The Mongols

The Mongols (Tatars) are the peoples of Mongolia and the far east who united under a single ruler, Genghis Khan, at the start of the seventh Hijri century, extended his rule into the Turkish kingdoms and beyond, and whose descendants completed the conquests until Hulagu took Baghdad in 656 AH and ended the Abbasid caliphate in Iraq ¹.

Ibn Khaldun records in the Ibar that the Tatars and Mongols were many dispersed peoples whom Genghis Khan united under his rule, after which they expanded into the neighbouring kingdoms of the Turks, Khurasan, Khwarazm, Iraq and Syria ¹. The fall of Baghdad to Hulagu in 656 AH, in which the caliph al-Musta'sim was killed and the Ilkhanid states rose on its ruins, marks a turning point in Islamic history ².

• The fall of Baghdad is reported in all sources; the Ibn Khaldun text here is from the extracted Ibar (Heliopolis 1957), pp. 34-36 OCR, and numeric details need checking against the page images before expansion.