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Rubbing It In: History’s Greatest Flexes and Ownages

Khalid Elhassan June 3, 2025 17 min

8. A Humiliating Demise

Mongols capture the Abbasid caliph. K-Pics

Al-Musta’ṣim was captured along with his family. Accounts of his death vary, but most agree it was both symbolic and brutal. According to popular tradition, Hülegü, respecting a Mongol superstition against shedding royal blood, ordered Al-Musta’ṣim to be rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. Another account claims he was forced to watch a Mongol feast or used as a footstool by Hülegü, then executed.

Other sources suggest he may have been starved or executed in some other way, but all agree his death was deliberately humiliating. The fall of Baghdad and Al-Musta’ṣim’s execution ended centuries of Abbasid rule, and symbolized the collapse of centralized Islamic power. Later Abbasid caliphs were installed in Cairo under Mamluk protection, but they held only religious authority, never political power like their predecessors in Baghdad.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.