by Dan Davis
Stephen was shaken by the whole terrible event and had faced certain death by the screaming Mongols all around him. It was indeed remarkable that he had survived but he did not forgive me for putting him in that situation nor, of course, for leaving him to die. I think that he also mourned Abdullah.
The Saracen had taken a Mongol axe in the top of his head, splitting his skull in two. I had never much liked the man, despite finding a grudging respect for him in time, yet I felt particularly guilty for his death. Despite being banished for a social impropriety, he had cared enough about his homeland, his city, his people, to stay and fight when he could have done anything else and many thousands of his countrymen had given up. After all his snivelling and complaining, the man had discovered an admirable moral core to his soul but thanks to my actions, he would never be able to develop further. At least he did not have to witness the complete annihilation of his city.
There was no doubt that the esteem in which Thomas held me had declined. The man was always reserved but his demeanour became rather cooler for quite some time. On the other hand, he was a man who well understood the importance of duty and the conflicts that could arise between one duty that clashed with another.
Hassan was deeply angered because he had lost Jalal, Radi, and Raka and all three had died in order to protect him, their master. Even so, Hassan had almost himself been cut down. I could well imagine that he cursed me and chastised himself for ever trusting a Frank like me but he silently seethed instead. It seemed likely that any night he would cut my throat in my sleep but Eva thought otherwise.
“He will very likely do it,” she said. “But not until we have killed Hulegu.”
Later, I found out what had happened in Baghdad after we escaped it.
The Christians who assembled in the Nestorian church and some of the foreign visitors were spared, but the Mohammedan population was subjected to almost complete extermination. The Christian soldiers from Georgia and Armenia took great joy in it, for killing Saracens was what God wanted. And no civilised man could contend otherwise.
When all in the city were dead, and all the wealth plundered, then the palaces and the mosques, the university and libraries, the homes and the markets, were set on fire. The contents of the Caliph’s treasure house were loaded into two vast wagon trains, with one sent to Mongke Khan in far-off Karakorum, and the other sent to a city called Maragha in the north of Persia where Hulegu would make his capital.
During the week of slaughter, Hulegu held a banquet with the Caliph in the palace itself. Hulegu pretended that the Caliph was the host and that Hulegu was the guest. He mocked the caliph for not using his treasure to pay soldiers to protect his city. For what was treasure worth if you could not keep it?
When the city was finally in ruins, the Caliph and his sons were sewn up in beautiful carpets and trampled to death beneath the hooves of the horses of Hulegu’s immortal retinue.
The Vizier, Abdullah’s uncle, was retained in his office and served the Mongols. He faced the impossible task of rebuilding the city. He began immediately and worked to the best of his ability for three months.
He attempted this task for three months only because then the Vizier died.
The Shiites said he died of a broken heart because his city had been destroyed. The Sunnites said it was due to the guilt and shame he felt at betraying his caliph, and that he could not live with that decision.
The truth is that I killed him myself.
Although my companions and I argued over the risks involved, ultimately, I believed it would be worth it. We crept back to the city after most of the armies had moved off to new pastures and slipped through the few Mongols that remained. After three months of plundering, there was nothing left to protect, so no one was guarding anything with any great dedication. The Mongol garrison troops within the city were spread out and living in half-demolished and burned palaces, carousing and drunk as lords all night and lying insensible in their own piss through the day. It was remarkably simple to avoid any trouble.
While the others guarded the approaches and held our horses ready for the escape, Hassan and I walked almost right up to the Vizier’s bedchambers before cutting down the armed servants who attempted to thwart us. Hassan had been angry for three months, since the deaths of his men. Angry at me for the failure of my Baghdad strategy, for my tactical errors and abandonment of them during the sacking, and he was angry at the world and at himself. He rejoiced in the killing of the Vizier’s men and I was glad that he was taking it out on them rather than me.
Letting ourselves into the enormous, marble room, the most powerful man in Baghdad fell to his knees before us, weeping and begging for his life.
“We are here for your treasury,” I told him and he told us all we needed to know about how to take it.
“God is greatest,” he said, praying through his tears.
“Was it worth it?” I asked him.
The Vizier seemed almost relieved when my dagger pierced his neck.
I drank a little from him and passed him to Hassan, who savagely sucked down the blood before tossing his body across an ornate couch. We were already long gone by the time anyone raised an alarm. Perhaps no one ever did.
The wealth that had been left to the vizier by the Mongols was in the form of gold, silver, and gem stones locked in the much-reduced treasure room to be used for rebuilding the city. All that treasure, we stole, packing it into bags shared between two dozen horses that we rode and led out from the ruins of Baghdad without being challenged once, nor even pursued.
A mercenary act on the face of it, perhaps, but I needed a large amount to buy horses and equipment, to find places for us to live, and to pay for slaves to serve us and to provide blood for my people. And I had to pay vast sums for information on the whereabouts and activities of Hulegu while we planned our assault on his palace and the final assassination of him and his men.
It took us seven years.
But then, in early AD 1265, we were ready for the final assault on Hulegu Khan and his immortals.
Part Six – Maragha ~ 1265
I was the first one to climb the border wall of Hulegu’s palace compound, my fingers clinging to the cracks between the dark stone in the black moonless night. The compound was within a city, and there were thousands of people in homes and in the streets all around us, and guards and servants within the palace walls. My weapons were wrapped tight so they could not make a sound, and I wore no armour. Dressed in a close-fitting tunic in the Persian style, with a rider’s trousers beneath and a Mongol hood and coat over it all, I was able to move swiftly in relative silence. Beneath me, hanging suspended from my belt, was a heavy sack and the sound that it made brushing against the stone as I climbed seemed loud enough to wake the dead. I prayed that it would alert no one, as the rest of my company scaled the wall behind me or waited their turn to mount the wall in the shadows below.
Years of planning and preparation had preceded my scaling of that wall, and I was just about as nervous as I had ever been in my life. It seemed to me that anyone within fifty feet would be able to hear the thumping of my heart and I had to remember to breathe in and out or else I would have suffocated myself from apprehension. I felt like a weak-kneed squire riding toward my first battle.
A chunk of mortar broke off beneath my fingers and I crashed against the wall, cursing under my breath. The sack I was carrying bounced off the wall and the contents jostled inside. From somewhere below, I heard the nervous hissing of my comrades.
Stealthiness had never been my forte. Always, I had been made for the direct approach and the intricacies and timings of our infiltration had me rattled. If the slightest thing went wrong, we would be assaulted on all sides by numbers that we could never hope to overcome. Gathering myself, I climbed on.
On the other hand, if everything went according to plan, then it would end in an orgy of tremendous violence all the same.
And that was something I was familiar with.
As m
y hands reached the top of the wall, I pulled myself up and peeked over into the cluster of service buildings with yellow lamplight glowing from windows and doors, and the marble mass of the grand palace itself.
It was quiet below and so I whistled faintly and listened as my companions began their climbs. Sliding over the top, dragging the sack carefully behind me, I slithered down into the shadows and waited for the others to join me.
How we came to be scaling that wall on a cold night in early 1265 involves an assassination, the Mongol Empire’s first great defeat, and a massive civil war.
***
So much had happened since Baghdad fell. So much had changed.
After sacking Baghdad and massacring its people, Hulegu Khan intended to go on and conquer the rest of the Mohammedan lands and then to subdue Anatolia and destroy Constantinople. Once that great bastion of civilisation on the edge of Europe was gone, there would be nothing stopping them pouring across Christendom all the way to the Atlantic coast. The knowledge of those plans, won through interrogation of captured soldiers and bribed merchants and diplomats, instilled in me both a terrible fear and a determination to stop the khan at all costs, even if it meant my own life. But I knew that I must be patient, for I would get only one chance to put an end to him and his men.
Hulegu left three thousand Mongols in Baghdad to rebuild it but without the Vizier in charge, they accomplished nothing. I had seen their greatest city, and Karakorum was a pathetic, barbarian place. For all the wealth they had plundered, for all the multitudes of engineers and artisans from civilised peoples that they had pressed into slavery for them, the Mongols remained incapable of building anything of note, let alone rebuilding the greatness and beauty of Baghdad. In fact, even a hundred years later it remained mostly a ruin. And the people living around the city could no longer even be supported, as the Mongols had destroyed the intricate irrigation systems around the city and they were never rebuilt. Armies bring diseases and eat up the land like locusts, and vile plagues and famine remained after the Mongols left.
Other Mohammedan princes witnessed this destruction of Baghdad from afar, and it certainly appeared as though they felt any resistance to the Mongols to be hopeless. After Baghdad, Hulegu led his armies north to Tabriz to regroup and the remaining princes of Syria and Anatolia came one by one to offer their submission. For a time, we intended to assault him there but he remained on a war footing, with hundreds of thousands of men surrounding him and so instead we watched and waited.
After a period of consolidation lasting almost a year, Hulegu resumed his advance, this time towards the coast and Aleppo. His immortal second in command, a Mongol lord named Kitbuqa, commanded the vanguard and Hulegu himself commanded the centre of three grand armies. On his way to the coast, Hulegu finally subdued upper Iraq, where there were still holdouts. The Mongols reached Aleppo in January 1260 and took the city in mere days, although the town's citadel held out for another month. In that campaign, Hulegu was assisted by the King of Lesser Armenia and Crusader Bohemond VI of Antioch and Tripoli. The Mongols extended their power south into Palestine and it appeared to everyone that the entire Mediterranean coast would fall to them.
Watching it all happen from afar made me feel sick to my stomach. Most appalling of all was the relative weakness of those who attempted to stand against him and the ease with which Hulegu’s forces overran them. I wondered with dread whether even the Kingdom of France and her allies could resist such a relentless onslaught. How long would Paris stand? Would Rome even take up arms?
But in truth, the Mongols were a long way yet from Europe and not all the Saracens had fallen. The great Sultan of Syria and the Mamluks of Egypt represented the only remaining chance for the Mohammedans. Hassan, even though they would have considered him as a dangerous heretic, wanted us to help the Mamluks just as we had hoped to help the Abbasids.
I said no.
We were done with that. Done with attempting to ally with the enemies of Christ and done with relying on anyone other than each other. Thanks to the Vizier’s treasury, we had wealth enough to survive and to bide our time, and I told Hassan in no uncertain terms that is what we would do. Hassan grumbled but came to agree. Though his thirst for vengeance was as powerful as any of ours, the Assassins were well-versed in patience.
And then, across the world in the East, the Great Khan Mongke died.
It was many months before all Mongols heard and none of them knew that this death would signal the beginning of the end of a unified Mongol Empire.
The Great Khan had taken up the assault on the great nation of Cathay. News took a long time to travel, of course, but I heard eventually that he had died assaulting some Cathay fortress. There were a dozen whispered stories about how he had come to his end. We paid merchants for news and some told me that Mongke died of cholera during the siege. Another said he had shit himself to death in an endless bloody flux. Another told us that Mongke had drowned in a warship in the high seas while his armies besieged an island fortress. Another story said he was crossing a river, another swore he was being transported across a lake in a barge, and the vessel was destroyed by enemy fire, or it was a simple accident. A Hungarian silversmith fleeing his Mongol masters swore that Mongke had been killed by an arrow shot by an archer during an attack on an eastern castle, and then later the Hungarian’s wife said the Great Khan had been incinerated by an explosive bomb launched from a trebuchet.
But I knew the truth.
William had killed him.
The timing was too perfect for it to be otherwise. By my calculations, it would have taken about a year and a half for William to travel from Baghdad all the way to the Mongol assault on China. There, he had somehow managed to poison Mongke. Poison was a method of murder familiar to him and no doubt the Great Khan’s lifelong abuse of wine had thoroughly weakened his constitution. And surely the number and sheer variety of stories indicated that the Mongols spread misinformation to cover up what they must have known to be a shameful assassination that demonstrated a terrible failure in state security. Or perhaps they believed Mongke had simply drunk himself to death. Thousands of other Mongols had gone the same way before.
But I was sure. It was a remarkable assassination, and one perhaps greater than any Ismaili Assassin had ever achieved, though Hassan insisted that it had to have been one of his own four hundred fedayin who had finally succeeded in their mission.
Why, Hassan had challenged me, would William have done this thing?
“Chaos,” I said.
Following the death of the Great Khan, once again the worldwide campaigns of the Mongols came to quite a sudden halt. Chaos ensued.
And chaos was what William thrived on. Mongke's death in 1259 led to a four-year civil war between two of his brothers, Kublai and Ariq Boke. William had told me in Baghdad that he meant to throw in with Kublai, and with William’s support, Kublai eventually won the succession war.
Although he never sought the position of Great Khan for himself, the struggle for the succession took Hulegu away from Syria and Persia, and he left his subordinates in charge. I was sure that Hulegu now knew that he and his core group of bodyguards and lords were immortal and he could afford to take his time. It was clear that he meant to become lord of all lands from Persia to France, and so he left the Middle East and headed home with most of his armies.
One of his immortals was named Kitbuqa. This man was left in command of a single tumen of about ten thousand men and, with this small force, he made the fatal mistake of attacking the Mamluks.
The Mamluks were newly in power in Egypt and were the vanquishers of the King of France in his dismal failure of Louis’ crusade eight years earlier. Those Mamluks were not like the other Mohammedans the Mongols had faced. In fact, they were a slave army taken mostly from the steppe people of the north, especially the Kipchaks. These former steppe people understood Mongol tactics, and even employed them against the Mongols. Not only that, the Mamluks had the advantage of being equipped with the h
ighest quality Egyptian armour and weapons and had much finer and more powerful horses than the Mongols did.
The Mamluks were led by a man named Baibars, under the Sultan Qutuz. Baibars would be remembered as a great leader of the Egyptians, though he was, in fact, a tall, fair-skinned and light-haired former slave stolen from his Kipchak people near the Black Sea when only a boy. Baibars knew that the great Hulegu and his officer corps had gone to the East and so they baited the Mongols into attacking by doing the one thing that was guaranteed to draw them in. They beheaded the Mongol envoys, which as any horse nomad could tell you, is how you categorically declare war on the steppe.
In September 1260, the two forces clashed in what came to be known as the Battle of Ain Jalut. The site was known as the Spring of Goliath, and it was the very place that King David flung his stone at the Philistine champion.
It was an appropriate coincidence.
Strangely enough, although my companions took no part in it, we were not very far away when it happened, as the battle took place in Galilee and we were only thirty miles from there, on an estate near Acre. When the armies met, the first to advance were the Mongols, supported by men from the Kingdoms of Georgia and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, both of which had submitted to Mongol authority. The two armies fought for many hours, with Baibars provoking the Mongols with repeated attack and retreat, without committing and losing too many of his men. It was said that Baibars had laid out the overall strategy of the battle since he had spent much time in that region as a fugitive earlier in his life. When the Mongols carried out another heavy assault, Baibars and his men feigned a final retreat, drawing the Mongols into the highlands to be ambushed by the rest of the Mamluk forces concealed among the trees.