February 15, 1258

Siege of Baghdad (1258)

Hulagu holds a banquet in the captured caliph's palace

Five days after the caliph walked out to surrender, Hulagu banqueted inside the captive ruler's own palace — while the city was still being looted.

15 February 1258: the third day of pillage

A scholarly chronology places Hulagu's banquet in the captured Abbasid caliph's palace on 15 February 1258. It was the third day of the organized pillage: Mongol troops had entered Baghdad to plunder on 13 February, after the city's resistance collapsed and al-Musta'sim surrendered on the 10th.

So this was not a first entry into an unconquered city. The banquet dramatized Mongol possession of the Abbasid seat of power while killings, fires and looting continued around it.

The caliph still alive, for five more days

Al-Musta'sim remained a prisoner through the banquet. Hulagu killed him and most of his family on 20 February, when the week of looting ended.

Traditional accounts of books turning the Tigris black, or of a single still-functioning 'House of Wisdom' destroyed that week, are literary narratives whose precise factual basis is difficult to establish.

The library story runs backwards

A familiar tale credits the rescue of 400,000 books from Baghdad before the siege. The chronology does not support it: the Maragha observatory was begun in 1259, after the sack, and the reported holdings were collected from Baghdad, Syria and al-Jazira — a figure the modern scholar reporting it judges likely exaggerated.

The sack was catastrophic, but Baghdad's book arts and literary life revived under Mongol-era patronage; 'the end of the Islamic Golden Age' is a periodization convention, not something that happened by nightfall.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes

How this was checked

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What the sources leave uncertain

The banquet is supported by a modern scholarly reconstruction of the siege chronology, but surviving medieval narratives do not always align perfectly in their conversion of Islamic and Mongol calendar dates.
Claims about the destruction of a single, still-functioning “House of Wisdom” and books turning the Tigris black are traditional literary narratives whose precise factual basis is difficult to establish.
The 400,000 figure comes from fourteenth-century reports about the later Maragha library, not an inventory of books rescued before Baghdad fell.