Baghdad
Conceived of as a planned city for administering the largest empire in the world, Baghdad was founded in 762 AD by the second Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur as his capital. Both the site of the city and its layout were to have symbolic significance. Located just north of the Sassanid Persian’s old capital of Ctesiphon, which had laid in ruins since its conquest by Muslim armies in the seventh century, Baghdad was designed by a Persian Muslim and a Jew – an indication of the Caliphs intent to reimagine his empire as the heir to Persia and a place for all religions.
In short order Baghdad became one of the largest cities in the world, housing a million inhabitants at a time when the population of Rome was a mere 30,000. For nearly five hundred years the “city of peace,” as it was sometimes called, served as a center for international scholarship. The works of the ancient Greek philosophers were preserved at a time when they were being destroyed in Europe, and significant advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were achieved. Then, in the early thirteenth century rumors began to arrive of the emergence of a ferocious power in the East, the Mongols.
It would be decades before Baghdad fell under the gaze of the Mongols, but the day finally came in 1258 when Hulagu Kahn approached the Caliph’s city. Knowing that the Mongols had become experts at siege warfare the Baghdad garrison rode out to confront them, but Hulagu’s forces pulled down damns and dikes on the Tigris flooding the defenders camp before they could challenge him. Those who did not drown were ridden down. With the garrison subdued, the Mongols surrounded Baghdad, digging a trench and building a palisade so that no one could escape before storming the walls directly.
After taking the city Hulagu marching the Caliph out for execution. Thereafter the Mongols went on to ransack the city. The entire population was executed or enslaved, the coffers looted, and the buildings set afire. The Tigris ran black with the ink of the books cast into it, and the millennia-old irrigation canals were filled in. The stench of death was so overwhelming that Hulagu was forced to relocate his camp upwind from the razed city one the pillage was complete. Baghdad’s golden age was over, it would be rebuilt but never fully recover.