1258 and the Ilkhanate
Persia: Empire and AfterwardsThe Worst Thing That Happened
The Mongol invasions of the 1220s under Genghis Khan and the campaign of his grandson Hulagu in the 1250s were, by any measure, catastrophic for Iran. Cities that resisted were destroyed. Nishapur, Merv and Herat were sacked. The qanat irrigation systems that made agriculture possible on the plateau were damaged and in places never repaired. Population estimates for the period are unreliable and contested, but every serious account agrees the losses were enormous.
Baghdad, 1258
Hulagu took Baghdad in February 1258 and executed the last Abbasid caliph. A caliphate that had existed for five centuries ended. The famous line that the Tigris ran black with the ink of books thrown into it is repeated everywhere and appears in no eyewitness account — it belongs to the tradition rather than the record.
Then the Conquerors Stayed
Hulagu did not withdraw. He founded the Ilkhanate, a Mongol state governing Iran and Iraq, and it lasted about eighty years. Within two generations his successors had converted to Islam — Ghazan Khan formally in 1295 — adopted Persian as the language of administration, and become patrons of Persian art, architecture and history-writing.
Maragha
In 1259, the year after Baghdad, Hulagu paid for an observatory at Maragha in northwestern Iran. The astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi persuaded him to fund it out of religious endowment revenues, arguing it would pay for itself. It became the most advanced observatory in the world, produced a major set of astronomical tables, and developed geometric models — the Tusi couple among them — that appear, mathematically identical, in the work of Copernicus three centuries later.
Both Things Are True
The same man destroyed Baghdad and funded Maragha, one year apart. Iran suffered a catastrophe it took centuries to recover from, and the descendants of the men who caused it paid for some of the finest Persian work ever done. Neither half cancels the other, and a history that tells only one of them is not telling you what happened.
Key Dates to Remember
- 1219–1221 — Genghis Khan's invasion; Nishapur, Merv, Herat sacked
- Feb 1258 — Hulagu takes Baghdad; the Abbasid caliphate ends
- 1259 — Construction begins at the Maragha observatory
- 1256–1335 — The Ilkhanate governs Iran and Iraq
- 1295 — Ghazan Khan converts to Islam