Siege of Bukhara

The siege of Bukhara in February 1220 was one of the first blows of the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire. After the governor of Otrar seized a Mongol trade caravan and Shah Muhammad II insulted and killed Genghis Khan's envoys, Genghis left the war in China and rode west with the bulk of his army. The Shah spread his troops as garrisons in his great cities, trusting walls rather than a field battle. Genghis then did what contemporaries thought impossible: he took a force of perhaps thirty to fifty thousand men across the Kyzylkum Desert and appeared before Bukhara, which the Shah had left lightly defended. A sortie by the garrison was destroyed on the river bank, and the outer city surrendered within three days. Loyalists held the citadel for less than two weeks before the Mongols, using siege engineers brought from China, breached it. The citadel's defenders were killed, the population was enslaved or conscripted, and fire destroyed most of the city, including its famous library. Bukhara recovered within a generation, but the shock of its fall spread across the Islamic world.