At a glance
Era 3- Dates
- 1213-1258 CE; caliph 1242-1258 CE
- Who
- The thirty-seventh and last Abbasid caliph to reign in Baghdad
- Era
- The Abbasids & the Golden Age
ProfileAl-Musta'sim
Abdullah al-Musta'sim was born in 1213 and became caliph in 1242, on the death of his father, al-Mustansir. He inherited an ancient and honoured office whose real power had long been limited. The caliphs of the previous half-century had won back control of Iraq, but the state was small, its army was weak, and the Muslim world around it was divided.
Muslim historians remember him as a gentle and religious man, but weak and easily led, with advisers who could not agree on how to meet the danger from the east. The Mongols had already ruined the cities of Central Asia and Iran, and in the 1250s the Great Khan Mongke sent his brother Hulagu to bring the rest of western Asia under Mongol rule.
Hulagu called on the caliph to come out and submit. Al-Musta'sim refused and is said to have warned that the whole Muslim world would rise to defend its caliph, but he did little to prepare, and no help came. In January 1258 the Mongols surrounded Baghdad, broke the dykes to flood the caliph's army and battered the walls. On 10 February the caliph surrendered.
The city was sacked, a great number of its people were killed and its libraries were destroyed. About ten days later al-Musta'sim was put to death. Most accounts say he was rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses, so that no royal blood would touch the ground. Most of his sons died with him. Five hundred years of Abbasid rule in Baghdad were over.
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