After the Caliphate: Early Modern Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, Mughal India—The Heyday of Islamic Gunpowder Empires

Abstract

On February 10, 1258, the Mongols, under Hülegü Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, appeared at the gates of Baghdad. They massacred most of the inhabitants, who numbered about half a million souls at that time, in a slaughter that lasted days, including al-Mu’tasim, the last Abbasid caliph, sacked the city, and razed it to the ground, and, perhaps most importantly for its future, destroyed the canals and irrigation works that had supported the huge population. This doomed the city to economic stagnation so that by the early twentieth century the population of the city under Ottoman rule had regrown to just over 100,000, one-tenth of the population that existed during the height of Abbasid power, which was estimated between 1 and 2 million.