The fall of Baghdad (1258)

Part oneHulagu marches west

In 1251 Mongke became Great Khan. In 1255 he gave his brother Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, a task: to bring under Mongol rule every power left between Iran and the Mediterranean. Hulagu took a great army west. Several Christian kingdoms of the region, among them Armenia and Georgia, sent troops to help him.

His first target was the Nizari Ismailis, the group known in the West as the Assassins, who held a chain of mountain fortresses in Iran, the most famous of them at Alamut. One after another the fortresses surrendered or fell, and the Nizari state came to an end. Then Hulagu turned toward Iraq.

The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad was al-Musta'sim, who had ruled since 1242. The caliphate he led was old and honoured, but it had long been weak. For two centuries real power had been held by others, first the Buyids and then the Seljuk sultans, and the caliph's own army was small. Some of his advisers urged him to submit, others to resist. He did neither with any strength. When Hulagu demanded that he come out and surrender, the caliph sent back a refusal but made few preparations to fight.

Part twoThe siege

Early in 1258 the Mongol army reached Baghdad and surrounded it on both banks of the Tigris. The Mongols had brought siege engineers from China and Persia. They built a wall and ditch around the city, broke dykes to flood the caliph's army camped outside, and battered the walls with catapults. The siege lasted about twelve days. In February 1258, in the year 656 AH, al-Musta'sim came out and surrendered.

The surrender did not save the city. The Mongols entered and plundered it for many days. One account gives the sack as lasting forty days. Estimates of the dead run from 200,000 to 800,000. Nobody can know the real number, but every account agrees that it was very large. The libraries of Baghdad, with books and manuscripts gathered over five centuries, were destroyed, and so was the House of Wisdom. The caliph was put to death, and with him most of his family.

The news ran through the Muslim world. Baghdad had been the capital of the caliphs since al-Mansur laid out the Round City in 762. Within about forty years the Mongols had broken four great Muslim dynasties: the Khwarazmshahs, the Seljuks, the Abbasids in Baghdad and soon the Ayyubids of Syria. Hulagu went on to control Iraq and much of the Middle East, and in 1260 his armies took Aleppo and Damascus.

Part threeWhat the fall meant

Some Muslims read the fall as a judgement. Others looked for meaning in what followed. One view, held by some later scholars, was that God had taken the leadership of Islam from the weakened Abbasid state and given it to the Turks, who would rebuild the strength of the Muslims in Egypt, in India and later in Anatolia.

There was another surprise. Not every Mongol was pleased. Berke, a grandson of Genghis Khan who ruled in the north and had become a Muslim, was angry when he heard that the caliph had been killed. By one account he told his followers that Hulagu had sacked the cities of the Muslims and caused the death of the caliph without consulting his kinsmen, and that he would call him to account for so much innocent blood. The bitterness between the two cousins would soon turn into war.

Baghdad never again held the place it had held before. With the city ruined, the centre of the Muslim world moved, almost by default, to Cairo. Survivors of the Abbasid family fled there, and within a few years an Abbasid caliph was again named in the Friday sermon, this time under the protection of the Mamluk sultans.

The city of the caliphs fell after a siege of about twelve days, and its libraries went with it.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Alamut
• Hamadan
• Baghdad
• Aleppo
• Damascus

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.

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