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Art. XII.—The Story of the Death of the last Abbasid Caliph, from the Vatican MS. of Ibn-al-Furāt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

G. Le Strange
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Extract

At the end of January of the year 1258 A.D., after a siege of more than a month, the Mongol array stormed and took possession of Baghdad; then, on or about the 18th of February following, the thirty-seventh and last Caliph of the House of Abbas, Al-Musta'ṣim-billah, was by order of Hūlāgū put to death. Concerning the manner of his death the accounts differ; unfortunately there has come down to us no narrative by an eye-witness of these events, for the only really contemporary historian, the author of the Ṭabaḳāt-i-Nāṣirī, was a native of India and wrote at Delhi.

Type
Original Communications
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , April 1900 , pp. 293 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1900

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References

page 293 note 1 Joinville merely says that the Caliph was shut up in an iron cage, but implies that he was finally left by Hūlāgū to starve.

page 294 note 1 A copy of this rare book exists in the British Museum Library, and for the following transcript (beginning col. 1, folio xv recto of the same) I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the Department of Oriental MSS. in the British Museum, as also for the bibliographical notes given above. It is curious that until the middle of the present century the work of Hayton had not existed in his native Armenian language, so that the countrymen of the author during more than five centuries had to read the book in the old French or in one of the numerous European translations. In 1842, however, an Armenian version was made of this History of the Tartars, and printed at Venice, by the monks of the well-known Armenian convent on the. Island of San Lazzaro.

page 295 note 1 G. Weil in his Geschichte der Chalifen makes no mention of the anecdote, nor does Sir W. Muir, who follows him. Major Price in his Muhammadan Dynastits (ii, 221) gives the story as reported by the late authority of Khwāndamīr in the Ḥabīb-as-Siyār.

page 295 note 2 Geschichte Waṣṣāf, Persisch herausgegeben und Deutsch übersetzt, by Hammer - Purgstall, Vienna, 1866, pp. 77–9 of the text and 75–6 of the translation. This Persian account is reproduced from Waṣṣāf, without acknowledgment, by both Mīrkhwānd writing about the year 1500 a.d. (Rawḍa-aṣ-Ṣafā, Bombay lithographed edition of 1266 a.h., part v, p. 75) and by Khwānd-amīr some thirty years later (Ḥabīb-as-Siyār, Bombay lithographed edition of 1271 a.h., part iii, section 1, p. 55).

page 296 note 1 I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to Mr. H. F. Amedroz, to whom I am indebted for having called my attention to this MS. last year when we were in Rome together for the Thirteenth Orientalist Congress; and he has laid me under no inconsiderable obligation in generously giving me his transcript of many pages of the MS. made by him before my arrival. Also I must take occasion to record my gratitude to the.Reverend Father F. Ehrle, S.J., Librarian at the Vatican, who afforded me every facility for examining and copying the MSS. in his charge. The present copy of Ibn-al-Furāt (namely the nine volumes at Vienna and the two in Rome) purports to be an autograph, and the part preserved in the Vatican has in it many blank pages as though left for additional matter that the author never had time to till in. Further, the Vatican MS., to judge by a note on the last page, would appear to have at one time belonged to the historian Maḳrīzī, who was some thirty years junior to Ibn-al- Furāt and must doubtless have known him in Cairo.

page 298 note 1 The name of the Mongol chief is generally given by Ibn-al-Furāt under the usual Arabic form of Hūlākū for Hūlāgū; in this anecdote, however, the name is spelt Hulāwūn or Hulāwῠn, which I believe is unusual in Arabic or Persian authors.