Baghdad Falls: Mongols End Abbasid Caliphate
Hulagu Khan's Mongol army breached Baghdad's walls on February 10, 1258, after a siege of just twelve days. What followed was one of history's most devastating sackings. The Abbasid Caliph al-Musta'sim was executed by being rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses, a method that avoided spilling royal blood, which the Mongols considered taboo. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 200,000 to over a million. The Mongols destroyed the House of Wisdom, the greatest library in the Islamic world, throwing so many books into the Tigris that the river reportedly ran black with ink for days. Irrigation canals that had sustained Mesopotamian agriculture for millennia were systematically destroyed. Baghdad, which had been the intellectual and cultural capital of the Islamic world for five centuries, never recovered its former prominence. The sacking marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age and shifted the center of Islamic power permanently westward to Cairo.
February 10, 1258
768 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on February 10
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