Editing Openai/691d9c1d-d468-8006-890d-7854f5b6223f (section)

=== The Mongol sack of Baghdad is one of the great ruptures in Eurasian history. ===

Before 1258, Baghdad — under the Abbasids — was:
* the intellectual center of Eurasia
* the administrative center of an enormous territory
* the financial center of the Islamic world
* the nerve center of long-distance trade

Baghdad wasn’t just a city — it was the clearinghouse of Afro-Eurasian commerce.

Then the Mongols arrived.

==== The Mongols: ====
* broke the irrigation system
* killed the scholars, bureaucrats, and merchant elites
* destroyed libraries, workshops, and markets
* collapsed the tax apparatus

Baghdad never fully recovered.

==== Baghdad → Basra → Indian Ocean was one of the major arteries of world trade. ====

After 1258:
* Persian and Iraqi merchants lost capital
* the Gulf cities lost political protection
* the region became unstable

Trade shifted toward:
* the Red Sea (Aden + Cairo)
* the Indian ports (Calicut, Cambay)

==== The Mongol shock broke the centralization of the Islamic world. ====
Merchants migrated to:
* Hormuz
* Muscat
* Calicut
* Malacca
* East Africa

This diaspora ironically spread their influence further, but created a more fragmented system.

==== Later Mongol rulers (like Kublai Khan) established the famous Pax Mongolica, reopening the great overland routes — but those helped: ====
* Central Asia
* China
* Persia (a bit)

Not Iraq.

The old “Baghdad-centric world” was gone.