50 A Short History of the Middle East
steppes of Eastern Asia that still bear their name. Between 1219 and
1224 they overran Transoxiana and North Persia, and utterly
destroyed the highly-civilized cities of those lands and massacred
their inhabitants, before passing on across South Russia to establish
an empire which, extended from the Vistula to the Pacific. Such is
the mental tortuousness of political strategists, especially those
dominated by an ideology, that the directors of Christian policy
actually conceived the idea of an alliance with these savages
against the civilized and treaty-keeping Muslims of the Levant. In
1245, following the loss ofjerusaleni, largely as a result of Crusader
intrigue against Egypt, Pope Innocent IV sent John de Piano
Carpini on a political mission to Mongolia, and three years later
St. Louis of France was also negotiating with the Mongols and sent
the friar William of Rubruquis to their homeland. These missions
brought no political success to the Crusader cause; but in 1253
another and more grievous blow fell on the Muslim world in a
Mongol invasion under Hulagu, the grandson of Jingiz. He over-
ran South Persia and in 1258 captured Baghdad, massacring its
inhabitants. He laid open Iraq to uncouth Turcoman1 and Mongol
herdsmen from the north-east, who by their neglect allowed the
elaborate irrigation-system on which the country's fertility de-
pended to fall gradually into decay. Hulagu finally put an end to
the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, that pitiful relic of former Arab
greatness. The triumphant Mongols pressed on to invade Syria
and destroyed Aleppo, but were decisively defeated in North
Palestine by the armies of Egypt in 1260. In Egypt, meanwhile, an
important dynastic revolution had taken place: the last feeble
sultan of Saladin's line had been deposed by the Turkish com-
mander-in-chief of his slave armies, himself originally a slave
(mamluk); and for the next 250 years a 'dynasty' of these Mamluk
commanders—usually Turkish by birth, sometimes Mongol or
Circassian—was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria. The succession
to the throne was sometimes hereditary, but more often the prize
of the strongest, and intrigue and assassination were the rule. The
millions of native Egyptians and Syrians, Muslim and Christian
alike, had even less part in the government of their countries under
this turbulent foreign soldateska than they had known in previous
1 Medieval Arab and Persian historians apply this term to all the Turks of
Western Asia, including the Seljuks and even sometimes the Ottoman Turks
(Encyclopaedia of Idam> art. Turcoman).