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Mongol Invasion / Il-Khan Empire

In the later years of the 12th century the Mongols began their westward march and, after the conquest of the ancient the territory of the Khwarizm shahs, which was at once overwhelmed. In the early years of the thirteenth century, a powerful Mongol leader named Temujin brought together a majority of the Mongol tribes and led them on a devastating sweep through China. At about this time, he changed his name to Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, meaning "World Conqueror." In 1219 he turned his force of 700,000 west and quickly devastated Bokhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Merv (all in what was later the Soviet Union), and Neyshabur (in present-day Iran), where he slaughtered every living thing. Before his death in 1227, Chinnggis Khan, pillaging and burning cities along the way, had reached western Azarbaijan in Iran.

Jenghiz Khan brought his army into the Islamic territory, and commencing with Turkestan the Mongols subjugated it, marching westward. They went from city to city, slaughtering, plundering, burning, demolishing, leaving in their rear nothing but heaps of ruins, after a fashion unexampled in the history of mankind. And the Mongol hordes acted very differently from the Arab hordes. The latter spared the countries which they conquered, giving security and protection, to the inhabitants and imitating their culture, and adding to it a culture of their own ; whereas the Mongols had no idea save to slaughter and plunder like savage beasts. There is no occasion to dilate in this place on the career of Jenghiz Khan ; it need only be said in general that he was able in his lifetime to found an empire of a size which had been attained by no conqueror either before or after him, not excepting Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Nadirshah, or Napoleon Bonaparte. He founded an empire stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea, and comprising millions of Chinese, Tanguts, Afghans, Indians, Persians, Turks, and others.

After his death his empire was partitioned between his sons after the custom of the Mongols at that time, on the theory that the empire being his it was to be divided between his descendants like the rest of his goods. It was therefore split into four, which four divisions were afterwards yet further subdivided.

After Chinggis's death, the area enjoyed a brief respite that ended with the arrival of Hulagu Khan (1217-65), Chinggis's grandson. The empire of the Ilkhans established by Hulagu lasted nominally until 1353, but after the death of the Ilkhan Abu Said in 1335 the real power was divided between five petty dynasties which had been formed out of the provinces conquered by Hulagu. After the death in 1335 of the last great Mongol khan, Abu Said (also known as Bahadur the Brave), a period of political confusion ensued in Iraq until a local petty dynasty, the Jalayirids, seized power.

Hulagu son of Tuli son of Jenghiz Khan, who obtained some fiefs in his father's kingdom, of which he made himself independent ruler, and took possession of Fars in AH 654. His dynasty there is known as the dynasty of the Ilkhans, or Mongols of Persia. He began by appropriating the relics of the empire of the Khwarizmshahs in Persia, and then ventured on an exploit which none of his predecessors had attempted. When settled on his throne in Persia he attacked Baghdad.

The cause of this was that the rivalry between the Sunnis and Shi'i's in Baghdad broke out afresh at the end of the 'Abbasid dynasty, and not a year passed without the occurrence of a battle between the two factions calling for the interference of the Government. And since the Government was Sunnf, the pressure ordinarily fell on the Shf'ites, who dwelt together in Karkh, having to endure persecution. Meanwhile the Government continued to entrust members of the faction with important offices, even of an administrative character. The Caliph of Hulagu's time, Al-Musta'sim, appointed in 640. was a weak man, and took for his vizier a Shf'ite named Mu'ayyid al-dfn Ibn al-'Alkami, a crafty and astute individual.

One of the ordinary disputes taking place between the two factions, a son of the Caliph named Abu Bakr, who was a fanatical hater of the Shi'ites, called in the aid of the commander of the forces (called the Dawadar), and ordered an attack to be made on the Shi'ites ; an assault was then made on Karkh, when many women were outraged. The Vizier Ibn al-'Alkamf, indignant at this and unable to restrain his wrath, wrote privately to Hulagu, tempting him with the prize of Baghdad, and sent his brother to urge him to attack the metropolis. Hulagu accordingly brought a great army against Baghdad. Musta'sim, hearing of this, sent against Hulagu under the Dawadar such forces as remained in Baghdad, not exceeding 20,000 men. The two armies met at two stages distance from Baghdad, and the army of the Caliph was defeated and dispersed.

In 1258 Hulagu advanced till he encamped on the eastern bank of Baghdad, and sent one of his captains to encamp on the west bank opposite the Caliph's palace. Musta'sim, having no idea of the schemes of Ibn al-'Alkamf, sent him to make an inquiry concerning terms of peace with Hulagu, and Ibn al-'Alkamf brought his schemes to a head by replying that Hulagu meant to leave the Caliphate to Musta'sim and give his daughter to the Caliph's son Abu Bakr. The Caliph thereupon went out to Hulagu with a number of his chief men ; these were all bidden to remain in a tent. The vizier then demanded that all the jurists and notables of Baghdad should be gathered there, and when they appeared Hulagu ordered them to be slain.

They then let the soldiers loose in Baghdad, attacked the Caliph's palace, and slew all the nobility to be found there, except infants, whom they took and placed with the other prisoners and captives. For forty days Baghdad was pillaged, and then an amnesty was proclaimed. The year in which Hulagu took Baghdad was 656. The 'Abbasid Caliph thus departed from 'Irak through the machinations of the 'Alid faction, as Mansur, Mahdi, and Rashfd had feared, who for fear of such a catastrophe had overthrown their viziers and commanders. The 'Abbasid Caliphate was not completely extinguished, as those members of the imperial family who escaped from Hulagu's massacre migrated to Egypt, where they lived under the protection of the Mamluk Sultans.

While in Baghdad, Hulagu made a pyramid of the skulls of Baghdad's scholars, religious leaders, and poets, and he deliberately destroyed what remained of Iraq's canal headworks. The material and artistic production of centuries was swept away. Iraq became a neglected frontier province ruled from the Mongol capital of Tabriz in Iran.

After Hulagu had taken the capital of the Islamic world he aspired to conquer the regions beyond, and attacked Syria, which was under the protection of the Mamluk Sultans after the fall of the Ayyiibid dynasty. They succeeded in repelling him, and he had to be satisfied with what was already in his grasp. His empire indeed extended from Syria to India ; he left it to his children, but before a century had passed over it his dynasty terminated (654-750). It split into small principalities, which were in a disturbed and decayed condition.

Islam had made great progress among the Mongols, the third Ilkhan, Nikudar Ahmed (reigned 1281-1284) having embraced that faith. The western frontiers of their empire bordering on the Syrian possessions of Egypt there was frequent intercourse, sometimes friendly, sometimes warlike, between the Ilkhans and the sultans of Egypt. Of the petty dynasties which supplanted that of Hulagu, one known as the Jelairids held Bagdad until about 1400. Another dynasty which reigned in Azerbaijan was overthrown in 1355 by the western Kipchaks. Between 1369 and 1400 Timur made himself masler of the greater part of Persia and established there a second Mongol dynasty, which in turn gave place to that of the Ak Kuyunli.

After the death in 1335 of the last great Mongol khan, Abu Said (also known as Bahadur the Brave), a period of political confusion ensued in Iraq until a local petty dynasty, the Jalayirids, seized power. The Jalayirids ruled until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jalayirid rule was abruptly checked by the rising power of a Mongol, Tamerlane (or Timur the Lame, 1336-1405), who had been atabeg of the reigning prince of Samarkand. In 1401 he sacked Baghdad and massacred many of its inhabitants. Tamerlane killed thousands of Iraqis and devastated hundreds of towns. Like Hulagu, Tamerlane had a penchant for building pyramids of skulls. Despite his showy display of Sunni piety, Tamerlane's rule virtually extinguished Islamic scholarship and Islamic arts everywhere except in his capital, Samarkand.

In Iraq, political chaos, severe economic depression, and social disintegration followed in the wake of the Mongol invasions. Baghdad, long a center of trade, rapidly lost its commercial importance. Basra, which had been a key transit point for seaborne commerce, was circumvented after the Portuguese discovered a shorter route around the Cape of Good Hope. In agriculture, Iraq's once-extensive irrigation system fell into disrepair, creating swamps and marshes at the edge of the delta and dry, uncultivated steppes farther out. The rapid deterioration of settled agriculture led to the growth of tribally based pastoral nomadism. By the end of the Mongol period, the focus of Iraqi history had shifted from the urbanbased Abbasid culture to the tribes of the river valleys, where it would remain until well into the twentieth century.

The state of ruin to which Baghdad was reduced by the Mongol sack is clearly indicated, half a century later, in the Mardsid, an epitome of Yakut's Geographical Dictionary, which was composed about the year 700 (a.d. 1300) by an anonymous author. This book gives a summary of the facts detailed in the more voluminous work ; but in addition, the epitomist, when treating of places personally known to him, constantly supplies emendations for correcting Yakut, and states how matters stood in his own day. Hence, though primarily only an epitome of a compilation, the Mardsid has for Baghdad and Mesopotamia the value of an authority at first hand. The author's description of Baghdad city is graphic and terse. After referring to the ruin brought about by a long succession of plundering armies-Persian, Turk, and Mongol-each of which had in turn wasted the goods and houses of the former inhabitants, he concludes with the following paragraph :- "Hence nothing now remains of Western Baghdad but some few isolated quarters, of which the best inhabited is Karkh; while in Eastern Baghdad, all having long ago gone to ruin in the Shammasiyah Quarter and the Mukharrim, they did build a wall round such of the city as remained, this same lying along the bank of the Tigris. Thus matters continued until the Tatars (under Hulagu) came, when the major part of this remnant also was laid in ruin, and its inhabitants were all put to death, hardly one surviving to recall the excellence of the past. And then there came in people from the countryside, who settled in Baghdad, seeing that its own citizens had all perished; so the city now is indeed other than it was, its population in our time being wholly changed from its former state - but Allah, be He exalted, ordaineth all."

The Mongols founded no permanent dynasty on Islamic territory, and had no influence on Islamic civilization; their only connexion with Islamic civilization was that when the Islamic Empire was in its last stage of weakness and decline, owing to the incursions of Franks, Georgians, Armenians, and Alani, they, the Mongols, came and weakened it still further, and removed the last relics of the 'Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. They then went home, leaving the Islamic Empire in articulo mortis, being all dispersed, without any living dynasty capable of combining the elements. This task, however, was accomplished by the Ottoman dynasty in the second Turkish period, and the dynasty of the Shahs of Persia in the second Persian period, and these empires compose the second period in the history of Islam.