Khwarezmian Empire

The largest state in the Islamic world in 1218 and gone within three years, having caused its own destruction. It began as a governorship under the Seljuks in the oasis south of the Aral Sea and grew as the Seljuks declined, absorbing Persia and Transoxiana, until by the early thirteenth century its shah ruled from the Zagros to the Syr Darya and had ended the Abbasid caliph's temporal authority in everything but name. It was newly conquered territory with a Turkic army and a Persian administration, held together by force and by a mother-queen with her own faction, and it had few reserves of loyalty. In 1218 a governor at Otrar seized a Mongol trade caravan and killed the merchants; Genghis Khan sent envoys to demand redress and Muhammad II had them executed. The Mongol invasion that followed was the most destructive campaign of the period. Bukhara, Samarkand, Gurganj, Merv and Nishapur were taken in turn and their populations massacred or enslaved, the irrigation works of Khwarezm were broken and never fully restored, and the shah died a fugitive on an island in the Caspian. His son fought on for a decade from Persia and India and was killed by a Kurdish villager in 1231. The destruction was demographic as much as political. Khwarezm depended on canal irrigation from the Amu Darya maintained by continuous labour, and when the population that maintained it was killed or driven off the system silted and the oasis contracted permanently. Nishapur and Merv, among the largest cities in the world before 1220, never recovered their size. The empire's scholars scattered west and east, and the historians who recorded the invasion - Juvayni writing for the Mongols, Ibn al-Athir writing in Mosul - produced the two accounts on which almost everything written about the Mongol conquest still rests.

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