Hulegu Khan

Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, led the great Mongol expedition into western Asia in the 1250s and founded the Ilkhanate, the Mongol state that ruled Iran and Iraq for much of the following century. His army destroyed the Nizari Ismaili strongholds, sacked Baghdad in 1258 and ended the Abbasid caliphate there, before its advance was stopped by the Mamluks of Egypt in 1260.

Hulegu was born around 1217, a son of Tolui, the youngest son of Genghis Khan, and of Sorghaghtani Beki, a Christian princess of the Keraite people who skilfully steered all her sons into positions of power. His brothers included Möngke, Kublai and Ariq Böke.

After Möngke became Great Khan in 1251, he gave Hulegu the task of bringing the remaining Muslim powers of south-western Asia under Mongol rule: those who submitted were to be spared and those who resisted destroyed. Two in every ten of the empire's fighting men were reportedly assigned to the army, perhaps the largest the Mongols ever raised. Hulegu reached Transoxiana in 1255. The Lurs of southern Iran were quickly crushed, and in early 1256 the Nizari Ismailis, known in Europe as the Assassins, gave up their fortress of Alamut without a fight in return for their lives. Hulegu then made Azerbaijan his base.

In late 1257 the army moved on Baghdad, whose caliph, al-Musta'sim, refused to surrender. The siege began on 29 January 1258, the walls were breached early in February, and the city surrendered on 10 February. Three days later the Mongols entered it and spent a week looting and burning, destroying mosques, palaces, hospitals and the great library. Estimates of the dead range from about 90,000 to as many as a million and cannot be verified. The caliph was put to death, most accounts say by being rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses, so that royal blood would not touch the ground.

In 1260 Hulegu's forces, joined by the Armenian king Hethum I and Bohemond VI of Antioch, took Aleppo and then Damascus, ending Ayyubid rule in Syria. When news came of Möngke's death, Hulegu withdrew most of his army to the east, leaving a much smaller force under his general Kitbuqa. The Mamluk sultan Qutuz, with Baybars commanding his vanguard, destroyed it at the Battle of Ain Jalut later in 1260, and Kitbuqa was killed. The Mongol advance into the Levant never recovered.

By 1262 Hulegu was back in his own lands, planning revenge on Egypt, but he was drawn instead into war with his cousin Berke, khan of the Golden Horde, a Muslim convert who had been angered by the sack of Baghdad and who allied with the Mamluk Sultanate. Hulegu suffered a heavy defeat north of the Caucasus in 1263. It was the first open war between Mongol states and a sign that the unified empire was breaking apart. Hulegu also wrote to Western rulers, including Louis IX of France in 1262, proposing a joint war against the Mamluks, but no alliance resulted.

Hulegu employed Persian administrators, among them the Juvayni brothers, one of whom governed Baghdad and helped repair it. He sponsored the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, for whom an observatory was built at Maragheh. His own sympathies seem to have been Buddhist, and his favourite wife, Doquz Khatun, was a Christian. He fell ill in January 1265 and died on 8 February by the Zarrineh River, and was buried on an island in Lake Urmia. His tomb has never been found. In later Muslim memory he was long remembered chiefly as a destroyer, while historians also credit the state he founded with shaping medieval Iran.

Our 1279 map shows the western reaches of the Mongol Empire soon after Hulegu's death, and the 1300 map shows the Ilkhanate he founded across Iran and Iraq. The Abbasid Caliphate he ended appears on much earlier maps.