Читать книгу Art of Islam - Gaston Migeon - Страница 27

Although Baghdad became the ultimate capital of the caliphate, nothing is left of Haroun-al-Rashid’s monuments or those of his successors, who reigned there without interruption for almost four centuries. This may be explained by the fact that the buildings there were made of baked and unbaked bricks, and very rarely of stone, which was reserved for columns and the pavement of courtyards. Mosul alabaster was used for the buildings. Since buildings made of sun-dried bricks are short-lived, we can understand why most monuments from this period have since crumbled. In addition to time, however, almost all monuments there were destroyed following the conquest of Baghdad led by Hulagu in 1250. The vanquishers swept radically across the territory, leaving nothing in their wake: wealth was pillaged and manuscripts were burnt or thrown into the Tigris. “These were resources that knowledge seekers had assembled in this city before this terrible tragedy,” says Kotb ad-Din El Hanafi. “The Mongols threw all the college books into the Tigris to the extent that they piled up to form a kind of bridge for both pedestrians and horsemen, and the river’s waters turned completely black from them.”