Before the siege, Nishapur was one of the great cities of the medieval world. Situated on the plains of Khorasan in northeastern Iran, it sat at a critical crossroads of the Silk Road, the trade network stretching from China to the Mediterranean. Caravans carried silk, cotton textiles, and the region's prized turquoise through its gates. Nearby mines had supplied turquoise of the finest quality for over two millennia. Under the Samanid dynasty, the city became a provincial capital. During the Seljuk period, it often served as a royal residence. By the early thirteenth century, Nishapur held between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, sustained by an ingenious network of underground water channels called qanats that fed the city and its surrounding farmland. Scholars, poets, and artisans filled its streets. Its citadel stood on an artificial platform built by the Samanids, and its markets hummed with the commerce of half a continent.

Nishapur's destruction was not strategic calculation alone. It was vengeance. In 1220, Mongol generals Jebe and Subutai passed through the city peacefully, demanding provisions that were quickly delivered before they continued pursuing Shah Mohammed II of Khwarazm. But after the Mongols departed, rumors of their defeats spread, and Nishapur's inhabitants rebelled. Genghis Khan dispatched his son-in-law Taghaqchar to pacify Khorasan. During fighting near Nishapur, Taghaqchar was killed. For the Mongol royal family, this was personal. When Genghis Khan ordered his son Tolui to crush the remaining Khwarazmian strongholds with an army of 80,000, Nishapur was marked for a reckoning that went beyond military necessity.

Tolui's forces reached Nishapur in March or April of 1221. The governor, Sharaf al-Din, had prepared a formidable defense: 12,000 archers stationed at each of the city's four gates, totaling 48,000 defenders. The Mongol siege arsenal was staggering. Persian chroniclers recorded 3,000 siege crossbows, 100 mangonels and ballistae, 4,000 scaling ladders, and 1,700 naphtha-throwers, their designs influenced by Chinese military engineering. For eight days, the archers held. The city's chief qadi was sent to Tolui to plead for quarter and offer tribute. He was refused and never permitted to return. On the ninth day, the Mongols broke through the walls in over seventy places simultaneously. Governor Sharaf al-Din died fighting in the streets. What followed was systematic slaughter. According to the chronicler Juvayni, the Mongols spared neither cats nor dogs. The site was sown with barley, as though the city had never existed at all.

Medieval sources claim 1,747,000 people died at Nishapur. Modern scholars estimate the actual toll at 100,000 to 200,000, still catastrophic for a single city in a single week. Historical accounts describe the Mongol forces stacking severed heads into three separate pyramids, men, women, and children, a calculated display of terror. Before departing for Herat, Tolui left behind four hundred men with orders to comb the ruins and execute any survivors. The destruction was not merely military but civilizational. With Attar died the living tradition of one of the great literary centers of the Islamic world. The qanats that had sustained the city for centuries fell into disrepair. Agricultural output collapsed. The landscape itself changed. A thriving metropolis became, in the words of one historian, a place of absolute silence.

A smaller settlement eventually grew north of the ruins, but old Nishapur lay buried. Later rulers tried to revive the city. Mahmud Ghazan and Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan rebuilt some surrounding villages, and by the 1340s, when the historian Hamdallah Mustawfi visited, forty mills were running along the Mir Ab River. But the ancient city remained underground. In 1935, a team from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York arrived and began excavating. They worked until 1940, returned for a final season in 1947-48, and unearthed pottery, glassware, and artifacts that now fill museum galleries thousands of miles from where they were made. Today, the archaeological zone covers 3,500 hectares south of modern Nishapur, a silent expanse that was once one of the largest and most vibrant cities on the Silk Road. The turquoise mines still produce. The poetry of Attar is still read. The city that created both is dust.