HAVOC 153ancients as "the Mother of Cities," dumping its library into the Oxus
River, hundreds of thousands of handwritten volumes swept away.
Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols at-
tempted genocide. No other word really seems appropriate. Writing
shortly after the events in question, the Muslim historian Sayfi Heravi said
the Mongols killed 1,747,000 when they sacked the city of Naishapur,
killing everything down to the cats and dogs. At the city of Herat, he put
the toll at 1 ,600,000. Another Persian historian, J uzjani, claimed that
2,400,000 died in Herat. Obviously these number are inflated. Herat and
Naishapur could not possibly have had anywhere near this number of in-
habitants in the 1220s.^8
Yet the numbers might not be quite as inflated as they may seem at first
because when the Mongols came down upon the Islamic world, people
fled from their depredations-they had to. The Mongols burned fields,
destroyed crops, stripped peasants of their livelihood, and promoted tales
of their murderous fury as a strategy of war. They intended for the news
and fear of their deeds to travel fast and far so that subsequent cities they
attacked would not put up any fight.
One city they attacked in northern Afghanistan was called-well, I
don't even know what it was called originally. Today, it's called Shari
Gholghola-the City of Shrieking, and all you see there now is a heap of
rubble and mud and stones. So it's quite possible that by the time the
Mongols attacked any major city such as Herat, it was swollen by refugees
from hundreds of miles around. It may be that when these cities finally
fell, it wasn't just their original population but the population of the entire
region that perished.
No one could really know how many died. Surely no one actually went
out to the battlefields and counted the dead. But even if these numbers
aren't really statistics, they function as impressions of scale, as expressions
of how it felt to be alive in the shadow of such massacres, such horror. No-
body told any such stories about the Seljuks or the other earlier Turks. The
Mongol invasion was clearly a disaster on a different scale.
Whatever the numbers were based on, there must have been some truth
to them. Two histories completed around 658 AH {1260 CE), one in
Baghdad, one in Delhi, gave almost exactly similar accounts of these