Sykes' History of Persia Vol 2 (pdf) - Heritage Institute

LVI EXTINCTION OF THE CALIPHATE 167
I statesman, he would surely have been able to organize a
force capable of defeating the Mongols, and would thereby
he is
have prevented the sack of Baghdad. As it
was,
remembered in history
as a dazzling meteor, perhaps a
prototype of Charles XII. of Sweden.
The Mongol Campaigns in Asia Minor and Syria.
Chormaghun, realizing that Jalal-u-Din was not in a
position to offer any organized resistance, ravaged Mesopotamia,
Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, and
committed atrocities similar to those already
described.
Ibn-ul-Athir states that the panic which prevailed
made
the peasantry so cowardly that on one occasion a Mongol
who wished to kill a man, but was unarmed, told him to
lie down and await his return with a sword, and this the
unnerved victim actually did. As will be seen later, in
the eighteenth century the Afghans were able to treat the
citizens of Isfahan in the same manner, they too being
unable to move from fear.
The division commanded at first
by Chormaghun,
and afterwards by Baydu, ravaged the provinces to the
west of Persia during the next twenty years,
their cavalry
raids extending as far as Aleppo, and we learn from
Matthew Paris *
that the Christian Prince of Antioch and
other Christian lords paid them tribute.
The Kutlugh Khans of Kerman, A.H. 619-703 (1222-
Fars and Luristan
1303). As mentioned in Chapter LI1 1.,
were governed by independent princes termed Atabeg,
and escaped the Mongol terror by politic
We submission.
now turn to the remaining province of Kerman.
Although
like Fars its remoteness saved it from the
Mongols, it had, as already related, been devastated again
and again by the ferocious Ghuzz. The Ik or Shabancara
tribe next gained possession of the province for a short
time, but in A.H. 600 (1203) it was seized by an army
from Fars.
Shortly after the exhausted country had
begun to recover under the ruler sent by the Atabeg of
Fars, a new power appeared on the scene in the person
of Khoja Razi-u-Din Zuzani with an army from Khiva
which destroyed everything that the other armies had
1
Pp. 876 and 937.