The whole series, Heirs of Genghis Khan, from the beginning:
The Son Genghis Khan Refused to Disown — A...
In February 1258 Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khan), took Baghdad, and for a week his army killed and burned. Through all of it one man was kept alive: al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. When he was finally put to death, it was done without a drop of his blood touching the ground. This is the story of why — of the astrologer who warned that the sky would answer, and of the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who read the same sky and said it would not. It follows Tusi from the Ismaili castles of Alamut to Hulagu's camp, the siege of Baghdad, the Mongol rule on royal blood that reaches back to Jamukha, the observatory Tusi built on a hill above Maragha, the Ilkhanic Tables — and the two circles in his book whose lettering turns up, almost point for point, in Copernicus three hundred years later.
Every factual claim in this video is sourced. Where the sources disagree, the video says so instead of picking the tidier version: on how Tusi came to live among the Ismailis, on the death toll of Baghdad (from around ninety thousand to more than a million — none of it can be checked), on the fate of the astrologer Husam al-Din, and on the roles of the vizier Ibn al-Alqami and of Tusi himself in the fall of the city, which Sunni and Shia writers have argued over for seven centuries. Two popular stories are treated as legends and said to be so: Marco Polo's caliph starved among his gold, and the Tigris running black with ink. How the Tusi couple reached Copernicus has never been proved; the matching letters were pointed out by Willy Hartner in 1973. Rashid al-Din, Juvayni and Tusi are retold rather than quoted — the modern translations are still in copyright. There are no direct quotations in the narration.
Images: manuscript miniatures from the Diez Albums (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), Rashid al-Din's Jami al-Tawarikh, the Maqamat of al-Hariri, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Khalili Collections; astrolabes and celestial globes from the Louvre, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and other collections; pages of Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543); and photographs of Alamut, Baghdad's Abbasid Palace and Mustansiriya Madrasa, the Talisman Gate, the Maragha observatory hill and the Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarkand — all via Wikimedia Commons under their respective terms. 185 images; the full per-image licence list is kept with the production files. Attribution where the licence requires it — CC BY-SA 4.0: 13th century CE author, Aubry Gérard, Benjamin Goetzinger, Cinokat, Homo sapiens History, Husseinal-mauktar, Khoshhat, Marcyś 1971, Mondalawy, Romaine, Rəcəb Yaxşı, Sam.Donvil, Samir Al-Ibrahem, Taisir Mahdi, unknown, Yevlem, Zahraa raid, طارق العساف, منصة الصور السعودية. CC BY-SA 3.0: Ayoub Farabi (ایوب فارابی), Captainm, Ciphers, Elmju, Hadibehestani, Jacopo188, Makaay31, PHGCOM. CC BY 2.0: Evan Bench from paris, france, Julia Maudlin, Mo from London, U.K., simonhn (Simon Helle Nielsen) from flickr.com, smallcurio from Rochester, NY. CC BY 3.0: Alireza Javaheri, Ayoub Farabi (ایوب فارابی), Sailko. CC BY 4.0: Khoshhat. CC BY-SA 2.0: Adam Jones. CC BY-SA 3.0 FR: Rama. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO: Khalili Collections. Public-domain and CC0 works are not listed individually. Maps use Natural Earth data (public domain). The Tusi-couple animation, maps and cards are our own work. The thumbnail contains no third-party material.
Sound: the narration voice is synthesised with Chatterbox (Resemble AI, MIT licence) from a speaker sample in the LibriTTS-R corpus (Koizumi et al., 2023), licensed CC BY 4.0. The music is original, composed for this channel with ACE-Step (MIT licence). The ambience under the narration — mountain and desert wind, a campfire, a market, horses, crickets at night, a river, a blacksmith's workshop — is thirteen field recordings released under CC0 via Freesound (felix.blume, dwightsabeast, Spandau, ninebilly, silencyo, INNORECORDS, jorge0000, kangaroovindaloo, thefilmbakery, Defelozedd94, kingsrow, UnderlinedDesigns). CC0 asks for no credit; it is given anyway.
Previous episode — Berke, the first Muslim khan in Genghis Khan's line:
The First Muslim Khan in Genghis Khan's Li...
Next episode — Ain Jalut, where Genghis Khan's heirs met an army of slaves:
Why Genghis Khan's Heirs Lost to an Army o...
