God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Damietta was surrendered, Alphonse of Poitiers was kept as hostage, much money handed over and an agreement made for the balance to be paid. Margaret and Louis sailed to Acre where Louis, in hopes of recovering some advantage from Muslim disunities and in the determination to wait until his imprisoned followers could be ransomed, stayed on, acting as the effectual king of Jerusalem and refortifying Acre, Jaffa, Caesarea and Sidon. The scriptorium at Acre produced one of its finest works, the Arsenal Bible, as a compliment to Louis’s faithful queen, giving emphasis in illustration to the decisive female figures in Scripture, such as Esther and Sisera.

  The Flemish friar William of Rubruck reported to Louis during this stay in the Holy Land on the council of religious representatives he had attended at Karakorum, in the presence of the Great Khan. Louis had long been disillusioned about any prospects of enlisting Mongols as allies after an earlier emissary of his, taking with him a tent with Christian symbols as a present for the Khan, had received a dusty answer. William’s report, however, added to the West’s knowledge, providing accurate information on Mongol practices and attitudes and making the first mention of Buddhists, hitherto wholly unknown in the West.

  Despite Conrad being the titular but absolute king of Jerusalem since the death of his father, the emperor, in 1250, barons welcomed Louis as the de facto king. Louis had no thought of formally taking the role. Disregarding Innocent IV’s dramatic decree of deposing Frederick II, he had always treated Frederick as emperor and so accepted Conrad as his lawful successor.

  Even though his army was now small, Louis hoped to wring concessions from the Ayyubids, profiting from their dissensions and the threat of allying his army to one faction or another. That failed as the contestants perceived the danger to Islam. He stayed on, in fear that without him the remnant kingdom could easily founder and when he sailed for home in April 1254, left behind a small salaried contingent of a hundred warriors under Geoffrey de Sergines, commander of his bodyguard, who served in Outremer until his death in 1269. Despite disasters, Louis’s unswerving devotion to his ideal won hearts and the spontaneous popular movement of Pastoureaux, shepherds, agitated for him while he remained in the East.

  Pilgrims now had to make the best of Muslim domination of the city. The resolute could make their way to Jerusalem, but the occupiers made them enter furtively by a side-gate and pay a heavy fee. Less venturesome travellers were catered for with sanctuaries and reliquaries in the forty churches of Acre. The barons and the Italian cities remained anarchic. In 1257–8 rival sides fought each other on land in the streets of Acre and on sea as the Venetians reacted violently to an action of the Genoese, suddenly seizing a strategic point, the hill overlooking Acre on which stood the monastery of Saint-Sabas, and all the quarrelling factions piled in. The Hospitallers began sending crucial documents to Cyprus for safety, and individual settlers attempted to make deals with the Mamluks.

  Louis’s Last Crusade and its Sequel

  In 1267 King Louis once again took the cross. Joinville refused to support him, saying he was too frail and that the kingdom needed him. Fleet and troops assembled and were directed in 1270 not to Egypt or to Jerusalem but to Tunis, where the presence of Dominican friars, who kept a language school and were allowed to ring their bells and minister to Christians, led the king to believe that the emir of Tunis was ready to convert to Christianity. He was responding to a vision which recurred in the strategic crusades of the thirteenth century, that somehow an additional force, a counterweight, could be called into being to bring Jerusalem back to Christian hands. It was a false hope. The emir turned on the Dominicans, and Louis died of dysentery in the camp before the gates of Tunis with ‘Jerusalem’ the last word on his lips. The fleet dissolved. Some ships attempting to go on to the Holy Land were lost in a storm; others went back to Europe; arriving late, the Lord Edward, Henry III’s son and heir, who had beaten rebellious barons in England, went on with his galleys to the Holy Land. He was a true crusader, unwilling to let tensions with France spoil co-operation with Louis. Charles of Anjou, Louis’s brother, arrived to make peace and succeeded in extracting tribute for himself in Sicily from the emir.

  There followed the pontificate of Teodaldo Visconti, elected when he was still in the Holy Land, who reigned as Gregory X from 1271 to 1276 and was the last pope to be devoted, above all, to crusade for Jerusalem. He summoned the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and called for judgements on the reform of the Church, reunion with Byzantium and the way, militarily, to pursue the crusade – themes which in his mind all interlocked.

  A treatise submitted to the pope by Humbert of the Romans, formerly master-general of the Dominicans, was designed to defend the use of force to recover Jerusalem and in scholastic fashion surveyed all the criticisms known to its author before dismissing them, a proceeding too often misunderstood as implying that during the thirteenth century rejections of crusading had grown in number and vehemence. This is not so, but at one point one may suspect a new factor, brought into play by Louis’s sanctity and his failures. If he, with his heroic virtues, could not win through, might it be that the recovery of Jerusalem was not the will of God? Significantly, no submission to the Lyon Council spoke for crusade to Egypt. Instead, there were interesting developments in ideas about professional, even mercenary, small-scale crusading, involving regular reinforcement of the Holy Land garrison, to provide freshness in warriors to confront the Muslim enemy, and the launching of a passagium particulare, again small-scale and highly professional with no stray accompaniments, to back the garrison and begin to turn round the military situation. Trade boycott was advocated, followed by a passagium generale, a general crusade to exploit damage done to Muslims and bring about a reoccupation.

  Crusading had not died, but it was beginning to run in different channels. The pope hoped to discuss projects face to face with kings. It was not to be. Gregory was still working towards a new crusade when he died in 1276. No one of his calibre and determination succeeded him, and no general crusade was ever again launched to recover the Holy City.

  Crowned heads could still achieve victories against Muslims and the thirteenth century saw decisive advances by St Ferdinand III of Castile (1230–1252), with the expulsion of the Moors, territory gained and cities taken. Mudéjars were made second-class citizens. James I of Aragon (1213–1276) took the Balearics from the Moors.

  When Acre at last fell in 1291, it was still not clear that a rescue of the Holy Land was impossible and there were still attempts made, with varying degrees of credibility, to recover it. But to the perceptive it became clear that a shift was taking place, away from Jerusalem and towards crusading inside Europe.

  9

  THE VICTORY OF

  THE MAMLUKS

  Baybars, a Kipchak Turk from the South Russian steppes, a victim with his family of the irruption of the Mongols into their lands and forced into slavery, was a short, swarthy, barrel-chested man of powerful physique and extraordinary energy – the greatest of the Mamluks and the destroyer of the crusaders’ residual hopes for the Holy Land. A boy slave in the second half of the thirteenth century, he was accursed of God in the eyes of contemporaries because of the white spot in his eye. His first purchaser returned him to the auctioneer because of the flaw; the mother of the second, seeing the eye, said, ‘Have nothing to do with that swarthy fellow, he has an evil eye’ and persuaded her son to give him up. He was then chosen as a bargain by an emir who subsequently got into economic difficulties and finally he passed from the emir into the hands of al-Salih Ayyub, the dissident son of al-Kamil who had achieved some success in the fighting and manoeuvring of the Ayyubid heirs after the death of al-Kamil and had captured Cairo. Al-Salih was distinguished for his habit of collecting Mamluks whom he trained to a high calibre of fighting and kept as an elite force for his disposal on an island in the Nile, Bahr al-Nil: hence their name, bahriyya. Al-Salih’s decision to take him launched Baybars on his career.

  Slave soldiers were not new in Islamic histor
y, for the development of their selection and training went back to the caliph al-Mutasim in the ninth century: wearied at the cost and volatility of Arab troops, he had spotted the opportunity in Islamic law to recruit pagan boys as slaves to be trained as soldiers and form a praetorian guard. Boys they had to be. Puberty was the best time to recruit, when muscles were still forming and minds could be shaped. No Muslim could be enslaved but a pagan or Christian could, and nomad peoples on the fringes of Islamic lands were easy prey for slave dealers. Nomads were cheap to acquire: dealers could act as substitute parents. Al-Mutasim was one of the great Muslim generals but had reigned for only eight years, before dying in 842; however, the concept of the slave soldier that he developed was a vital one for the future.

  Al-Salih’s army depended on the superb horsemanship of his troops, bred in the steppe. Once recruited, a boy would be given years of exacting military training, building on horsemanship to achieve a mastery of the bow, lance and sword, accompanied by induction into Islamic beliefs. They were wholly in the hands of their masters and had only one loyalty and one interest.

  The master guides for the techniques of the cavalryman and the care of horses, the furusiyya, gave detailed information on the making of skilled professional fighters out of raw recruits. The master would take the novice right back to the first principles of riding and the manipulation of weapons, including both balance and manoeuvrability. Central to the equipment of the Mamluk was the bow – but not a bow of the type usual among invading crusaders. It had an ancient origin on the steppes and was adjusted to dry climates, not to the humidity of the West, since it was composed of horn and sinew brought together on a wooden frame. This powerful weapon needed more pull than the classic Western longbow but had much more penetration. Extensive training was needed to master the pull, using the thumb, protected by rings, to draw the bow right back to the ear. The whole manoeuvre was carried out on horseback, the knees controlling the horse and the archer adapting to the rise and fall of his mount. Only a supreme mastery of riding would make possible the classic achievement of the horse-archer, in which the retreating horseman could swing his body round to fire at his opponent without halting.

  The Mamluk expected to take with him on his mount a substantial collection of weapons: generally a second bow for security, a quiver with arrows varied for different purposes, and a lance plus a sword, dagger and mace for close-quarter fighting. To aid this carriage of weapons there was a tendency to breed heavier horses than the steppe ponies, fodder-fed rather than reliant on casual grazing on the thin Middle Eastern grass. Exercises built up specialist skills: endless slicing at lumps of clay on horseback to produce exceptional arm muscles, or shooting at a gourd mounted on a pole. The skilled use of the short sword was developed by exercises using the right side and arm while the left held the reins.

  Islamic instruction, no doubt emphasising the remarkable conquests of the early caliphate, led the recruit to feel he was being taken out of the darkness of heathenism into a new light of true and conquering belief. Jihad fitted admirably into the Mamluk ideology: Mamluks were shock troops for the holy war. Recruitment from Turkish speakers and the pre-dominance of one ethnic group, the Kipchak Turks, from which Baybars derived, gave an additional coherence and unity to al-Salih’s quality Mamluks. Turkish was the language of command and conversation and this tended to cut soldiers off from Arabic-speakers. Eunuchs were commonly given command positions in order to obviate the dangers of pederasty; there were heavy penalties for sodomy.

  Within this competitive military society, as developed by al-Salih Ayyub, Baybars flourished. The bahriyya survived the death of al-Salih and played a crucial part in the failure of Louis’s crusade to Egypt. Joinville ruefully records how Mamluks harassed him and his colleagues with the skilled use of tubes to loose off fire darts. Baybars was a junior emir in the subsequent episode in which the king’s brother Robert of Artois charged into the streets of Mansura, opening the French army to the skill of the bahriyya in fighting at close quarters. Success against the crusade won fame, but it did not lead to a Mamluk supremacy. Instead, for years they were troubled by squabbling, assassinations and political manoeuvring while the Mongol menace, unchecked, threatened both the Christian Eastern world and the great area of the conquests of the early caliphs. In 1241 Mongols won battles in eastern Europe against Teutonic Knights and Poles at Liegnitz and against a Hungarian army at the River Sajo, spreading great fear across Europe. Meanwhile, al-Salih Ayyub had insisted on leading the fight against St Louis, even being carried towards the battle on a litter while a dying man. He succumbed to his illness while his son and successor, Turanshah, was still far away in northern territory; installed in power, his son showed himself sluggish and dissolute; moreover, he set about replacing members of the bahriyya by his own men. Baybars, bursting into the tent where Turanshah was dining with his emirs, attempted to assassinate him; bleeding, Turanshah escaped, only to drown in the Nile. It was a controversial action, resented by other Mamluks; some of the bahriyya even attempted to murder Baybars himself.

  There followed an eccentric episode in which Shajarat al-Durr, al-Salih’s widow, was elected queen of the Muslims but then was forced to abdicate in favour of a leading emir, Aybeg. In 1254 Aybeg made use of the emir Qutuz as his agent to kill off Aktay, the leading figure in the faction which included Baybars, who never forgave the killing and withdrew with 700 of the bahriyya to Syria and Anatolia. There they engaged in casual violence before finally trying to storm Cairo and seize power, only to be beaten off by Qutuz, who killed any leaders he could capture.

  Over a decade the Mamluks so forcefully collected and trained by al-Salih Ayyub had shown both their outstanding military skills and their inability to exercise power. Baybars had backed the wrong side and remained an outsider. This began to change only when the fear of the Islamic world before the menace of the Mongols pulled him out of the shadows.

  The Battle of Ain Jalud and the Defeat of the Mongols

  Genghiz Khan, the great destroyer, had died in 1227, but the threat of the Mongols to both the West and Islam had not abated. After Liegnitz, victories continued. The Assassins, the supposedly impregnable dissidents of the Islamic world, had been eliminated and the Abbasid caliphate ended. Cracks within the Mongol empire began to appear when rivals manoeuvred for the great inheritance of Genghiz Khan, but not swiftly enough to undermine the terrifying power of the Mongol cavalry, their mounted archers and their reputation for utter destruction of those who resisted. Hulegu, the brother of the Great Khan Mongke, defeated the army of the last caliph of the Abbasids outside Baghdad in 1258, skilfully using a combination of his horsemen and the marshy land near the battle site. The caliph still resisted but was forced to surrender as the Mongol siege-engine specialists set about reducing Baghdad’s walls. Hulegu, influenced by his Nestorian wife, spared her fellow Christian believers but no one else. Avoiding the direct shedding of blood, the Mongols rolled the last Abbasid in a carpet and trampled him to death under the hoofs of their horses. Damascus surrendered: there too the Mongol command humiliated the Muslims and gave favour to the Christian minority. When cross-bearing processions were arranged, they were forced to stand in respect and Christians offensively showed their contempt for Muslim practices by drinking during Ramadan.

  Christians elsewhere surrendered to the Mongols and the last great Muslim city of Syria, Aleppo, was devastated. There remained Egypt and the seat of Mamluk power and to Qutuz, recently made sultan without restrictions, Hulegu sent the habitual Mongol demand for surrender without any reserve. Qutuz executed Hulegu’s envoys, cut their bodies in half in the horse market and put their heads on the gates of Cairo. He now made a major decision, responding to an astute offer by Baybars to come over to him. It was agreed that Baybars should join him, bring his own formidable force from the bahriyya and stand together with him against the Mongols. Witnesses remembered the icy hostility of the two men as they met in March 1260. But they made a deal. Baybars in the event of vi
ctory was to receive the governorship of the ancient Syrian fortress at Aleppo. It was agreed that they would not stand and fight in or near Cairo but choose terrain well forward suitable for deploying cavalry skills. One fortunate chance aided their decision. The Great Khan Mongke had died in August 1259 and dissension between two brothers of Hulegu caused him to draw off part of his army to Maragha, at the edge of modern Iran, to await events; alternatively Hulegu may have thought that, in the long term, the Levant could not support the Mongol mass of horse. He left behind him his lieutenant, Kitboga, and a diminished Mongol force.

  Thus the Mongols lacked their usual overwhelming superiority of numbers. Still, Qutuz was aware that his troops were facing the greatest warriors of the age, with a remarkable record of victories. Even Mamluks could waver facing them. Qutuz appealed to jihad and the great days of Nur al-Din and Saladin.

  The Mongols set out from Damascus and the Mamluks from Egypt, while the Franks remained neutral and even received Baybars in Acre. Battle was joined in Palestine. Baybars played a helpful part at the beginning of the campaign, skirmishing with a reconnaissance force of Mongols, narrowly escaping encirclement and giving Kitboga the impression that the Mamluk army was smaller than was the case. There were probably 12,000 on either side. Straddling the Jezreel valley, the Mongols encamped at Ain Jalud, Goliath’s Spring, where there was ample watering for their troops, spare mounts and animals kept with the host to slaughter en route. The location had resounding biblical echoes. Ain Jalud was the site of David’s encounter with the giant Goliath and Mount Gilboa, on its flank, was where the Philistines killed King Saul’s sons and he and his armour-bearer fell on their swords.

  Baybars quickly warned Qutuz of the Mongol position and the key decision for victory was made. In the darkness of the night on 2 September 1260 a massive Mamluk force slipped into position behind the Mongols on the northern foothills of Gilboa, gently sloping and at that time devoid of trees.*