Sanctifying Baghdad: The Abbasid Capital as an Emblem of Muslim Community and Tradition

In 1258, the Mongols laid siege to and vanquished the city of Baghdad, which had served as the locus of the Abbasid caliphate for centuries. The Mongol troops massacred the majority of the city’s inhabitants, including its leading intellectual and political figures, and all members of the Abbasid dynasty were exterminated or enslaved.  Baghdad itself was reduced from being the illustrious capital of an Islamic caliphate with universalistic claims to being a provincial center
within the expanding Mongol Empire.  The dramatic trauma of these events has inspired their memorialization through Arabic musical traditions, and contemporaries sought to remember and reconstruct these momentous occurrences through their prose, poetry, and scholarship.  The diversity of these primary source materials from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries helps reshape conventional historiography of Baghdad’s fall to the Mongols, by moving beyond the political and military histories of particular dynasties, to appreciating the dynamic currents of collective memory in fashioning broader notions of religious community and belonging in the Islamicate.