Islam Between the Crusades and the Mongols
From 1095 to 1291 the Islamic world kept up a long series of attacks against Africa and Europe, and later against the Balkans, and turned thousands of churches into mosques. Eight crusades, called by twelve popes, drew kings, commanders and common men from Europe to the Muslim fortresses of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia. They ended in failure, but they were enough to disrupt the order of Muslim lands and drain their resources. In Spain the crusading wars ended in victory. Islam retreated, and a few survivors gathered in Granada, where they only briefly delayed defeat. Sicily was also taken from Islam by the powerful Normans.
All these wounds were minor beside the blow the Mongols struck between 1219 and 1258. Across Transoxiana, Iran and Iraq, the cities that anchored Islamic civilization fell one after another to plunder, massacre and fire. Bukhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Rey, Herat and Baghdad were the most important. Administration and city government collapsed. Irrigation channels were abandoned and silted up. Trade disappeared. Schools and libraries burned, and scholars and writers fled, were killed or were taken captive. For nearly a century the brave spirit of Islam stayed disheartened and weak.
Timur, the Ottomans and a Civilization That Would Not Die
Slowly it revived, only to fall once more into the grip of Timur and his Tatars, who made all of western Asia their field of raiding and ruin. The Mongol advance westward was halted by the resistance of the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor, who closed the road at the Bosphorus. In all of human history no civilization has suffered disasters as relentless, severe and widespread as Islam did.
Even so, the Mongols, Tatars and Turks supplied fresh blood to replace what had been wasted. Islam had grown soft and fond of luxury, and Baghdad, like Constantinople, had lost the will to live and to rely on its own strength. This dazzling civilization, like the Byzantine empire, was ripe for death. Yet it was so deep and rich that, like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, it could civilize its conquerors with its surviving fragments and memories.
Under the Mongol Ilkhans, Iran had a capable government, magnificent art and a high literature, and history was adorned by a scholar of the stature of Khwaja Rashid al-Din Fazlullah. Timur rebuilt in Transoxiana almost as intensely as he had destroyed, and even in the midst of his raiding he stood before Hafez's tomb and honored the poet. In Asia Minor the Turks had become civilized and poets were plentiful among them. In Egypt the Mamluks went on building and restoring with legendary energy. In West Africa Islam spread the seeds of learning. At the same time Islam was expanding across India and pushing toward the farthest regions of the East.
A Mongol Empire Across Asia
When Marco Polo set out from Iran to visit China, then ruled by Kublai Khan (1271), he found himself almost everywhere inside the Mongol empire. History had never seen a realm so vast. In the west it reached the Dnieper River in Russia. In the south it included the Crimean peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Tibet and part of India as far as the Ganges. In the east it had taken in China and Korea, and in the north lay the Mongols' original homeland, the great plains of Mongolia. Across their dominions the Mongol rulers kept roads in good order, encouraged trade, protected and sheltered travelers, and let every faith worship in its own way.
After destroying Baghdad in 1258, Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, made Maragheh in northwestern Iran his capital. When he died in 1265 his son Abaqa became ruler of Iran, owing only partial obedience to the Great Khan, Kublai. This was the start of the Ilkhanid dynasty, which ruled Iran and Iraq until 1337.
Ghazan Khan and the Rise of Tabriz
The most important Ilkhan was Ghazan Khan. He was the shortest man among his troops, yet his will was harder than their weapons. He broke with the Great Khan, whose seat was in Mongolia or China, made his realm independent and chose Tabriz as capital. Envoys came to his court from China, India, Egypt, England and Spain. Ghazan reformed the administration, stabilized the currency and protected peasants from the abuses of landlords and bandits. He raised Tabriz to the prosperity and prestige Baghdad had enjoyed in its great age.
In Tabriz he built a mosque, two madrasas, a university of philosophy, an observatory, a library and a hospital, and he endowed them permanently with the income of vast estates. He summoned the greatest scholars and physicians of his day to work in them. He was himself a learned man who spoke several languages, Latin included, according to the book. He built himself a tomb so grand that his death in 1304 seemed a triumphal entry into a higher dwelling.
Marco Polo described Tabriz as a "great and noble city". The friar Odoric of Pordenone wrote in 1320 that it was the best city in the world for trade, with every kind of goods in abundance, and he reported that its Christians believed the tax it paid its ruler exceeded all that France paid its king. In 1404 Clavijo called it an enormous city with great wealth and goods, beautiful buildings, splendid mosques and some of the finest baths in the world, and estimated its population at a million. These figures are the travelers' own and should be read with caution.
Rashid al-Din: Vizier, Physician and Historian
Oljeitu followed the wise policy of his brother Ghazan. Some of the finest examples of Persian architecture and illumination date from his time. The distinguished career of his vizier, Khwaja Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, is itself a striking example of the culture and learning of the era. Rashid al-Din was born in Hamadan in 1247, perhaps to Jewish parents, which his enemies said explained his mastery of the law of Moses. He was court physician to Abaqa, grand vizier to Ghazan and treasurer to Oljeitu.
In a district of eastern Tabriz he founded a great center of learning and medicine called the Rab-e Rashidi. A letter of his, preserved in the Cambridge University library, describes it. He lists 24 caravanserais, 1,500 shops, 30,000 handsome houses, baths, gardens, warehouses, mills and workshops for textiles and paper. Capable people had been brought from every land, among them 200 Quran reciters. He housed 400 scholars, theologians, jurists and traditionists on a "Street of the Learned" with stipends, food, clothing and even soap and sweets provided. He supported a thousand more students so they could study in comfort.
The letter also describes his plans for medical training. Fifty skilled physicians from India, China, Egypt and Syria were invited to the hospital, and each had to teach ten students daily. Every eye doctor, surgeon and bonesetter was assigned five boys from the household staff to train, and the physicians lived on their own "Street of the Healers". Craftsmen from many countries were settled in separate streets as well.
His energy is astonishing. While running a kingdom he found time to write five books of theology, four on medicine and statecraft, and a large two-volume history of the world. A Muslim admirer reported that he had time for his writing only between the dawn prayer and sunrise. But since even Azerbaijan has cloudy days, he finished in seven years his famous Jami al-Tawarikh, "the Compendium of Chronicles". It covers the history of the Mongols from Genghis Khan to Ghazan, the history of the Islamic lands and dynasties, Iran and the Jews before and after Muhammad, and China and India, with a thorough study of the Buddha and his teaching. It ends with a brief and critical account of the kings, popes and philosophers of Europe.
The book says that those who have read the work, which in its view had not been translated into any European language, rank it as the most valuable and scholarly work of Persian prose. For it Rashid al-Din used all the state's records and employed Chinese scholars to give him Chinese historical texts. He apparently read these and other important works in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkic and Mongolian in the original. To protect the work from time and war, he sent copies to far-flung libraries of the world, had it translated into Arabic, and set up an endowment to pay for two new copies each year, one Persian and one Arabic, to be given to an Islamic city.
Even so, part of the book and some of his other works were lost, perhaps a result of the blow that fell on his political life in his last years. In 1312 Oljeitu named Khwaja Ali Shah of Gilan as Rashid al-Din's co-treasurer. Under Oljeitu's successor Abu Said Bahadur Khan, Ali Shah slandered him and convinced the khan that Rashid al-Din and his son had poisoned Oljeitu. The great historian was dismissed and soon afterward, at seventy, was put to death with one of his sons (1318). His property was confiscated, his institutions lost the income endowed to them, and the Rab-e Rashidi was plundered and destroyed.
When it was too late, Abu Said repented and tried to make amends by appointing one of the historian's sons, Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, as his vizier. He governed with prudence and fairness. Then came an age of chaos. The Ilkhanid dynasty died out, its realm split into small, warring emirates, and yet poetry and letters flourished.