mongo PRESENTATION

MONGOLS

1200s

• Nomadic horsemen
• Central Europe - Korea - India
• Terror

How to build the world's largest empire?

Avoid fighting, capitulate to the Mongols and join the Mongol army in their continued campaign of conquest.

Resistance: if the city resisted the Mongols and lost (as most cities did), its entire garrison would be put to the sword and the city looted.

Mass resistance to the Mongols, by both the city’s armed garrison and civilians.

KHWAREZMIAN EMPIRE

The Sack of Bukhara

- Persia, Iraq and Syria- Bukhara - Ancient Balkh; library - Modern-day Iran and Afghanistan - Massacred 1.7 million people in Nishapur and over 2 million people in Herat

Ögedei Khan

Europe: 1237 - 1241

Muslim world

The Khwarezmian Empire

Mongol army

The Abbasid caliphate

VS

Leader: Hulagu

The Ayyubid Dynasty--> Mamluks Sultanate

100,000 +

Christian Europe + Christian Armenia + Crusader states

BAGHDAD- capital of the caliphate since 750

Never before in Islamic history had the caliphate itself fallen, or had the capital been taken (10 Feb 1258)

CASUALTIES

Baghdad's entire Muslim population, 200,000 to 1 million, was killed.

House of Wisdom books were dumped into the Tigris River, the ink from hundreds of years of scholarship turning the river black.

1000s of works on math, science, geography, history, theology and fiqh were lost forever.

It would seem that nothing was going to stop the Mongols from moving south into Egypt, destroying Islamic civilization there, and effectively erasing Islam from the world just as fast as it rose 600 years before.

The young Mamluk Sultanate halted the Mongol advance in 1260 in northern Palestine.