Sassanian Period

The Decadence (1258-1534).

The conquest was unprece dentedly ruinous. By ordering the destruction of the embankments and headworks of the rivers and canals Hulagu converted vast areas of 'Iraq into steppe or swamp. The cultivators, thinned first by massacre and then by malaria and famine, were too weak to rebuild the canal system and prevent the nomads of Arabia ter rorizing the countryside and encroaching on the remnants of culti vation. Henceforth the internal history of 'Iraq is that of an un ending struggle between a few towns and the pastoral tribes— Arabs in most of the region, Kurds and Turkomans in the north —who regarded farmer and townsman as inferiors to be black mailed and robbed.

For 8o years after the conquest 'Iraq was a poor province of the empire of the Ilkhans, the house of Hulagu. When their empire broke up Hasan Jalair, a Muslim Mongol noble, seized its western provinces and made Baghdad his winter capital. His successors ruled the Eastern Jazirah. The Ortoqids, the only Atabeg dynasty to survive the Mongols, were more or less independent on its western flank. In 1393 Timur the Tatar took Baghdad, but the Jalair expelled his governor. He returned in 14b1 and sacked the city only less barbarously than Hulagu. On his death the Jalair returned but were soon overthrown by their rivals, the Turkomans of the Black Sheep (Qara-Qoyunly), whose capital was at Van. But their unstable power was challenged by the Turkomans of the White Sheep (Aq-Qoyunly), whose power was based on Diyar bekir. Their chief, Uzun Hasan, conquered 'Iraq and the Jazirah, but the new empire was distracted by rebellion and threatened by the growing ambition of the Osmanli Turks and of the new Persian dynasty of the Safawids. In 15°8 Shah Ismail's general, Lala Hussein, took Baghdad and soon added Mosul, the capital of the Jazirah, to his master's empire.

Turco-Persian Rivalry (1512-1638).

In 1512 Selim the Grim girt on the sword of Osman and promptly made war on the Safawis. Shah Ismail's defeat at Chaldiran gave the Turk Ardalan, Mosul, Amadia and Raqqa, but Kirkuk and Baghdad remained Persian until 1534, when Suleiman the Magnificent took Baghdad.

Basra was taken 12 years later by the Turks.

Unfortunately frequent wars with Persia and the turbulence of the tribes prevented the Turks organizing an anarchical country as they had organized their more central conquests. Their hold on Basra was precarious and the province was practically independent during most of the 17th century under a local dynasty. Shahrizor (the Kirkuk region) was constantly disputed by the Persians, sometimes aided, sometimes opposed, by local Kurdish chiefs.

Local treachery brought the Persians into Baghdad in 1623. After 15 years Murad IV. retook the city and massacred many Persian prisoners. For three generations there was peace between Persian and Turk. From 1724, when war broke out again, to 1747 fighting was almost continuous and the exploits of Nadir Quli, who became Nadir Shah, and of his opponent Topal Osman Pasha gave an epic grandeur to an indecisive struggle. The wars of and of 182o-23 were less destructive and equally indecisive.

The Tribal Problem.—Wars with the Arab tribes were con stant from 1638 to the middle of the 19th century. The names of the tribes or confederacies changed but there was no change in their politics. The close proximity of Arabia and of the vast Syrian steppe gave rebels a sure refuge. In 1641 the Shammar from Nejd reached the Euphrates and long controlled the towns of Anah and Zor.

The central government was at its weakest between 176o and 182o owing to foreign war and the ambitions of provincial pashas. In Mesopotamia it tolerated a succession of "Slave Pashas," mostly Georgian freedmen, who ruled as independent satraps of `Iraq, though they never renounced their allegiance to the sultan.

The Last Phase.—The period of direct Ottoman rule began in 1831 when Ali Riza Pasha deposed Daud, the last slave pasha of `Iraq. The Jalili were followed into exile or retirement by the ruling families of the Kurdish hill states. Mohammed "the Blind" of Ruwanduz had a brief period of rebellious success but was cap tured and made away with, and the last and best of the Kurdish princes disappeared when the Babans of Suleimaniyah ceased to rule (185o). In the south Qarbala was sternly disciplined (1842 and 1852). But until Midhat Pasha no Mesopotamian governor made any attempt to solve the tribal problem by other means than striking, often feebly, at the elusive nomads in the hope that they would be compelled to obedience. Midhat (see MIDHAT PASHA) won his reputation as a reformer in Baghdad (1869-72) by im posing conscription and founding municipalities and administra tive councils and by inaugurating a policy of land settlement. His aim was to wean the tribes from nomadism by selling state lands to their sheikhs upon easy terms giving security of tenure; where the sheikhs became landlords, as among the Muntafiq, their power over their followers waned and by the beginning of the loth century the nomad Arabs, though by no means tamed, were less powerful and dangerous.