Ain Jalut: The Slave Soldiers Who Stopped the Mongols

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In twelve fifty-eight, Baghdad was destroyed and the caliph was trampled to death wrapped in a carpet. Then the Mongols sent a letter to Cairo demanding surrender. The sultan answered by cutting the envoys in two. Two years later, beside a spring in Galilee, an army of men who had been bought and sold in the slave markets as boys faced the force that no one had been able to stop.

They say that in February 1258, the waters of the Tigris ran in two colors for days. One was ink, because the books thrown into the river from Baghdad's libraries had darkened the water. The other was blood. How much of this story is true, and how much is a lament composed later, we cannot say for certain today. What we do know is this: the city that had been the seat of the Abbasid caliphs for some 500 years, the city seen as the heart of the Islamic world, surrendered after a siege of a few weeks to the army of Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan. The last caliph, al-Musta'sim, was by most accounts rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death beneath the hooves of horses. Mongol belief held that spilling a ruler's blood on the ground brought bad luck. Even the manner of his death was part of a ritual.

Baghdad was only the beginning. In January 1260, Aleppo fell. Its walls were breached, and most of its people were put to the sword. In March, Damascus opened its gates without resistance. The Ayyubid ruler of Syria, an-Nasir Yusuf, was a descendant of Saladin, yet he could find no choice but to flee. Mongol advance units pushed south into Palestine, as far as Gaza. Anyone looking at the map saw the same thing: Mesopotamia and Syria were gone. Egypt was the last great Islamic state still standing.

It was then that a letter reached Cairo. Hulagu's envoys had brought it. The Mamluk historian al-Maqrizi recorded its text some two centuries later. Its language read less like a letter to a foreign ruler than like a verdict. Hulagu presented himself as a punishment sent down to earth by Heaven. He reminded the masters of Egypt of what had happened to Baghdad and Aleppo, and wrote that there was nowhere to run, that neither fortresses nor armies would protect them. There were two choices: surrender, or be destroyed.

The man who read the letter was Sayf al-Din Qutuz. He had taken the throne only a few months earlier, in November 1259, and the way he had done it could hardly be called legitimate. He had deposed the previous sultan's son, still a child, arguing that no child could rule the country in the face of the Mongol threat. Most of the emirs in Cairo submitted to him only grudgingly.

Qutuz himself was a slave, or rather, a man who had become a soldier while still a slave. By his own account, he was in fact a prince of the Khwarazmian dynasty, the nephew of Jalal al-Din, the last Khwarazmshah to fight the Mongols. When his family was scattered by the Mongol storm, he was taken captive and passed from hand to hand through the slave markets until he reached Egypt. We have no document to prove this story, but his contemporaries believed it. If it is true, then Qutuz read this letter as the child of a family whose dynasty the Mongols had destroyed.

The word mamluk means "one who is owned" in Arabic. The Ayyubid sultans of Egypt, especially as-Salih Ayyub, had built the core of their armies from young slaves bought at market. Most of these boys were Kipchak Turks brought from the steppes north of the Black Sea. In Cairo they were housed in barracks, converted to Islam, and trained for years in horsemanship, archery and the lance. When their training was complete they were freed, but they remained a military brotherhood, bound to their masters and to one another. In 1250, these soldiers overthrew their own masters' dynasty and seized power for themselves.

And here lies the strangest part of the story. In the 1230s and 1240s, Mongol armies had swept across the Kipchak steppe. Tens of thousands of young Kipchak captives ended up in the slave markets, and some of them were sold to Egypt. In other words, the flow of people that fed the growth of the Mamluk army in Cairo had largely been created by the Mongol conquests. Many of the men reading Hulagu's letter were people the Mongols had torn from their homelands as children.

Qutuz's decision was harsh. He had the envoys executed and their severed heads hung on Bab Zuwayla, the Zuwayla Gate, Cairo's southern gate. In the language of diplomacy, this meant only one thing: the Mongols held the inviolability of envoys to be sacred, and they never left a city that killed their envoys standing. Qutuz had deliberately destroyed any chance of compromise. From then on, surrender was no longer an option for Egypt. Only war remained.

But for there to be a war, the enemy first had to reach the gates of Cairo, and just then, something that happened thousands of kilometers to the east had shifted the balance in Syria in a way no one expected.

In August 1259, in the Sichuan region of southwestern China, Möngke, the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, died while besieging a Song fortress. The sources disagree on the cause of his death. Some say it was dysentery, others cholera. One account holds that he was wounded by a projectile hurled from the fortress walls. What is certain is that Möngke was Hulagu's elder brother, and that his death reopened the empire's greatest problem. That problem was succession.

In Mongol tradition, a new Great Khan was chosen at a kurultai, an assembly attended by members of the dynasty and the senior commanders. Two of Möngke's brothers put themselves forward for the throne. One was Kublai, on the Chinese front. The other was Ariq Böke, in Mongolia. By the time the news reached Hulagu in Syria, the year 1260 had already begun. The Mongol postal system was fast, but news traveling from one end of the world to the other still took months.

Hulagu took the bulk of his army and withdrew east, to Azerbaijan. For a long time, the succession struggle was thought to be the only reason for this withdrawal. Today, historians point to another reason as well, and it may have been the more important one: pasture. A Mongol cavalryman did not set out on campaign with a single horse, but with several spare mounts. An army of tens of thousands of soldiers meant hundreds of thousands of animals. The highlands of Azerbaijan and Iran could feed those herds. The parched summers of Syria could not. Hulagu's army had reached the limit of how far an empire of the steppe could be carried into a land that was not steppe.

Hulagu left a force behind in Syria and placed at its head one of his trusted commanders, Kitbuqa. The size of this force is disputed. Sources and historians give figures ranging from 10 thousand to 20 thousand. This was not an army of conquest but a garrison. Its task was to hold Syria and keep order until Hulagu returned.

Kitbuqa came from the Naiman tribe and was a Nestorian Christian. Nestorianism was widespread among the Mongol aristocracy. Hulagu's most influential wife, Doquz Khatun, was a Nestorian as well. This detail had stirred excitement among the Christian communities of Syria. Some saw the Mongols as deliverance from Muslim rule. Bohemond, Prince of Antioch, and Hetum, King of Cilician Armenia, had pledged their allegiance to the Mongols. According to some Christian sources, Bohemond and Hetum rode alongside the Mongol commanders as they entered Damascus. The scene was not well received in the West. The Pope excommunicated Bohemond for collaborating with the Mongols.

For those weighing the situation in Cairo, the picture had now changed. The great army that had taken Baghdad and burned Aleppo was gone. What stood before them was a force that was still dangerous, but one it was conceivable to defeat. They also knew this opportunity would not last forever. Hulagu could return, and the Mongol succession struggle might be settled within a few months.

Qutuz faced yet another problem. His army was divided. A few years earlier, in 1254, the sultan at the time, Aybak, had ordered the killing of Aqtay, leader of the elite Mamluk regiment known as the Bahriyya. Qutuz had been among those involved in that murder. The leading figures of the Bahriyya had fled Egypt and spent years wandering Syria much like mercenaries. The best known among them was Baybars.

Baybars, too, was a Kipchak. As a boy, after the Mongols swept across the Kipchak steppe, he had been taken captive and sold at the slave market in Sivas, in Anatolia. According to contemporary accounts, he had a blemish in one eye, and for that reason he sold for a low price. He was tall, dark-skinned, and had a booming voice. He eventually entered the service of as-Salih Ayyub, and in 1250 he was among the Mamluk cavalry who halted the Crusader army of King Louis of France at Mansurah.

The Mongol threat weighed on Baybars as well. He had watched the Ayyubid princes of Syria collapse one by one before the Mongols. In 1260, he sent word to Qutuz, asked for guarantees, and returned to Cairo. Qutuz accepted him and granted him land and rank. The two men did not trust each other, and in all likelihood both of them knew it. But a common enemy was enough to set an old blood feud aside, for a time.

When Qutuz gathered his emirs, he heard objections. Some wanted to stay in Egypt and fight a defensive war, meeting the Mongols in the desert. According to al-Maqrizi, Qutuz responded that he would compel no one to follow him, but that he himself was setting out. He added that those who stayed behind would answer for whatever befell the Muslim women and children. The emirs followed him.

At the end of July 1260, the Mamluk army set out north from Cairo. Ahead of it lay the Sinai desert, beyond that Gaza, and beyond Gaza a third power that no one had reckoned with: the Crusaders, clinging to their last few cities along the Mediterranean coast.

The vanguard under Baybars easily scattered the small Mongol force left at Gaza. Meanwhile, the main army had a critical decision to make. Kitbuqa's forces were deep inside Syria, near Baalbek. The Mamluks had two routes to reach him. One ran through the interior, along the Jordan Valley. The other followed the coast, passing through Crusader territory. The coastal route was faster and better for supply, but it meant a Muslim army marching through the heart of a Christian kingdom.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was a kingdom in name only. Jerusalem had not been in Christian hands since 1244. The kingdom's center was Acre, on the coast, and real power lay not with a king but was divided among barons, merchant republics and the military orders. Qutuz sent envoys to Acre. He wanted an alliance, or at the very least, free passage.

We know about the debate in Acre from the letters the Crusaders sent back to the West. On one side were those who sympathized with the Mongols. But that sympathy was melting away fast that summer. In August, Julian, the lord of Sidon, had led a raid into Mongol territory. In the fighting, a nephew of Kitbuqa was killed. Kitbuqa's response was harsh: Mongol troops descended on Sidon and sacked the city. The barons of Acre had learned the bitter lesson that the Mongols were not a Christian-friendly ally, but above all an empire that treated everyone who refused to submit in exactly the same way. It was also known that the Mongols demanded submission from the Crusaders as well, and that the letters they sent were full of threats.

On the other hand, they did not trust the Mamluks either. A Muslim army camped in arms before the city meant a sword held to Acre's own gates. In the end, a middle path was chosen. The Crusaders did not enter into a military alliance with the Mamluks, and they did not fight alongside them. But they allowed the army to pass through their territory and agreed to sell it provisions. Under those circumstances, neutrality was the greatest help the Mamluks could have been given.

The Mamluk army camped outside the walls of Acre for several days. According to some sources, a number of the Mamluk emirs entered the city and were received as guests. This became a detail the Crusaders would recall with some regret in the years that followed. The Crusaders who watched the size and discipline of that army from the gates of Acre did not know that within a few decades, the same army would wipe them out of the Eastern Mediterranean entirely.

Qutuz also used this halt to restore his army's morale. He gathered his emirs and reminded them of what the Mongols had done, and of what losing this war would mean. There was no road back to Egypt. Behind them lay the desert; ahead of them, the Mongols.

Kitbuqa, for his part, turned south when he learned that the Mamluks were advancing north. He crossed the Jordan River and entered the region of Galilee. For a Mongol commander, this was a logical move. For years, the Mongols had almost never lost against Muslim armies. Kitbuqa had no reason to wait for his enemy.

The two armies drew near each other south of Galilee, at the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley. Here, at the foot of Mount Gilboa, a spring flowed out of a rocky hillside. The Arabs called it Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath. According to local tradition, this was where David had defeated the giant Goliath with his sling. The tradition was probably not historical. The biblical story took place in a different valley. But for those who stood there that September morning, the meaning of the name was clear: the place where the small brings down the great.

On the 3rd of September 1260, the 25th day of Ramadan in the year 658 of the Islamic calendar, the battle began early in the morning. The Mamluk soldiers were fasting.

What the sources say about numbers is uncertain, but most historians believe the two armies were roughly equal in size, and that the Mamluks may even have been slightly more numerous. This was not a situation the Mongols were used to. Their great victories had usually been won not through superior numbers, but through mobility, discipline and deception. At Ain Jalut, however, the army facing them was made up of soldiers from the same steppe tradition as their own. The Mamluks, too, were mounted archers. They, too, had spent their childhoods in the saddle. And they, too, knew what deception was.

Qutuz hid his army among the hillsides and the folds of the valley. The first thing the Mongols saw was the vanguard under the command of Baybars. This force advanced, clashed with the Mongols, and then began to fall back. It was the oldest trick in steppe warfare: the feigned retreat. The Mongols themselves had used it for centuries. They would lure the enemy into pursuit, scatter him, and then lead him into an ambush.

This time, it was the Mongols who took the bait. Kitbuqa's cavalry set off after the retreating vanguard and were drawn toward the main body of the Mamluk army. But the battle did not unfold along the straight line of a plan. The Mongol charge struck the Mamluk left wing and broke clean through it. The wing began to scatter. For a moment, it looked as though Ain Jalut would end like every other Mongol battle.

Mamluk historians would tell of that moment for centuries. Qutuz tore off his helmet and flung it to the ground, so that his soldiers could see his face. Then he cried out three times, at the top of his voice, "Oh, my Islam!" and plunged into the heart of the fighting with his own guards. Part of this account may have been embellished later. But that the sultan put himself in danger and rallied the broken wing appears consistently in the accounts of contemporary witnesses.

There was one more factor that would decide the outcome of the battle. Among the Mongol ranks stood al-Ashraf Musa, the Ayyubid ruler of Homs, together with his soldiers. Al-Ashraf had submitted to the Mongols and joined the campaign on their behalf. But before the battle, he had come to a secret understanding with Qutuz. At the critical moment of the fighting, he withdrew his forces and left the field. A gap opened in the Mongol line.

Some Mamluk sources claim that in this battle the Mamluks used a kind of gunpowder hand weapon to frighten the horses. What these weapons were, and how effective they proved, remains a matter of debate. Perhaps they were nothing more than a few fire tubes; perhaps they were an exaggeration by historians of later centuries. What is certain is that they were not what won the battle. What won the battle was a cavalry army disciplined enough to withstand a sudden change of direction.

Once the Mamluks regrouped and launched their counterattack, the Mongol army began to come apart. Kitbuqa refused to retreat. In Mongol tradition, for a commander to abandon his khan and flee was a greater shame than death itself. He fought on alongside the units around him, until his horse was killed beneath him and he was taken prisoner.

Kitbuqa's final moments are described by the Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din. This is a Mongol source, and it portrays Kitbuqa as a hero, so it must be read with care. Yet the scene it describes reflects how these two worlds saw one another. Brought before Qutuz, Kitbuqa declares that he does not fear death. He adds that he himself is a servant who remained loyal to his master until the end of his life, whereas the men standing before him had risen to the throne by murdering their own masters. Then he is beheaded.

These words sound like a prophecy, but they were not one. They were a bitter observation on the very nature of the Mamluk state. And just how right that observation was would become clear in a very short time.

The fleeing Mongol units withdrew eastward, toward Beisan. There they tried to regroup once more. But the second clash also ended in a Mamluk victory, and the Mongol forces pulled back beyond the Euphrates. Within a few days, Damascus was freed of its Mongol garrison. Aleppo followed soon after. Syria had changed hands in less than a week.

It is often said that Ain Jalut was the Mongols' first defeat, but that is not true. The Mongols had been beaten before. Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah, whom Qutuz claimed as his uncle, had routed a Mongol army at Parwan, in Afghanistan, in 1221. The Volga Bulgars, too, had ambushed a Mongol force in the 1220s. But those defeats had no lasting consequences. Each time, the Mongols had come back and taken their revenge. What set Ain Jalut apart was what came afterward.

Qutuz entered Damascus as a liberator. He appointed governors to the cities of Syria, brought the Ayyubid princes who had submitted to the Mongols back under his authority, and distributed the spoils. Al-Ashraf Musa, who had gone over to Qutuz during the battle, was left in place at Homs. News of the victory was sent to Cairo, and the city began to decorate itself for the sultan's return.

Meanwhile, far away in Azerbaijan, the news reached Hulagu. Hulagu's fury fell upon a prisoner in his hands: an-Nasir Yusuf, the fugitive ruler of Syria. After fleeing Damascus, an-Nasir had fallen into Mongol hands and been brought before Hulagu. For a time, Hulagu may have considered using him to govern Syria. The news from Ain Jalut put an end to that idea. An-Nasir Yusuf was executed. And so the last great Syrian ruler of the Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin paid the price for the victory of the Mamluks, who had done what he himself could not.

The tension between Qutuz and Baybars resurfaced immediately after the victory. According to most sources, Baybars asked for the governorship of Aleppo as a reward for his role in the battle. Qutuz refused. Perhaps he thought it would be dangerous to leave so powerful an emir as Baybars in northern Syria, far from Egypt, with soldiers of his own. Or perhaps there was a score between the two men that had never truly been settled since the killing of Aqtay. Whatever the reason behind Qutuz's refusal, its consequences were grave.

In October, Qutuz set out with his army to return to Egypt. As they neared the edge of the Sinai desert, on Egypt's eastern frontier, the sultan organized a hunt. This was something Mamluk rulers often did: both a pastime and a way of spending time among their soldiers.

The details of what happened vary somewhat from source to source, but the broad outline is the same. During the hunt, Baybars and a group of emirs with him approached the sultan. Baybars asked Qutuz for a favor. According to some accounts, he asked for a woman from among the Mongol captives. Qutuz agreed. Baybars bent down to kiss the sultan's hand, and gripped it tightly. This was the signal the other emirs had been waiting for. Swords and daggers were drawn. Qutuz was killed in the saddle.

The date was the 24th of October 1260. A little more than seven weeks had passed since Ain Jalut.

When the conspirators returned to the sultan's tent, it was said that by Mamluk custom the man who killed the sultan should take his place. Baybars took the throne. He gave himself the title al-Malik al-Zahir, "the victorious king." When he entered Cairo, the decorations hung to welcome Qutuz were still up in the city's streets. The people did not cheer the sultan who had won the battle. They cheered the man who had killed him.

The death of Qutuz held the whole contradiction of the Mamluk state. These soldiers had been bought as slaves and raised with no family ties, loyal only to their masters and to one another. That made them superb soldiers. It also created a system in which power was not inherited but won by the sword. The words Kitbuqa spoke before he died came true at the end of Qutuz's own story.

In the years after Ain Jalut, the Mongols came into Syria several more times. In 1281, at the Second Battle of Homs, and in 1303, at Marj al-Saffar near Damascus, they met the Mamluk armies, and each time they were driven back. Only once, in 1299, did they defeat the Mamluks and take Damascus for a short time, but they could not hold it. The next summer they withdrew. The Euphrates River became, roughly speaking, the border between two worlds for more than half a century.

Why that border held is a question historians still argue about today. One school sees Ain Jalut as the moment the Mongols first faced an army that fought with their own weapons and their own tactics. The Mamluks had come from the steppe, and they knew steppe warfare as well as the Mongols did. Other historians say this is only half the story. The real issue was the one we saw earlier: pasture. Syria could not feed the horses of a large Mongol army. Whenever the Mongols came to the region, they had to bring either a small army or a large one for only a short time. The Mamluk army they faced at Ain Jalut was not only skilled. It was also fighting at home.

Then there was the division among the Mongols themselves. The succession struggle that began with Möngke's death ended the last period in which the empire answered to a single khan. Kublai won in the end, but by then the empire had in practice split into separate, independent khanates. One was the Ilkhanate, centered on Iran and founded by Hulagu. Another was the Golden Horde, which ruled the Kipchak steppe. And Berke, khan of the Golden Horde, had become a Muslim.

Berke never forgave Hulagu for destroying Baghdad and killing the caliph. The two khanates were also in dispute over pastures in the Caucasus. In 1262, open war broke out between them. For the first time, Mongols were fighting Mongols. Baybars saw the opportunity at once and made an alliance with Berke. Envoys traveled back and forth between Cairo and the Golden Horde. The alliance also had a practical side. Most of the slave soldiers who filled the Mamluk army came from the lands of the Golden Horde, from the Kipchak steppe. This trade in people, stretching from the steppe to Egypt, was now part of a formal diplomatic relationship.

Baybars found one more way to give legitimacy to the throne he had won by killing Qutuz. In 1261, in Cairo, he proclaimed as caliph a member of the Abbasid dynasty who had fled Baghdad. This caliph had no political power. But he gave the Mamluk sultans a powerful symbol for their claim to be the protectors of the Islamic world. The caliphate, snuffed out when Baghdad fell, began to live again in Cairo as a shadow, and that shadow would last for about 250 years.

Perhaps the longest-lasting result of Ain Jalut was how long the thing that began there endured. The Mamluk state had been founded in 1250 and had proven itself in 1260. It survived until 1517, when the Ottoman sultan Selim the First took Cairo. For those 267 years, Egypt remained a country the Mongol invasions never reached. While the libraries of Baghdad, Merv and Nishapur burned, Cairo's libraries grew. With its madrasas, its mosques and its manuscripts, Mamluk Cairo became one of the greatest centers of learning and culture in the Islamic world. Historians like al-Maqrizi, whose record of Hulagu's letter we began with, could describe the period in such detail because of this unbroken continuity.

In the end, the Mongols changed too. In 1295, the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan became a Muslim. Hulagu's descendants had become rulers of the faith whose center he had destroyed. The war with the Mamluks went on for a while longer. But now it was a border war between two Muslim states, not a civilization's struggle to survive. In 1323, the two sides signed a peace. It was 63 years after Ain Jalut.

The story of Ain Jalut gathered together all the irony of a century. The Mongols had destroyed the Kipchak steppe, and the children they drove out of it became the army in Cairo that would stop them. The name of a small spring with no place in history, carrying the distant echo of a legend, became the name of a victory. And the sultan who won that victory did not live long enough to celebrate it.

Qutuz's tomb was dug beside a road on the edge of Egypt, close to the place where he was killed. Later generations remembered him as the hero of Ain Jalut. Baybars ruled for 17 years. He took the Crusader castles one by one, fought the Mongols, and went down in history as perhaps the greatest of all the Mamluk sultans. The victory won at the Spring of Goliath belonged to both men. But once again, the point of a sword decided who would tell the story.

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