The Death of the Last Abbasid Caliph, al-Musta

Oh, boo! Now I have to get walled off in a building surrounded by my own gold and given nothing to eat until I starve! — this might as well be the caption of the illumination here from the early 1400s, illustrating the death of the last ruler of the Abbasid Dynasty, often called the “Golden Age” of Islam, the Caliph al-Musta ‘sim bi-llāh. The thing about al-Musta’sim’s death, though, is that sources don’t agree how it happened. Instead, there are a kaleidescopic range of accounts, all of them horrible in their own way.

After centuries of rule out of the capital city of Baghdad, the last of the Caliphs finally was deposed by in 1258, succeeded by the invading Mongolian leader Hülegü. It was quite a big deal to off al-Musta’sim, and in the decades and centuries that followed, pro-Mongolian, pro-Abbasid, pro-Georgian, pro-Armenian, and pro-Western European sources all came up with different ways of telling what happened.

For instance, one author has poor al-Musta’sim dying by having molten gold forced down his throat. Others have him stabbed at the hands of the Mongolian leader Hülegü. A lot of accounts (and the ones considered Most Likely To Be True) have al-Musta’sim rolled up into a carpet and trampled to death. This last death, btw, was supposed to be honorable because the Caliph’s blood was not actually shed.

Historian Nassima Neggaz has recently pointed out that there is real value to looking at each of these death stories not just to uncover the true unspooling of events, but also to detect the POV of all the different writers. And the accounts shifted, depending on how much one person hated the Mongols, or detested the late Abbasid rulers, or whether one was Christian, for instance.

To take the being surrounded by gold version, for instance — in the version written by al-Tūsī shortly after the Caliph died — al-Musta’sim appears as a self-centered greedy leader who neglected to support his own people during the war with the Mongols by hoarding his gold rather than helping pay his own soldiers. Stories of cruel leaders who paid too much attention to their own wealth were replete in the Ancient world, and al-Tūsī knew this tradition and likely worked it into his account.