Mongol invasion of Khorasan

Genghis Khan ordered two of his foremost generals, Subutai and Jebe, to follow the Shah and prevent any such Khwarazmian resurgence; meanwhile, he sent his youngest son Tolui south to subjugate any resistance.

By this point, Jebe and Subutai had moved into western Iran to pursue Shah Muhammad II, and the cities which had earlier submitted to them in the Khorasan region had become bolder; Genghis Khan's son-in-law Toquchar was killed by a nascent rebellion at Nishapur in November 1220.

[4] After capturing Balkh in early 1221 and while continuing to besiege Taliqan, Genghis dispatched Tolui to Khorasan to make sure that no opposition remained in the extensive and wealthy region.

[5] Tolui's army was composed of a tenth of the Mongol invasion force augmented by Khwarazmian conscripts; the historian Carl Sverdrup estimates its size at around 7,000 men.

Having been subjected to a general assault on the seventh day, the townspeople, who twice attempted a sortie to no effect, lost the will to resist and surrendered to the Mongols, who promised to treat them fairly.

[8] Tolui, however, reneged on this guarantee, and ordered that the entire population be driven out on the plain and put to the sword, excluding a small number of artisans and children.

The early 20th-century historian Vasily Bartold, citing a local history from the 1400s, stated that none of the inhabitants were killed with the exception of the garrison; meanwhile, the chronicler Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, who fought the Mongols nearby, recorded that after an eight-month siege, the city was taken and its population slaughtered.

[19] The population subsequently rebelled and were besieged for months by the Mongol general Eljigidei, who was said to have killed between 1,600,000 and 2,400,000 people during his sack of the town, in a massacre lasting seven days in June 1222.

[23] The historian Michal Biran has suggested that the speed with which the Mongols brought the pragmatically brutal warfare of East Asia into the less ruthless Muslim world was a factor in this cultural shock.

Map depicting the Khwarazmian Empire in 1215
A map of the Khwarazmian Empire in 1215; Tolui's campaign subjugated Khorasan , the central region of the empire.
An elegant building in Islamic style, with a lower half composed of three curved-arch porches, and the top a bright blue dome, standing on a pathway in the middle of a verdant garden.
The mausoleum of Attar of Nishapur , a Persian poet who was killed during the sack of Nishapur, was built during the Timurid Renaissance in the 15th century. [ 10 ]