The Mongols Lay Waste to Nishapur, 1221

It may have been from a book I read or some online article, but a statement by one historian really made me pause and reflect. In paraphrase, he/she asked the rhetorical question “What group of people caused the most misery while contributing the least to civilization?” and then proceeded to answer it rather emphatically: the Mongols. He/she was not alone, as Genghis Khan and his sons Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei and Tolui have a well-earned reputation as killers, epitomizing savagery and barbarism while doing precious little to hasten progress of almost any kind.

Between 1206 (when the local warlord Temujin won acclamation as Genghis Khan, emperor of Mongolia) and 1242 when the Mongols withdrew from Europe after the death of Ögedei, successor as Great Khan, they vanquished just about everything between the Pacific and Adriatic Oceans. At its peak, the Mongol empire covered an estimated 12 million square miles. And they did it by employing a ruthless “surrender or die” policy. Taking massacre and bloodshed to an entirely new level, the Mongols have been and I guess they still are perceived as the monstrous Gog and Magog mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel, the demons of Tartarus from Greek mythology and the warriors of Satan himself. The Mongols caused an estimated 36 million deaths, considering all the big and little wars they instigated. While Genghis Khan may have been a military genius, he was an illiterate nomad whose men knew just one thing—fighting. Eurasia’s Pax Mongolica was none too peaceful.

What happened to the city of Nishapur (in northeastern Persia) in April 1221 may have been the Mongols at their worst. It sat on the Silk Road and was a major center of learning, trade and culture. People in Nishapur knew they were living in a dangerous neighborhood; other towns that had been or would soon be given the Mongol “treatment” included Baylquan, Hamadan, Rayy, Qom, Merv, Herat, Bukhara and Samarkand. Genghis Khan sent an army of between 10,000 and 15,000 men to the Khorasan region, instructing Tolui and other generals to subdue all who dared resist. The Mongols had already had some interactions with Nishapur and felt that they had been insufficiently respected. The people knew those fearsome invaders were coming; Sharaf al-Din Amir Majlis, the governor of Nishapur, had 48,000 archers and other soldiers at the ready, so the numbers appeared to have favored him.

As soon as Tolui’s army reached the gates of Nishapur, he ordered the drums of war to sound and the siege to begin. They were successfully held off for eight days, but it soon became apparent that the scale and sophistication of the Mongols’ wrecking machinery (including Chinese-made catapults) were too much. The corpses were piling up when Sharaf al-Din’s representative, Mawlānā Rukn al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm al-Mughīsī, went out to ask for quarter. He must have realized the futility of such a request, as he was seized. The Mongols renewed their attack the next day, breaching the walls in numerous spots. Although the defenders of Nishapur fought back, organized resistance collapsed when Sharaf al-Din was killed.

Also dead was a Mongol general named Toquchar—who happened to be Genghis Khan’s favorite son-in-law. He had taken an arrow launched by one of Nishapur’s defenders. When this news reached the big man’s daughter (Toquchar’s wife-now-widow, Toregene Khatun), she was consumed by grief. The woman is said to have called for complete destruction of the city, with not even a dog or cat left alive. Genghis Khan sent a message to Tolui coldly commanding him, “Grant her wish.” According to historian Shivan Mahendrarajah, “the city’s inhabitants quaffed from the goblet of martyrdom.” All were killed (with the exception of a few scribes who were told to record what had transpired and spread the word north, south, east and west), their heads chopped off and stacked into ghastly pyramids. Among those unfortunates was Faridoddin Abu Hamed Mohammad Attar Nishapuri, well known as a poet, theoretician of Sufism, hagiographer and pharmacist.

It was not unusual in ancient and medieval times for numbers to be wildly inflated, and so it was in the case of Nishapur. No, 1.7 million people did not die—merely between 100,000 and 200,000. Still, that was slaughter on a big scale; the killing was said to have taken six days to complete. Before moving on, the Mongols planted barley over the ruins. The city was effectively erased from the map, but not forever. About 100 years later, a highly productive agricultural center was operating just to the north. Also known as Nishapur, it is today one of Iran’s provincial capitals, home to 265,000 people and source of some of the world’s finest turquoise.

The original Nishapur lay below ground for seven centuries until a team of excavators, led by Charles Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dug between 1935 and 1940, returning for one more look in the winter of 1947–1948. It must have been a sobering sight for those archaeologists who uncovered the remains of the citadel, a mosque and some houses and kilns. Nishapur, founded in the third century by King Shapur I and destined to be a jewel of Persian culture, had suffered an unimaginable cataclysm.

The destruction of Nishapur in 1221, symbolic of Mongol wrath, cemented the reputation of Genghis Khan (although he was not actually present when it happened) as a force of terror in that part of the world. To him, resistance was an insult to be answered with annihilation, which is just what the Mongols administered. For centuries to come, this would be recognized as one of the darkest acts of Mongol conquest. The memory of Nishapur became legend, and poets wrote mournful verses of a city once radiant, now lost to time.

Mongol messengers at the walls of Nishapur demanding surrender. They did not get it and so began destruction of the city…

Faridoddin Abu Hamed Mohammad Attar Nishapuri…

An artistic representation of what Nishapur may have looked like before the Mongols attacked in 1221…

Charles Wilkinson and fellow archaeologists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art digging amid the ruins of ancient Nishapur…

Genghis Khan demanded submission…