Holy Warriors (47 page)

Qutuz responded by cutting the four envoys in half and displaying their heads in public, one at each of the main gates of Cairo; an act of blatant provocation that made war inevitable. The Egyptians were joined by the Bahri Mamluks, now led by Baibars, who had based himself in Syria, far from the turmoil of Cairo. The kingdom of Jerusalem also needed to formulate a policy, and while the Franks openly assured Mongol envoys of their neutrality, in reality a council had decided to allow the Mamluks through their lands and to give them supplies. Because the Mamluks would
later destroy the Latin settlements and, on account of sporadic hints of Mongol interest in Christianity (one of Hulegu’s wives, for example, was an Eastern Christian), it might seem that the decision to favor the Egyptians rather than the Mongols meant the Franks missed a unique chance to destroy Islam in the Near East. In reality, the decade since the murder of Turanshah had offered little indication that the Mamluks would evolve into such a lethal military state. Likewise, the Mongols had done nothing serious to convince the Christians to work with them, and in 1260 it was the steppe warriors that seemed to pose the greater threat.

Qutuz took the initiative when he led his men out of Egypt and chose to fight in Palestine; this gave the Mamluks the opportunity to fall back to their homelands in case of defeat. The sultan urged his warriors to fight bravely to protect their families, their property and, more importantly, to defend Islam: his troops vowed to resist. The two armies, probably numbering about twelve thousand each, met at Ayn Jalut—the Springs of Goliath, an appropriate place for a supposedly weaker party to take on an allegedly invincible opponent.
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Unlike a battle between Christians and Muslims, the forces here were very similar in makeup with both sides formed largely of mounted archers, rather than the heavy cavalry intrinsic to Frankish strategy. The battle took place on September 25. At first the Mongols looked the stronger and they broke through the Mamluks’ left wing. With a cry of “Oh Islam! Help your servant Qutuz against his enemies,” the Muslim general gathered his troops and pushed the Mongols back toward a marshy area; Baibars too was prominent; some of the enemy had climbed a slope and “he stood facing the enemy all day long . . . people everywhere heard about his stand on the mountain . . . and he fought like one who staked his very life . . . the victory was due to [him].”
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Some of the Mongols’ Syrian Muslim allies deserted and when Kitbuqa was killed the Egyptians had won the day. The Mongols fled but they were pursued and soon driven out of Syria.

This was a magnificent achievement for Qutuz, but he did not get to enjoy the fruits of victory. Baibars had long been his rival and on the journey back to Egypt he murdered Qutuz near Gaza on October 23, 1260. Given his heroism during the battle, Baibars was able to claim much of the responsibility for the Mamluk victory; more importantly, Ayn Jalut allowed him to stand as the true defender of Islam, the savior of the faith. Notwithstanding the Mongols’ diminished resources, the battle also showed that the
nomads could be defeated, something that had previously seemed unthinkable. With hindsight, Ayn Jalut marked the end of their advance westward, although they threatened several further invasions.

While the Franks had favored the winning side, in 1260 they were in no position to benefit. Their own affairs were in chaos. A detailed account of their troubles would be complex; in essence, however, conflicts such as the War of Saint Sabas (1256–58), a struggle that started between the Genoese and Venetian merchant communities of Acre and subsequently drew in the Levantine nobility, showed the settlers to be deeply riven by political troubles, aside from the threat of outside forces.
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A series of absentee and minor kings of Jerusalem had opened the doors to faction and manipulation, and a lack of strong leadership was a feature of the final decades of Latin rule. By contrast, the dynamism and focus of Baibars and his successors gave the Mamluks the impetus to destroy the Christians.
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Baibars himself was originally a Kipchak Turk, born on the southern Russian steppes c. 1229. In the face of Mongol invasions his tribe fled to the Crimea where he was enslaved at age fourteen. A white mark in the iris of one of his eyes meant he fetched a low price when sold in the slave markets of Aleppo; after his master fell into political disfavor and lost his possessions, Baibars was sent to Ayyub’s court in Cairo and then dispatched to join the Bahri. It was in the service of the revered Ayyub that Baibars claimed to acquire the nobility and the virtue necessary to rule. Given the brutal way that he took power there was an obvious need to justify himself; his biographer and head of chancery, Ibn Abd al-Zahir, claimed that it was a decree of fate: “fortune made him king.” Baibars moved fast to capitalize on the victory at Ayn Jalut and began a clever propaganda push. Ibn Abd al-Zahir wrote: “When God had granted him victory over the Tartars at Ayn Jalut, the sultan ordered the erection of the Mashhad al-Nasr to make plain the importance of this gift of God and the spilled blood of the enemy. He did this, furthermore, because the place was ennobled since God had mentioned it in the story of Talut and Jalut in his exalted book and the sultan acknowledged the rank of this site for which God had had this extraordinary victory in store.”
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Baibars brought a religious edge to the conflicts with both the Christians and the Mongols. Jihad sentiments had been notably low-key during the later decades of Ayyubid rule but, as we saw in the Mamluk approach at Ayn Jalut, this changed. Under Baibars the desire to rid the Levant of unbelievers formed a significant part of his approach and these lines from a letter to Prince Bohemond VI of Antioch after the capture of his city in 1268 give a flavor of his attitude: “you should have seen your [Christian] knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves . . . your women sold four at a time . . . the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of false testaments scattered . . . fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.”
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Qutuz had discovered someone who claimed to be an uncle of the last caliph but when this individual proved too independent-minded for Baibars’s taste he was disposed of. The sultan soon found another “relative” of the caliph who was invested with the title in 1262. With the appropriate guidance this man provided Baibars with a source of supreme spiritual legitimacy, something that enabled him to tap into the traditions of Zengi, Nur ad-Din, and Saladin as the leader of the jihad.

Perhaps Baibars’s two most important personal characteristics were his energy and his uncompromising harshness. His reign was distinguished by an iron-fisted discipline—exemplary crucifixions or bisections were a familiar tactic. He made great use of spies and often turned up unannounced at government offices to check up on things; he would also venture out in disguise to reconnoiter enemy positions or to find out what his own people were thinking about him; deception was routine. There was a cruel edge to Baibars’s career that marks him out as a particularly brutal—if effective—exponent of holy war. His personal physician described him as a short, barrel-chested man who slept only fitfully and was troubled by nightmares and frequent stomach upsets; given the number of enemies he had made such obvious manifestations of stress are hardly a surprise.
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Once Baibars was established in Egypt and southern Syria, he turned his attention to the Franks. To confront the continued Mongol threat to Muslim Syria the sultan relied upon the support of Egyptian armies. To move
quickly between his territories he needed to eradicate the Christians, and he also coveted the settlers’ fertile lands on the coastal plain. Between 1261 and 1271 he mounted campaign after campaign against the Franks, who by this stage controlled little more than the coast from Jaffa northward. Their authority was based upon fortified cities such as Caesarea and Acre, or massive castles such as the Templar fortress of Safad. Yet even these gigantic defenses could not resist Baibars, whose ingenuity proved almost impossible to counter.
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He approached Safad in June 1266 and, as usual, offered the defenders presents to try to induce them to surrender; much to his fury, however, the gifts were adopted as ammunition and hurled back by mangonels. The sultan brought up his own siege engines and soon took the barbican, although in doing so he suffered heavy losses. Worried by this he offered the Syrian Christians—but not the Templars—safe conduct; he then renewed the attack. Because the castle seemed about to fall, a Templar official went to negotiate with the sultan. Baibars still nursed a grievance over the diplomatic insult, and to revenge the slight to his honor he substituted a doppelgänger of himself. This person was to offer safe conduct to everyone, while in reality the sultan intended to slay them all. Baibars told the Templar envoy his plan and gave him a simple set of alternatives—if he wanted to live and be rewarded, he was to go along with this stratagem, otherwise he would be killed most cruelly. The man picked the former option. The defenders duly made their agreement with the false sultan and surrendered on July 22. The following night, as they made their way toward Acre, the Christians were seized and executed, and their bones and heads placed inside a small circular wall to be seen by travelers.

Baibars conducted annual raids, repeatedly ravaging crops and orchards near Acre to exert an unbearable pressure on the Franks. Again he employed various tricks: on one occasion his men carried captured Templar and Hospitaller banners so as not to alarm agricultural workers close to the city; only when it was too late did the defenseless peasants realize the deceit and five hundred of them were killed and then scalped. The trophies were strung onto a cord and hung around a tower on the castle of Safad.

In 1268 he took Jaffa, although this time he allowed most of the defenders free passage to Acre. Once inside Jaffa he seized and burned relics from the churches as a mark of his hatred for Christianity. The same year, the Templar castle of Beaufort fell, as did Antioch, the latter accompanied by a huge massacre with up to seventeen thousand dead and tens of thousands
taken captive. Around the same time, Baibars also brought the Assassins under his subjection. Like Saladin he claimed to defend Sunni orthodoxy against the heretical Shi’ite sect and thus justified his conflict with other Muslims.

The most celebrated castle of all, the mighty and majestic Krak des Chevaliers, fell in 1271.
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While many crusader fortresses have been damaged or destroyed, Krak remains remarkably intact, still perched proudly on the edge of a ridge looking over a broad fertile valley toward the hills of the Lebanon. Krak was built to protect the towns and farms of the coastal region from Muslim raids. The Hospitallers acquired the castle in 1144, and over the years they developed it into one of the most sophisticated defensive sites of all time. In the early thirteenth century they erected the huge concentric walls and multiple towers that characterize castles of this period. The seemingly endless entry tunnel, complete with a 180-degree hairpin, ascends gently into the gloom, pierced only by shafts of dusty light from the murder holes. The high-quality, neatly finished stonework shows the expense and care lavished upon this most sophisticated of defensive systems. At the core of Krak lies a surprisingly small courtyard—not the wide-open areas familiar from contemporary Welsh castles, such as Caernarfon or Harlech, but a much more intimate space. Along the western side remains a facade of delicate Gothic tracery; looking at this, one could be in a western European monastery—which is exactly the point. It reminds us that the Military Orders were warrior-monks; both soldiers and religious men. Here was something akin to a cloister with a chapel also built on to the enclosure. Elsewhere, other features include immense stables and storerooms, vital to allow Krak to accommodate a garrison of two thousand. Yet in spite of this the castle could not hold out against Baibars—and once again, the sultan is suspected of using treachery. After the capture of the forward defenses and the outer barbicans, he faced the muscular immensity of the main castle. To breach this structure would surely have cost him an intolerable number of men, and he therefore resorted to a trick. He sent the defenders a forged letter that claimed to be from the Hospitaller commander in Tripoli instructing them to surrender. Some historians believe the garrison was duped by this, others suggest that after two months of siege they had little chance of survival and saw this as a way to end their confinement; either way, this mighty stronghold capitulated for the first time in its history and Baibars had struck another weighty psychological blow for Islam.

The Franks suffered a further setback in 1270. Louis IX had been determined to atone for the defeat of his first crusade.
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In 1267 he began to organize another expedition, although this time he proposed to march through North Africa and approach Egypt from the west. By this time the king’s health was poor and Joinville judged those who advised Louis to set out as having committed a mortal sin against the king and his people.
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Another sizable French army sailed for Africa on July 2, 1270. The king’s profound religiosity meant the mendicant orders exerted a strong influence on this campaign; the idea of conversion had become an increasingly powerful theme during the thirteenth century and the desire to convince the Mongols, Muslims, and the Eastern Christians to become Catholic was a highly prominent aspect of relations between Europe and the wider world. The main focus of Louis’s attention was the ruler of Tunisia who had recently set up a rival claim to the caliphate in Cairo. In the event the French only reached Carthage. The Muslims showed little interest in conversion and, by contrast, harassed the Christian camp with arrows and projectiles. It was the height of summer and conditions for the crusaders quickly became deleterious. Louis’s son, John-Tristram, born at the siege of Damietta in 1249, soon expired; after two weeks the king himself was struck down with dysentery and forced to his bed. By August 24 his death was imminent. As he lay in terminal decline the king called out “O Jerusalem! O Jerusalem!” and prayed for his people; he died the following day. His bones were kept in a casket and brought to Saint-Denis but his entrails and flesh were taken to the cathedral of Monreale on Sicily by his brother, Charles.