The Il-Khans of Persia and the Christian West
J.A. Boyle describes how, in 1258, the Mongol Khans from Persia captured the Caliphate of Bagdad and international contacts followed with the European powers.
We are told by the Sire de Joinville in his History of St Louis that when the King was supervising the fortification of Sidon the news was brought to the French camp that ‘the King of the Tartars had taken the city of Bagdad and the Pope of the Saracens, that was lord of the city, whom men called the Caliph of Bagdad’. Here Joinville, who completed his History in extreme old age, has suffered a lapse of memory.
It was in fact some five years later, at the beginning of 1258, when Louis had long since returned to France, that the ‘King of the Tartars’, Prince Hülegü, a younger brother of the Great Khan Mongke and the first of the Il-Khans, or Mongol rulers of Persia, captured what had for five hundred years been the metropolis of Islam and put to death the ‘Pope of the Saracens’, that is to say, al-Musta’sim bi’llah, the last of the Abbasids.
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