In the fall of Alamut, the centre of the Assassins was gone; the props of their authority were broken, in the loss of the castles of Rudbar and Kuhistan. Still, the grand-prior of Syria refused submission to the grand-master’s orders to surrender,—the armies of the Mongols being, as yet, too distant to compel his obedience. A far greater object occupied the mind of Hulaku, than the destruction of a few Syrian mountain forts, in which the order, after the fall of Alamut, and the annihilation of the Ismailites in Persia, might yet, though with difficulty, raise its head. He entertained no less a project than the conquest of Bagdad, and the overthrow of the khalif’s throne, on which the Arabs had, in the prophet’s name, already, for six centuries and a half, ruled over the world of Islam. This great event is, not only by its immediate consequences, but also from its proximate cause, inseparably connected with the destruction of the Assassins. In the second year after the fall of Alamut, and, consequently, before the conquest of Kirdkuh the last fortress of the Assassins, which only surrendered in the third year of the siege, Bagdad, the queen of the cities of the Tigris, fell. The overthrow of the khalifat, as we have seen, in the instructions given by Mangu to his brother Hulaku, did not enter immediately into the plan of the khan, who merely claimed submission and troops, but Nassireddin, the great _savant_ and traitor, who had delivered the capital of the Assassins into the conqueror’s hands, and had paved a road to his own revenge, over its ruins, laboured unceasingly to urge Hulaku to the destruction of the khalifat. Besides the close connexion of this event with the one which we have described, it is in itself so great and important, in the history of Asia, and the middle ages,—so attractive, from the novelty and rarity of the subject, that we cannot deny our readers and ourselves the pleasure of following the khan, in his expedition from Alamut to Bagdad.