Seljuks, a divided caliphate and the end in 1258

Part oneA caliph with a title and little else

In 945 soldiers from Daylam, a mountain region south of the Caspian Sea, entered Baghdad. They were led by the Buyid brothers, who held the city for the next century. The caliph kept his title, his palace and his place at the Friday prayer. The Buyid emirs held the army, the treasury and the real decisions.

It had been a long slide. In 836 the caliph al-Mu'tasim had moved the court from Baghdad to a new city, Samarra, to live among his Turkish soldiers, who were recruited from the steppe and loyal to him alone. Samarra still has the great spiral minaret of its Friday mosque, built under al-Mutawakkil. Commanders of the Turkish soldiers grew powerful, and several caliphs were made and removed by them. The court returned to Baghdad in 892, but the habit of strong generals had taken root.

Meanwhile, provinces drifted away. Egypt, Iran and Central Asia came under local dynasties that still recognised the caliph by name but ruled for themselves. By the 10th century, there were three rulers who each used the title caliph: the Abbasid in Baghdad, the Fatimid in North Africa and then Egypt, and the Umayyad in Córdoba. The Fatimids were Ismaili Shia, and they ruled from Cairo, which they founded in 969.

Politics fragmented, but learning did not fade. Rulers in Bukhara, Ghazni, Cairo and Córdoba all wanted scholars at their courts, and many of the scientists of the last chapter worked under these local patrons. The Golden Age was never only a story about one city.

Part twoThe Seljuks

The next change came from the steppe. The Seljuks were a Turkic family, Sunni Muslims, who rose in the early 11th century and swept through Iran. In 1055 their leader Tughril Beg entered Baghdad, ended Buyid rule, and received from the caliph the title of sultan. The caliph remained head of the religion, and the sultan held the army. The Seljuk sultans ruled mostly from Iran, with Isfahan as a main capital.

Tughril's successor Alp Arslan defeated a Byzantine army at Manzikert, in eastern Anatolia, in 1071. The victory opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement, and the region slowly became a Muslim land.

Alp Arslan's chief minister was Nizam al-Mulk, a Persian statesman who governed with skill for about thirty years until his death in 1092. He founded a network of colleges called madrasas, known as the Nizamiyyas. The one in Baghdad opened in 1065. Its teachers included the scholar al-Ghazali, who taught there in the 1090s.

Under Malik-Shah, the third Seljuk sultan, scholars including the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam worked on a new calendar, which was introduced in 1079. When Malik-Shah died in 1092, the empire split among rivals. Soon after, in 1099, crusaders from Europe took Jerusalem. The Muslim world was divided at that moment, and the era on the Crusades tells that story.

Abbasid power revived in the late 12th century. The caliph an-Nasir, who ruled from 1180 to 1225, rebuilt the caliphate's authority across Iraq and worked to bring other rulers into his circle. For a short time Baghdad was once again a power in its own right.

Part threeThe Mongols and 1258

By then a new force was gathering far to the east. Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and died in 1227, and his armies had already overrun Central Asia and much of Iran. In the 1250s his grandson Hulagu, sent by his brother Möngke, the Great Khan, to bring western Asia under Mongol rule, led a large army west.

Hulagu demanded that the caliph, al-Musta'sim, submit. The caliph declined. The Mongol army reached Baghdad in late January 1258 and surrounded the city. After about twelve days the city surrendered, on 10 February.

What followed was among the great disasters of Islamic history. The Mongols sacked Baghdad for several days. A large part of the population was killed, and estimates of the number vary widely. Libraries, colleges and mosques were damaged or destroyed, and many books were lost. The caliph was executed. One of Baghdad's finest colleges, the Mustansiriyya, had opened in the 1230s, and part of the building still stands. Yet the city never again held the place it had held under al-Mansur and Harun.

The Abbasid line did not end entirely. In 1260 the Mamluks of Egypt defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut in Palestine. A year later their sultan, Baybars, welcomed a man of the Abbasid family to Cairo and recognised him as caliph. The Abbasid caliphs of Cairo held a ceremonial role for about two and a half centuries, until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517.

Learning also survived. In 1259 Hulagu supported a new observatory at Maragha, in north-western Iran, under the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Scholars carried their books and their students to Cairo, Damascus and elsewhere. Cities that had once learned from Baghdad now taught others.

The palaces fell, but the books and the students kept travelling.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture Al MuqaddimahHow did the Abbasid Caliphate Collapse? (opens on YouTube)

The mapWhere it happened

• Samarra
• Baghdad
• Manzikert
• Maragha
• Ain Jalut
• Cairo

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter