The Mongol Sack of Baghdad

The armies of Hulagu destroy Baghdad and end the Abbasid caliphate there, a wound remembered across the Muslim world.

In the first weeks of 1258 the Mongol army besieged and destroyed the City of Peace. Libraries were cast into the Tigris, and the river was said to run dark with ink. Yet the story did not end: scholarship migrated to Cairo, Damascus and beyond, and within a generation many Mongol rulers themselves entered Islam.