Hulagu Khan

Hulagu Khan destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate, sacked Baghdad, and founded the Ilkhanate that ruled Iran for eighty years. He was a grandson of Genghis Khan and a brother of the Great Khans Mongke and Kublai, and he was sent west in 1253 with an army assembled by levy from the whole empire and a specific brief: to reduce the Ismaili Assassins, and then the Caliph if he refused submission. He took the Assassin fortresses in the Elburz mountains in 1256, including Alamut, whose library was burned, and the last Ismaili imam was killed on the way to Mongolia. He reached Baghdad in January 1258. The Caliph al-Musta'sim had refused to submit, refused to dismantle his walls, and did not raise the army he could have raised. The city fell in under two weeks and was destroyed over the following week; the death toll is reported from 90,000 to 800,000 and none of the figures are reliable. The libraries went into the Tigris, and the canal system of Mesopotamia, maintained continuously for millennia, was damaged past recovery. The Caliph was rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses, so that no royal blood touched the ground. Hulagu took Aleppo and Damascus in 1260 and was recalled by Mongke's death, leaving Kitbuqa with a reduced force that the Mamluks destroyed at Ain Jalut - the first serious check the Mongols suffered. His wife Doquz Khatun was a Christian and he was sympathetic to Christians and Buddhists, and his descendants converted to Islam within two generations.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history