Trolling the Mongols Turned Out to be a Bad Idea
Al Musta’sim Billah (1213 -1258) was the last ruler of the Abbasid Caliphate, and Islam’s last Caliph. A weak ruler of a weak rump of what had once been a mighty empire, Al Musta’sim was surrounded by ineffectual advisors. When the Mongols demanded his submission, the Caliph rejected their demands, ignored some, and answered others with bluster and empty threats. Significantly, he failed to prepare adequate defenses against what was sure to follow such rejection. The Mongols had first erupted into the Islamic world in the 1220s, when Genghis Khan destroyed the Khwarezmian Empire and conquered as far west as Persia up to the edges of Mesopotamia. That outburst was followed by a decades-long lull, as far as the Middle East and the Islamic world were concerned.
The Mongols directed their energies elsewhere, against China, Kievan Rus, Eastern Europe, and in internal squabbles amongst themselves. The lull ended in the 1250s, when a new Mongol ruler, Genghis Khan’s grandson Mongke, turned his attention to the Middle East and sent his brother, Hulagu, to assert Mongol power over the region. Hulagu began with the destruction of the Assassins, a murderous cult led by a shadowy mystic known as The Old Man of the Mountain. It operated from a string of mountain holdfasts, and had terrorized the Middle East for over a century and a half. Hulagu wiped them out by 1256. He then turned his attention to the Abbassid Caliphate, based in Baghdad, and ordered it to submit to Mongol suzerainty and pay tribute.
