Vol. 12 No.04            April 2003/Muharram/Safar 1424 H Price Rs. 2.00

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The effects upon the Middle East were much less significant. Its people became convinced that the Westerner was a ruthless soldier, semibarbarous in nature, ignorant, and uncivilized. Even today Syrian mothers frighten their children when they misbehave by threatening them with “Richard the Lionhearted will get you.” For centuries, Crusaders’ castles dotted the landscape, but these never altered in any measurable degree the architecture of the Levant. The Middle East was politically disunited when the Crusaders arrived; it was still in fragments when they departed. In the interim, to be sure, the Ayyubids united the Muslims from the Nile to the Tigris. But this had no relationship to the Crusades; it was only an example of the recurring pattern of centralizing and decentralizing political forces continually at work in the area. In general it can be said that the Crusaders were more destructive than constructive, and that the Middle East was poorer because of the experience.

In the thirteenth century as the Crusades were waning, devastation rode in upon the Muslim world from the east. Born about 1160 in the neighborhood of Lake Baikal, Genghiz Khan, ruler over Mongol nomads and the self-styled “Scourge of God,” consolidated in his hands the military might of the tireless Mongol warriors. Shortly after the opening of the thirteenth century Genghiz and his hordes moved west-ward to Iran, conquering all lands in their path. Bukhara, Samarkand, Marw, Nishapur, Hamadan, Maraghah, and many other centers of civilizations were stormed and sacked. Inhabitants were slain by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.

Iraq, Syria, and provinces in the west were spared by Genghiz’s death in 1227 and by the subsequent division of the empire among his sons. But his sons and grandsons and other Mongol khans maintained the great empire. Pressure continued upon the Middle East. The Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor were defeated in a ruinous battle in 1243, and the Mongols levied tribute upon them. Under Mangu, the third successor to the position of Supreme Khan, a great expedition moved westward under the direction of Mangu’s younger brother Hulagu. Starting from Karakarum in 1252 to rid the world of the Assassins and to destroy the Abbasid Caliphate, Hulagu Khan razed Alamut, the Assassin headquarters. Baghdad’s turn came in 1258. Following a siege of several months, the city fell and was given over completely to the troops for a week. Destruction continued for a month. The Mongols then proceeded westward as far as Damascus but were halted by Baybars, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, in an historic battle in 1260 at Ayn Jalat, near Nazareth. Egypt was spared Mongol violence; and Baybars pressed his victory, freeing Syria from Mongol control.

The Mongols in their conquests helped themselves to whatever they wanted and destroyed the rest, not knowing what to do with it. They could not garrison the cities adequately; they were pagans; and they neither understood nor appreciated the cultures and civilizations of the peoples they conquered. The devastation wrought by the Mongols is only now in the twentieth century being mended. Millions of peoples perished; cities vanished; canals silted full and irrigation ceased; lands became barren and deserted; government disintegrated; civilization foundered; and life returned to the bare essentials. Through the previous ages conquering armies and peoples had come and gone—Medes, Persians, Sasanids, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs—and customs, religions, knowledge, and culture had been modified, developed, and altered. But through all this time the Middle East had never suffered such a cataclysmic and paralytic shock as it received from the Mongol invasions.

(From The Middle East: A History by S.N. Fisher, pp.138-39) 

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