Sack of Baghdad

After a twelve-day siege, the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan stormed Baghdad on 10 February 1258. They sacked the city for a week, butchering perhaps two hundred thousand inhabitants and throwing the books of the great libraries into the Tigris until, the chronicles say, the river ran black with ink. The last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses, ending the caliphate that had ruled the Islamic east for half a millennium.