances, he should surrender. ‘It is the action of the wise to
humble themselves and humiliate themselves’. Give up, he said, hand over the
treasures, because that’s what they’re after; then arrange a marriage to that
‘empire and religion shall fuse, so that sovereignty and splendour, caliphate and
power become one’.

The Caliph wavered, while the city’s morale collapsed. Thousands streamed out,
hoping for mercy; but since there had been no surrender, all were killed. With
survivors cowering in nooks and crannies, the Caliph saw that he had no chance. On
10 February he led an entourage of 300 officials and relatives to Hulegu’s camp to
surrender. Hulegu greeted the Caliph politely, and told him to order all the
inhabitants to disarm and come out of the city.

This they did- only to find themselves penned and slaughtered like sheep for having
continued their resistance. Sources speak of 800,000 being killed. All figures should
be treated with scepticism, but the Mongols who were used to mass executions,
were quiet capable of killing on such a scale. Even if the figure was one-tenth that
amount, it was a massacre of Third Reich proportions. No wonder Muslims refer
back to it today as one of the greatest crimes against their people and religion.

Three days later, the Mongols poured into the empty city and set almost all of it on
fire. Mosques, shrines, tombs houses- all went up in flames. The Nestorians,
however, were spared, as Hulegu had promised. While Baghdad burned around
them, they found sanctuary with the patriarch in a Christian church. Afterwards, the
patriarch was awarded the palace of the vice-chancellor, and no doubt joined other
Christians in celebrating Islam’s astonishing collapse and their renaissance.

To crown his victory, Hulegu chose to conduct an exercise in humiliation. Taking

over the Caliph’s Octagon Palace, he threw a banquet for his officers and family
members to which he invited his prisoner. ‘You are the host, we are your gusts’, he
taunted. ‘Bring whatever you have that is suitable for us’.

The Caliph, quivering with fear, volunteered to unlock his treasure rooms, then
found that none of his remaining servants could sort out the right keys. Eventually,
after locks had been smashed, the the attendents bought out 2,000 suits of clothes,
10,000 dinars in cash, jewel encrusted bowls and gems galore. All of which Hulegu
magnanimously divided among his commanders.

Then he turned on the Caliph. OK, these were the visible treasures. Now: ‘Tell my
servants were your buried treasures are’.

There was indeed a buried treasure, as perhaps Hulegu already knew: a pool full of
gold ingots, which were fished out and distributed.

Next the harem, 700 women, and 1,000 servants. Oh please, begged the Caliph, not
the women. Hulegu however was again magnanimous. The caliph could choose 100
who would be released; the rest were shared out among the Mongol commanders.

Next day, all the possessions from the rest of the palace- royal art treasures
collected over 500 years- were stacked in piles outside the gates. Later, some of the
booty was sent back to Monkhe in Mongolia. The rest (according to Rashid ad-Din)
joined booty from Alamut, from other Assassins’ castles, from Georgia, Armenia and
Iran, all of it being taken to a fortress on an island in Lake Orumiyeh (Urmia), a salt
lake in Iran’s far north-western corner.

And at last, the city foul with the stench of rotting flesh, Hulegu ordered one more
set of executions: those of the caliph himself and his remaining entourage. Al-
Mustasim and five others, including the caliph’s eldest son, met their ignominious
deaths in a nearby village. Two days later, the second son was executed. Only the
youngest son was spared. He was married off to a Mongol woman, by whom he had
two sons. That was the end of the Abbasid line, and the first time in history that all
Islam had been left without a religious head.

Now came the peace. Bodies were buried, markets restored, officials appointed.
Three thousand Mongols began the task of reconstruction in Baghdad, while others
set about securing the rest of the Abbasid territory. Most towns, like Al-Hillah,
opened their gates. Some did not, with the usual consequences. In Wasit, 15
kilometres to the south-east of Baghdad, 40,000 died (according to one source,
though again the numbers must be treated with caution; always vague, they were
usually exaggerated by anything up to tenfold). Resistance made no difference. The
region was Hulegu’s from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Georgia and rump of the
Seljuk Sultanate today’s eastern Turkey-submitted. Beyond lay Syria and Egypt.