Hulagu Khan Sacks Baghdad and Ends the Abbasid Caliphate
The House of Wisdom is destroyed and the Tigris is said to run black with ink
Quick facts
- Date
- January-February 1258
- Mongol commander
- Hulagu Khan
- Institution destroyed
- House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma)
- Last Abbasid caliph
- al-Mustasim, executed by trampling
What happened
Hulagu Khan, brother of Mongke, defeated the Abbasid Caliphate in January 1258, and Mongol forces captured Baghdad the following month after a brief siege. The World History Encyclopedia's account of the Abbasid dynasty describes the city, including the great library and research institute known as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), as leveled and its population massacred; the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mustasim, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses so that no royal blood would touch the ground, and most of the royal family was killed. Medieval tradition put the death toll as high as 800,000, a figure modern historians treat as unverifiable but indicative of a massacre on a scale that shocked the wider Islamic world.
Why it matters
Baghdad's fall ended over 500 years of Abbasid rule and destroyed one of the medieval world's great centers of translation and scholarship, an intellectual loss historians still cite as a symbolic end to the Islamic Golden Age's Baghdad-centered phase. The sack also pushed the Mongols to the edge of the Mamluk Sultanate's territory, setting up the confrontation at Ain Jalut two years later.
How we know
The Ilkhanate and Abbasid Dynasty articles on the World History Encyclopedia both describe the siege and its aftermath, drawing on medieval Arabic and Persian chronicles; the traditional casualty figure is explicitly flagged as a figure from tradition rather than a verified count.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Ilkhanate · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Abbasid Dynasty · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Rise of Islam → · The Abbasid Caliphate and House of Wisdom the Mongols destroyed