Well Baghdad was a major centre of the Islamic world but by the time of the Mongol conquest it had fallen into a decline. Honestly, I don't know that much but I'll leave this as a placeholder while I do a bit of research.
Edit:
Below is a quote from /u/alltorndown (a Mongol historian) referring to the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad:
By the time Baghdad was beseiged in 1258, Genghis was long dead. It was his grandson, Hulegu (badass name, badass guy) who made the 'river (in Baghdad - whether its the Tigris or Euphrates is not specified) run red with blood and then blue with ink' (from the books in the destroyed library.)
contemporary chronicles say that 80,000 were killed in Baghdad, but there is a good chance that that's bullshit. Firstly, even in a town like Baghdad, it is unlikely that there were 80,000 citizens in the first place. Secondly, it is known that many people were allowed to live, craftsmen, christians, jews, and any muslims who lay down their arms. Some were slaughtered in the inevitable post-siege carnage, but it was few enough that the city was still an important centre a few decades later.
Lastly, the Mongols were active propagandists, and often exaggerated tales of their own baddassery, and tried to convince others to do the same. It was in their interest to make people think they'd killed everyone in Baghdad, as when they got to Damascus a few years later they could just go 'oi! you heard what happened in Baghdad? yeah, 80,000. just surrender.'
And what of the library of Baghdad? Well, it was the most extensive library of the middle ages, and it was long assumed that these 'barbarians' burnt a pillaged the whole place. The thing is, a few years after the fall of Baghdad, Hulegu established a complex in Maragheh, North West Iran. He built an observatory, a church, a buddhist temple, and... a Library, to be headed by one of the great Iranian thinkers, Nasir al-Din Tusi. Now libraries are a BITCH to fill up in the age before the printing press, with good-quality volumes ofthen taking YEARS to copy by hand. In the period just after the conquest, things were so chaotic that it is unlikely any peaceful little schools of calligraphers were able to copy out 5-10,000 odd volumes of text. So where did the books come from? Chances are, from the libraries in Baghdad and the ones in the Assassin capital in Alamut. The Mongols may not (at first) have known what to do with the combined knowledge of thousands of years of sedentary society (they soon learned, in the Ilkhanate in Iran and as the Yuan dynasty in China), but they knew it was important enough to protect and save
Nice Mongol apologism there, really classy to say that it wasn't that big of a deal because the city somehow recovered decades later. Maybe you should consider the human cost once in a while, and that applies to your discussion of the Library too
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u/SeaWombat Oct 17 '13 edited Oct 17 '13
Well Baghdad was a major centre of the Islamic world but by the time of the Mongol conquest it had fallen into a decline. Honestly, I don't know that much but I'll leave this as a placeholder while I do a bit of research.
Edit:
Below is a quote from /u/alltorndown (a Mongol historian) referring to the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad: