Meanwhile, the Bahriyya went into exile under the leadership of Baybars–one of the conspirators in the 1250 murder of the Ayyubid heir, Turanshah. Born around 1221, Baybars was a tall, dark-skinned Kipchak Turk, the hardy, bellicose people of the Russian steppes, known in the ancient world as the Cumans. He was said to possess a remarkably powerful voice, but Baybars’ most striking feature was his blue eyes, one of which held a small but distinct white fleck the size of the eye of a needle. Taken into slavery at the age of fourteen, Baybars began mamluk training, and then passed through the hands of a number of owners before eventually being recruited into al-Salih’s new Bahriyya corps in 1246. There his martial skill and leadership qualities were soon recognised, and he fought against King Louis’ crusaders in the Battle of Mansourah in 1250.

In the mid-to late 1250s, Baybars and the Bahriyya served a succession of ineffectual Ayyubid emirs who were trying desperately to cling to power in Syria, Palestine and Transjordan. Among them was al-Nasir Yusuf, the nominal ruler of Aleppo and Damascus–an emir born of a noble bloodline, being Saladin’s grandson, but singularly incapable of facing the violent challenges of this turbulent era of shifting allegiances and emerging world powers. During this period, Baybars honed his abilities as a military commander, scoring a number of impressive successes, but also enduring some chastening defeats. Throughout, he was closely supported by a fellow mamluk and Kipchak Turk, Qalawun, perhaps his closest friend and comrade in arms. With an ever watchful eye upon events in Egypt, Baybars twice attempted to invade the Nile region and depose Qutuz, but, being heavily outnumbered, he proved unable to achieve a significant victory.

By 1259, Baybars had shown himself to be an adept general with an obvious appetite for advancement, but as yet he had not been given the chance to realise his ambitions or evident potential. That opportunity would come, both for Baybars and indeed for the entire Mamluk regime, with the appearance of a new, devastating threat to the Muslim Near East.1

Around the year 1206 a warlord named Temüjin united the nomadic Mongol tribes of the vast east Asian steppe grasslands of Mongolia and assumed the title of Chinggis, or Genghis, Khan (literally ‘stern ruler’). Genghis and his followers were driven by a boundless hunger for war and came to believe, within the tenets of their pagan faith, that the Mongols were destined by a heavenly decree to conquer the entire world. Through sheer strength of will Genghis transformed the feuding Mongol tribes into an unstoppable army, harnessing the innate resilience of his people and their peerless skills as horsemen and archers.

For the next fifty years, first under Genghis Khan and then, after his death in 1227, under his sons, the Mongols exploded across the face of the Earth. They were a force unparalleled in the medieval world, perhaps in all human history. Unrelenting and utterly uncompromising in their approach to warfare, they expected enemies to show immediate wholesale submission or face total annihilation. And by 1250 their dominions stretched from China to Europe, from the Indian Ocean to the northern wastes of Siberia. This exponential expansion inevitably brought the Mongols into contact with the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Having subjugated northern China, the Mongols began their westward advance in 1229, crushing the Islamic rulers of northern Iran–a move which prompted the Khwarizmians to flee into northern Iraq and eventually culminated in the Khwarizmian invasion of the Holy Land in 1244. Between 1236 and 1239 the Mongol horde defeated the eastern Christians of Georgia and Greater Armenia and, in 1243, invaded Asia Minor, overwhelming the Seljuq Turkish dynasty that had ruled there since the eleventh century. Through the 1230s Mongol armies also conquered the southern steppelands of Russia, establishing a polity that came to be known as the Golden Horde. Ironically, this caused many of the Kipchak Turks native to this region to become refugees. Flooding southwards, they fell into the clutches of slave traders and thus massively increased the availability of mamluk recruits for the Muslims of Egypt.

Driving further west, the Mongols eventually encountered the Latin Christians of Europe, where their advent was greeted with a mixture of fear, confusion and uncertainty. News that the Muslims of Iran had been defeated by an unknown force from the distant lands of the East reached the Fifth Crusaders in Egypt in 1221, causing many Franks to imagine that the Mongols might actually be valuable allies. At first this view gained credence, because the shadowy Mongols were equated with the ancient legend of Prester John–a powerful Christian king, prophesied to emerge from the East in Christendom’s darkest hour. Over time, it also became clear that Nestorian Christians (a sect long settled in Central Asia) had managed to gain some influence among the Mongols, even converting the wives of some leading warlords.

But Latin Christendom slowly realised that the Mongols, or Tartars as they came to be known in Europe, were not merely a distant foreign power, but an immediate and potentially lethal threat. In 1241 the Mongol army pushed on from Russia and spent the next year ravaging and terrorising Poland, Hungary and eastern Germany, causing untold destruction. Even in the wake of this devastating incursion, the rulers of western Europe–locked in their own disputes–were slow to react, and many continued to nurse ideas of accommodation or alliance. From the late 1240s onwards, the Roman papacy sent two missionary embassies to the Mongols, led by groups of Friars. These Frankish envoys travelled thousands of miles to visit the lavish Mongol court at Qaraqorum (in Mongolia), hoping to convert the Great Khan to Christianity; they returned with blunt ultimatums instructing Rome to submit to Mongol authority. During his time on Cyprus, Louis IX also made contact with the Tartars. In 1249 he sent his own representatives to the Mongols in Iran, but when this embassy returned in 1251 to find Louis in Palestine, it likewise bore a stark demand that he begin paying an annual tribute, which, needless to say, he ignored.

In spite of this uncompromising approach to diplomacy, the Mongol Empire actually started to decay in the second half of the thirteenth century, corroded by dynastic struggle and the problems attendant on governing such an immense realm. Nonetheless, they remained an awe-inspiring force. In the 1250s, the new Great Khan Möngke (Genghis Khan’s grandson) initiated a renewed wave of expansion into the Muslim world of the Middle East and beyond, placing his brother Hülegü in command of a massive host of tens of thousands of warriors, alongside the leading Mongol general Kitbuqa. Marching through southern Iran in 1256, this mighty army turned towards Baghdad, where an enfeebled member of the Abbasid dynasty still claimed the title of Sunni caliph. In February 1258 Hülegü crushed Baghdad, putting in excess of 30,000 Muslims to the sword and destroying much of the once great capital. He went on to subjugate most of Mesopotamia, establishing what came to be known as the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia (stretching from Iraq to the borders of India). Hülegü then crossed the Euphrates to arrive on the borders of Syria and Palestine in 1259.

Not surprisingly, the coming of the Mongols terrified the peoples of northern Syria. The Christians continued to harbour the hope that Hülegü might prove to be an ally against Islam, encouraged by the fact that his wife was a Nestorian. King Hethum of Cilician Armenia had submitted to Mongol rule as far back as 1246, and had been allowed to retain partial autonomy in return for the payment of an annual tribute. Hethum now convinced his son-in-law Bohemond VI (ruler of both the principality of Antioch and the county of Tripoli) to ally with Hülegü’s army. Al-Nasir, the Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo and Damascus, had also been paying the Mongols tribute since 1251 in the hope of forestalling a direct invasion, but in autumn 1259, with the horde now marching into Syria, the limitations of the policy of appeasement became apparent.2