4 - THE TÜRKMEN DYNASTIES

Summary

INTRODUCTION: THE TURKISH BACKGROUND

With the conquest of Baghdad in 656/1258, the Mongols dealt a deathblow to the empire of the caliphate. This event, together with the dramatic circumstances that attended it, is often regarded as a dividing-line between two historical epochs. This view is justified only in so far as the fall of the caliphate destroyed the last tie which, up till that time, had with difficulty been holding together the world of Islam. Yet the historical significance of this event should not be over-estimated. It is true that, apart from the liquidation of the 'Abbasids, it represented the prelude to new historical developments, such as the rise of the Il-Khanid dynasty, which was to be of great importance in the history of Persia. But its total effect on the history of the Islamic world was of a more or less superficial nature. For the political organisation of the caliphate which the Mongols had destroyed was little more than an outer shell, which had long been crumbling away, around heterogeneous structures which as a whole had very little to do with the Islamic empire of the early 'Abbasids, and which indeed actually negated the raison d'être of a common polity.

In spite of the catastrophic effect of the Mongol assault upon the people of that time, and in spite also of the changes which it caused and the traces which, here and there, it left behind it, eighty years later it already belonged to the past. Of distinctly greater historical significance were other developments which had begun long before.