At a glance
Era 6- Dates
- c. 1217-1265 CE; Ilkhan 1256-1265 CE
- Who
- Grandson of Genghis Khan who sacked Baghdad and founded the Mongol Ilkhanate in Iran
- Era
- The Mongols & the Mamluks
ProfileHulagu Khan
Hulagu was a grandson of Genghis Khan, the son of Tolui and of Sorghaghtani Beki, a Christian princess of the Kereit. In 1251 his elder brother Mongke became Great Khan and gave him a vast task: to bring every power between Iran and Egypt under Mongol rule. Hulagu set out with one of the largest armies the Mongols ever gathered, and Christian troops from Armenia and Georgia joined him on the way. His chief wife, Doquz Khatun, was also a Christian, while he himself kept to the old Mongol beliefs and leaned toward Buddhism.
He first destroyed the Nizari Ismailis of Iran, taking their fortress of Alamut in 1256. Then he turned on Baghdad. When the caliph al-Musta'sim refused to submit, Hulagu besieged the city, and after its surrender in February 1258 his army sacked it, killed a great part of its people and put the caliph to death. In 1260 he took Aleppo and Damascus.
News of Mongke's death drew him back east, and he left his general Kitbuqa in Syria with a smaller force. In September 1260 the Mamluks of Egypt, led by Sultan Qutuz with Baibars at the head of the vanguard, destroyed that force at Ain Jalut. Hulagu never took his revenge, because his cousin Berke, the Muslim khan of the Golden Horde, who had condemned the killing of the caliph, went to war with him.
Hulagu ruled Iran and Iraq as Ilkhan, and his descendants held them for about eighty years. He also paid for an observatory at Maragha for the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. He died in 1265. Thirty years later his great-grandson Ghazan became a Muslim, and the Ilkhans ruled as Muslims from then on.
Meet them inWhere they appear on the road
Further reading
SourcesSources for this profile
The books, lectures and maps behind this page are listed on our Sources page.