Baghdad

When the Ilkhanate broke apart, Baghdad found new masters in the Jalayirids, who made it their capital, and whose court workshops produced illustrated manuscripts such as the Khamsa of Nizami made for Sultan Ahmad Jalayir in the 1380s. Then the city twice met Timur. In 1393 he reached it from Shiraz in only eight days and Ahmad fled to Syria; when Timur came back in 1401, after Ahmad had returned, he spared almost no one and ordered each of his soldiers to bring him two severed heads.

Baghdad never again led an empire. It passed to the Qara Qoyunlu, the Aq Qoyunlu and the Safavids, and after the Ottomans took it in 1534 it became the frontier fortress between sultan and shah, lost to Persia in 1623 and won back by Murad IV in 1638. Plague repeatedly carried off much of its population. A measure of revival came only in the 18th century, under a line of Georgian mamluk pashas who governed Iraq from Baghdad with growing independence from 1704 until the Ottomans overthrew them in 1831.