At Alamut the Assassins kept a great
library full of works on philosophy and the occult sciences. Hulagu sent his Moslem
Chamberlain, Ata al-Mulk Juveni to inspect it. Juveni set aside the Korans that
he found, as well as books of scientific and historical value. The heretical
works were burnt. By a strange coincidence there was about the same time a
great fire, caused by lightning, in the city of Medina, and its library, which
had the greatest collection of works on orthodox Moslem philosophy, was totally
destroyed.
After the Assassins had been wiped out in
Persia, Hulagu and the Mongol host moved against the headquarters of orthodox
Islam at Baghdad. The Caliph al-Mustasim, the thirty-seventh ruler of the
Abbasid dynasty and son of the Caliph al-Mustansir by an Ethiopian slave, had
hoped to revive the power and prestige of his throne. Since the collapse of the
Khwarismians the Caliphate had been its own master, and the rivalry between
Cairo and Damascus enabled the Caliph to behave as the arbiter of Islam. But,
though he surrounded himself with pomp and ceremony, al-Mustasim was a weak and
foolish man, whose main interest was his personal amusement. His court was torn
by a feud between his vizier, the Shia Muwaiyad ad-Din, and his secretary, the
Sunni Aibeg, who had the support of the heir to the throne. Baghdad was
strongly fortified, and the Caliph could call upon a large army. His cavalry
alone numbered 120,000. But it depended on military benefices; and al-Mustasim
did not trust his vassals. He therefore followed his vizier’s advice to reduce
the army and spend the money thus economized on a voluntary tribute to the Mongols
which would keep them away. Such a policy of appeasement was hardly likely to
succeed, even were it consistently carried out. But when Hulagu replied by
demanding suzerain rights over the Caliphate, Aibeg’s influence was in the
ascendant; and the suggestion was haughtily refused.
Hulagu approached the campaign with some
trepidation. His astrologers were not all of them encouraging; and he feared
treachery from his own Moslem vassals and the intervention of the rulers of
Damascus and Egypt. But his precautions against treason were effective; and no
one came to the rescue of Baghdad. Meanwhile his own army was strengthened by
the arrival of the contingent from the Golden Horde and the army that Baichu
had kept for the last decade on the borders of Anatolia, and by a regiment of
Georgian cavalry, eager to strike against the infidel capital.
At the end of 1257 the Mongol army moved
down from its base at Hamadan. Baichu with his troops crossed the Tigris at
Mosul and marched down the west bank. Kitbuqa and the left wing entered the
plain of Iraq due east of the capital while Hulagu and the centre advanced
through Kermanshah. The Caliph’s main army started out under Aibeg to meet
Hulagu, when it heard of Baichu’s approach from the north-west. Aibeg recrossed
the Tigris, and, on ii January 1258, he came upon the Mongols near Anbar, about
thirty miles from Baghdad. Baichu feigned to retreat and so lured the Arabs
into a low marshy terrain. He sent engineers to cut the dykes of the Euphrates
behind them. Next day the battle was renewed. Aibeg’s army was driven back into
the flooded fields. Only Aibeg himself and his bodyguard managed to escape
through the waters to Baghdad. The bulk of his troops perished on the
battlefield. The survivors fled into the desert and dispersed.
1258: The Mongols sack Baghdad
On 18 January Hulagu appeared before the
east walls of Baghdad, and by the 22nd the city was completely invested, with
bridges of boats constructed across the Tigris just above and just below the
city walls. Baghdad lay on both sides of the river. The western city, which had
contained the palace of the earlier Caliphs, was now less important than the
eastern, where the government buildings were concentrated. It was against the
eastern walls that the Mongols made their heaviest attacks. Al-Mustasim began to
lose hope. At the end of January he sent the vizier, who had always advocated
peace with the Mongols, together with the Nestorian Patriarch, who, he hoped,
might intercede with Dokuz Khatun, to try to treat with Hulagu. They were sent
back without obtaining an audience. After a terrible bombardment during the
first week of February, the eastern wall began to collapse. On 10 February when
Mongol troops were already swarming into the city, the Caliph emerged and
surrendered himself to Hulagu, together with all the chief officers of the army
and officials of the state. They were ordered to lay down their arms and then
were massacred. Only the Caliph’s life was spared until Hulagu entered the city
and the palace on is February. After he had revealed to his conqueror the
hiding-place of all his treasure, he too was put to death. Meanwhile massacres
continued throughout the whole city. Those that surrendered quickly and those
that fought on were alike slain. Women and children perished with their men.
One Mongol found in a side-street forty new-born babies whose mothers were
dead. As an act of mercy he slaughtered them, knowing that they could not
survive with no one to suckle them. The Georgian troops, who had been the first
to break through the walls, were particularly fierce in their destruction. In
forty days some eighty thousand citizens of Baghdad were slain. The only
survivors were a few lucky folk whose hiding-places in cellars were not
discovered, and a number of attractive girls and boys who were kept to be
slaves, and the Christian community, which took refuge in the churches and was
left undisturbed, by the special orders of Dokuz Khatun.
By the end of March the stench of decaying
corpses in the city was such that Hulagu withdrew his troops for fear of pestilence.
Many of them left with regret, believing that there were still objects of value
to be found there. But Hulagu now possessed the vast treasure accumulated by
the Abbasid Caliphs through five centuries. After sending a handsome proportion
to his brother Mongka, he retired by easy stages back to Hamadan, and thence
into Azerbaijan, where he built a strong castle at Shaha, on the shore of Lake
Urmiah, as a storehouse for all his gold and precious metals and jewels. He
left as governor of Baghdad the former vizier, Muwaiyad, who was closely
supervised by Mongol officials. The Nestorian Patriarch, Makika, was given rich
endowments and a former royal palace as his residence and church. The city was
gradually cleaned and tidied, and forty years later it was a prosperous
provincial town, a tenth of its former size.
News of the destruction of Baghdad made a
deep impression throughout Asia. The Asiatic Christians everywhere rejoiced.
They wrote in triumph of the fall of the Second Babylon and. hailed Hulagu and
Dokuz Khatun as the new Constantine and Helena, God’s instruments for vengeance
on the enemies of Christ. To the Moslems it was a ghastly shock and a
challenge. The Abbasid Caliphate had for centuries been shorn of much material
power, but its moral prestige was still great. The elimination of the dynasty
and the capital left the leadership of Islam vacant, for any ambitious Moslem
leader to seize. The Christian satisfaction was short-lived. It was not long
before Islam conquered its conquerors. But the unity of the Moslem world had
suffered a blow from which it could never recover. The fall of Baghdad,
following half a century after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, put an end
for ever to that old balanced dyarchy between Byzantium and the Caliphate under
which Near Eastern humanity had flourished for so long. The Near East was never
again to dominate civilization.
1259: The Mongols enter Syria
After the destruction of Baghdad Hulagu
turned his attention to Syria. The first step was to strengthen the Mongol hold
over the Jezireh and in particular to repress the Ayubite prince of
Mayyafaraqin, al-Kamil, who refused to accept Mongol suzerainty and had gone so
far as to crucify a Jacobite priest who had visited him as Hulagu’s envoy. Before
he left his encampment near Maragha Hulagu received envoys from many states.
The old Atabeg of Mosul, Badr ad-Din Lulu, came to apologize for past misdeeds.
The two Seldjuk Sultans, sons of Kaikhosrau, Kaikaus II and Kilij Arslan IV,
arrived soon afterwards. The former, who had opposed Baichu in 1256, vainly
tried to placate Hulagu by fulsome flattery which shocked the Mongols. Finally
an-Nasir Yusuf, ruler of Aleppo and Damascus, sent his own son, al-Aziz, to pay
humble duty to the conqueror. Mayyafaraqin was besieged and captured early in 1260,
largely thanks to the help of Hulagu’s Georgian and Armenian allies. The
Moslems were massacred and the Christians spared. Al-Kamil was tortured by
being forced to eat his own flesh till he died.
In September 1259, Hulagu led the Mongol
army out for the conquest of north-west Syria. Kitbuqa led the van, Baichu the
right wing, another favourite general, Sunjak, the left, while Hulagu himself
commanded the centre. He advanced through Nisibin, Harran and Edessa to
Birejik, where he crossed the Euphrates. Saruj attempted to resist him, and was
sacked. Early in the new year the Mongol army closed in round Aleppo. As its
garrison refused to surrender, the city was invested on 18 January. The Sultan
an-Nasir Yusuf was at Damascus when the storm broke. He had hoped that the
presence of his son at Hulagu’s camp would avert the danger. When he found that
he was wrong, he made the still more humiliating move of offering to accept the
suzerainty of the Mameluks of Egypt. They promised him help, but were in no
hurry to provide it. In the meantime he gathered an army outside Damascus, and
summoned his cousins of Hama and Kerak to his aid. But while he waited there
some of his Turkish officers began to plot against him. He discovered their
plans in time; and they fled to Egypt, taking with them one of his brothers.
Their defection so weakened his army that he gave up all hope of going to the
rescue of Aleppo.
Aleppo was bravely defended by an-Nasir
Yusuf’s uncle, Turanshah; but after six days of bombardment the walls crumbled
and the Mongols poured into the town. As elsewhere, the Moslem citizens were
given over to be massacred and the Christians spared, apart from some of the
Orthodox whose church had not been recognized in the heat of the carnage. The
citadel held out for four more weeks under Turanshah. When at last it fell
Hulagu showed himself to be unexpectedly clement. Turanshah was spared because
of his age and his bravery, and his suite was untouched. A vast horde of
treasure fell into the conqueror’s hands. Hulagu allotted Aleppo to the former
Emir of Horns, al-Ashraf, who had had the foresight to come as a client to the
Mongol camp a few months before. Mongol advisers and a Mongol garrison were provided
to keep him in control.
1260: The Fall of Damascus
The fortress of Harenc, on the road from
Aleppo to Antioch, next had to be punished for refusing to surrender unless
Hulagu’s word was guaranteed by a Moslem. When it had been captured with the
usual massacre, Hulagu came to the frontier of Antioch. The King of Armenia and
his son-in-law the Prince of Antioch visited his camp to pay him homage.
Hethoum had already provided him with auxiliaries and had been rewarded with
some of the spoil from Aleppo, while the Seldjuk princes had been ordered to
retrocede to him their father’s conquests in Cilicia. Bohemond was also
rewarded for his deference. Various towns and forts that had belonged to the
Moslems since Saladin’s day, including Lattakieh, were given back to the
Principality. In return, Bohemond was required to install the Greek Patriarch,
Euthymius, in his capital in place of the Latin. Though King Hethoum was not
well disposed towards the Greeks, Hulagu understood the importance of their
element at Antioch. It is possible that his friendly relations with the Emperor
at Nicaea gave him a further inducement.
To the Latins at Acre Bohemond’s
subservience seemed disgraceful, especially as it involved the humiliation of
the Latin Church at Antioch. Venetian influence was still paramount in the
kingdom, and the Venetians were on good commercial terms again with Egypt.
Their interest depended on the trade from the Far East travelling by the
southern route, up the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. They watched with growing
concern the Mongol caravan routes across central Asia to the Black Sea, where
the Genoese, with their alliance with the Greeks, were strengthening their
control. The government at Acre looked round for a lay protector. It was known
that Charles of Anjou, the French King’s brother, had Mediterranean ambitions
and was already intriguing for the Sicilian throne. An anxious letter was sent
in May 1260, to describe the dangers of the Mongol advance and to beg him to
intervene.
By the time that the letter was written,
the Mongols were masters of Damascus. The Sultan an-Nasir Yusuf made no attempt
to defend his capital. On the news of the fall of Aleppo and the approach of a
Mongol army he fled to Egypt, to take refuge with the Mameluks, then changed
his mind and was captured by the Mongols as he rode northward again. Hama sent
a delegation to Hulagu in February 1260, offering him the keys of the city. A
few days later the notables of Damascus followed suit. On 1 March Kitbuqa
entered Damascus at the head of a Mongol army. With him were the King of
Armenia and the Prince of Antioch. The citizens of the ancient capital of the
Caliphate saw for the first time for six centuries three Christian potentates
ride in triumph through their streets. The citadel held out against the
invaders for a few weeks, but was reduced on 6 April.
With the three great cities of Baghdad,
Aleppo, and Damascus fallen it seemed that the end of Islam in Asia had
arrived. In Damascus, as everywhere else in western Asia, the Mongol conquest
meant the resurgence of the local Christians. Kitbuqa, as a Christian himself,
made no secret of his sympathies. For the first time since the seventh century
the Moslems of inner Syria found themselves a repressed minority. They burned
for revenge.