Above and beyond any reliance on castles, however, Sultan Baybars regarded the army as the bedrock of the Mamluk state. Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.
Baybars ploughed massive financial reserves into building, training and refining the Mamluk army. In total, the number of mamluks was increased fourfold, to around 40,000 mounted troops. The core of this force was the 4,000-strong royal mamluk regiment–Baybars’ new elite, schooled and honed in a special practice facility within the citadel of Cairo. Here recruits were taught the arts of swordsmanship–learning to deliver precise strikes by repeating the same cut up to 1,000 times a day–and horse archery with powerful composite recurve bows. The sultan emphasised rigid discipline and rigorous military drilling across every section of the Mamluk host. In the course of his reign, two massive hippodromes were constructed in Cairo–training arenas where the essential skills of horsemanship and combat could be perfected. Whenever in the capital, Baybars himself came daily to practise the warrior craft, setting a standard of professionalism and dedication. His mamluks were encouraged to experiment with new weapons and techniques, some archers even attempting to use arrows doused in Greek fire from horseback.10
Once of adult age, mamluks were paid, but also were expected to maintain their own horses, armour and weaponry. To ensure his forces were outfitted properly, Baybars instituted troop reviews, in which the entire army, in full martial regalia, would parade past the sultan in a single day (in part to ensure that equipment was not being shared). Failure to attend these displays was punishable by death. Fear was also used to maintain order while on campaign. The drinking of wine was banned on many expeditions, and any soldier caught contravening this injunction was summarily hanged.
To reinforce the human component of the Mamluk armed forces, Baybars invested in some forms of heavier armament. Close attention was paid to the development of siege weaponry, including sophisticated counter-weight catapults, or trebuchets. These engines became the mainstay of Mamluk siegecraft. Capable of being dismantled, borne to a target and then readily reconstructed, the largest could propel stones weighing in excess of 500 pounds. In addition to raw military power, Baybars also placed great value upon accurate and up-to-date intelligence. He therefore maintained an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near East and received reports from agents embedded in Mongol and Frankish societies. The sultan also showed generous patronage to the nomadic Bedouin Arabs of the Levant, and thereby won their valuable support, both in military conflicts and in the gathering of information.
Through these diverse methods, Baybars constructed the most formidable Muslim army of the crusading era; a force more numerous, disciplined and ferocious than any yet encountered in the war for the Holy Land–the perfect military machine of its day.11 Having carefully legitimised and consolidated his hold on power, the sultan turned in 1265, with a united Islamic Near East behind him, to wield this deadly weapon in the name of jihad.
THE WAR AGAINST THE FRANKS
Unlike his Ayyubid predecessors, Sultan Baybars showed little or no interest in reaching an accommodation with Outremer. Rather than appease the Franks to preserve commercial links and stave off a western European crusade, he sought simply and completely to eradicate the Latin presence in the Levant. Baybars calculated that, by this means, the flow of trade might be forced back through Mamluk Egypt and that, with no bridgehead in the Holy Land, any attempts by the West to mount an invasion would surely fail. The sultan was always conscious of the need to maintain a watchful eye on the Mongol threat, but this did not prevent him from initiating a series of merciless strikes against the crusader states.
While the work of preparation proceeded apace in the Mamluk world through the early 1260s, Baybars carried out a number of incidental exploratory raids into Frankish Palestine, the only notable product of which was the destruction of the church in Nazareth. To preclude any premature outbreak of full-scale hostilities, the sultan agreed to some limited truces with various factions within the Latin kingdom–a realm that was now in an appallingly disunited and feeble state. The most useful pact was that forged with John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa, one of the last great barons of Outremer. In 1261, Baybars accepted John’s entreaties for peace, and in return used the port at Jaffa to transport grain supplies from Egypt to Mamluk territories in Palestine. By 1265, however, with the Mongol siege of al-Bira having faltered, Baybars’ offensive against the Franks began in earnest.
A path of destruction
For the next three years, Sultan Baybars prosecuted a brutal campaign of conquest and devastation, waging war on a scale not witnessed since the days of Hattin in 1187. To provide a formal justification for his attack, the sultan accused the Franks of encouraging the recent Mongol invasion of Mamluk territory to the north. Then, in early 1265, he initiated his own assault. In the past, Baybars’ first objective might have been to confront the Frankish field army, but now only a tattered remnant of this force remained. The sultan thus was free to begin the task of eliminating Latin settlements relatively unhindered.
In February the Mamluk host made camp in the woods near the fortified coastal town of Arsuf. Baybars had a massive tent erected next to the royal pavilion, within which five trebuchets were reassembled in secret. With the siege train prepared, the army marched on the Latin port of Caesarea on 27 February. Appearing suddenly and unheralded, the Muslims quickly secured control of the lower town, while the Christian populace retreated into the citadel–one of those recently refortified with the aid of King Louis IX. The sultan deployed his trebuchets, commencing heavy bombardment with stones and Greek fire, while a siege tower was raised, upon which he himself fought. By 5 March, the battered defenders had taken flight in a number of ships sent from Acre, abandoning Caesarea, and Baybars ordered the town and citadel to be razed to the ground.
Again, without announcing his target, the sultan moved south on 19 March and laid siege to Arsuf, which by this date was encircled by a major moat and possessed a sturdy keep. At first, Mamluk units under the direction of Qalawun tried to create a path to Arsuf’s walls by filling sections of its moat with vast quantities of wood (felled from local forests), but the defenders managed to burn these piles of timber during the night. After this initial setback, Baybars subjected the town to an incessant aerial barrage, and the garrison eventually capitulated on 30 April 1265 and was taken captive. In the face of this terrifying offensive, the hopelessly outnumbered Franks based in Acre were all but impotent. Even when the nominal ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Hugh of Lusignan, arrived from Cyprus on 23 April with a small party of reinforcements, no move was made to counter the Mamluk invasion. In early May Baybars instructed his troops to demolish Arsuf, and, in triumph, led his Christian prisoners back to Egypt, forcing them to enter Cairo with broken crosses hung around their necks. That summer, the sultan wrote to inform Manfred of Sicily of these successes. In a stark demonstration of the casual disregard for Outremer’s future now prevalent in some western circles, Manfred responded by sending congratulatory gifts to Egypt. Others, including the papacy, began to consider action upon hearing of the Mamluk aggression.
In this first wave of attack, Baybars struck with speed and efficiency. His methods and achievements revealed the Mamluks’ grasp of siegecraft and their overwhelming numerical and technological supremacy. The sultan had also indicated an ability to employ stealth so as to prevent his Latin quarry from preparing for an attack. In future campaigns Baybars took extreme st
eps to maintain this element of surprise. Always suspicious of enemy spies and scouts, he used messengers to deliver sealed orders to his generals, containing details of the next target that were only to be read once on the march. Most crucially of all, the sultan had shown that, in the case of Caesarea and Arsuf, his intention was destruction, not occupation. All along the Mediterranean coast his policy would be to wipe the Latin ports from the face of the Holy Land, closing, one by one, the doorways that linked Outremer with the West.
Breaking the Franks
Baybars renewed his attacks in spring 1266. One army of around 15,000 troops was sent north under Qalawun to ravage the county of Tripoli, where it swept up a number of minor fortresses, all of which were razed. Later that summer, a second Mamluk force was dispatched, this time to punish the Armenian Christians of Cilicia for their alliance with the Mongols. The Muslim host invaded in August 1266 and proceeded to lay waste to a succession of Armenian settlements. This unrelenting campaign left Hethum’s Cilician kingdom in a severely weakened state.
Meanwhile, the sultan led the bulk of his forces on a series of scouring raids up the coast, enacting a devastating scorched-earth strategy around the likes of Acre, Tyre and Sidon. The Mamluk host then turned inland to attack the major Templar fortress of Safad in Galilee, the last Latin bulwark in the Palestinian interior. According to Baybars’ chancellor, this castle was targeted because ‘it was a lump in Syria’s throat, and an obstacle to breathing in Islam’s chest’. The siege began on 13 June 1266 with a mixture of bombardment and sapping, and though the Templars put up strong resistance, they were eventually forced to sue for terms on 23 July. Conditions of surrender were agreed that supposedly allowed the Franks safe conduct to the coast, but these were never realised. Whether through blunt deceit or, as most Muslim sources suggest, because the Templars were found still to be armed as they marched from Safad, Baybars ordered the garrison’s execution. Some 1,500 Christians were duly led to a nearby hill–the site upon which the Templars traditionally themselves had executed Muslim captives–and the entire party was beheaded. One sole surviving Frank was spared and sent to Acre to relate the news of these events, and thus inspire fear.12
In the aftermath of this massacre, Baybars refortified Safad with great care and at considerable expense, and garrisoned the fortress with Muslim troops. In addition to the strengthening of battlements, two mosques were also built within its confines. This established the second arm of the sultan’s strategy: the retention of major inland strongholds to act as centres of Mamluk administration and military domination. In the months that followed, he overran a series of other castles and settlements in Palestine, including Ramla. By the end of the summer, Galilee and the Palestinian interior were under Mamluk control.
Having suffered two years of unmitigated defeat, the Latins of Outremer were left in total disarray, unsure of how to react to this seemingly unstoppable enemy. In October 1266 Hugh of Lusignan bravely tried to lead a raiding party of about 1,200 men into Galilee, but around half of this force was butchered by the Muslim force now stationed at Safad. From this point onwards the Franks began clamouring to secure terms of peace with the Mamluks, no matter how punitive. In some cases, Baybars was happy to neutralise and isolate potential opponents while the work of conquest and destruction progressed elsewhere. In 1267, for example, the master of the Hospitallers agreed a humiliating ten-year treaty covering the castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Marqab, agreeing to forsake the tribute monies traditionally extracted from local Muslims and acknowledging Baybars’ right to annul the treaty whenever he wished. However, when the Franks of Acre desperately tried to negotiate a truce in March that same year, Baybars flatly refused and, in May, made another destructive incursion into the city’s environs, terrorising the population and burning the harvest. According to one Latin chronicler, the Mamluks ‘killed more than 500 of the common people’ taken prisoner in the fields, and then ‘sliced all the hair off their heads, to below their ears’. These scalps were then supposedly hung from a ‘cord around the great tower at Safad’. This story is not confirmed in any Muslim source, but it indicates clearly the level of horror either experienced or imagined by the Christians during Baybars’ dreadful assaults.13
The fate of Antioch
Baybars’ assiduous preparations in the early 1260s had borne considerable fruit. The outposts of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem were being picked off virtually at will and the power of Cilician Armenia had been all but broken. Even so, the Mamluks had yet to conquer one of Outremer’s great cities–to crush a crusader state and drive home the message that the days of Latin dominion in the Levant were ending. In 1268, with the Ilkhanid Mongols still showing no sign of launching a new invasion, the sultan decided that the time for such a statement was ripe. As his target, he chose the territory of Bohemond VI, lord of Tripoli and Antioch–the Frankish prince who had collaborated with the Mongols in 1260.
With his sights firmly set on the north, Baybars marched out of Egypt that spring. He briefly paused at Jaffa. The truce agreed with John of Ibelin had elapsed (and John himself had died in 1266) and the sultan brusquely refused to renew terms of peace. The port promptly fell to his attack in half a day, and was demolished. After this short interruption, Baybars led his armies into the county of Tripoli, marching up the coast in early May, leaving a trail of desolation behind them. Contemporary Muslim testimony described how ‘the churches [were] razed from the face of the earth…the dead were piled up on the shore like islands of corpses’.
Bohemond VI was ensconced in Tripoli, readying himself to resist a siege, but the Mamluks bypassed the city. Baybars’ target was Antioch. Advancing north via Apamea, he arrived outside the ancient city on 15 May 1268. Antioch’s power as a crusader state had long since waned, but its great walls still stood, holding a population numbered in the tens of thousands. The sultan appears at first to have encouraged the Antiochenes to negotiate terms of capitulation, but they brazenly refused, choosing to rely upon the same walls that had held back the First Crusaders for eight months and had later repelled numerous Muslim warlords, from Il-ghazi to Saladin. This was to prove a foolish and fatal error. The Mamluk host surrounded the city on 18 May and, within a day, Baybars’ troops broke in near the citadel on Mount Silpius. A bloody and savage massacre followed, echoing that enacted by the Franks at the moment of their own conquest, almost exactly 170 years earlier. In retribution for their stubborn refusal to submit, the sultan locked the city gates so that none could escape.
Glorying in the triumphant horror of this moment, Baybars wrote to Bohemond VI to describe Antioch’s sack. In mocking terms he congratulated the Frankish ruler for not having been in the city, ‘for otherwise you would be dead or a prisoner’, and described how, if present, ‘you would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves…flames running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world, before going down to the fires of the next’. The city’s fall brought the Mamluks a huge amount of plunder–it was said to have taken two days simply to divide the loot–but, once they had picked it clean, Baybars’ men left Antioch in a state of utter ruination; one from which it would not recover for centuries. The few remaining Templar outposts to the north were immediately abandoned, while the Antiochene patriarch was permitted to linger in his castle at Cursat (just to the south) for a few more years, but only as a Mamluk subject. The principality of Antioch–once Outremer’s great northern bastion–had been overwhelmed, reduced to a tiny, isolated enclave at the port of Latakia. Only the imperilled husks of two crusader states now remained: the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem.14
In three years of hardened campaigning, Sultan Baybars had demonstrated the unrivalled strength of the Mamluk military machine, laid bare his own hunger for conquest and for the prosecution of jihad, and exposed the wretched weakness of the Franks. In 1269 he allowed his victorious armies to pause for breath, and, that same summer, permitted himself the luxury of performing the Hajj, although even th
en he travelled in secret so as not to leave the sultanate unduly vulnerable to any threat, external or internal. With this affirmation of his Islamic faith completed, Baybars returned to Syria and began touring his dominions through the autumn. At this moment, he seems to have been absolutely confident of his ability finally to eliminate the last vestiges of Latin settlement and to resist any renewed threat of Mongol invasion.
But by then, tidings of Outremer’s devastation and the emergence of the terrible Mamluk scourge of the Levant had reached the West. Old champions and new were taking up the cross, eyes set to the East, for one last chance to reclaim the Holy Land.
23
THE HOLY LAND RECLAIMED
By the end of the 1260s, little remained of the once mighty crusader settlements of Outremer. The Franks were confined now to a coastal strip running north from the Templars’ Pilgrims’ Castle (south of Haifa), through the likes of Acre, Tyre, Tripoli and Marqab, to the outpost at Latakia. Only a handful of inland castles still stood, including the headquarters of the Teutonic Order at Montfort and the redoubtable Hospitaller fortress, Krak des Chevaliers. Internal rivalry among the Latins was rife, with various claimants contesting the Jerusalemite throne, the Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa fighting over trading rights and even the Military Orders embroiled in petty politics. Centralised authority had devolved to such an extent that each Frankish city functioned as an independent polity. The shock of Antioch’s conquest in 1268 did nothing to arrest this spiralling descent into disunity and decay.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 65