The sack of Baghdad

Hulagu takes Baghdad in 1258, kills the last Abbasid caliph, and puts the city to slaughter — casualty figures in the sources range from 90,000 to 800,000 and none is reliable. The libraries are destroyed, with accounts of the Tigris running black with ink. The event is often treated as the end of the Islamic Golden Age, though scholarship continued and flourished elsewhere; what ended was Baghdad's centrality and the Abbasid caliphate itself.