A branch of the same great horde, under the leadership of Subutai, destroyed Moscow and Kiev in a campaign conducted with striking ability and ending in 1239, and settled in Russia. Poland, aided by French Knights Templars and the Grand Master of the Teutonic order, had put forward all her strength to resist the same division of the all-devouring army, while another wing attacked the Hungarians with half a million of men. Their entry into Europe was in such numbers and the excesses of cruelty committed by them were so alarming that their advance everywhere created terror. The Tartars--coming from Tartarus, as some of the Crusaders believed--were so little known, says Pachymer, that many declared they had the heads of dogs and fed upon human flesh.[36] Seen nearer, they were less formidable as individuals, though infernal, terrible, and invincible as an army. In 1258, the year before the recapture of Constantinople and the destruction of the Latin empire by the Greeks, Houlagou, the grandson of Genghis Khan, captured Bagdad, and deposed the last of the Bagdad caliphs. He extended his conquests over Mesopotamia and Syria to the Mediterranean. Damascus and Aleppo were sacked. Houlagou sought to ally himself with the Crusaders in order to overthrow the Saracens and the sultan of Egypt. [Sidenote: The Seljukian Turks.] When Houlagou turned his attention to Asia Minor, he found among the Christian populations a division of the Turkish race known as Seljuks, whose sultan resided at Konia, and called himself sultan of Roum.[37] He attacked and inflicted injuries upon them from which they never recovered. It is difficult to state precisely what were the boundaries of the Seljuks and of other Moslem or partly Moslem peoples in Asia Minor and Syria, during the thirteenth century, and this difficulty arises from the fact that their boundaries were continually changing. The Saracens held certain places in Syria, but there was a Christian prince in Antioch; there were cities occupied by the western Knights Templars, a Christian prince in Caramania and a king of Lesser Armenia. There were Turcomans at Marash and in the hill country behind Trebizond, and Kurds invaded Cilicia in 1278. A large tract of country around Konia was ruled over by the Seljuks. No natural boundary marked the extent of territory occupied by any of these peoples or in Asia Minor by the Roman emperor.