Hulagu

Hulagu (1217?-1265), founder of the il-Khanid dynasty, which lasted about 70 years, in Persia. The grandson of Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and brother of Kublai Khan and Mangu Khan, Hulagu brought Persia and Iraq into the Mongol Empire, one of the largest continuous land empires in history. Ordered by Mangu to subdue the Mongols' western neighbors, Hulagu led his enormous army into Persia in 1251 and by 1256 had crushed the heretic Ismaili order of Muslims (also known as the Assassins). From 1257 to 1258 he besieged and finally sacked Baghdād after the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustasim rejected Hulagu's demand for Abbasid surrender. In the massacre, only Christian lives were spared, apparently due to the intervention of Hulagu's Christian wife. Baghdād burned for seven days, and some historians estimate as many as 800,000 people, including the caliph and his family, were killed. In a letter to King Louis IX of France, Hulagu estimated his army killed 200,000 people. Hulagu then captured Aleppo (now Ḩalab) and Damascus in Syria and invaded Palestine when, in 1260, he received word his brother Mangu had died in China. Hulagu returned to Persia for reasons that are not entirely clear, but his army stayed in Palestine, where it was defeated by the Egyptians, thus checking, but not reversing, the westward advance of the Mongols.

Hulagu spent much of his later life near Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran. Many of the towns he and his soldiers destroyed were partially rebuilt during his lifetime. At the time of his death, the Mongol kingdom still stretched from the Oxus River (now Amu Darya River) in Central Asia almost to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean. As befitted an emperor in Mongol custom, several young women were buried with Hulagu, the last recorded instance of humans sacrificed for a Mongol funeral.