At a key point in the battle the reserve force from the foothills of Gilboa moved against the Mongols, with devastating effect. Even then the manoeuvre almost failed as the rest of the Mamluks’ front line had been so weakened by the detachment to Mount Gilboa that it came close to giving way in the face of the Mongol hail of arrows. Qutuz kept his nerve and by a narrow margin rallied his troops. Then, on the flank, al-Ashraf, an Ayyubid leader and his Muslim auxiliaries, whom he had brought to the Mongol side, kept their promise to Qutuz to desert and turned on the Mongols, who collapsed and fled, some to be killed on the slopes of Gilboa by local men, others caught in reeds, others fleeing towards Damascus and cut down by Baybars, others flying to take refuge with Hetum of Armenia. Kitboga, courageously resisting, was killed. It was a major event: it broke the legendary invincibility of the Mongols. They could be defeated; the Muslim world took heart and the Mamluks gained massively in prestige.
It is a good surmise that a new sophistication of the Mamluk archers’ weaponry also played a part. For all their effectiveness, Mongol arrows were of one kind only. Mamluks took to carrying at the hip a splayed quiver with as many as sixty arrows – some for armour-piercing, some very light for creating a storm, shower-shooting from above, others for long-range, direct attack. The usual Mongol technique of combining movement with rapid firing could still be devastating – it nearly prevailed at Ain Jalud – but the Mamluks had gained an edge in weaponry.
Despite playing an exemplary role, Baybars was not given his promised prize of Aleppo and the enmity with Qutuz continued. Qutuz feared Baybars and dared not let him far from his sight. Uneasily, with their entourages, the two travelled through the desert to Cairo. Baybars hatched a plot with other Mamluk emirs to be rid of Qutuz, making use of his passion for hare-coursing to divert him from their line of travel and strike him down on 24 October. The emirs conferred with Baybars and would only accept his leadership in return for promises of their security and power.
Unaware of Qutuz’s death, the army carried on. The conspirators had calculated that the vanguard would have believed he was with the rearguard and vice versa. Meanwhile, Baybars and a small party galloped ahead to Cairo, made fair promises to the vice-regent and took the citadel. When morning prayers bade the people pray for the dead Qutuz and the new sultan, Baybars, Cairo was astonished. Baybars acted swiftly to allay adverse response by removing Qutuz’s emergency taxes levied to pay for the Mongol campaign, avoiding the ceremonial ride that should have followed his enthronement and burying Qutuz in a secret site. Rapid removal of inconvenient witnesses to Qutuz’s murder led Mamluks to support him as a strong man who would look after them. He reigned for seventeen years.
The Mamluk Sultanate
Installed in power, himself an assassin and executioner, Baybars was determined never to fall victim to murder and so patiently created a structure designed for his own protection against conspiracy and built himself an administration with a firm financial core, of a kind which had entirely eluded Saladin and his Ayyubid successors. He increased Mamluk numbers. Under him there flourished the finest and most professional army of its day, still recruiting from the steppe and numbering many thousands. Within the army he developed a core of Royal Mamluks, the most rigorously trained of them all and firmly linked to him. Training and long-term support cost a great deal and the Mamluk army was feasible only because Baybars had built up a massive, stable income.
As he began developing his support in devoted soldiers and administrators, so he also looked to ideology and to ceremony, to attract both literate and illiterate. Promoted Mamluks took an oath of allegiance to the sultan by the tomb of al-Salih Ayyub, Baybars’s quondam master. Saladin and his jihad were cited and revered. Baybars presented himself as the leader who would fulfil all their plans. He was illiterate and thus vulnerable to a scheming hermit-soothsayer, Shaykh Khadir, whom he endowed richly, allowed to seize the property of Jews and Christians and consulted over and over again. When he was found guilty of multiple sexual offences, Khadir said his death would be followed by that of the sultan, so Baybars spared him execution and put him in prison. Khadir’s hold may also have been aided by Baybars’s adherence to Sufism.
Despite many vicissitudes in the history of the caliphate, believers still had an inveterate attachment to the ancient office, which had some juridical importance, and Baybars followed the lead of Qutuz in appointing a puppet caliph to succeed the line which had once reigned in Baghdad. A candidate, al-Mustansir, claiming relationship to the Abbasids, emerged, was vetted by experts and duly installed. He fulfilled his function by issuing a diploma in favour of Baybars as sultan of the whole Muslim world, after which he, Baybars, promised his allegiance to the caliph to rule justly, to protect the true faith of the Sunnis and to pursue the jihad against the enemies of the faith. Baybars and al-Mustansir rode through the streets of Cairo, with Baybars displaying symbols of power, including the sword of the great caliph Umar; when al-Mustansir perished in an attempt to recover Baghdad, Baybars selected a kinsman of his, who had survived. The practice of appointing such shadow caliphs continued under Baybars’s successors.
His military achievement was made possible by the peculiar nature of the slave aristocracy which he inherited. They have been described as a one-generation nobility. The successful individual could expect to be rewarded in his lifetime, to be given higher commands in recognition of his talent and courage and to be emancipated from slave status. He could have wives, whom he could readily divorce, and concubines. The link to his biological father, far away on the steppe, had long been lost. His loyalty was to his fellow Mamluks, joined in a military comradeship to his sultan, and above all to his patron, who manumitted him. It was understood that he could not transmit land, power or wealth to his sons. He was in no way subject to the pressures of a wife seeking to advance her son at the expense of others. He could engage in trade or perhaps join the reserves. But that was all. The system prevented the build-up of appanages, which often in medieval states generation by generation reduced the land and revenues available to rulers, as leading nobles provided for their families. In addition to the advantages Baybars gained from the Mamluk system, his dictatorship took firm charge of the lucrative Egyptian seaborne trade.
Baybars faced two Mongol powers to east and to west: the Ilkahnate of Persia and Iraq and the Golden Horde’s settlement in southern Russia. After various manoeuvres he came to hold al-Bira, on the Euphrates, as a forward post against the Ilkahnate and benefited from the decision of Berke Khan of the Golden Horde to convert to Islam. Berke Kahn was fêted on a trip to Cairo, flattered by being included with Baybars in the khutba, the Friday prayers, and provided vital collaboration with Baybars by giving unchallenged passage to victims of the slave trade, so allowing a steady flow of young boys for his army, while the Genoese kept their lucrative role as middlemen.
Meanwhile the combination of Mongol power and the Mamluk ascendancy under Baybars reduced the role of the Assassins. They paid tribute to the Hospitallers, then wisely shifted their tribute to placate Baybars himself. The Mongols had destroyed Alamut. Other castles fell; Baybars appointed Grand Masters at his will and forced remnants to live at his court. By 1273 their strange power, which had issued in over fifty assassinations, frightening Sunnis and Franks alike, was over. Yet there remained the Ismaili beliefs, originally born of a combination of anger over the appointment of a caliph by improper procedures in 1094 excluding the more than capable son, Nizar, of the aged Fatimid caliph in favour of the inadequate candidate al-Mustali as a cat’s-paw. The Assassins had never accepted the choice of 1094, continued to back Nazir, and were inspired to support him as the true caliph and fight against what they saw as the marginalisation of Shiism. In obscurity the sect lingered on in Syria and Persia, shorn of its murderous capacity but still retaining an intense devotion to its imams as religious leaders. The two branches drifted apart; nothing more was heard of the Syrians, but effectively only in Iran the sect continued to exist.
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bsp; Baybars was aware of the continued threat of the Mongols. His plan was both to keep them apart – aided in this by their mutual hostility – and to prevent them linking up with the remnants of the Crusader States. After the disaster of La Forbie in 1244 the settlers had no effective field army but still had the dedicated forces of the military orders. Baybars knew that an appeal from the East could yet start off a crusade. He had to keep an eye not only on the Mongols and the Holy Land Christians but also on individual adventurers and the remnant of the Ayyubids, meeting these threats with a mixture of diplomacy and force administered with terror. Only once did he attempt a direct major attack on the Ilkhanate and that was one of his rare failures. He still held the inner lines of defence against his Mongol enemies on the north and east and could easily switch his forces from one front to another.
The sources depict Baybars as a serious jihadi. He intended to enforce obedience to the Quran, to forbid alcohol, to stop pederasty among his young Mamluks and to look after Muslim Holy Places. When opportunity offered, he made the hajj pilgrimage in secrecy for fear of assassination and had repairs undertaken in Mecca and Medina. In Jerusalem he restored the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque. In 1263 he sent a high-level delegation to Mecca, bearing the kiswa, the black silk veil with a band of gold-embroidered Quranic texts, to cover the great cubic shrine of the Kaba. Freshly manufactured in Egypt each year, it established Baybars’s effective claim to succession to the rights and powers of the Abbasid caliphs.
The Destruction of the Christians
Baybars’s ferocious zeal for jihad was made manifest in his attacks on the Christians and his systematic demolition of their coastal strongpoints. He was aware of Mamluk naval weakness and concluded that while the Christians kept their superiority at sea, pulling in by the maritime route both pilgrims and warriors, Islam would never be secure against their Holy Land presence. The solution was to destroy all the ports and fortifications on which they relied.
To siege warfare he brought subtlety, secrecy and intense attention to detail. If the Christian fortresses lay inland, he could devote ample time to the siege because it was unlikely that a Christian army could come to its relief; the fortifications could be severely damaged, notably by mining, but then built up again in the Mamluk interest. There was always enough finance to do it. Castle-breaking was Baybars’s most notable military achievement. Techniques differed. In an early coup against Kerak, the fortress on the caravan route to Damascus, Baybars invited its Ayyubid governor, al-Mughith, to his camp; what appeared to be a mere courtesy call turned sharply into a court set up to judge and condemn al-Mughith for treasonable correspondence with the Mongols; forged papers proved the case, he was removed to Cairo and there killed. His sons gave up the castle, thereafter kept in trim by the Mamluks. He also ensured Mamluk control at an early stage of Shawbak (Montréal), the other fortress dominating the caravan route.
Secrecy helped: sealed letters were given to his generals to avoid leakage of information. The counterweight trebuchet had a key role for siege warfare. Baybars developed a technique of assembling massive blocks of stone for the counterweight, brought by oxen over great distances to ensure that his machines could throw projectiles weighing up to 500 lb. It was an expensive but devastatingly effective procedure, and here again his mastery of finance was crucial. Naphtha could secure the torching of vulnerable buildings. After storming the outer walls at Caesarea, he faced a citadel that had been reinforced by St Louis; he did not attempt to undermine it but used his trebuchets to devastate the defenders with stones and naphtha. A church tower was also used to project hails of arrows. The defenders surrendered, went to their ships and the site was razed to the ground.
At Arsuf there was a hard-fought battle over the moat, with Baybars filling in a passage over it and the defenders mining beneath and destroying his infill materials. Eventually the defence was overwhelmed by trebuchet and the entire strongpoint destroyed, captive Christians providing labour. Safad was an inland fortress in Galilee and had a Templar force commanding Syrian Christian auxiliaries to defend it. Baybars built up tension by promising amnesty to the auxiliaries if they surrendered. Aware of the immense shift of power in the Holy Land, auxiliaries did leave, putting a strain on the Knights’ ability to man the walls. Allegedly the Templars failed to meet conditions imposed on them, so that when they surrendered they were massacred and a Mamluk garrison took over.
At Beaufort uncompleted improvements had left a level space outside the walls, thus providing a base for Baybars’s trebuchets, which destroyed the defences in ten days. An attack on Antioch ruined the quondam buttress of crusader strength in Syria. Bohemond VI, heavily compromised with the Mongols, was based in Tripoli; Baybars left him there and moved on to Antioch. On the First Crusade it had stood siege for eight months; Baybars and his superior equipment took it in little more than a day, then locked the gate and massacred the inhabitants, writing to Bohemond to describe the scene of ‘flames running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires in the next’. A scanty littoral was now left to the Crusader States.
In part, Baybars had been aided by the Mongol irruption. They were a menace he never failed to emphasise. They also had created a vacuum in the Muslim northern lands, assisting his attempt to make Cairo the true and only capital of the Muslim world. There was no longer tension between Syria and Egypt, and complicity with the Mongols enabled him to eliminate Christians more or less at will. Abbasid errors, combined with Mongol destructiveness ruining the irrigation systems, had destroyed the economy of Iraq, which had become a backwater. Baybars’s mastery of the express postal system enabled him to have control of Syria and crush dissidence. Relays of horses, postal stations and efficient riders enabled messages to pass between Damascus and Cairo in four days and in grave emergency three. Dispatches were taken directly to the sultan wherever he was, even on occasion received in the bath. A network of towers kept the traditional pigeon service in being.
The sultan himself was relentlessly in the saddle. Not for nothing was the symbol of Mamluk power gold cloth on a saddle. Baybars loved horses, had an extraordinary energy and insisted on personal supervision, even turning up secretly in disguise to spy on his subordinates and see what was happening. Fear of his enemies gave him chronic insomnia and indigestion. Intelligence was gained through merchants acting as spies in the West to inform him about the doings of popes, kings and would-be crusaders. They came to the sultan in deep disguise, worked as individuals, were never allowed to meet up with each other and, in the manner of intelligence services at all times, collude in serving up agreed information to their masters. Terror backed intelligence and kept his power in being. Conspirators and the recalcitrant were subjected to impaling and crucifixion. A massive hippodrome was constructed in Cairo for riding exercises and the endless training requisite for his army. Here he would inspect his men, ensuring by a grand parade that all present had with them the full equipment. Polo was a passion and encouraged as a sport, for it practised the swift turns which were so much a part of Mamluk military skills.
Attention to detail was incessant, as in the case of the lime blocks he obtained for supporting the bridge at Lod, which survives to this day. Krak des Chevaliers fell to him late in his reign, in 1271. Needing a month to batter at the outer walls, his troops would have been dismayed at the great slope of the glacis guarding the inner fortress, where the knights held out – once climbed by the young T. E. Lawrence in plimsolls – but a ruse got his Mamluks over the obstacle with the delivery of a forged letter from the Grand Master, instructing the Hospitaller Knights to seek terms. They were too few and had no prospect of relief and so, whether they had their suspicions or not, they duly surrendered and marched out. Krak was repaired and kept as a stronghold in northern Syria.
The last serious intervention from the West to save Acre came from England. The Lord Edward, long blooded in fighting rebels against his father, Henry III, brought with him to Acre in May 1
271 a skilled fighting force a thousand strong with thirteen ships and – a rare event in crusader history – his beloved wife, Eleanor, who gave birth in the Holy Land. He took the risk of exposing her to a dangerous climate because of his fear of breaching his crusader vow by falling to the temptation of adultery.
Baybars saw in this intervention by Edward, who was expecting to link up with an attack from the north by the Mongol Ilkhan Abagha, just the type of crusading irruption into the Near East that he always feared. The Ilkahn was too far away and the combined attack never came off. Baybars made peace, but he was still wary of a capable general from the West and, just to make sure, hired an assassin to stab Edward with a poisoned dagger while he slept in his chamber at Acre. Edward lay unconscious and only just survived to take ship for home, leaving a small English garrison behind.
Thereafter, Baybars was occupied elsewhere and delayed the final attack on Acre, which would have completed the expulsion of the Christians. On 1 July 1277, in a rare moment of relaxation watching a polo match in Damascus, he met his end drinking qumiz, fermented mare’s milk, a drink which just skirted the Quran’s prohibition of alcohol. It had its hazards: notoriously when over-fermented, it could kill. So it was for Baybars.
The Fall of Acre
In their prime the Mamluks stopped hereditary succession but sometimes nonetheless the inveterate wish of fathers to hand over power to sons prevailed. Baybars tried to pull it off and associated his son Baraka with him in rule in his lifetime. Succeeding, Baraka showed he lacked competence. His father-in-law, a fighting general, Kalavun took over and Baraka was packed off to a gilded seclusion in Kerak, where he died later after a mysterious fall from a polo pony.
God's Armies Page 24