The resulting power vacuum allowed a former vassal of Sanjar, the governor of Khwarazm, to build up his power. Khwarazm’s location on the lower Amu Darya allowed it to derive extensive wealth from irrigated agriculture, and it benefitted from a trade route that connected Khorasan with the valley of the Volga River. Khwarazm’s rulers, known as the Khwarazm-Shahs, built up a remarkably strong power base in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries while in principle subject to the Qara-khitai. Tekish, the Khwarazm–Shah from 1172 to 1200, absorbed western Khorasan in the 1180s in a series of destructive campaigns, building up his reputation sufficiently for the caliph al-Nasir to call upon him in 1194 to help him defeat the last of the western Saljuqs. By 1212, his son Muhammad defeated the Qara-khitai Mongols and began annexing Transoxiana. Muhammad, however, had developed a reputation as a ruthless and rapacious tyrant, and many of the Muslim inhabitants of Transoxiana preferred the rule of the pagan Qara-khitai to the prospect of rule by him. They resisted his attempts to take them over, and Muhammad engaged in a particularly brutal campaign to subject the population. As a result, much of the great city of Samarqand was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Muhammad continued his blitzkrieg over the next few years, and soon his empire incorporated territories from Afghanistan to Azerbaijan.
Sunni–Nizari Rapprochement
The disintegration of Great Saljuq power after the death of Muhammad in 1118 was the fulfillment of the dream of the Nizaris, but the consequences were not what they might have expected. The constant squabbling and warfare among the various branches of the Saljuq family, and between them and their subjects, caused the Assassins to lose their raison d’être. Their political murders no longer caught the public’s attention amid the constant mayhem of the era, and yet they were not powerful enough to take advantage of the chaos by seizing power themselves. They became inactive for several decades.
The one major exception to the lower profile of the Assassins during this period was the career of the head of the Syrian community. Known to the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain, he was Rashid al-Din al-Sinan, a native of Basra, whom the fourth Lord of Alamut had sent to lead the Syrian Nizaris in 1162. He remained the head of the community there until his death in 1192. Thus, he was a contemporary of the great Nur al-Din of Syria and northern Iraq, Amalric of Jerusalem, and Saladin. In typical Nizari fashion, he considered Nur al-Din and Saladin, who were Sunnis, potentially greater threats to his movement than the Crusaders were. Although he made enemies with the Hospitallers, in general he maintained peaceful relations with the Crusaders while making several attempts on the life of Saladin. Sinan was also often at odds with the leadership at Alamut. Despite the difficulties of communication among the widely flung Nizari “state,” he was the only regional leader who occasionally pursued policies that ran counter to those of the central command.
The changed conditions of the region may well be responsible for two radical shifts in Nizari doctrine over the next half-century. In 1164, the Lord of Alamut, Hasan II, announced the arrival of the Last Day, the end of history. The exact meaning of Hasan’s announcement is still debated. Most scholars agree that it entailed the long-awaited Last Judgment, when individuals would be assigned to paradise or to hell, and apparently at least some Nizaris understood it to mean the abrogation of the Shari‘a. Many of Hasan’s followers also inferred that he was claiming to be the Imam rather than merely his deputy. A year and a half later, one of his former followers stabbed him to death, but his son who succeeded him made explicit the claim that his father was a descendant of Nizar, and not merely a deputy or spokesman for him. From that point, the Nizaris recognized the Lord of Alamut as their Imam.
Thus, the Nizaris and the Muslim world at large were stunned in 1210 when their new Imam, Hasan III, repudiated Nizari doctrine and proclaimed the adherence of his community to Sunni Islam. The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir did not hesitate to welcome a potential ally in his effort to reassert caliphal authority against the Saljuqs, and many other Sunnis cautiously followed his lead in accepting the new “converts.” Ulama from across southwestern Asia were invited to the regional Nizari centers to instruct the members of the community. Most Nizaris, however, assumed that the reason for the apparent conversion was a severe threat to the community and that this was really an instance of taqiya, or divinely sanctioned dissimulation. They were convinced that the stated adherence to Sunnism was merely a tactic for the survival of the Nizari community and that the Imam should continue to be recognized as such in private.
MAP 7.2 The Muslim East, 1200–1260
These conservatives were reassured in 1221, when Hasan III’s successor, Muhammad III, reclaimed the position of Imam. Many Sunnis felt that their cynicism had been vindicated, but in fact relations between Nizaris and Sunnis from this point on were not as hostile as they had been. Assassinations of political and religious leaders were no longer automatically assumed to be the work of Nizaris, particularly since that tactic served no useful purpose in the revised doctrines of the community. Moreover, all Muslims, regardless of doctrinal affiliation, had a more important foe to fear: The Mongols had arrived.
The Mongol Campaigns
However presumptuous and brutish the Crusaders were and however shocking the Reconquista had proved to be by 1248, the Mongol campaigns of 1219–1222 and 1253–1260 were far more destructive. Between the Mediterranean and Central Asia, only Syria, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula remained free of Mongol destruction and subsequent occupation. The arrival of the Mongols marks a major turning point in the history of the Muslim world east of the Maghrib.
The Campaign of Chinggis Khan, 1219–1222
In the late twelfth century, a Mongol warlord by the name of Temuchin began asserting his dominance over the tribes of Mongolia near the Sea of Baikal. The process was largely completed by 1206, and Temuchin immediately began preparing for a campaign against the traditional target of Mongol nomads, China. By 1215, Temuchin, who gained the title of Chinggis (Genghis/Jengiz) Khan, had pushed as far south as the modern city of Beijing, and he began securing his borders to the west.
Chinggis established diplomatic contact with the Khwarazm–Shah, Muhammad. As we have seen, Muhammad had just defeated the Mongol Qara-khitai of Transoxiana and had rapidly expanded his territories. His achievements were genuinely spectacular, and he wanted to be recognized for them. Unfortunately, in the letter of diplomacy that Chinggis sent to him, Chinggis stated that he viewed the Khwarazm–Shah as he did his own sons. Muhammad, not knowing that he should be flattered, took offense at the remark. A few months later, when a delegation arrived from Chinggis protesting the massacre of several hundred merchants at the hands of one of Muhammad’s governors, Muhammad ordered the execution of the Mongol envoys. This act was not only a brazen violation of a basic element of diplomatic protocol, but also one of history’s greatest miscalculations of relative strength.
Chinggis began an offensive against Muhammad in 1219 with an army that may well have numbered 150,000–200,000 men. He took Transoxiana in the winter of 1219–1220, razing the great cities of Bukhara and Samarqand in the process. He rested during the summer heat, and then pursued a scorched-earth policy in Khorasan during the period from late autumn of 1220 into early winter of 1222. Nishapur, Merv, Herat, and other cities were destroyed stone by stone and their inhabitants massacred. The Mongol destruction of the eastern Iranian world is one of the great catastrophes of world history. Even when placed in the context of the region’s violent history, it still elicits wonder and shock. The farmers and townspeople of Iran had been accustomed to destruction. During the two hundred years since the advent of the Saljuqs, they had experienced the wanton and irrational destruction of property by Turkmen, and the subsequent clashes of great armies among the regional powers had inflicted great loss on the area. Cities had been sacked, large numbers of civilians killed, and libraries burned. But nothing had prepared the inhabitants for what the Mongols would visit upon them.
When cities resisted
Chinggis Khan’s army, the walls and buildings were destroyed and the populations were massacred. Eyewitnesses from the era report seeing adjacent to such cities numerous pyramids of skulls that contained the heads of as many as 40,000 people each. It is true that we have to evaluate critically the reports of chroniclers, whose estimates of the size of armies and populations were not tempered with modern concern for demographic accuracy. In this case, however, the reports come from numerous sources and many locations and are supported by what we know of the subsequent economic and social history of the area.
The natural tendency of cities to resist an invader was met by the Mongols with utter destruction. Some artisans from the cities were spared and sent back to Mongolia or China so that their skills could be utilized, and thousands of peasants in the vicinity of the cities were sometimes herded ahead of the army to serve as arrow fodder at the next siege. Eventually, the residents of cities learned that, if they did not resist, a general massacre was not likely, but during the campaign of 1219–1222 that was not widely known, and the destruction to the cities and to the agricultural infrastructure was almost total. Thousands of ulama, secular scholars, and merchants fled in advance of the danger, seeking refuge farther west or even east. Many scientists and philosophers found refuge among the Nizari communities, while others fled all the way to Konya, Damascus, and Cairo in the west, and Lahore and Delhi in the east. The Mongol armies split into two major units. One pursued potential threats as far east as the Indus River, and the other circled the Caspian Sea, returning home through southern Russia.
Chinggis returned to Mongolia, where he died in 1227. His son Ogedai became the Great Khan, and his other three sons inherited the areas of Mongolia and the lands between China and the Caspian. In 1235, Ogedai authorized his nephew Batu to lead a campaign into the west, and western Russia was subdued over the next few years. By 1241, Batu commanded two armies in Europe. One delivered a devastating blow to the knights of eastern Europe at Liegnitz (modern Legnica, Poland), in April 1241. The other conquered Pest (the eastern half of modern Budapest). As western Europe trembled in the expectation of further devastating attacks, Batu abruptly reversed course and headed east. He had received word that Ogedai had died and that the Great Khan’s son Guyuk, with whom Batu had earlier quarreled, was claiming the throne. Fearing an attack from Guyuk, Batu set up his command post on the lower Volga River. A settlement known as Saray grew up around it, and it became the commercial and administrative capital of an empire known to the Europeans as the Golden Horde.
Having established control over the Russian steppes, Batu now focused on securing control over the Caucasus. In doing so, his armies came into contact with the Sultanate of Rum, which had expanded by this time into eastern Anatolia. In 1243, one of Batu’s generals informed the sultan of Rum that he needed additional grazing land for his army. The sultan, realizing that any concession would result in Mongol dominance, challenged Batu militarily. At Kose Dagh, the Mongols routed the Saljuqs, and for the next several decades, the sultanate was a vassal state of the Mongols. It soon became embroiled in a civil war, and disappeared by the end of the century.
The Campaign of Hulagu, 1253–1260
In 1253, the Great Khan sent Chinggis’s grandson Hulagu to conquer southwestern Asia. Hulagu made it clear that the destruction of Alamut was a high priority. He laid siege to Alamut in 1256 and promised safe passage to those who surrendered. The Nizari Imam stalled for several weeks, hoping for the onset of winter weather. During this period, he tried to appease the Mongol leader by authorizing the destruction of scores of his castles. Eventually, however, the Imam had no choice but to surrender, and he and his family were sent to the Great Khan. En route to the Mongol capital, he and his family were killed, and his followers who were in the custody of Hulagu were massacred in violation of the terms of surrender. Muslim scholars who accompanied Hulagu received permission to salvage some of the immense library at Alamut, but most of it was destroyed. Other Nizari fortresses fell in the next fifteen years, sometimes after sieges of a decade or more.
The Nizari castle of Samiran, in the western Elburz Mountains.
After destroying Alamut, Hulagu proceeded to Baghdad, where he demanded the surrender of the city. The city resisted for four weeks and then surrendered. When the inhabitants left the city as demanded, however, Hulagu ordered them to be massacred, and the city was pillaged. The last caliph of Baghdad was then executed, either by being smothered in a carpet or by being rolled up in a carpet and trampled by horses.
By early summer 1260, Hulagu’s troops were in Gaza, preparing for an invasion of Egypt. He sent an insulting ultimatum to the slave–soldiers who were still engaged in their ten-year-old, often violent, factional quarrels regarding who should lead the others. Many Muslims, both inside and outside Egypt, were impatiently waiting for some dynasty to take control of the state and bring these unruly Turks to order. The mamluk who held effective power at the time, Qutuz, showed no interest in seeking the advice of a nonslave master to deal with the Mongols, however. He took the initiative of prudently arranging a temporary truce with the few remaining Crusaders in Syria in the face of a Mongol threat that concerned both sides. Then, rather than waiting for the Mongols to attack, he moved toward them, advancing into Palestine.
As the two armies were preparing to meet each other in a showdown that would determine the fate of the Muslim world, Hulagu received a message that the Great Khan had died. Almost twenty years earlier, a similar message had saved Europe from Batu; now Hulagu headed east at once with most of his army, perhaps intending to present himself as a candidate for the vacant throne. He left the remaining Mongol force under the command of his general, Kit-buqa. Halfway across Iran, Hulagu received word that the succession crisis had been resolved, and he turned back. Before he could reinforce Kit-buqa, however, Qutuz met the latter at a site near Lake Tiberias called ‘Ayn Jalut. The result was a crushing defeat for the outnumbered Mongols and the death of their general. Qutuz himself had only a few days to relish his victory until Baybars murdered him and seized power in Egypt.
Meanwhile, Batu’s brother, Berke, succeeded to the throne of the Golden Horde, and converted to Islam. He was now exerting great efforts to secure his hold on the Caucasus. Hulagu knew that if he were to control southwestern Asia he would have to possess Azerbaijan, and so he based himself there in order to block Berke’s expansion. From there he sent a second army against Egypt. It, too, was defeated. Rather than challenge the Mamlukes again, he set about consolidating his power in Iran and Iraq from his capital at Tabriz. His empire would become known as the Il-khanate.
Conclusion
After three hundred years of almost continual violence, the political map of the Dar al-Islam quite rapidly achieved a relatively fixed form in the decade before and after the year 1260. The expansionist designs of Muslim states and of neighboring powers alike seem to have been replaced by a focus on the consolidation of power. In the West, the Reconquista had achieved more in the twelve years from 1236 to 1248 than it had in the previous three hundred. Granada was the single remaining Muslim principality in the Iberian Peninsula, but the Christian kingdoms would not make another serious effort to capture it for over two centuries. The Marinids were in secure control of Morocco, and they would also remain in power for two centuries.
Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Cities were under the rule of the slave–soldiers, who would rule there until 1517. The Mamlukes were the most powerful Muslim regime in the Dar al-Islam in the thirteenth century, and their prestige was higher than perhaps any Muslim government in history due to their defeat of the Mongols at ‘Ayn Jalut. They moved quickly to certify their place in the Sunni world by installing a member of the Abbasid family as the new caliph in Cairo. (Like his grandfathers, he turned out to be merely an ornament for the military court.)
The Mongol states of the Muslim world—the Il-khans, the Golden Horde of Russia, and the Chaghatay khanate of Central Asia—were likewise relatively stable compared wit
h the irresistible aggression their people had shown for half a century. They did send out raiding parties and the occasional expedition, but none of them ever again conquered significant territory. The conversion of Berke of the Golden Horde to Islam held out the hope that other Mongol rulers might yet convert.
As it happened, these Mongol newcomers were turning out to be not so unfamiliar, after all: Both the Golden Horde and the Il-khanid armies had assimilated numerous ethnic groups as they moved west in their campaigns, and the single largest ethnic group in them was Turkish. The “Mongol” armies of both the Il-khans and the Golden Horde were largely Turkish by the time they began to consolidate their power at their respective capital cities. It was not lost on the public who had anxiously watched the events unfold at ‘Ayn Jalut that the armies of the Mamlukes and of Hulagu’s Mongols were both largely Turkish, fighting for control of Muslim southwestern Asia.
FURTHER READING
General
Lewis, Archibald R. Nomads and Crusaders, A.D. 1000–1368. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988.
The Crusades
Gabrieli, Francesco. Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated from Italian by E. J. Costello. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1984.
Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Hitti, Phillip K. An Arab–Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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