The Sack of Baghdad (1258 CE)

Historical context

Baghdad was sacked by the armies of Hülegü on 10 February 1258, and the Abbasid caliphate ended with it. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts describe the killing continuing for days, the libraries and the House of Wisdom destroyed, and the Tigris running black with the ink of thrown books before it ran red. The figures given by medieval chroniclers (hundreds of thousands dead) are not reliable, but the destruction of the city's scholarly institutions is not in doubt. Rashid al-Din, a physician and vizier who served the very Ilkhanid regime that destroyed Baghdad, compiled the Jami' al-Tawarikh — the Compendium of Chronicles — in the early fourteenth century, and it is often described as the first genuinely world-historical survey, with its illustrated copies among the earliest surviving Islamic manuscript paintings; the earliest dated portion is in Edinburgh University Library. That a servant of the conquerors wrote the first world history is not a paradox. It is how the archive is made.

The sighting — unverified

Unverified lead: A detached manuscript leaf, ink and opaque watercolour on paper, catalogued as an Ilkhanid world chronicle and without a secure parent volume. It shows a walled city in a shallow, stacked perspective, its gate broken, and small figures in Mongol armour moving among the buildings. In the lower right, on the riverbank outside the walls, a small black cat sits amid a scatter of objects that read as thrown books — dark rectangles lying open on the ground, some in the water. The water is painted almost black, with a thin red-brown wash along its lower edge. No album page, waqf record or library inventory places an animal in this composition.

Evidence — interpretation

The leaf is genuine fourteenth-century Persian manuscript work: burnished paper with a faint sizing sheen, opaque mineral pigments — lapis, orpiment, vermilion — applied over a black ink outline, and gold applied in small dabs rather than as leaf. The water is not a wash of one pigment but a built-up ghost of indigo and black that has been dry-brushed, which is the technique used for deep water in this school. The cat is drawn in the same ink line weight as the soldiers and filled with the same black used for the water, with no difference in drafting confidence. The leaves of the manuscript are cockled and foxed, the pigment has flaked at the edges of the fold, and a later Persian hand has added a marginal note in the same brown ink as the outline.

Competing reading

Rashid al-Din's project was to legitimise his patrons, not to mourn their victims, and the Jami' al-Tawarikh's account of the sack is not a humanitarian record. The dark rectangles by the river could equally be stones, debris, or the standard convention for scattered bedding — the reading of 'thrown books' is imported from the chroniclers' famous sentence about the Tigris running with ink, which is a literary topos of long standing and may not describe the physical event at all. The vividness of this plate is its least trustworthy feature: it is very good at making us see a scene that the sources are least able to support.

Case theory — fictional interpretation

The most damning object in this file is not the painting of the fire. It is the book that was made afterwards, by the man who worked for the arsonists, and kept in a library that has outlasted every person it describes. Rashid al-Din served Hülegü's dynasty, wrote their world history for them, and in doing so preserved Baghdad's catastrophe as an illustration — which is the only way calamity survives at all: as something somebody useful to the victors wrote down. The chroniclers say the river ran black with ink and then red with blood, and everybody repeats it, and nobody can show it happened. What the leaf actually shows is water painted as a ghost of indigo dry-brushed over black, with a scatter of dark rectangles on the bank that may be books, may be stones, may be bedding. She sits among them, in the same ink as the water, because she is the same kind of evidence: something that gets read into a shape and then reported as having been there. The archive is a set of decisions taken by people who were on the winning side of the fire.

Reconstructed voice — not a historical quotation

Reconstructed voice—not a verified quotation: “They were not burning the books. That is the part everyone gets wrong. They were washing them, and the river carried the writing away instead of the fire.”

Sources consulted

Each source link opens in a new tab.

• University of Edinburgh — ArchivesSpace: Jami' al-Tawarikh, 714 AH (1314 CE)
• Khamseen — Rashid al-Din's Jami' al-Tawarikh
• Wikipedia — Siege of Baghdad (1258)