Al-Musta'sim
Al-Musta'sim was the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and was killed in a way designed to spill no blood. He succeeded in 1242 to an office that had five centuries of prestige and by then very little else: real power in Iraq had passed to viziers and army commanders, and the caliphate's authority elsewhere was formal. He was, by every account including sympathetic ones, unsuited to the moment - fond of music and diversion, badly advised by a court that quarrelled among itself, and unwilling to believe the danger. Hulagu demanded submission and the dismantling of the city's defences. The replies were proud and empty, warning that the whole Muslim world would rise if the caliph were touched. He neither paid a tribute that might have bought time nor spent the treasury on troops, and his vizier is accused by the sources of having reduced the garrison and possibly of corresponding with the enemy. The siege lasted under two weeks. The walls were breached in February 1258 and the city sacked for a week, with the House of Wisdom destroyed and the Tigris said to have run black with ink and red with blood - a phrase from the chroniclers that is repeated as though it were a measurement. Mongol custom forbade shedding royal blood on the ground, so he was rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses. Baghdad never recovered its position, and a surviving Abbasid was installed in Cairo by Baybars as a caliph with no power at all.
- Lived: 1213 CE – 1258 CE
- Nationality: Abbasid
- Roles: head_of_state
