52 .4 Short History of the Middle East
and facile compilation. A high level of esoteric scholarship had
been maintained in the higher grades of the Isma'ili sect, which was
re-propagated c. 1090 in North Persia and North Syria; but both
these centres were practically exterminated in the late thirteenth
century by the Mongols and the Mamluks respectively.1 Strangely
enough, a temporarily fertile ground for at least some branches of
science and scholarship was provided in North Persia and Trans-
oxiana by the courts of the Mongols themselves. Inspired by Ms
unlettered interest in astrology as a means of foretelling the future,
Hulagu, the destroyer of Baghdad, founded an astronomical
observatory and library at his capital of Maragha near Tabriz.
About 1300 one of his descendants, who had been converted to
Islam, endowed an observatory, library, and schools at Tabriz. A
century later the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tiniur Leng (Taiu-
berlane) deported to his capital at Samarqand scholars, architects
and craftsmen from the cities he had destroyed, such as Aleppo and
Damascus; and his successor was patron of a flourishing astrono-
mical observatory at Samarqand in the first half of the fifteenth
century.
Instead of the resurgence of uncouth Turk and Mongol ending
abruptly the growing commercial penetration of the Middle East
from Europe, as might be supposed, it actually fostered it. Al-
though the Mamluks severely punished the native Christians of the
Levant for their complicity, real or suspected, with the Mongol
invaders,2 the Christian pilgrim-traffic to the Holy Places was too
profitable a source of Mamluk revenue to be stopped; and this
material consideration applied still more to the trade in the silks,
spices, and other products of the further East, for which the peoples
of Europe, now growing in sophistication, had acquired an
insatiable appetite. Consequently, the Mamluks encouraged and
took a heavy toll of this trade through Alexandria and the Levant
1 On Alamut, the Persian centre, see Freya Stark.The Valley of the Assassins.
The Isrna'ilis continued a ruthless underground struggle against the Sunni
rulers of the Muslim world, and gained the sinister title of'Assassins' (originally
Hashshashin) by allegedly furnishing with 'Dutch courage* in the form of
hashish members chosen from their lower grades whom they used to murder
their political opponents. One of their first and most distinguished victims was
the enlightened Seljuk wazir Nizarn ul-Mulk.
A minority of the Isma*ilis survived the destruction of their centres, and to-
day some 200,000, who have long abandoned the aggressive tendencies of their
forerunners, venerate as their Imam the Agha Khan, who claims descent from
Ali in the forty-seventh generation, through the medieval Grand Masters of
Alamut.
2 V. Minorsky, Royal Central Asian Journal, XXVII (1940), 436.