The World полностью

Hulagu marched west with 100,000 men (each with two slaves, five horses and thirty sheep), a corps of Chinese siege engineers with 1,000 mangonels, possibly gunpowder bombardiers with thundercrash bombs – and new allies, Christian princes and knights from Antioch, Georgia and Armenia, eager to destroy the caliphate. This horde of men was accompanied by a horde of pathogens. Hulagu brought his own food supplies – huge quantities of grain, escorted by rats, and dried meats, including cured marmot. New research suggests that this was the moment the Black Death transferred from the east, a century earlier than the previously accepted date.

The khan crushed Transoxiana, then besieged the Assassins in their eyrie of Alamut. In November 1256, the Assassin imam, Rukn ad-Din, surrendered. One of Hulagu’s Persian aides, Ata-Malik Juvaini, whose father had served the Khwarizmian shah and then Genghis, encouraged the burning of the library, but the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi explained that Assassin theology did not depend on books. Hulagu spared the library. As for Rukn, he was wrapped in a carpet, then hoof-stomped to pulp. Hulagu concluded by ordering the assassination of 12,000 Assassins.^*

On 22 January 1258, Hulagu encircled Baghdad, having warned the caliph that ‘Humiliation by the grace of Tengri has overtaken the dynasties of Khwarizm, Seljuk, Daylam [Assassins], yet the gates of Baghdad were never closed to them. How then should entry be closed to us who possess such power? Once I lead my forces to Baghdad in righteous anger … I will bring you crashing down from the summit of the sky. I won’t leave a single person alive.’

‘Young man,’ retorted the Abbasiya caliph al-Musta’sim (who was forty-five to Hulagu’s thirty-eight, ‘you who have barely started your career and are drunk on a ten-day success, believing yourself ruler of the world, don’t you know that from the east to the Maghreb all worshippers of Allah are slaves to my court?’ Hulagu ordered his paladin, Kitbuqa, a Christian, to rain rocks, bombs and naphtha on to Baghdad, which was soon blazing, while they destroyed the dykes, flooding the countryside. When the city fell, Hulagu’s Christian wife Doquz, cousin of his mother Sorqaqtani, persuaded him to spare Christians, but his allies the Georgians took special pleasure in killing Muslims.

On 10 February 1258, the caliph arrived at Hulagu’s ordu to surrender. Hulagu drove out all Baghdad’s inhabitants. Outside the wall, Baghdadis were slaughtered – some sources claim 800,000 were killed; Hulagu himself boasted of 200,000 – and the Mongols looted Baghdad ‘like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves or raging wolves attacking sheep, with loose reins and shameless faces, cutting with knives any cushions and beds of gold encrusted with jewels, dragging veiled girls from the harem through the streets to become their playthings’, burning mosques and hospitals, shattering the Abbasiya tombs, though much of al-Mamun’s library was saved by the bibliophile hero Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Hulagu held court in the Octagon Palace where at a victory banquet he menaced the broken caliph: ‘You’re the host, we’re your guests. Bring us whatever you have.’ Al-Musta’sim opened his treasure chests. ‘Now tell my servants,’ ordered Hulagu ‘where your hidden treasures are.’ Al-Musta’sim revealed gold hidden in an ornamental pool. Then the caliph and his sons were rolled up in carpets and stomped to death by horses.^* It was not only Hulagu killing people. His camp in Baghdad was now hit by a mysterious epidemic, scarcely recorded amid the murderous mayhem, but it flared up too at his other sieges.

Leaving his Iranian epigone Juvaini to rebuild Baghdad, Hulagu galloped into Syria, meeting his Hauteville ally Bohemond VI le Beau, the twenty-one-year-old prince of Antioch, and his father-in-law King Hethum of Cilician Armenia, a small Christian kingdom, who joined his horde and helped capture Aleppo and Homs. Inspired by his Frankish friends, Hulagu punished a Turkish warlord who had crucified a Christian: the man was bisected while being forced to eat his own body.

It is hard to grasp the tragedy of Hulagu’s depredations, but a witness, a Persian poet called Saadi, talked to Arab soldiers and recorded in his masterpiece Bustan what it was like to fight the khan: ‘From the raining of arrows descending like hail, the storm of death arose on all sides,’ unleashed by the attacking Mongols, who resembled ‘a pack of leopards, as strong as elephants. The heads of the warriors were encased in iron, so were the horses’ hoofs.’^*

In March 1260, Mongol marshal Kitbuqa rode into Damascus, accompanied by Beau Bohemond and King Hethum, who joyously held mass in the former St John’s, now Great Mosque. As Hulagu’s cavalry took Nablus and reached Gaza, the fulfilment of the Crusader dream of Christian Jerusalem and the Mongol conquest of Egypt seemed inevitable.

I WISH I WERE DUST: THE SLAVE KING AND THE LAST HAUTEVILLE