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Baghdad was also the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, founded five hundred years earlier. The ruling caliph was the thirty-seventh—and arguably feeblest, vainest, and least worthy— successor to the Prophet Muhammad. In what must have seemed an astounding act of hubris, Hulegu issued a summons to the caliph, demanding that he surrender or perish. The caliph responded haughtily, declaring that all of the Islamic world, with God by their side, would rise up to slay the infidels. The caliph was mistaken.

The Abbasid caliphate was a theocracy, committed to Sunni Islamic orthodoxy. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Abbasid lands were filled with disaffected minorities, including Shiites, Jews, and especially Christians, who were eager to see the overthrow of their Sunni overlords. The Mongols shrewdly exploited these religious and sectarian divisions. Many among Baghdad's significant Shiite minority, most likely including the caliph's own vizier and chief minister, conspired with the Mongols, acting as informants and spies. Thousands of Baghdad's Christians simply joined the Mongol forces.31

By contrast, the Mongols were more religiously open than any other power in the world. Hulegu had Muslims and Christians of every sect in his army. One of his advisors was the brilliant Shiite astronomer Nasir ad-Din Tusi. Moreover, Hulegu's mother and two wives were Christian, making it easier for him to cultivate the Christians of the Middle East, many of whom hailed him as a savior. Hulegu marched on Baghdad in 1257. (He had left the steppe in 1253, but it took his men several years to overcome the hashish-smoking, fearless Order of the Assassins, a bizarre Muslim sect that controlled an extensive network of mountain fortresses stretching from Afghanistan to Syria.) On February 5, 1258, after a week of flooding and bombardment, they breached the eastern wall of Baghdad; the caliph capitulated days later. In falling to the Mongols, the Abbasid caliphate succumbed not to a nomadic horde but to the combined “human, financial, material, and technological resources of northern China, central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, and Iran.”32

Baghdad was sacked and looted; corpses piled up on the streets, producing a suffocating stench. Christians and Shiites were generally spared. Hulegu reportedly tried to force the caliph to eat pieces of his own gold. When that failed, Hulegu ordered the caliph and his male heirs rolled in carpets and stomped to death— a punishment apparently reserved for the very highborn.

By bringing down the caliphate, the Mongols had accomplished in two years what the Christian crusaders had not been able to do in two centuries. Baghdad's Christians celebrated by slaughtering Muslims and destroying mosques. Throughout the Middle East, Christians from Damascus to Aleppo hailed the Mongol advance with almost apocalyptic fervor. Above all, they prayed that the Mongols would liberate Jerusalem, and gleefully prepared to take vengeance on their former Muslim oppressors.33

For all their ruthlessness, there was no such religious venom or zealousness among the Mongols. On the contrary, back at Karako-rum, the Mongol court's approach to religion was more like that of an Ivy League university. According to William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk who visited Karakorum in 1254, Grand Khan Mongke presided over elaborate religious debates in which everyone had an equal voice and the finding of common ground was encouraged. Rubruck himself was a rigid Catholic, intolerant even of other Christians. When Rubruck informed the Great Khan that he had come “to spread the word of God,” Mongke asked him to participate in a debate before three judges: a Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Christian. The debate was closely supervised, the most critical rule being that “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” The anthropologist Jack Weatherford vividly describes the events that followed:

In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made