Sack of Baghdad by Timur

July 1401

Twenty thousand skulls, the chroniclers insist, were stacked into towers outside the Abbasid city's ruined gates. Baghdad, already a shell of its Harun al-Rashid glory, would not recover for centuries. Timur departed with its libraries, its glassblowers, and its architects strapped to camels bound for Samarkand. The city that once anchored the intellectual world of Islam was reduced to a provincial backwater for centuries.