More than you ever wanted to know about Mongolian history, from my Mongolia
Guy: “I wanted to correct a few mistakes that have appeared about the
Mongol empire in the Corner. … (1) Genghis Khan never got anywhere near
Baghdad. He died in 1227 after unifying Mongolia, conquering North China,
and the –stans of Central Asia. The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. (2)
Genghis Khan was not a baptized Christian. There was however a Christian
tribe in Mongolia and after conquering them, Genghis gave several of their
ladies to his sons as wives. Thus many grandsons of Genghis Khan had
Christian mothers. (3) Among them was Hulegu, who led the Mongols sacking
Baghdad. His mother was a Christian, but he was probably not baptized. His
main religious interest was Buddhism and he imported Chinese artisans to
build a Buddhist temple in northwest Iran. His wife Toghus was a baptized
Christian who convinced him to spare Christians in the sack of Baghdad. (4)
The Mongols who sacked Baghdad had many non-Mongol auxiliaries. One group,
the Georgians were to the Islamic world of the thirteenth century what the
Israelis are today—the most feared and despised group of uppity dhimmis.
Thirty years earlier an anti-Mongol jihadist Jalal-ud-Din Menguberdi had
sacked the Georgian capital, killed everyone alive in it and destroyed all
its churches. For the Georgians in the Mongol army, the sack of Baghdad was
just pay-back time. It is also worth noting that the Shi’ite cities of
southern Iraq surrendered without a fight to the Mongols and were made an
autonomous ecclesiastical regime. The Baghdad Caliphate was (like Saddam’s
regime) based on Sunni supremacy. The decades before the Mongol conquest in
Baghdad were punctuated with frequent Sunni pogroms against the Shi’ites and
some Shi’ites believed the Mongols were the predicted liberators of them
from the Sunni tyranny.”