The Mongol Storm at Bukhara

In 1219 Chinggis Khan turned the full force of the Mongol armies upon the Khwarazmian empire, the great Muslim state that then ruled Transoxiana, Khurasan and much of the eastern Islamic world, after its governor at Utrar had killed a Mongol trade caravan and the Khwarazm-Shah had refused redress. In the campaign that followed, from 1219 to 1221, the rich and ancient cities of the land between the two rivers fell one after another, and the destruction was on a scale the Muslim world had not known. Bukhara, one of the wealthiest and most learned cities of Islam, a centre of scholarship, trade and the crafts on the Silk Road, was among the first to fall, early in 1220 (617 AH): the army appeared before the walls, the garrison was broken, the citadel held out for some days and was then stormed, and the city was given over to plunder and largely burned, its people killed, enslaved or driven out. The near-contemporary Sunni historian Ibn al-Athir, in al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, recoiled from the task of describing the Mongol catastrophe, calling it the greatest calamity to befall mankind since God created Adam; the Persian historian Juvayni, in his Tarikh-i Jahangushay, written a generation later while he served the Mongols and could see what they had wrought, preserved the famous report that Chinggis Khan rode to the great congregational mosque, mounted its pulpit, and declared himself the punishment of God sent upon the people for their sins, before the city was put to the sack. The jurist al-Juzjani, in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri, carried the same horror eastward to the Muslims of India. Samarqand, Nishapur and the other cities of Transoxiana and Khurasan met similar fates, and the eastern Muslim world took generations to recover, even as it would in time absorb and convert the conquerors. This scene depicts the sack as it happens: the great mudbrick citadel, the Ark, still standing as the last redoubt, a tall brick minaret of the kind that marked the congregational mosque beside it, black smoke pouring from the burning city, the townspeople fleeing with what they can carry past the collapsed bazaar, and a column of Mongol horsemen advancing across the oasis plain under their standards. In keeping with a sober treatment of such a subject no killing and no bodies are shown; the fire, the flight and the closing cavalry carry the weight of the catastrophe.