Iraqi History · Chronicle XI of XII
Medieval & Ottoman Iraq
Ilkhans, Timur, the Turkmen, and the Ottoman–Safavid struggle for Iraq.
IlkhanatePolitical
Once the centre of the world, Baghdad becomes a provincial town ruled by Mongol Ilkhans from distant Tabriz.
The Mongol Ilkhanate ruled Iraq as a peripheral province of an empire centred in Iran. The elaborate irrigation canals that had watered Mesopotamia since Sumerian times fell into neglect, and much farmland reverted to marsh and desert. Baghdad's centuries of primacy were over; it would not be a capital again for seven hundred years.
IlkhanateReligious
The Ilkhan Ghazan converts to Islam, and the Mongol rulers of Iraq and Iran become Muslim.
Ghazan's conversion reconciled the Mongol dynasty with its Muslim subjects and brought a measure of recovery, with new building and tax reform. Yet Iraq remained a distant frontier of the Ilkhanate, and when that state collapsed in the 1330s the land fell to a scramble of local dynasties.
Jalayirid DynastyCultural
The Jalayirid dynasty rules Iraq from Baghdad, bringing a brief revival of courtly art and manuscript painting.
Emerging from the wreck of the Ilkhanate, the Jalayirids made Baghdad a capital once more and patronized poets and painters; the exquisite Baghdad school of miniature painting dates from their court. It was a last flicker of splendour before a far greater storm broke over the city.
Timurid InvasionsMilitary
The conqueror Timur storms Baghdad and butchers its people, building towers from the skulls of the dead.
Timur (Tamerlane) sacked Baghdad twice, and in 1401 his soldiers were ordered to bring back severed heads, from which he raised grisly towers outside the walls. Coming atop the Mongol catastrophe, Timur's devastation confirmed the ruin of medieval Iraq, whose population and prosperity had collapsed far below their former heights.
Turkmen ConfederationsMilitary
Rival Turkmen confederations, the Kara Koyunlu and Aq Koyunlu, contest Iraq amid its long decline.
The 'Black Sheep' Kara Koyunlu and the 'White Sheep' Aq Koyunlu, tribal Turkmen dynasties, ruled Iraq in turn through the fifteenth century as one corner of their pastoral realms. Power lay with nomad cavalry and shifting confederations; the settled cities and canals of the plain mattered little to them.
Safavid IraqReligious
Shah Ismail's Safavids seize Iraq, exalting the Shia shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.
The new Safavid dynasty of Iran, militantly Shia, took Baghdad and lavished patronage on the tombs of Ali at Najaf and Husayn at Karbala, which drew pilgrims from across the Shia world. Iraq now lay on the fault line between Shia Iran and the Sunni Ottoman empire — a contested frontier for the next three centuries.
Ottoman IraqMilitary
Suleiman the Magnificent conquers Baghdad for the Ottomans, beginning four centuries of Ottoman rule.
Suleiman took Baghdad from the Safavids and organized Iraq into Ottoman provinces governed from Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. He honoured the Sunni shrines and rebuilt the tomb of the jurist Abu Hanifa. But the Safavid threat never disappeared, and Iraq remained a war zone between the two great Muslim empires.
Ottoman IraqMilitary
After the Safavids seize Baghdad again, Sultan Murad IV storms it back, fixing the Ottoman–Persian border for good.
The Safavid shah Abbas had retaken Baghdad in 1623 and massacred its Sunnis; Murad IV led a great army to besiege and storm the city in 1638. The peace treaty that followed drew a border between the Ottoman and Persian empires that broadly survives as Iraq's eastern frontier today — one of the oldest continuous borders in the world.
Ottoman IraqPolitical
A dynasty of Georgian Mamluk officers rules Iraq in the sultan's name, nearly independent for over a century.
From 1704 a self-perpetuating elite of Georgian slave-soldiers, the Mamluks, governed Iraq with wide autonomy, curbing the tribes and cultivating trade with British and other merchants. Their loose rule lasted until 1831, when a reforming sultan reasserted direct Ottoman control over the province.
Ottoman ReformsPolitical
The reformer Midhat Pasha modernizes Baghdad, bringing the first newspaper, steamboats, and secular schools.
As governor, Midhat Pasha dragged Ottoman Iraq into the modern age with the Tanzimat reforms — a printing press, hospitals, tramways, a new army, and settled land laws that reshaped tribal society. His brief tenure planted institutions and grievances alike that would shape the Iraq that emerged from the empire's fall.
The First World WarMilitary
British forces capture Baghdad from the Ottomans, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule over Iraq.
The Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War — which had seen a British army trapped and forced to surrender at Kut in 1916 — ended with the fall of Baghdad in 1917. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain occupied the provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, the raw material from which a new country called Iraq would be assembled.
3 more entries, to 1917
