Among the names given to Bagdad, as has been said in a preceding page, was that of Dar-as-Salam, or Medina-as-Salam—City of Peace. In view of the numerous vicissitudes through which the erstwhile capital of the Caliphs has passed, the protracted sieges it has sustained, the frightful destruction it has time and again undergone, the appalling massacres of its inhabitants at the hands of bloodthirsty invaders, it would be difficult to conceive a more preposterous misnomer.
We have seen what was the fate of the city when it was given over to the savage and rapacious hordes of Hulagu Khan. But this reign of terror was but a prelude to the horrors that befell the ill-fated city when, less than a century and a half later, the brutal Mongols again captured and sacked the city; when its streets streamed with the blood of its defenders and reëchoed with the frenzied shrieks of women and children, and when, as a climax of all this unutterable carnage,[448] the Mongol leader, Timur, celebrated his bloody victory by erecting on the ruins of Bagdad a gruesome pyramid of ninety thousand heads of its slaughtered inhabitants.[449]
No wonder that the people of the East were wont to declare that “conquest by Turks or Saracens was a blessing compared with falling into the jaws of the implacable Mongols.” When word reached the Court of Byzantium that the Mongols, under Timur, were approaching the city, so great was the terror which they inspired that “popular rumor painted the invaders as having dogs’ heads and eating human flesh.”[450]
When, in addition to all these atrocities, one recalls the deeds of violence and savagery which afterwards followed the successive storming and occupation of the unfortunate city by Turkomans, Persians, and Turks, one must conclude that the proper epithet for Bagdad would have been not Dar-as-Salam—City of Peace—but Dar-al-Harb—City of War.
“But what,” the reader inquires, “of modern Bagdad, of the Bagdad of to-day”? Since the Muses left the fair capital of the Caliphs, long centuries ago, little more of interest remains in it than may be found in any other city of the Moslem East.
My first hurried view of Bagdad was in the parting splendor of sunset,
When her shrines through the foliage were gleaming half shown,
And each hallow’d the hour by some rites of its own.
My eyes were then open only to what was beautiful, romantic, picturesque.
My second view was on the following morning, from the terrace of the Carmelite monastery. It was at the hour when the sun, in the words of Omar Khayyám, was scattering