Baybars: The Slave Who Became Sultan and Stopped the Mongols

In 1260 the Mongols had not lost a battle that anyone could remember. They had swept across Persia, and two years earlier they had taken Baghdad, ended the Abbasid caliphate and killed the caliph, by tradition rolled in a carpet and trampled so that no royal blood would touch the ground. They looked unstoppable. Then they met the army of Egypt, led in large part by men who had themselves been bought and sold as slaves, and for the first time the Mongol advance was broken.

The slave soldiers

The Mamluks were the institution that made it possible. They were military slaves, mostly Turkic boys from the steppe north of the Black Sea, bought young, converted to Islam, and trained as elite cavalry with a discipline and loyalty that free troops rarely matched. In Egypt this slave soldiery had done the unusual thing of seizing power for itself, overthrowing the last of Saladin's Ayyubid line and ruling in its own name. Baybars was one of these men, a Kipchak Turk captured and sold as a youth, said to have been passed over once by a buyer because of a flaw in one of his eyes.

Ain Jalut

When the Mongol demand for surrender reached Cairo, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz had the envoys killed and marched north to meet the threat in open country. The armies met at Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, in the Jezreel valley of Palestine, in September 1260. Baybars commanded the vanguard and is credited with the tactics that won the day, using a feigned retreat to draw the Mongol force into ground where the main Mamluk army was waiting. The Mongols were beaten and their commander killed. The myth of their invincibility died on that field, and the limit of their westward expansion was effectively set there.

From the vanguard to the throne

Baybars did not wait long to collect his reward. On the march back he took part in the assassination of Qutuz and had himself made sultan. As ruler he was relentless and effective. He rebuilt the Egyptian military, fought the Mongols again and again, ground down the remaining Crusader strongholds along the coast, installed a surviving member of the Abbasid family in Cairo as a figurehead caliph to lend his rule legitimacy, and built an administration that would let the Mamluk state dominate the eastern Mediterranean for more than two centuries. He died in 1277, reportedly from poison meant for someone else. Few rulers have travelled the full distance from the slave market to the throne, and fewer still have used the throne so capably once they reached it.

The Baybars print belongs to the Riwayah Empires collection. You can see it here.

The Mamluks were one link in a long chain of Muslim states. For the wider sweep, see the great Islamic empires.