Armageddon in the Mideast
The Mongols set the region back centuries
In a famous and oft-repeated tale, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan sent emissaries to the Khwarezmid Empire, a great kingdom that ruled what is now Iran, Central Asia and a goodly chunk of Afghanistan. It was the early 1200s, and Genghis had recently united the fierce nomadic tribes who ranged the vast plains that stretched from China to Russia. The hard work of empire-forging complete, he wanted to reach out to his neighbors to further trade and diplomacy. The Khwarezmid leaders, having contempt for this horseback upstart, foolishly slaughtered the Great Khan’s diplomatic mission. In revenge Genghis launched a full-scale invasion, his incredibly powerful forces rapidly overwhelming the Khwarezmids, wiping their empire off the map and massacring perhaps millions of citizens along the way — no one is really sure how many people died.
And so, by the year 1221, conquest had brought the Mongols into the Mideast for the first time. However, they halted for a time. In truth, the region wasn’t much of a threat to the Mongols; the area was ruled, weakly, by the Abbasid Caliphate. This was the still-existing government founded by descendents of one of the Prophet Mohammad’s uncles in 750 AD. In its heyday, the Abbasid Caliphate was truly one of the most glorious civilizations the human race has ever seen. Its capital, Baghdad, was home to staggering achievements in every human endeavor, from architecture and mathematics to poetry, philosophy and art. It had collected every scrap of knowledge left by the Roman and Greek civilizations and added its own genius; it had collected inventions and wisdom from India and China by way of the Silk Road; it had studiously preserved everything in a series of grand libraries. It had indeed been home to the Arab Golden Age, one of the brightest lights in all the history of the world.
But by the 1200s and the dawning of the Mongol Empire, the Abbasids were long past their great years. Baghdad was still a treasure-house stuffed with knowledge, art and culture, but divisions, weakness and general decay had left the rulers essentially powerless. Far stronger were the Mamluks, who had originally been slaves forced by the Abbasids to be soldiers, but who had long since become more powerful than their onetime masters. They ruled Egypt and many nearby territories and often fought with the European Crusaders who still held small pieces of the Holy Land (though the era of the Crusades was almost over).
For a time the Mongols ignored the Mideast, instead focusing their power on other areas, particularly China, where again millions may have died before the Mongol conquest. The victorious Mongols turned west of their homeland, massacring what is now Russia and Ukraine, decimating perhaps half the population. They pushed on, defeating the Hungarians, Poles and Teutonic Knights on a rampage through Eastern Europe that destroyed half the region’s cities and towns. Only the death of Genghis Khan’s successor spared the rest of Europe from destruction — by law the Mongols had to head home to choose a new leader.
Finally, in the 1250s, the Mongols targeted the Mideast. They aimed the Abbasid Caliphate first, and overwhelmed the kingdom’s defenses with little effort, laying siege to Baghdad. The Abbasids, though, had no hope whatever of winning, and they knew it. And so they surrendered. They may have hoped for mercy. They received none. Instead, the Mongols followed their well-established path of extreme terror, carried out, some say, to make it more likely that future enemies would surrender without a fight rather than risk being wiped out.
In one of their worst crimes, the Mongols destroyed Baghdad completely. So thorough was the destruction that visitors from the future might wonder if the place had been hit by nuclear weapons.
The great capital was subjected to a season of rape, murder and destruction. The Abbasid dynasty was exterminated, except for one of the Caliph’s daughters, sent to join the Great Khan’s harem (whether she liked it or not) and a son who was kept prisoner for the rest of his life (though some say he was later allowed to have a family and die in obscurity).
The magnificent architecture was burned to the ground; the grand avenues, the fountains, the parks, ruined; and the libraries, the incredible libraries, filled with vast amounts of priceless manuscripts dating from ancient times, were utterly destroyed. The Mongols threw so many books into the Tigris River that the waters were said to have been stained black by the ink. The light of Arab genius, the echoes of the Golden Age, the home of a civilization’s heart and soul, were all lost forever. And up to a million people may have died, though there’s no way to know for sure.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Mongols devastated the entire region, including the intricate irrigation system that dated back to Babylonian, even Sumerian times. This system had made the desert bloom, and permitted the flowering of civilization in the region and the shining of its many golden millenia
It is impossible to overstate the intensity of the destruction. It was, indeed, not just bricks and mortar but an entire society that was devastated. Social structures, economic relationships, trade, family structures — all the little details of human society we so often take for granted.
The Mongols moved west, intending to do to Jerusalem, and later Egypt, what they had done to Baghdad. Along the way, the Knights Templar, the last of the European warriors still maintaining a toehold in the Holy Land, tried to ally with the Mongols in hopes of sharing in the spoils.
But then came the one thing that could stop a Mongolian advance: far off in Mongolia, the Great Khan died. The bulk of their forces streamed out of the Mideast, heading home to pick a new leader; only a small force was left behind. This small rearguard was attacked by the Egyptian Mamluks, who, incredibly, won — an unexpected victory that secured them fame that lasted for centuries. The unhappy Knights Templar, having picked the wrong side, abandoned their grand plans; soon afterwards, Jacques Molay, their leader, would be charged with heresy and burned at the stake.
The Caliphate, once destroyed, never returned. Today it’s remembered with pride but sadness, its many achievements continuing to glow from the pages of history. Indeed even the most backward, thuggish extremists seek to recapture its glory, calling for a reborn Caliphate — though their savagery and anti-intellectualism would be alien to the witnesses to the Arab Golden Age.
In Egypt, the Mamluks enjoyed a brief period of prestige after their victories against the Mongols, but inevitably their kingdom began to decay and was eventually taken over by the Ottoman Turks in the 1500s, who were already in the process of conquering the entire Middle East. The Ottomans would hold the region prisoner, keeping it stagnant for centuries.
The destruction wrought by the Mongols threw the Mideast into a kind of dark age. Instead of the worldly cultural glories of the Abbasids, the peoples of the region began looking inward, emphasizing theological purity over trade, development and technology. Even today, according to the World Bank, the Gross Domestic Product of the entire Middle East is roughly equivalent to that of Mexico. And it’s likely to only get worse if states continue to fail and conflict expands.
Some might say that the region never really got a chance to recover from its 13th Century apocalypse. Within a couple of centuries it became dominated by the Turks, whose oppression prevented a reviving of anything resembling the Caliphate.
It took Europe at least a thousand years to recover from the destruction wrought by the collapse of the Roman Empire — in the Mideast, it’s been around 800 years since their world fell apart. How long before the Middle East finally gets its Renaissance?
