Battle of Ain Jalut

When Möngke Khan became Great Khan in 1251, he immediately set out to implement his grandfather Genghis Khan's plan for a world empire. To lead the task of subduing the nations in the West, he selected his brother, another of Genghis Khan's grandsons, Hulagu Khan.[11]

Assembling the army took five years, and it was not until 1256 that Hulagu was prepared to begin the invasions. Operating from the Mongol base in Persia, Hulagu proceeded south. Möngke Khan had ordered good treatment for those who yielded without resistance and destruction for the rest. In that way, Hulagu and his army had conquered some of the most powerful and longstanding dynasties of the time. Other countries in the Mongols' path submitted to Mongol authority and contributed forces to the Mongol army. When the Mongols had reached Baghdad, their army included Cilician Armenians and even some Frankish forces from the submissive Principality of Antioch. The Assassins in Persia fell, the 500-year-old Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad was destroyed (see Battle of Baghdad) and the Ayyubid dynasty in Damascus fell as well. Hulagu's plan was then to proceed southwards through the Kingdom of Jerusalem towards the Mamluk Sultanate, to confront the major Islamic power.[11]

During the Mongol attack on the Mamluks in the Middle East, most of the Mamluks were Kipchaks, and the Golden Horde's supply of Kipchaks replenished the Mamluk armies and helped them fight off the Mongols.[12]

In 1260, Hulagu sent envoys to Qutuz in Cairo to demand his surrender:

From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. To Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords. You should think of what happened to other countries and submit to us. You have heard how we have conquered a vast empire and have purified the earth of the disorders that tainted it. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as the mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. Fortresses will not detain us, nor armies stop us. Your prayers to God will not avail against us. We are not moved by tears nor touched by lamentations. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Hasten your reply before the fire of war is kindled. Resist and you will suffer the most terrible catastrophes. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness of your God and then will kill your children and your old men together. At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.

— Hulagu, [13]

Qutuz responded, however, by killing the envoys and displaying their heads on Bab Zuweila, one of the gates of Cairo.[11]

Shortly before the battle, Hulagu withdrew from the Levant with the bulk of his army, leaving his forces west of the Euphrates with only one tumen (nominally 10,000 men but usually fewer),[2][7] and a handful of vassal troops under the Nestorian Christian Naiman Kitbuqa Noyan.[14] Contemporary Mamluk chronicler Al-Yunini's "Dhayl Mirat Al-Zaman" states that the Mongol army under Kitbuqa, including vassals, numbered 100,000 men in total, but this was likely an exaggeration.[15] Until the late 20th century, historians believed that Hulagu's sudden retreat had been caused by the power dynamic having been changed by the death of the Great Khan Möngke on an expedition to the Song dynasty's China, which made Hulagu and other senior Mongols return home to decide his successor. However, contemporary documentation discovered in the 1980s reveals that to be untrue, as Hulagu himself claimed that he withdrew most of his forces because he could not sustain such a large army logistically, that the fodder in the region had been mostly used up and that a Mongol custom was to withdraw to cooler lands for the summer.[16]

Upon receiving news of Hulagu's departure, Mamluk Sultan Qutuz quickly assembled a large army at Cairo and invaded Palestine.[17] In late August, Kitbuqa's forces proceeded south from their base at Baalbek, passing to the east of Lake Tiberias into Lower Galilee.

The Mamluk Sultan Qutuz was then allied with a fellow Mamluk, Baibars, who chose to ally himself with Qutuz in the face of a greater enemy after the Mongols had captured Damascus and most of Bilad al-Sham.[10]

The Mongols attempted to form a Franco-Mongol alliance or at least to demand the submission of the remnant of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, now centreed on Acre; but Pope Alexander IV had forbidden that. Tensions between the Franks and the Mongols had also increased when Julian of Sidon caused an incident which resulted in the death of one of Kitbuqa's grandsons. Angered, Kitbuqa sacked Sidon. The Barons of Acre and the remainder of the Crusader outposts, contacted by the Mongols, had also been approached by the Mamluks and sought military assistance against the Mongols.[10]

Though the Mamluks were the traditional enemies of the Franks, the Barons of Acre recognised the Mongols as the more immediate menace and so the Crusaders opted for a position of cautious neutrality between the two forces.[18] In an unusual move, they agreed that the Egyptian Mamluks could march north through the Crusader states unmolested and even camp to resupply near Acre. When news arrived that the Mongols had crossed the Jordan River, Sultan Qutuz and his forces proceeded southeast, toward the spring at Ain Jalut, in the Jezreel Valley.[19]

The first to advance were the Mongols, whose force also included troops from the Kingdom of Georgia and about 500 troops from the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, both of which had submitted to Mongol authority. The Mamluks had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and Qutuz capitalized on that by hiding the bulk of his force in the highlands and hoping to bait the Mongols with a smaller force, under Baibars.

Both armies fought for many hours, with Baibars usually implementing hit-and-run tactics to provoke the Mongol troops and to preserve the bulk of his troops intact. When the Mongols carried out another heavy assault, Baibars, who it is said had laid out the overall strategy of the battle since he had spent much time in that region earlier in his life as a fugitive, and his men feigned a final retreat to draw the Mongols into the highlands to be ambushed by the rest of the Mamluk forces concealed among the trees. The Mongol leader, Kitbuqa, already provoked by the constant fleeing of Baibars and his troops, committed a grave mistake. Instead of suspecting a trick, Kitbuqa decided to march forward with all of his troops on the trail of the fleeing Mamluks. When the Mongols reached the highlands, Mamluk forces emerged from hiding and began to fire arrows and attack with their cavalry. The Mongols then found themselves surrounded on all sides. Additionally, Timothy May hypothesizes that a key moment in the battle was the defection of the Mongol Syrian allies.[20]

The Mongol army fought very fiercely and very aggressively to break out. Some distance away, Qutuz watched with his private legion. When Qutuz saw the left wing of the Mamluk army almost destroyed by the desperate Mongols seeking an escape route, he threw away his combat helmet, so that his warriors could recognize him. He was seen the next moment rushing fiercely towards the battlefield yelling wa islamah! ("Oh my Islam"), urging his army to keep firm and advancing towards the weakened side, followed by his own unit. The Mongols were pushed back and fled to a vicinity of Bisan, followed by Qutuz's forces, but they managed to reorganize and to return to the battlefield, making a successful counterattack. However, the battle shifted toward the Mamluks, who now had both the geographic and psychological advantage, and some of the Mongols were eventually forced to retreat. Kitbuqa, with almost the rest of the Mongol army that had remained in the region, perished.

On the way back to Cairo after the victory at Ain Jalut, Qutuz was assassinated by several emirs in a conspiracy led by Baibars.[21] Baibars became the new Sultan. Local Ayyubid emirs sworn to the Mamluk sultanate subsequently defeated another Mongol force of 6,000 at Homs, which ended the first Mongol expedition into Syria. Baibars and his successors would go on to capture the last of the crusader states in the Holy Land by 1291.

Internecine conflict prevented Hulagu Khan from being able to bring his full power against the Mamluks to avenge the pivotal defeat at Ain Jalut. Berke Khan, the Khan of the Golden Horde to the north of Ilkhanate, had converted to Islam and watched with horror as his cousin destroyed the Abbasid Caliph, the spiritual and administrative center of Islam. The Muslim historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani quoted Berke as sending the following message to Mongke Khan, protesting the attack on Baghdad since he did not know that Mongke had died in China: "He (Hulagu) has sacked all the cities of the Muslims, and has brought about the death of the Caliph. With the help of God I will call him to account for so much innocent blood."[22] The Mamluks, learning through spies that Berke was a Muslim and was not fond of his cousin, were careful to nourish their ties to him and his Khanate.

After the Mongol succession was finally settled, with Kublai as the last Great Khan, Hulagu returned to his lands by 1262 and massed his armies to attack the Mamluks and avenge Ain Jalut. However, Berke Khan initiated a series of raids in force that lured Hulagu north, away from the Levant, to meet him. Hulagu suffered a severe defeat in an attempted invasion north of the Caucasus in 1263. That was the first open war among the Mongols and signaled the end of the unified empire.

Hulagu was able to send only a small army of two tumens in his sole attempt to attack the Mamluks after Ain Jalut, and it was repulsed. Hulagu Khan died in 1265 and was succeeded by his son Abaqa.

The large number of sources in vastly-different languages caused Mongol historians have generally focused on one limited aspect of the empire. From that standpoint, the Battle of Ain Jalut has been represented by numerous academic and popular historians as an epochal battle that was the first time that the Mongol advance had been permanently halted and even their first major defeat.[10][23] However, Ain Jalut, placed in the broader scope of the Mongol conquests in more comprehensive recent research, was actually not a first defeat or as pivotal as earlier histories portrayed it to be.

The Mongols had been defeated several times before Ain Jalut, not even including Temujin's defeats to Jamuqa and the Kerait's during the Mongol wars of unification. Mongol General Boro'qul was ambushed and killed by the Siberian Tumad tribe between 1215 and 1217, which prompted Genghis to send Dorbei Doqshin, who outmaneuvered and captured the Tumad tribe.[24] In 1221, Shigi Qutugu was defeated by Jalal al-Din during the Mongol conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire at the Battle of Parwan. As a result, Genghis Khan himself made forced marches to bring the Sultan Jalal al-Din to battle and annihilated him at the Battle of Indus. During the initial reign of Ogedei Khan, his general, Dolqolqu, was heavily defeated by the Jin generals Wan Yen-Yi and Pu'a. In response, Ogedei dispatched the legendary Subutai, and after encountering fierce resistance, the Mongols brought their entire army to bear under a vast encirclement of the Jin Empire by separate armies under Ogedei, Tolui and Subutai.[25] The Jin armies were decisively defeated and Subutai conquered Kaifeng in 1233, effectively dooming the Jin Dynasty.

Additionally, Ain Jalut did not mark the limit of Mongol expansion or show an end to their conquests. In 1299, the Ilkhanid army, under Ghazan Khan, decisively defeated the Mamluks at Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar, capturing Damascus and pursuing as far as Gaza. However, a combination of poor pasturage and the ongoing war against the Chagatai Khanate forced Ghazan to recall his army to northeastern Iran. After that campaign ended, he sent another smaller force back into Syria, but it was defeated at the much more important Battle of Marj al-Saffar (1303). It was that battle that marked the limits of Mongol expansion. The war against the Chagatais and his failing health prevented Ghazan from launching a counteroffensive before he died in 1305.

Put in proper perspective, Ain Jalut was actually the first time a Mongol detachment was defeated and did not immediately return with a stronger army to avenge its loss. Though it was only a minor defeat in the grand scheme, it showed a problem that would continually plague future Mongol attempts at expansion. Mongol forces looking to attack or exact revenge were often diverted by the death of a key Khan or by giving greater priority to fighting off opposing Mongol khanates.

According to Arabic military treatises of the 13th and 14th centuries, hand cannon was used by the Mamluk side in the Battle of Ain Jalut to frighten the Mongol armies, making it the earliest known battle for hand cannon being used. The compositions of the gunpowder used in the cannon were also given in those manuals.[26][27][28][29][30][31]

Robert Shea's historical novel The Saracen deals extensively with the Battle of Ain Jalut and the subsequent assassination of Sultan Qutuz.

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