Scourges of God

A General Comparison of Tamerlane and Hulagu

in the History of Baghdad
Michael Hancock
 2

Archetypes of destruction appear throughout history, but their relationship with

reality is tenuous at best, especially in the pre-modern era. Each society can identify

itself at least partially by naming the force of destruction against whom it stands in

opposition. This paper will seek to compare two such figures, connected by similar

cataclysmic events, united in location but separated by more than a century; the sack of

Baghdad by Il-Khan Hulagu in 1258 AD and by Tamerlane in 1401 AD1. A variety of

contemporary sources exist, as well as later histories and commentaries on the sources,

and a multitude of modern interpretations. The manipulation of sources suggests that

Arab nationalism2 and Sunni struggles against Shī„ah incursions may have played some

role in the shaping of history, namely because Hulagu‟s attack has been redefined as a

destruction of Arab culture and even a „vengeful‟ action against the mighty Arab

Empire3, while Tamerlane‟s equally ferocious action is rarely given the same attention.

The sacking of Baghdad earned both Hulagu and Tamerlane the epithet „scourge

of God4,‟ though it will be shown that Hulagu‟s reputation has suffered more, acting as

the scapegoat for later failings of Muslim empires.5 Tamerlane‟s reputation has

fluctuated over time in various locales, being scorned by his contemporary neighbors

and lauded in Europe as a possible savior, even immortalized in song, prose, and on the

1 Hulagu and Tamerlane are the transliterated forms of the names that the author will use for clarity, though
Khüle’ü and Tīmūr bin Taraġay Barlas, respectively, would be more accurate.
2 Osama bin Laden attempted to incite Muslim (mainly Arabs) to violence, saying “Colin Powell and Dick

Cheney destroyed Baghdad worse than Hulagu of the Mongols” which has confused American journalists into
seeking Mongolian history from the Arabs they conquered, producing prose like this: “Other Mongol facts: On
their treeless steppes, they tended to get hit by lightning a lot. Thunder terrified them.” (Frazier)
3 (Collomb), (Simons), (Silvester)
4 (Grousset) p. 367
5 Similar studies have been conducted on the real and perceived effects of the so-called “Tatar Yoke” in

Russian history, discussing the actual weight of Mongol rule in Golden Horde Russia versus the convenience
of a reason for every imagined failing and slight of luck.
 3

stage6. Tamerlane, unlike Hulagu, has more recently been recreated in the form of an

Uzbek national hero7 for use by the ruling elite of newly independent Uzbekistan. This

paper will explore the portrayal of both conquerors in turn, chronologically.

Certain epithets and titles have appeared throughout history to be reapplied to

different persons and entities. One such title is „scourge of God.‟ The famous first use of

this term was applied by the Romans (flagellum dei) to the leader of invading horsemen

from the steppes of Eurasia, Attila of the Huns. Due to the nature of steppe warfare and

the similarity in nomadic steppe culture over time, there is some utility in describing the

Huns in brief before considering the Mongols or the Timurids. The Huns, like the

Mongols and Timurids after them, had an affinity for the horse, and according to

historic sources as related in Howarth, “Hun children learned to ride almost as soon as

they learned to walk8.” The Huns were practitioners of mounted cavalry warfare against

standing infantry and static defenses, with a focus on raiding for plunder to pay off the

military and reward loyal officers. Also familiar to the case of the Mongols and Timurids

is the eventual consideration of the invasion as a punishment for poor administration. A

„scourge of God9‟ is a tool of divine punishment, an atoning skin-flaying from the Lord.

Apocryphally, Temujin (Genghis Khan) claimed the title for himself at the sack of

Bukhara, the legend of which lives on in Uzbekistan10.

6 See Handel’s opera Tamerlano, Nicolas Pradon's play Tamerlan, ou La Mort de Bajazet, Christopher
Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great, and Edgar A. Poe’s epic poem Tamerlane
7 (Duin)
8 (Howarth)
9 (Gordon)
10 (Whitehead)
 4

Hulagu was the son of Tolui Khan, himself the youngest son of Temujin.

Hulagu‟s mother was Tolui‟s Nestorian Christian wife Sorghaghtani Beki11. Hulagu‟s

favorite wife was likewise a Christian, though his own religion is debated among

Armenian, Persian, and Mongol sources. The perceived special treatment of various

religious orders under Mongol rule can be traced to the confusion about Hulagu‟s

religious biases and his own faith. Hulagu‟s brothers included the Möngke and Kublai,

the fourth and fifth Great Khans of the East. It was Möngke who ordered Hulagu to

fulfill Temujin‟s imperial wishes in the Middle East. His specific orders, as portrayed in

Rashid ad-Din‟s history, were to “to destroy the Ismā'īlī‟s [Assassin] fortresses, to bend

the Caliph to Mongol submission, and to always ask [his wife] Doquz Khātun for

advice12.” Hulagu set forth from Karakorum in 1253 with his wives and personal guard,

his army having left to prepare the way in 1252. The size of Hulagu‟s army has been

debated in various sources, as Hulagu is purported to have taken one-fifth of the able-

bodied men of Mongolia into his army. Whether or not it was the largest Mongol force

ever assembled, it appears as the largest in Arabic history. Naturally, actual numbers

for the military are at best an estimate. As units joined Hulagu‟s march from present-

day Mongolia to Baghdad and as casualties incurred against the Ismā'īlī‟s increased,

more soldiers were pressed into service from newly subjugated areas. The Mongols

arranged their forces decimally, and Amitai-Preiss suggests a probable total of troops at

“15-17 tumens [units of 10,000 men], ca. 150-170,000 Mongol and Turkish troops to

which a slightly smaller number of local auxiliaries was eventually added, for a grand

11 (Barthold)
12 (Venegoni)
 5

total of some 300,000 troops…13.” Hulagu‟s progression towards Baghdad was well-

planned and un-hurried. Thanks to numerical superiority and siege equipment, the

Assassin capital of Alamut had fallen by 1256 with minimal loss to the Mongols.

Many modern histories about the Arab state fail to mention even this cursory

background to Hulagu‟s invasion of Baghdad and the intrigue that played out during the

fall of the Ismā'īlīs. Hulagu, with the aid of his Persian advisor Juvayni, was well-aware

that the Caliph in Baghdad likewise considered the Shi‟ite Isma‟ilis a dangerous foe, and

Hulagu had sent several messengers asking for the Caliph‟s submission and alliance,

that the Caliph would have the name of the Mongol leader Möngke pronounced in the

k̲h̲uṭba. The Caliph refused, instead reminding Hulagu that Baghdad had never fallen to

an infidel. This attitude is more curious, as past envoys between the states, starting in

1246, had to the Great Khan with the rhetoric of submission.14

Baghdad at the time of the Mongolian conquest was a pale shadow of its former

glory at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate. Looting and rioting was common in the

streets, exacerbated by sectarian violence between Sunni and Shī„ah, Jew and Christian,

as the weakened government struggled to maintain order. Duri describes that even fifty

years before the sack of Baghdad, “Ibn Jubayr … in 1185… noticed the general decline,

and criticized the arrogance of its people15.” In the final years of the Caliphate, Baghdad

was a town with neglected infrastructure, collapsing agriculture, and almost no ability to

defend itself16. On January 29th, 1258, the Mongol forces under Hulagu surrounded the

13 (Amitai-Preiss)
14 (Amitai-Preiss) p. 16
15 (Duri)
16 “The government was too weak to keep order. Floods recurred, indicating the weakness of government and

the neglect of irrigation. In 1243 floods… ruined some quarters. In 1248 floods surrounded east Baghdad,
 6

city and laid siege. By February 4th the outer wall was breached, and by February 10th

the city was entirely at Hulagu‟s mercy. In Arab sources, Hulagu had no mercy. 17

According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, “Estimates of the number killed vary between

800,000 and two million, the estimate mounting with the lapse of time18.” And yet,

Mongol sources, which have a history of emphasizing war casualties for the purposes of

their own propaganda, say only that several tens of thousands were killed19.

The discrepancies continue, as Rashid ad-Din suggests that, upon taking the city,

Hulagu‟s first proclamation was to “…promise to spare God's erudite, the holy men,

descendants of Ali, the merchants, and all who had not borne arms against him20.”

These merchants were afforded special treatment according to the Encyclopaedia

Iranica, “as the merchants who used to travel to Khorasan had… a connection with

Mongol rulers… After the city fell, those merchants applied to the Mongol commanders,

entreating them to appoint guards to watch over their houses… and those of other

individuals who had taken refuge with them21.” Le Strange suggests that it was

destroyed a part of the wall… It also flooded Rusafa and many of its houses fell. West Baghdad was
submerged, and most houses fell. Houses on the river collapsed. Floods entered Baghdad in 1253, and again
in 1255 when a great number of houses collapsed and cultivation was damaged. The worst flood was in 1256
when both sides were surrounded by water and the flood even entered the markets of east Baghdad, Dar al-
Hilafa, and the Nizamiyya.” Ibid.
17 “The city itself was given over to slaughter.” (Amitai-Preiss) p. 16 “Hulagu… razed the city and put 200,000

of its inhabitants to the sword.” (Collomb) p.125 “The sack of Baghdad which followed lasted forty days,
during which time a large proportion of the inhabitants were butchered in cold blood…” (Le Strange) p. 341
“The caliph’s army was instructed to assemble on the plain outside Baghdad, where all were massacred. Then
the inhabitants of the city were told to assemble, when they too were shot and hacked to death, their corpses
piled in heaps. … It is estimated that some eight hundred thousand men, women and children were killed
over a period of days… and all the glories of medieval Baghdad were reduced to ruins.” (Simons) p. 134 “For
six days Hulagu permitted his men to run amok. When the Mongols rode out of Baghdad, 750,000 lay dead in
its streets or engulfed in the flames that destroyed the city's palaces, mosques and libraries. The fear of
plague had called an end to the rapine and the plunder-laden train that snaked out of Baghdad was over five
miles long.” (Silvester)
18 Ibid
19 Ibid.
20 (Venegoni)
21 (Kennedy)
 7

treachery by the shī„ahs in their respective quarters of the city that aided the Mongol

capture of the city22, remaining silent of the massacre of shī„ahs in the years preceding

the invasion. Clearly, the Mongols were attacking a city divided unto itself, and the

shī„ah population was right to look to the Mongols for liberation, as the Il-Khan rule that

followed saw the decline of Arab influence and culture and the rise of Persian. Baghdad

suffered during the Mongol conquest, and though the Sunni mosques were destroyed,

churches were spared, a new cathedral was ordered built, and the city ulama issued a

fatwa stating that “a just kafir was better than an unjust imam23.” Hulagu left Baghdad

soon after, but before departing ordered the restoration of many public institutions in

ruins under the Abbasids, and reopened several ribat for Sufis and schools around the

city.

Tamerlane‟s background is perhaps the most confused of any of the great

conquerors from the steppe. He has been identified as Uzbek, Mongol, Tatar, Turk,

Turko-Mongol, Uzbek-Mongol24, and a Chaghatayid Turk. That his background is

uncertain is self-evident. Styled in later histories as Timur bin Targhay Barlas, what is

known is that he was the son of a minor chieftain, a speaker of Chaghatay, a Turkic

language named for the descendant of Temujin that ruled over Central Asia. Thus,

Tamerlane was not a member of the Mongol aristocracy, but a semi-nomadic herder

born in the city of Kesh, near Samarkand. Similar to Hulagu, his religious orientation

seemed to be opportunistic, as his faith was defined for him by his chroniclers. As Lamb

stated, by “his own deeds” Tamerlane was not a devout Muslim: he never took an

22 (Le Strange)
23 (Duri)
24 Perhaps the most erroneous title, found in (Collomb), as Tamerlane spent a large part of his career fighting

the Golden Horde north of the Dasht-i Qipchaq, from whom the Uzbeks and Kazakhs are descended.
 8

Islamic name, was as likely to spare Christian populations as Muslim populations in the

cities he conquered25, and attempted to fill the shoes of the previous conquerors of

Central Asia, Alexander the Great and Temujin26. Unlike Hulagu, he was the creator of

his own destiny, and his taking of Baghdad was to fulfill his own ambitions, and not out

of family duty.

Also unlike Hulagu, Tamerlane took Baghdad twice. The initial conquest of the

city was a bloodless transfer of power. In 1393, Tamerlane‟s reputation was such that

Sultan Ahmad of Baghdad fled at the first news of his approach. Baghdad submitted to

Tamerlane, who claimed to be arriving as a “liberator” at the invitation of the elders of

the city, rescuing the city from the tyrannical rule of Sultan Ahmad. Tamerlane

celebrated the capture for several weeks, collecting ransom from the citizens in

exchange for sparing their lives. The Sultan barely escaped with his life, fleeing across

the Syrian Desert to Damascus. During his flight, he barely outpaced a section of

Tamerlane‟s army, and in the process had to leave behind his wives and son, who were

taken back to Tamerlane in Baghdad. Along with the Sultan‟s wives and son, the city‟s

chief artisans and treasures were sent back to Samarkand to enrich Tamerlane‟s own

capital27. As Hookham describes Baghdad, the earlier devastation of Baghdad had

ruined the city‟s reputation as a center of Arab culture, but the Persian traders still

25 (Lamb) p.305
26 Tamerlane later assumed the title “Sahib qiran” or, "Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction, was a title
bestowed upon those lucky few, such as Alexander the Great and Chinggis Khan who, according to tradition,
were born during the fortunate conjunction between Jupiter and Venus.” (Sela) p.24
27 (Hookham) p.149 There is an account of the thrilling chase after the fleeing Sultan in (Lamb) p. 179, which

lends some credence to the argument that Tamerlane’s second visit to Baghdad was punitive in nature.
 9

benefited from its location at the crossroads of the trade between Khorasan and the

West, as well as being on the conjunction of pilgrimage routes southward28.

Scholars of Central Asian history that have compared the campaigns of the

Mongols and Tamerlane would consider this an excellent example of their distinctive

strategies. Temujin and his heirs generally acted swiftly enough so that cities could be

caught unawares. This allowed the city leaders to be brought under Mongol subjugation

or executed. Tamerlane was not as careful in his campaigns, and on several occasions

revisited towns that he had previously taken.

Such was the case with Baghdad. A year after Baghdad submitted to Tamerlane,

Sultan Ahmad returned, escorted by his new allies, the Mamluk army of Egypt. Sultan

Ahmad was installed as a regional governor, subservient to Egypt but nominally

independent, with little military support. It can be said, then, that Tamerlane did not

take Baghdad to hold it, leaving behind a weak regional government, and as such lost

the city shortly after „liberating‟ the city of its most valuable citizens and possessions.

Tamerlane, however, would eventually return, and the second encounter was by far the

more disastrous.

In March of 1401, following the sack of Damascus, Tamerlane crossed the

Euphrates, headed towards Baghdad29. The campaign was an attempt to upset the

alliance of the Ottomans and Mamluks. Tamerlane arrived in early summer to find the

gates of Baghdad closed to him. Sultan Ahmad had again fled Baghdad, this time to join

the Ottoman ruler Bayezid, and the Sultan left orders for Faraj, his commander of the

28 Ibid. p.150
29
(Lamb), (Manz, Tīmūr Lang), (Hookham)
 10

city‟s defense. If Tamerlane arrived in person to take the city, Baghdad should

surrender. However, if it was merely a detachment of the army, the city was to hold out

and send for Ottoman reinforcements to support the city.

Tamerlane appeared before the city and found the city gates closed before him,

and Faraj had an officer that knew Tamerlane by sight verify that the conqueror had

returned to Baghdad. Faraj understood that Tamerlane would consider his life forfeit

for stopping him at the gates, and Faraj considered that the unbearable heat of summer

would make Tamerlane‟s siege unbearable for the immobile army. However, Tamerlane

intended to have the Tigris under his domain, and Baghdad was the key to the Tigris,

and his initial plans to march on Egypt were changed, and the siege of Baghdad begun.

Tamerlane sent orders to his son in Tabriz to come to Baghdad with ten veteran

divisions and siege engineers. A bridge of boats was built across the river and siege

equipment was put into place around the city walls, while the sappers brought down the

outer wall of the city in a matter of days. Tamerlane‟s generals requested a general

assault, as the heat of the summer that Faraj expected was taking its toll on the

soldiers30. According to various chronicles, the siege of Baghdad lasted anywhere from

ten to forty days, and was broken at noon one day in late June, 1401. Most of the army,

like the city‟s defenders, generally slept through the heat of the day, and only a few

watchers were left on the walls. The walls were scaled with ladders and the gates

opened, and the slaughter that followed appears of Biblical proportion in most of the

chronicles31. Faraj was killed while fleeing the destruction. Each soldier was ordered to

30
(Iriskulov, Ignatenko and Kim)
31“The Abode of Peace [had become] the Palace of Havoc and Hell.” (Lamb) p. 217 “Baghdad was no longer
the Abode of Peace… but the city of hell and discord.” (Hookham) p.241
 11

collect a head of a Baghdadi, (two a piece, according to Arabshah)32, and more than a

hundred pyramids of severed heads were built outside the city. Many of the public

institutions of the Abbasid Caliphate that had survived the destruction of the Mongol

siege were put to the torch by Tamerlane when he ordered that the city be burnt, but in

respect to his dominantly Muslim army, he asked that mosques and religious buildings

be spared. The Encyclopaedia of Islam offers an overview of Tamerlane‟s career, and it

is especially useful in characterizing his relations with Baghdad.

Tīmūr offered a choice of submission with safety or complete destruction; he

carried off the skilled artisans and spared the religious classes, sometimes

amusing himself by matching them in disputation and in chess. Even from

submissive cities he extorted a massive ransom. His campaigns included displays

of spectacular ferocity, sparingly used, and almost always intentional. The

ravages of his army were considerable but frequently followed by the restoration

of agriculture. On his first expedition to a region, Tīmūr simply extracted

submission and taxes, returning later to punish insubordinate vassals and install

governors.33

The Encyclopaedia of Islam suggests that this was the blow that most wounded

Baghdad as a center of culture and a town of critical importance in the region. Sultan

Ahmad, one year after the sack of Baghdad, returned and ruled until the coming of the

Turkmen Ḳara Ḳoyunlu. The city never recovered, and less than forty years after

Tamerlane‟s destructive siege, Makrizi came upon little more than ruins, recording that,

32 (Hookham) p.242
33 (Manz, Tīmūr Lang)
 12

“Bag̲h̲dād is ruined, there is no mosque or congregation, and no market. Its canals are

mostly dry and it could hardly be called a city34.”

Tamerlane and Hulagu have since become historical figures, synonymous with

destruction, though their exploits would appear to now serve other purposes. Two

recent general histories that have been informed by recent interest in „Arab‟ history,

Collomb‟s The Rise and Fall of the Arab Empire and Simons Iraq: From Sumer to

Saddam, both describe Hulagu‟s destruction in apocalyptic rhetoric, while glossing over

Tamerlane‟s destruction, both with egregious errors in time, location, and degree of

destruction. Collomb opens his chapter on Tamerlane with

“By 1300, the Arabs of the Middle East were concerned almost exclusively with

survival. Over the centuries, they had alternately been indulged, exploited,

plundered and massacred by the Byzantines, by sects during Umayyad times,

during inter-communal fighting, …by venal Turkic mercenaries, …and by fiendish

Mongols. … In 1393 …Tamerlane (Timur), an Uzbek Turk claiming descent from

Genghis Khan… invaded the Middle East with another Mongol-Uzbek horde. He

had just completed an invasion of India where he had slaughtered the Muslim

population of Delhi…35”

Le Strange‟s work focuses on Abbasid Baghdad, but contains a large epilogue

chronicling the history of Baghdad after the rise of the Il-Khans. He mentions that the

34(Duri)
35Tamerlane’s campaign of 1393 was largely a campaign of collecting tribute. His Indian campaign occurred
between the first and second taking of Baghdad, in 1398. The Uzbeks were not yet in existence, so it is
uncertain how this could even be the ‘second’ Uzbek-Mongol joint invasion. Tamerlane never claimed
descent from Temujin, and for that reason put a Chingisid puppet Khan on the throne in Samarkand.
Tamerlane’s created genealogy suggests instead that he and Temujin share a common ancestor, the son of a
Mongol virgin impregnated by a moonbeam. (Iriskulov, Ignatenko and Kim)
 13

importance of the city had diminished after Hulagu so that all of its subsequent history

could be related in a few paragraphs, which is in direct contrast to the sources utilized

for this paper. Moreover, Le Strange does not mention the second sack of Baghdad

under Tamerlane or the colossal destruction of the city at that time36.

In short, the sack of Baghdad under Tamerlane has been reduced to a footnote in

Middle Eastern historiography, as just another moment of extreme violence in an age of

barbarism after the fall of the Arabs under the Abbasids. This is despite the fact that

Hulagu‟s conquest was directed against the Seljuqs and Mamluks, themselves

descendents of Central Asian nomads taken and sold into slavery to the Muslims.

Tamerlane‟s recent rise to relative fame is the product of nationalist revisionist history

on the part of Uzbekistan37, which has its own reasons for portraying the conqueror as

indifferent to neighboring polities regardless of race or creed. Hulagu‟s depiction as an

enemy of Islam owes at least as much to his affinity for Persians and Nestorian

Christians, and should be mentioned that the Mongols attacked peoples of varying

religions and controlled a vast empire of multiple faiths. Tamerlane, on the other hand,

though ruling over Muslims, rarely attacked non-Muslims except out of retribution for

resistance38.

Hulagu and Tamerlane as historical figures have become almost unknowable as

living persons, and have transformed into archetypal figures of death and punishment to

Muslims. While Tamerlane has gained some utility to Uzbek historians as a figure

36 (Le Strange)
37 (Duin)
38 “All of the lands that Timur conquered were both Islamic – formally at least -- and within territories ruled

by Turks or Mongols. Even Turkic rulers outside the Mongolian tradition had accepted some aspects of it.”
(Manz, Tamerlane and the Symbolism of Sovreignty)
 14

appropriate for the present secularized Muslim dictatorship of independent Uzbekistan,

the rise of Arab nationalism and a desire to discover a lost past of Muslim dominance

and Arab culture have painted Hulagu as a wanton destroyer, when in reality neither is

appropriate. Hulagu and his Il-Khan successors repaired much of the agriculture of

Baghdad and the city recovered much that was lost during the decline of the Abbasid

Caliphate, whereas the seemingly vengeful destruction that Tamerlane wrought did far

more damage to the city itself. The difference might be in the city‟s changed orientation,

away from Sunni Arab Islam towards Persian Shi'a Islam. The sources are varied in

their depictions of the events, but it seems self-evident that nationalism and its

appropriation of history have served to reverse the significance of the two destructions

of Baghdad in the 13th and 15th centuries.

 15

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