The Sack of Baghdad — the week the House of Wisdom drowned

Transcript

Bram: There is a word I am halfway through and I am not going to stop for anything. It is a long word. It is the Arabic for the diameter of the shadow, and it belongs in the middle of a table of eclipses that somebody worked out three hundred years ago by standing on a roof in this city with a brass instrument and a great deal of patience, and my hand is moving across the paper at the speed of a man who has done this every day since he was eleven. The pen is a reed — a qalam, which is the word for it here and also the word for the whole trade of using one. A length of river reed, cut at an angle, split up the middle. It makes a dry noise on the paper, a small precise scratching, like a mouse being methodical, and it is one of the loveliest sounds I have ever been inside. The paper is not parchment. That matters, and I will tell you why later, when there is time. It is rag paper, burnished with a stone until it shines, and the ink is soot and gum out of a little lidded pot at my right elbow, and there is a lamp, and the lamp is making the arch of brick above me look like the inside of an oven that has been warm for four hundred years. The room is full of men doing exactly what I am doing. Somebody two arches down is reciting under his breath to keep his place. Somebody is arguing about the price of a binding. There is a boy going along the row with a jug and a cloth, wetting the burnishing stones, and he has been told twice not to lean across the tables. Nine of us at nine rests, and the noise the nine of us make together has no rhythm in it at all — nine pens going at nine different speeds — so that if you stood in the doorway with your eyes shut it would be exactly the sound of rain starting on a flat roof. And on the brick in front of me, at the height of my eyes, there is a nail with a slip of paper on it in a hand that is not mine, and what it says is finish the tables before the almanac. It is the hand of a man who has been dead eleven years and who taught me. I have never taken it down. I could copy it out in my sleep and it would not be the same object, and I have thought about that more than is reasonable for a man my age. And then the floor hits me in the feet. That is the only way I can describe it. Not a noise first — a shove, up through the boards, up through the soles, and about a heartbeat behind it the sound arrives, a low flat thump from somewhere east that goes on too long at the bottom end. The lamp flame lies down flat and stands back up. Dust comes off the ceiling in a fine sheet, the way flour comes off a cloth. Nobody in this room looks up. That is the part I cannot get over. The reciting stops for the length of a breath and then picks up again in the same place. The man arguing about the binding lowers his voice slightly. And my hand — my hand has not left the paper. My hand has finished the word. And I hear myself count. Not aloud. In the back of the skull, quick and flat, the way you count stairs in the dark: one — two — three — four — and I am counting the gap between the shove in the floor and the sound in the air, which is a completely useless number, and I cannot stop doing it, and I understand, with a lurch, that I am not the one who started counting. These hands did that. These hands did it without asking me. I look at them. Ink in every crease of the right one — not fresh ink, old ink, forty years of it, down in the skin like a stain in a table. A reed pen held the way another man holds a knife he has owned all his life. Under the left hand, a stack of finished leaves, squared off, weighted with a smooth river stone. Oh. Oh. I know what I am. I am the man they bring the difficult ones to. I am a warraq — a copyist, a stationer, a keeper of books — in the greatest city of books the world has ever built, and it is the first week of February in the year twelve fifty-eight, and there is an army outside the wall throwing stones at us. And I have just decided, without consulting myself at all, that the important thing is to finish the line. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. Every great moment in history was LIVED, from the inside — and I wake up in there. Some days I'm the servant at the door. Some days I'm the one the whole room is watching. I can't change what happens — and I can never stay. But I live it, and I see everything. I'm the Traveller. Episode eleven. The Week the House of Wisdom Drowned. Right. Let me put you down properly, because you have arrived in the middle of something and I would like you to know what it is. The city is Baghdad. The date is the winter of twelve fifty-seven into twelve fifty-eight. And I need you to throw away whatever picture you are currently holding, because it is almost certainly a picture of a ruin, and this place is not a ruin. This place is the richest, cleverest, most comfortable city on the face of the earth, and it has been for the better part of five hundred years. It sits on the Tigris in what is now Iraq, and it sits on both banks, which is the first thing to get in your head, because it matters enormously later. The two halves are stitched together by bridges made of boats — moored gunwale to gunwale across the current, chained, with a plank roadway over the top, so that the road across the river rides up and down on the water while you walk on it. Flat-roofed houses in buff and ochre mud-brick, crooked lanes, covered markets so deep the sun comes down in slots, brick minarets, a few turquoise domes. And on the water, everywhere, the guffa — a round basket of woven reed daubed inside and out with bitumen to keep it tight, which carries four men and a donkey and spins gently the whole way across, because a circle has no bow to point. And here is the thing about it. Here is the thing I want you to hold on to for the next two hours, because everything that happens hangs off it. Baghdad is made of books. Not figuratively. There is a market in this city called the Suq al-Warraqin — the market of the stationers, the paper-men — and it is not a shop or a street, it is a whole quarter, hundreds of premises, each of them three things at once: a shop where you buy a book, a workshop where a team of copyists makes more of them, and a library where you can sit down and read. Hundreds, side by side. Plus the mosque libraries, the college libraries, the private collections of every wealthy family in a city stuffed with wealthy families, and the caliph's own. And the reason it can exist on that scale is paper. Five centuries earlier the Islamic world learned papermaking, and rag paper is cheap in a way that animal-skin parchment is not — you make it out of rags and rope-ends and worn-out clothes — and when the writing surface gets cheap, everything downstream of it gets bigger. More copies. More copyists. More libraries. More people who can afford to own the thing they are arguing about. And what got copied onto all that cheap paper was, essentially, everything — because Baghdad is heir to the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, the great translation effort that ran here from the ninth century, hoovering up Greek and Persian and Indian learning and turning it into Arabic. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, engineering. The word algebra comes out of a book written in this city. Five hundred years of the world's accumulated learning, copied and re-copied and argued over and improved on, sitting on shelves within a mile of each other. This is not a city that has a library. This is a city that is one. Hold that. Now. The other half of the picture, which is a very long way east, and coming. Thirty years before this, Genghis Khan died, and the empire he built did not fall apart the way empires usually do when the big man goes. It kept going. And in twelve fifty-one, at a great assembly of the Mongol princes — a quriltai — his grandson Möngke was raised up as Great Khan, and that assembly took a decision about unfinished business. The west was to be finished. Möngke handed his brother Hulagu an army and an instruction, and the instruction is the single most important sentence in this entire episode. Treat kindly those who submit. Utterly destroy those who do not. That is not a threat and it is not a boast. It is a procedure. Under Mongol law as they understood it, a power offered submission that refuses has, by the act of refusing, chosen its own annihilation. It is not that they get angry and overreact. It is that the decision has already been made — by you — and everything after it is the carrying out of a sentence you passed on yourself. Submit and you are taxed, garrisoned, absorbed and largely left alone. Refuse and there is no second offer. And it works, is the uncomfortable thing. All the way across Asia the arithmetic has been done and the answer has been the same: cities that opened their gates got a tax collector and a garrison and went on being cities; cities that shut them were made into an example so thorough that the next town down the road opened up without being asked. That is what the destruction is for. Every ruin is a letter addressed to whoever is watching, and the whole system runs on the letters being believed. Hulagu comes west slowly and thoroughly — a campaign of years, not a raid — and in twelve fifty-six he takes the mountain fortress of Alamut, headquarters of the Ismaili sect Europe would come to call the Assassins. And out of Alamut walks a man we are going to spend a great deal of time with: Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the finest mathematician and astronomer alive, who goes straight into Hulagu's service and stays. And then, in the autumn of twelve fifty-seven, the envoys arrive at Baghdad. And the demand is the standard one: submit. Pull down your defences. Send your ministers to us. And the Commander of the Faithful, God's shadow on earth, the thirty-seventh caliph of the house of Abbas, sends back an answer. Before we go and stand in the room where he sends it — one peg, so you know where in your own furniture to put all this. Twelve fifty-eight, in the part of the world you were probably taught about, is the High Middle Ages and it is going beautifully. Louis the Ninth of France — Saint Louis — has just come home from the Seventh Crusade, which went badly; he was captured in Egypt and ransomed, and in a few years he will be exchanging letters with Hulagu about a possible alliance. Thomas Aquinas is teaching at Paris, building his enormous synthesis of Christian thought partly out of Aristotle as transmitted through Arabic philosophy — which is to say, out of the intellectual tradition of the city we are standing in. Amiens is going up. Chartres is finished and full of new glass. And the Mongols are no abstraction to Europe: seventeen years ago, in twelve forty-one, Mongol armies destroyed European field armies at Legnica in Poland and Mohi in Hungary and then simply went home, and everybody who mattered in Christendom spent the next generation quietly terrified they would come back.

So: same decade. Aquinas at his desk in Paris, working with ideas that travelled out of Baghdad. And Baghdad with an army outside it.

Bram: Here is why this hour matters. In about thirteen weeks the five-hundred-year-old political centre of Islam will be gone, the last caliph of Baghdad will be dead, and the greatest concentration of books on the planet will be on fire — one of the very few moments in history you can point at and say: the accumulated learning of a civilisation was in that room, and then it was not. And the question the week actually asks — the one my hands are about to be holding — is smaller and much worse than that. It is this. When the men at the gate can unmake five centuries of work in a fortnight, what is a lifetime of careful copying worth? And if you can save a hundredth of it, and only by handing it to the people doing the burning — do you? Come on. The envoys are in the street and the crowd has seen them. In the cool of the palace I am carrying a tray of cold water in thin glass cups, and I have been told, twice, not to let them rattle. I am about fifteen. I know it because these knees are new and these feet know how many steps it is from the kitchen stair to the small audience room without counting. Everything here is cool. Tiled halls, a fountain going in a garden I cannot see, the smell of rosewater and lamp oil and, underneath it, wet stone. And black. Everybody is in black — the robes, the turbans, the hangings on the walls — because black is the dynastic colour of the house of Abbas, and after a week of it your eye reads black as normal and everything else as loud. The tray is heavy. The cups are cold. My hands, I notice, are steady, which is more than I can say for me. Through the doorway there are men who do not belong in this room. Four of them, dusty to the thigh, in fur-edged hats and coats with the lamellar showing at the collar, standing the way you stand when you have been kept waiting on purpose and have decided not to mind. One looks at me. Not at the tray — at me — with an expression of complete, patient, professional indifference: the way you look at furniture in a house you have been sent to value. And on the far side of the room, on a low seat, in black, is the Commander of the Faithful. He is about forty-five. He has a soft face and a very carefully kept beard and he is turning a ring on his finger, round and round, with his thumb. And he is not what the word caliph had made me expect. He is a man in a beautiful room being asked a question he does not want, looking round at everybody else in it to see who is going to take it off him. The vizier reads the demand out. Ibn al-Alqami — grey, careful, a chancery man to the bone, holding the paper at arm's length. Submit. Pull down the walls. Send the ministers north to attend the Khan. Nobody says anything for long enough that I hear the water clock in the corner.

Mujahid_al_din: Then let us buy the walls back. Give me the money and I will give you a wall.

Bram: The man who said it is the dawadar — the caliph's military secretary; the office is literally the keeper of the inkpot, and in this house it means the man who holds the seal and is also expected to hold the walls. He is short and hard and sun-dark, wearing a mail shirt under his over-robe in a room where nobody else is wearing metal, and he has clearly said this before and been told to wait.

Mujahid_al_din: The eastern face is soft. The southern towers have not been repaired in my lifetime. Give me the treasury for one season and I will put six thousand men and new brick on that wall, and then this letter does not matter.

Ibn_al_alqami: The treasury will not carry six thousand men for a season.

Mujahid_al_din: Then carry three thousand.

Ibn_al_alqami: The treasury will not carry three thousand either. I have shown you the rolls.

Bram: And the caliph says — and I felt the room tip —

Al_mustasim: They are being very rude.

Bram: Nobody moves.

Al_mustasim: He is a boy. Do you understand? His grandfather was a herdsman and he sends me instructions about my own gate. If I lift one finger — one — every Muslim from Egypt to the Indus comes to this city, and they will come whether I ask them or not, because I am what I am. It is not permitted for this to happen.

Bram: And the dawadar stops asking for the money. Not because he has been refused — because he has been told, in a room, that the wall is a matter of manners. He tells the vizier to write. Something dignified. Something with teeth in it. The vizier writes. And the dawadar looks at the letter going into its case, and then at me — at the boy with the tray, the only other person in the room with nothing to say — and gives me a small, tired, entirely private nod. Out in the street it is worse. The envoys ride down through the crowd with the case, and the crowd knows what is in it, because a city always knows, and the noise coming off them is not fear, it is delight — whistling, laughing, a boy running alongside slapping a horse's flank — and the envoys ride through it at a walk, without turning their heads, once. The letter goes north. The autumn goes on. And nobody in this city, including me, lays one brick on that wall. Alright — let them ride. They have a long way to go and the news at the other end of it will not improve. Come and stand over here with me for a moment, because there is something about the men in the fur hats that I need you to have straight before you watch them work, and if you get it wrong the rest of this hour turns into a fairy tale. When I say the Mongol army, I suspect you are picturing a horde. A dark mass of horsemen off the steppe, undifferentiated, unstoppable, pouring over things. Almost everyone does. It is the picture the survivors painted afterwards and it has never really been repainted since. It is wrong in a specific and interesting way. What is coming down on Baghdad is one of the most cosmopolitan organisations on the planet, and it is run like a business. Three things. One: the siege engineering is Chinese. The Mongols were nomads with no tradition of taking walled cities, so they acquired one — they took northern China first, and they took its engineers with it, and the man commanding a section of the artillery at Baghdad is a Chinese officer named Guo Kan. The stones that land on my roof are being thrown by machines designed by people from the other end of Asia.

Two: the administration is Persian and largely Muslim. The clerks, the tax-men, the interpreters, the scholars — al-Tusi rides in this army, and within a year the governor of conquered Baghdad will be a Persian historian named Juvayni who is riding with them right now. The conquest travels with its own civil service.

Bram: Three — and this is the one that reorders everything — a great many of them are Christians. Hulagu's mother was a Christian. His senior wife, Dokuz Khatun, is a Nestorian Christian of real conviction and real influence. One of his best generals, Kitbuqa, is a Nestorian Christian too, and wears a cross openly among the armour. Hulagu himself leans Buddhist and collects astronomers the way other men collect horses. So what is riding down on Baghdad is not one faith coming for another. It is a demand for submission, carried by a machine that has a Christian queen in its camp, a Christian general on its flank, a Buddhist-leaning khan at its head and a Muslim scholar at his elbow, all pointed at a Muslim city. Which leaves the sharpest religious wound in this story somewhere you would not think to look for it. Not between the city and the army. Inside the wall. Because the man in the black robes is not simply a king. Caliph means successor — the Commander of the Faithful, the one with the right to lead all Muslims — and that is a Sunni claim, and a very large part of his own capital does not accept it. Baghdad has been a two-sided city for three centuries. The Shi'a quarters on the west bank, with their own scholars, their own processions, their own dead to go and sit with. The Sunni court on the east bank, with the treasury and the offices and the army. They have rioted against each other inside living memory. Men have been killed in these streets over whose name is said first. And the second most powerful man in that building is a Shi'a. Ibn al-Alqami runs the chancery. He writes the letters, he keeps the rolls, he knows to the dirham what is in the treasury and what is not — and he serves a court that has always regarded his people as a thing to be managed. Which means every word he says about money gets heard twice: once as a number, and once as a motive. Hold that. It gets expensive later. Now. That case travels all winter, and it reaches Hulagu, and Hulagu reads what is in it, and the machinery begins to turn — and the map starts to close, one road at a time, from the north and the east and the west at once. But not yet. Before any of that touches it, I want you to see this city on an ordinary morning with the sun out. Because if you do not see what it was, none of what happens to it will land properly — and I only get to show you once. In the Suq al-Warraqin it smells of hot bread, wet stone, donkey, cardamom, and — under all of it, everywhere, like a floor the other smells stand on — paper. New paper has a smell. Faintly sweet, slightly dusty, a little like linen airing — which is more or less what it is: old cloth beaten to pulp, floated, pressed, dried, and rubbed smooth until it will take a fine line. There are stacks of it in every doorway on this street, tied in quires with cord, tinted straw and cream and a pale blue-grey, and men are haggling over it the way men elsewhere haggle over fish. This is the Suq al-Warraqin, and I am walking down the middle of it with a codex under my arm, and I would like to say I am observing it carefully, but these hands are busy. They keep touching things. A binding, in passing, testing the board with a thumbnail. A hanging quire, flicked at the corner to hear the paper. A spine straightened on a shelf I have no business straightening. The shops are open-fronted and go back further than you would think, arch behind arch, and each is three businesses at once. At the front, books laid flat on shelves — flat, in stacks, never spine-out, so a wall of books here looks like a wall of folded linen. In the middle, four or five men on carpets at low X-frame rests, copying. And at the back, cushions and a lamp and somebody's grandfather reading, for free, all afternoon, because that is what the back of a shop is for. I count eleven of these before the street even bends. Then I stop counting, because the street does not stop. The shop I turn into is mine. I know it the way you know your own kitchen in the dark. There is a boy at the second rest who has been with me two years and has a beautiful hand and no judgement whatsoever, and he is copying a medical text and has just — I can see it from here — guessed at a word instead of going and looking it up.

The_keeper: What is that.

The_boy: It is hummus, master. Chickpea. It is a recipe for a poultice—

The_keeper: It is khumus. A fifth. It is a dose. You have just told a physician in Mosul to put lunch on a man's leg.

Bram: He goes red. I let him. Then I sit down beside him and show him the trick, which is that the copyist before him had a habit of closing the loop on that letter, and once you know a man's hand you can read what he meant rather than what he wrote. Forty years of it: hearing a dead man's voice through his handwriting. And because he is still young enough to think the trade is speed, I tell him the thing about the money. Anybody can sell a copy. What a good shop sells is an accurate one, and it fetches more, and that is why the house four doors down keeps a man who does nothing all day but sit with a finished sheet while a second man reads the exemplar aloud at him. And I am, I realise, showing off slightly. For a boy. In a shop. In a city where three streets away someone is doing the same thing with a book of Euclid, and four streets the other way with a commentary on Aristotle that exists in this shop and in one other and nowhere else on earth. And it is not a collection. A collection is a room with a lock on it. This is a system. Every book in this city exists because a chain of people each spent a year of their life copying it and handing it on. That is the thing with the army outside it. Not a building. A chain. Late in the afternoon a man comes in wanting to sell, which happens, but he wants to sell the wrong things. Not duplicates. Not the tired sermons that clog every shelf in the quarter. He is selling his astronomical instruments and a very fine Ptolemy, cheaply, and he will not look at me while he does it.

The_keeper: These are good. Why are these here.

The_man: My brother writes from Irbil. He says the roads north are closed.

The_keeper: The roads north are always closed in winter.

The_man: He says they are closed the other way.

Bram: And there it is. The street going on outside, a hundred pens whispering, the smell of new paper. And a man in front of me turning his life's instruments into something he can carry. I buy them. Of course I buy them. I give him more than he asked, which is bad business and he knows it, and he takes it and goes. And I put the astrolabe on the shelf behind me, at eye height, where I will see it every day, and I go back to work, and I tell myself the thing that everybody in this city is telling themselves this winter, which is that it has not happened yet and therefore probably will not. Right. Come out of the shop. I want to show you a map, and then I want to show you why it is about to stop mattering. It is January now, twelve fifty-eight, and the thing everybody spent the autumn not believing has arrived. The Mongol force does not come at Baghdad down one road; it comes down three, in coordinated columns, and it does not hurry. By the middle of the month the city is being approached from the north-east and the west at the same time, and the men doing it have been on campaign for five years and have taken more walled cities than anyone alive. Two things worth knowing before we go and stand in it.

First: Baghdad still has a field army, and it is not a joke. The caliph's forces number somewhere in the tens of thousands, and their commander is the little dawadar — Mujahid al-Din Aybak, the short furious man in the mail shirt you have already met — and he is a genuinely capable soldier who has spent the winter being told there is no money.

Second: the ground. Baghdad sits in flat alluvial country, and flat alluvial country in Iraq means one thing above all others — it is irrigated. It is threaded, everywhere, with canals: the Dujayl system runs north of the city, water held up above the level of the fields by earth banks that people have maintained for centuries. In a country like this the dykes are not scenery. The dykes are the reason there is a country.

Bram: And an army of engineers has just walked into a landscape where the ground is only dry because somebody keeps it that way. And while we are being practical: how do you feed a thing like this. Because the answer explains the timing, and the timing is not an accident. A Mongol army is mounted three, four, five horses to the man, and horses do not eat what men eat — they eat grass, and grass is a place, not a supply. So the army does not go where the enemy is. It goes where the grazing is, and it arrives when the grazing is there, and it plans backwards from that. They wintered in the north, on the good pasture of Azerbaijan, and came down onto Baghdad in January with the horses fat and the ground firm and the rivers low. Which is why nobody inside the city is being stupid when they say not yet. They are working on the assumption that a besieger runs out of food before a city does. This one brought his own commissariat, his own herds and his own remount trains, and he can sit outside your wall until you starve, in perfect comfort, for as long as the grass holds. Third thing, and then we go. The force Hulagu brought west was, by most reckonings, the largest single field army the Mongols ever put together — his brother the Great Khan had stripped contingents from every corner of the empire to build it, on the principle that two in every ten fighting men across the whole Mongol world were to go west with Hulagu. And it is organised decimally, all the way down: units of ten, of a hundred, of a thousand, of ten thousand — the tümen — each with a named officer answerable for every man in it, so an order given at the top arrives at the bottom intact and somebody's head is on it. Which sounds like administration and is in fact the weapon. It is why they can encircle a city in a day, why they can run a three-day supply cycle for stone, and why, when the order comes to spare one quarter and not the next, the line holds exactly where it was drawn. An army that can be told things precisely can also be told to stop precisely. Hold on to that; it is going to matter more than any of the siege engines. On the sixteenth of January the dawadar takes his men out of the gate to fight in the open, north-west of the city, on the west bank — which is the correct and aggressive decision, and it goes well. It goes well for about nine hours. We have won, out here on the flat ground west of the Tigris, and I want that said before anything else, because it is true and by tomorrow nobody will ever say it again. We came out of the gate before light and we hit them and we moved them. I have a spear I have not had to use, a horse that is still fresh, and a cut across the back of my left hand from my own shield rim — and around me four thousand men are making the noise men make when the thing they were dreading turns out to be survivable. Somebody is laughing. Somebody further off has started a chant and lost it. And out in front, on a grey horse, standing in the stirrups and turning to count us — because he counts, he always counts, he has been counting us since Ramadan — is the little dawadar.

Mujahid_al_din: Not far! Not far! You will want your legs tomorrow!

Bram: He is furious and delighted at the same time, which I am learning is simply his face. He rides down the line with his helmet off and his hair flat with sweat, tells the front rank they were slow and the second rank they were worse, and they cheer him for it, and he calls a man by name and asks after his mother. We camp where we stopped, because it is late and the men are spent and we are eight miles out with canal banks either side of us. I remember thinking the ground was good. Dry. Slightly raised. The best bit for a mile. And I remember, half asleep, hearing the dawadar arguing with somebody about pickets on the dykes, and somebody saying there were not enough men to picket a dyke six miles long, and the dawadar saying then picket the sluices, and the other man saying with what. It is a very still night. Cold, clear, no moon to speak of. Horses shifting. Somebody two fires over singing something in a low voice with a lot of verses. The first thing is not a sound. The first thing is that the singing stops. Then there is a sound, and it is wrong, and it takes me a full second to place it because it is a sound with no edges — not a shout, not hooves, not iron. It is a long soft roar with a hiss inside it, coming from the north, and it is getting louder in the way weather gets louder. And then the ground comes in. It arrives as a shove, black, about knee-height, moving faster than a man runs, and it takes the fires first — every fire in the camp goes out at once, in sequence, north to south, like someone walking down a row of lamps — and the dark that comes after that is total and it is full of water. I am up. I do not remember getting up. The water is at my thigh and climbing me faster than I can climb anything, and it is not still water, it is going somewhere, and it has taken my legs out from under me twice before I understand that standing is not going to be available. It is full of things. Tent felt, sodden and heavy as a body, wrapping round the knees. Cook-pots. A saddle. Rope, which is the worst of them. And men — men going past me in the dark at the speed of the current, on their backs, and one of them takes hold of my arm as he goes and I go under with him and I get free by putting my hand in his face, and I want to be very clear with you that I did that, that this hand did it, and I do not know his name. The horses are the loudest thing. A horse in deep moving water in the dark makes a noise I had never heard before and have not stopped hearing since. And the mail. A man in a mail shirt weighs what he weighs, plus twenty-odd pounds of iron rings sewn to a padded coat that is now full of water, and the buckles are at the back, and his fingers are numb, and the water is four feet deep and running. The men who lived were the men who were not yet armoured, or who got the shirt off in the first thirty seconds, or who were lucky enough to be washed against something standing. I get washed against a dyke bank. I get up it on my knees. And I lie on the top of it in the dark, shaking so hard my teeth are going, and I listen to four thousand men being carried past me in the black, and there is nothing to see at all, and the noise of it slowly, over about an hour, becomes a different noise, and then it becomes almost quiet, and the quiet is the worst part of my life. In the grey of the morning the country is a lake with things in it. The dawadar is alive — half a mile up the bank with maybe a few hundred, bare-headed, black to the waist with mud, counting. He counts for a long time. Then he stops, and stands there, and does not say anything to anybody. It was engineers. There was no battle and no fight and nobody beat us. Somebody upstream, in the dark, with tools, opened the Dujayl — and the field army of the Caliphate, the only sword the city had, went off the board in a night without a single Mongol coming within a mile of us. We walk back to Baghdad. It takes most of the day. And the gates open for a few hundred filthy men where the morning before they had let out an army, and I look up at that wall as I go under it, and for the first time in my life I look at it as a thing that has to work. Come up out of that. Take a breath. I need a minute too, honestly — that one is going to stay with me. Two things happened in that flood, and only one of them is the twelve thousand men. The other is that it settled the argument the caliph had been avoiding all winter. Baghdad now has no field force. Everything that follows happens to a city that cannot come out. And what comes next is the part I find genuinely frightening, more than the water — because the water was a trick, and this is just competence. Hulagu invests the city, and he does it in about a day. Not a slow tightening over weeks. One day. A palisade and a ditch thrown up around the whole eastern perimeter, because the whole point of a Mongol army is that every man can dig and every man can build. And then he does the thing that closes the story, and I want you to notice what he does it with, because you already know the object. Boats. The city's own bridges — the ones that go up and down under your feet — are the piece of engineering that has let a city standing on two banks be one city for five hundred years. Hulagu has looked at the most ordinary thing in this landscape and seen the other use for it. The same line of chained boats goes across the Tigris upstream, and again downstream, above the city and below it. Not a road this time. A stopper. Two of them. And the river is Baghdad's food, Baghdad's trade and Baghdad's only door — everything in this country moves on that water — so a city that lives on a river is now a city sitting in a sealed bag of its own water. Its own bridges are the least useful objects in Iraq by nightfall: a road across a river nobody may travel, joining two halves of a place that is equally shut. Then the engines go up. Not on flat ground — on mounds, packed earth and brick raised so the machines can throw down into the city, and part of that artillery under Guo Kan, the Chinese officer. The bombardment opens around the twenty-ninth of January. And here is a detail I love, in the way you love a detail that is also awful. They run out of ammunition. Baghdad sits in alluvial mud — there is no stone. So they cut down palm trunks and throw those, and they throw pots of naphtha, and when that is not enough they send wagon trains three days into the hills to quarry boulders and cart them back. Three days out, three days back, to keep a machine fed. That is what a city is up against here. Not fury. Logistics. One more thing about those mounds, because it is the detail that tells you who you are dealing with. You do not raise a brick-and-earth platform in front of a wall in an afternoon. You raise it under fire, in stages, with the men on the parapet shooting down into the work, and you keep raising it until your machines are higher than the defenders' machines — because artillery in this century is a question of elevation, and whoever is throwing downhill wins. Every basket of earth carried forward is a foot of advantage bought with somebody's back. And once your platform is high enough, the exchange stops being a duel and becomes a demolition. The wall cannot answer. It can only stand there being hit, in the same place, all day, by men who have all winter. Thirteen days is the whole of it, bombardment to surrender. It does not take thirteen days to get through. There is a soft place in that wall, and the soldiers on it know exactly where it is, and so do the men on the mounds. On the south-eastern angle of the wall, on the Ajami tower, the drums do not stop. They are across the river and they have been going since the twenty-ninth of January, day and night, in shifts, and they are not a signal — nobody is being signalled — they are simply a large slow pulse laid under the city like a hand on a table, and after three days of it my own heart has stopped being able to find its own rhythm. And the Ajami is the soft place. Everyone knows it is the soft place — old mud-brick with a rubble core, not properly faced in fifty years. Any soldier in this city could have told you in December that this is where it would go. The stones. You hear the engine first — a long wooden groan, then a slap as the arm comes over — and then a gap, and the gap is the bad part, because in the gap you are a man standing on a wall doing arithmetic he cannot do. Then a noise overhead like cloth tearing. Then the impact, and it is not the clean ring you would get off cut stone; mud-brick takes a stone with a deep dull crunch, almost soft, and what comes off the parapet after is not chips, it is a dry brown fog you cannot breathe or see through for a count of ten. Before light to after dark. Between stones we carry brick up and pack the face, and men are wounded doing repairs far more than they are wounded fighting. The arrows are the other thing. They shoot recurve bows and they shoot them flat — not lobbed, flat, from the mounds, close — and a Mongol arrow arrives before its sound. You do not duck. You cannot. You stand up and work and are not hit, and then one time you are. The man beside me is called Bishr and he has spent three days arguing with me about a debt his brother owes me, and he stands up to shift a basket and is struck through the throat below the jaw, and he sits down against the parapet with his hands up around it, absolutely furious, trying to say something with a mouth full of blood. I hold his head. He dies in about a minute and a half. The drums do not change, and I go back to the basket, because the basket is still there. There is no ceremony available on a wall. You put them at the back and you keep working. On the last night of January they start with naphtha. It comes over in pots and it comes apart in the air, and what lands is a running liquid fire that goes into cracks and down steps and does not stop when you put earth on it, it just waits under the earth. Two men on the tower below us go up. They ran — men who are on fire run towards other people, that is the thing nobody warns you about — and we had to keep them off with the shafts of spears, at arm's length, for as long as it took, and the noise was not a scream, it was higher than that, and afterwards nobody on the tower spoke for an hour. The Ajami tower goes on the first of February. It does not fall like a building. It slumps. There is a stone, and then another stone in almost the same place, and then a sound like a great sigh, and the whole south-eastern angle sits down about twelve feet into its own dust, and where the tower was there is a slope. Not a hole — a slope. A ramp, made of the wall, going up. And they are on it before the dust is down. Not a charge, not a scream — men coming up a slope at a working pace with shields high, in ranks, being loosed over by the archers behind them, and the first three who reach the top are killed by us and the next six are not. The dawadar comes up at the run with maybe two hundred men.

Mujahid_al_din: The crest! Take the crest and hold it — nothing else, the crest!

Bram: And they take the top of the ramp back. Once. I am there for it and it is the loudest ninety seconds of my life and we hold the crest and for about a quarter of an hour it is possible to believe. — and let me carry us forward from there, because the two days after it are shovels and thirst and holding a gap with baskets. The bombardment goes on. The gap gets wider. And on the fourth of February a boy runs up from the river stair shouting that the dawadar has taken boats out. We can see it from the angle. Three ships and some smaller craft going downstream on the current, fast, hugging the far bank, trying to slip past the lower pontoon-line in the half-light — and it is a good plan, it is a genuinely good plan, and it lasts about four minutes. They had engines sited on both banks for exactly this. The first stone misses the lead ship and puts a column of water up higher than the mast. The second does not miss. Then the fire-pots come out from the rafts and the river is suddenly, briefly, absurdly beautiful — burning oil spreading flat on brown water in a half-lit dawn — and there are men going over the side into it, and the current takes them down past the walls of their own city, where we are all standing watching, and we cannot do one single thing about it. That was the door. That was the last door. After that morning nothing leaves Baghdad. And on the fifth the eastern battlements go, further along, in two more places at once, and the thing on the wall stops being a fight and becomes a question of which stair you can get down. And I see him at the head of the stair, the little dawadar, bare-headed again, sword down at his side, watching the Mongols come along the top of his wall in both directions — and he is not counting any more. That is what I noticed. He has stopped counting. Then he goes down to see the caliph, and I go the other way, and that is the last time I am a soldier. Alright. Let them have the wall. They have it. By the fifth of February the Mongols hold the eastern battlements — that is the wall on the palace side, the government side, the side with the markets — and then, for five days, almost nothing happens, and I want to tell you what those five days are, because they are the strangest part of the whole siege. They do not come down off the wall into the streets. They sit on it. Because Hulagu does not want a street-fight in a city this size with an army he would rather not spend; he wants the thing handed to him. So the wall is held, the river is held, the drums keep going, and the city underneath is left to arrive at its own conclusion. And inside, the arithmetic runs out one option at a time. The field army is at the bottom of a canal. The walls are open. The river is corked at both ends. There are no allies coming — no relief from Syria, no relief from Egypt, no rising of all Islam, because the rising of all Islam was a sentence in a letter and not a plan. And a sealed city comes apart in ways that have nothing to do with the wall. Baghdad drinks the Tigris. The water is lifted out of the river into channels and cisterns and it has been arriving that way, without anyone having to think about it, for five hundred years — and the wells inside the wall are brackish, because they always were, because nobody living on a river ever needed a good well. The bread is the same story. The mills are on the water; the grain comes down the water. Nothing has come in since the ring closed on the twenty-second of January. So by the second week of February there are people in the eastern quarters who have not eaten properly in a fortnight, in a city that had not had to think about food since it was founded. And nobody is fighting. That is the strangeness of a siege — the assault is not the long part. The interval is. Thousands of people sitting in their own cold houses listening to drums, with nothing to do, while the men who might have decided something have run out of decisions. The dawadar is offered terms and takes them, and it does not save him; he is executed after the surrender, along with most of the officers who walked out with him. He spent everything he had on a wall he was never funded to hold, and the men who blamed him for the loss were the men who would not pay for it. And there is a piece of procedure running underneath all of this that you should know about, because it is going to decide who lives. When a Mongol commander opens a siege he sends in an offer first, and the offer has a clock on it. Submit before the engines are assembled and you are taxed. Submit after they are assembled but before a wall is breached and you are taxed harder, and you lose your garrison. Submit after the breach and there is nothing left to submit to — the terms expire the moment the wall does. A concession you can still take after losing is a concession nobody takes before. Baghdad had four months of the first kind of offer. It is inside the third clock now, and the men outside are not being cruel when they stop replying. They are being consistent, which in this century is very much worse. And I want to put one comparison beside this, because it is the thing that makes the whole policy legible. Two years after Baghdad, the same army arrives outside Damascus. Damascus does the other thing. It opens the gates, it sends its notables out with the keys, it submits — and Damascus is not sacked. There is no massacre, there is no burning of its quarters. It takes a garrison and a tax assessment and goes on being Damascus, and its people go on living in it. So the offer was real. That is the unbearable part, and it is why the autumn matters more than the siege. The choice made in a warm room in October was a genuine choice with a genuine alternative, and the alternative was demonstrated two years later, by the next great city that army rode to, which took it. And in the palace, the man who never in his life had to make a decision now has one left, and only one, and no version of it is survivable. On the tenth of February the small gate on the eastern side opens, and God's shadow on earth walks out of it on his own feet. In the second courtyard of the Dar al-Khilafa, the fountains are still running. Nobody has turned the fountains off. I have been standing at the wrong end of this morning for two hours with a folded cloak over my arm that nobody has asked for. The palace has stopped working — the kitchens cold, the west-wing doors standing open with nobody on them, a broken lamp on the tiles since yesterday that no one has picked up — and in the middle of it the water is going round the way it has gone round every day of my life, because water does not need to be told. Men keep leaving. That is the traffic this morning — not arriving, leaving, in ones and twos, with bundles, by the garden doors, and nobody stops them, and nobody says the word that would make it desertion. He is in the small audience room, and he has been in there since before light, and there are perhaps thirty men in a building built for three thousand. I take water in because that is my job and because I want to see. He is sitting where he sat in the autumn when he sent the letter. Same seat, same black. He has not slept. And the thumb is going round and round on the ring.

Ibn_al_alqami: They will accept you in person. Only in person. That is the whole of it.

Al_mustasim: And then?

Ibn_al_alqami: And then it is what he decides.

Al_mustasim: You have not answered me.

Ibn_al_alqami: There is no answer to give you. There has been no answer to give you since October.

Bram: And the caliph looks up at his vizier — a Shi'a servant of a Sunni house, who has spent three months telling this room the truth about the money and been hated for it.

Al_mustasim: They say in the street that you wrote to him.

Ibn_al_alqami: I know what they say in the street.

Al_mustasim: Did you write to him?

Ibn_al_alqami: I wrote to you. Eleven times. About the wall.

Bram: And then he asks me for the grey cloak, because it is cold, and he asks the way he asks for anything, which is pleasantly, and by name. They go in the middle of the morning. Him, his sons, and behind them the whole apparatus — qadis, secretaries, chamberlains, the men of the diwan, three thousand by the time the column is out, all in black, on foot. I carry the cloak as far as the gate because nobody tells me not to. And then I carry it through the gate, because nobody tells me that either, and by the time I have understood that I am outside the wall of the Dar al-Khilafa for the first time in four years, the arch is behind me and there is no version of turning round. The gate is a brick arch I have been through ten thousand times, and on the other side of it, in a wide flat half-circle on ground that used to be a market, are the Mongols, mounted, in complete silence, arranged the way you arrange furniture. Not a mob. Ranks. Standing still on ground they had built a road across. And he stops. Just for a moment, right on the line of the arch, with the light on one side and the shadow on the other, and he does a small thing with his hand — smooths the front of his robe, the way you do at a doo…