BACK IN 1167, while the Crusaders were besieging Saladin at Alexandria, a baby boy was born thousands of miles away in the Lake Baikal region of Mongolia. Legend says that as he emerged from his mother’s womb he was clutching a blood clot in his tiny hand, a hand that would spill more blood than any before or since. He was named Temujin.
When his father died, Temujin became the chief of a nomadic tribe weakened by war. For protection, he pledged himself as vassal to the more powerful khan (lord) of the Nestorian Christian tribe of Kerait. With their help, he successfully conquered the hereditary enemies of his murdered father, bringing them under his rule. In 1203 Temujin asserted his supremacy over the Keraits as well. Combining all his forces, he defeated the Naimans, until then the dominant tribe of western Mongolia. In 1206 he called a great Kuriltai, or legislative assembly, of all the tribes to declare himself the Khagan, the Khan of Khans, the King of Kings. A man with extraordinary skills in organization, a true military genius and totally ruthless, Temujin was ready now to embark upon his great ambition to conquer the world under his new royal name, Genghis Khan.
Great waves of horsemen had come to Europe from the east over the centuries. First came the Huns, who had pushed the Goths out of the Russian steppes and into the heart of the Roman Empire. The Bulgars had spread into eastern Europe, then the Magyars into Hungary, followed by a series of Turkish tribes. None, however, had come with the numbers, the furious energy, or the insatiable brutality of the hordes of Genghis Khan.
He began his conquests by moving his army into northern China, taking the great walled city of Peking (Beijing) in 1215. Storming westward into Central Asia, he subdued the land of Kara Khitai (Turkestan). The Kwarismian empire, the dominant power in Central Asia, which included the walled cities of Khiva and Bokhara and the legendary Samarkand, became his next target in 1219. Genghis assembled a mounted army of two hundred thousand men, undeterred by the fact that the Kwarismian ruler, Muhammad-Shah, could muster more than twice that number. The first of the major cities to be overwhelmed was Bokhara. The civilians who surrendered were spared, but the garrison, which had tried to hold out, was butchered to a man, along with the Muslim holy men who had ordered them to stand and fight. At the city of Samarkand the Turkish soldiers not only surrendered without a fight but offered to join the Khan’s army. Genghis detested their disloyalty to their rightful ruler and ordered immediate execution for all of them.
The Khan’s enemies were learning how to be spared his wrath. The people of the city of Balkh gave up without a fight and were permitted to live. The people of Bamian chose to fight, in a battle that unfortunately for them brought the death of Genghis Khan’s grandson. When the city was in Mongol hands, every human being in it was put to the sword. Genghis’s son-in-law died in the attack on Nishapur, so after the city had fallen, his widow was allowed her personal revenge by presiding over the systematic mass beheadings. The heads were separated as to men, women, and children, then stacked in great pyramids. There was even a pyramid of heads of cats and dogs, for the Khan’s orders had called for the death of “every living creature” in the city.
The greatest resistance to the Mongol horde was mounted by the Kwarismian prince Jelal ad-Din, the son of Muhammad-Shah. After a bitter, losing fight, he took his army on an orderly retreat into Afghanistan. A Mongol army was sent after him, and Jelal ad-Din prepared to receive it at Parvan, a dozen miles north of Kabul. The Mongols had expected him to be on the run and were not fully prepared for the Battle of Parvan, where for the first time in the Kwarismian war a Mongol army was soundly defeated.
Such a humiliation could not go unanswered, so Genghis himself led a fresh army against Jelal ad-Din. Ad-Din fell back with his army to the Indus River, where the Mongols caught him in November of 1221. His army was shattered, but Jelal ad-Din escaped by spurring his horse into the river, fighting the strong current to reach the safety of the far shore. The family that he had left behind was taken captive to await the judgment of the great Khan. When that judgment was delivered, every male child in the family was butchered in full view of his mother and sisters.
A false hope sprang up in the city of Herat when news of the Mongol defeat at Parvan reached them. The city, a magnificent metropolis with a population of over three hundred thousand, had submitted peacefully to the Mongols, but on the news from Parvan it rose in jubilant revolt, ejecting or killing its handful of Mongol overlords. Now the people of Herat must be punished for their misguided rebellion. The Mongols had no machinery, so the siege took months, but they finally broke into the city in June 1222. Genghis Khan’s judgment called for the death of every human being in the city. Even for an army of men who were by now masters of the techniques of massacre, the mass murder took more than a week to complete.
An army under two of the Mongols’ best generals, Subotai and Jebe, was sent after Jelal’s father, Muhammad-Shah, who had fled west in the opposite direction. The generals, in no hurry to catch their fugitive, paused long enough to destroy cities along their westward march across Persia. They captured the holy city of Qum (which would centuries later be the seat of the Ayatollah Khomeini), then killed every person in it. Continuing northwest, they approached the Turkish emirate of Azerbaijan, where they accepted a huge payment in gold to pass by the capital city of Tabriz, sweeping on instead toward the kingdom of Georgia and their first encounter with a Christian enemy. King George IV personally led his fierce fighters in an attempt to halt the Mongol invasion, but he was severely beaten, at the same time that the Crusade under Cardinal Pelagius was meeting its own defeat in Egypt. Meanwhile Muhammad-Shah, in his panic to avoid falling into the hands of the blood-crazed Mongols, had finally found refuge on a tiny island in the Caspian Sea, where he died from exhaustion, stress, and despair.
Free to move wherever they wished, the Mongols decided to raid north beyond the Caspian, easily crushing the Caucasian tribesmen who were unlucky enough to find themselves in their path. The Kipchak Turks offered alliance and gold to the Russian princes, urging that they agree to join forces to stop this human plague. The princes of Kiev, Smolensk, Chernigov, and Galich answered the call, taking their combined armies to meet the Mongols near the Sea of Azov. Those armies were destroyed in the onslaught, and the Russian soldiers who were wounded or taken captive were executed. The four Russian princes were taken alive, to be bound and stretched out on the ground. A wood floor was placed on top of them, and then the Mongols feasted and danced on the floor. To no one’s surprise, when the party was over the Russian princes were found crushed to death beneath the floor. Then the Mongol army, whose mission was to raid, not to occupy, stormed through the Crimea, where they met their first Roman Catholic Christians as they looted a Genoese trading post. Swinging back eastward to rejoin Genghis Khan, they left behind them a wide swath of farms, villages, and whole cities now populated only by rotting corpses.
Both Muslims and Christians, themselves quite capable of barbarous atrocities, were nonetheless unable to comprehend such wanton destruction and wholesale butchery. The Mongols were demons from hell, described in letters as “surprisingly ugly” and “incredibly stinking.” Fortunately, they had come and gone, like a raging storm or an earthquake that devastates and then dies out. There seemed to be no realization that they had been the victims of an exploratory raid and not an all-out war, or that the Mongols would return. A Russian chronicler wrote, “. . . we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again. God knows whence He fetched them against us for our sins.”
In 1227, while Emperor Frederick II was assembling his crusading army in Italy, Genghis Khan, now sixty years old, died leading the conquest of Tibet. All of the princes of the royal house were called to a Kuriltai at their capital at Karakorum. After the burial of the great Khan in a secret tomb that has not yet been discovered, his son Ogodai was elected Khan of Khans.
In accordance with Mongol custom, Ogodai’s youngest brother Tului was assigned the administration of the homeland. His brother Batu was assigned the task of subduing the lands to the west that had been raided by the Mongol general Subotai, who was assigned to go with him.
During the lull in the Mongol wars, the Kwarismian prince Jelal ad-Din broke out of his safe haven at the court of Delhi in India. Gathering the remnants of his Kwarismian cavalry, Jelal set out to establish a new kingdom in the west. Raiding across Iran into Iraq and the lands around Baghdad, he moved northwest to conquer Azerbaijan and then down into Syria and to the lands of the Seljuk Turks. Jelal presented a much greater threat to Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt and Prince al-Ashraf of Damascus than the red-faced Emperor Frederick II, who was strutting through his negotiations for the occupation of Jerusalem. The Christians could be dealt with later, but Jelal ad-Din must be stopped now.
Al-Ashraf’s suggestion of a military alliance with his traditional enemies, the Seljuk Turks, was most welcome. Together, they met Jelal ad-Din in a mounted pincer movement with Turks at his front and Syrians attacking from the rear. The Kwarismians were decisively beaten, but thousands of them managed to gallop away from the battlefield. In the following year, 1231, the armies clashed again. Jelal ad-Din experienced another defeat and was murdered in its aftermath. The leaderless Kwarismian horsemen became roving bandits, their services available to anyone willing to pay their price. These were the mercenaries who were hired to invade Palestine and retake Jerusalem from the Christian Crusaders.
In 1237, as the Christian concerns were directed toward the expiration of the ten-year truce that Frederick II had arranged with the sultan of Egypt, Batu and Subotai launched a devasting western invasion. They sent word to the Russian princes that to avoid total destruction they must become vassals of the Mongol Khan. They should signal their submission by paying a 10 percent tax on everything they held—men, treasure, horses, everything of value. The princes refused, which was tantamount to an act of mass suicide. One Russian city after another fell to the Mongol horde, including the relatively unimportant river town of Moscow, and as each city fell its inhabitants were slaughtered. It has been estimated that the killings took 80 percent of the people in the lands through which the Mongols passed, more than the deaths caused by the worst of the plagues. The Franciscan friar John of Plano Carpini, passing through that countryside about ten years later as a papal envoy, reported to the pope, “In this country . . . we came across many skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung.”
The Roman Christians of Europe were peacefully ignorant of the renewed Mongol invasion until the following year, when a strange delegation visited the courts of France and England. It was a party of envoys from the grand master of the sect of Assassins. The Mongols had appeared in their homeland of Persia, and they feared for their continued existence. They had come to urge a grand alliance of Christians and Muslims against the murdering Mongols. They had no success.
Matthew Paris provides clear indication that the European Christians were untroubled by stories of Mongol terrors. He recorded that when Henry III of England expressed to the bishop of Winchester his concerns about the Assassin envoys’ report, the good bishop replied with ecclesiastic arrogance, “Let these dogs destroy one another and be utterly exterminated, and then we shall see the universal Catholic Church founded on their ruins and there will be but one fold and one shepherd.”
That arrogance was lowered a few notches when, after destroying the Russian city of Kiev in 1240, the Mongols split into two armies. The larger force, commanded by Batu and Subotai, headed toward Moravia and Hungary. The other wing swept through Galicia and into Poland, where it easily beat a combined Polish and German army at Liegnitz on April 9, 1241. Two days later the main Mongol army defeated the Magyar forces near Buda (across the river from Pest). The king of Hungary fled the field for his territory of Dalmatia, on the western side of modern Yugoslavia. A Mongol detachment chased him tenaciously all the way to the shores of the Adriatic, sending shock waves through the Republic of Venice, on the other side of the narrow sea. Another Mongol contingent raided deep into Austria.
Now the European Christians had good reason to be gripped with dread. Nor was the ever-faithful companion to calamity forgotten, as pulpits began to resound with sermons heralding Armageddon, the last great battle, the end of the world. God’s ultimate punishment for the sins of man was at hand.
Just as real panic was beginning to take hold, news began to arrive from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Austria. All along the eastern battle line the Mongols were reported to be in full retreat, disappearing back into the void from which Satan had vomited them forth. The Christians didn’t know it yet, but word had come to the Mongol armies that Ogodai Khan was dead. The leaders had been summoned to a Kuriltai in Mongolia to elect his replacement. The armies, however, did not go all the way back with their leaders. They stayed in Russia, camped along the Volga, ready to move again at Batu’s command.
Batu had ordered his best general, Baichu, to continue the pressure on the nearby Muslim states during his absence. In 1241 the Mongols rode against the Seljuk Turks. After a year of unsuccessful defense, the Seljuk sultan could see his own end coming and saved himself by accepting the suzerainty of the Mongol conquerors.
King Hethoum of Armenia had listened with great joy to the news of the Mongol victories over his Turkish enemy. He would have been glad to see the Seljuks completely destroyed, but he was stunned by the news of the Seljuk submission to the Mongols. There was no way that Armenia could survive a combined Turkish-Mongol invasion, so he sent a message to the Mongols that Armenia, too, recognized the overlordship of the Mongol Khan.
By 1245 Louis IX of France had made his vow to lead a new Crusade. It appeared to be just in time, as word arrived at Rome of the Christian defeat at Gaza a few months before. Baibars of Egypt had led an army of Mamelukes and Kwarismian mercenaries in a great battle that had killed thousands of Christians, including the grand master of the Knights Templar and most of his Templar companions. At home, the armies of Frederick II had driven the papal army out of Italy. The Church, too, was fighting for its life as Pope Innocent IV called a great council of the Church at Lyons. The council approved the crusading plans of Louis of France and dispatched Church prelates to support him by preaching the Crusade throughout France. In response to the concerns and confusion expressed at the council about the mysterious Mongols, the pope decided to send envoys to the great Khan, bearing two papal letters addressed to the Mongol leader.
The man selected to head the mission was a sixty-five-year-old, barefoot Franciscan friar, John of Plano Carpini. He was a brave and resourceful man. He had to be, because he was leading his party on a journey of thousands of miles to a destination totally unknown to him. He would need to pass through a dozen lands and languages of whose very existence he was as yet unaware.
Setting out from Lyons in 1245, John of Plano Carpini traveled first to Poland, where he spent the entire winter. In the spring his hosts pointed him in the direction of the Russian steppes. The Mongols were taught to have respect for official ambassadors, so the men in the Mongol outposts took him to their commander, who sent him to Prince Batu on the Volga River. Batu provided the party with relays of horses, a means of transportation strange to most Franciscans. The friar and his friends had ample opportunity to learn to ride: Their escort took them over three thousand miles to the east, a journey longer than a trip across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The weary travelers arrived at the Mongol court in July of 1246, after thirteen months of travel, just in time for the coronation of Guyuk Khan. A few days later they were escorted to the royal pavilion. As their escort looked at the friar’s bare feet, he warned the devout Franciscan that he had best cover his feet or risk losing them as punishment for appearing before the Great Khan in such an insulting condition.
There was really no hope for understanding between the Christian pope and the Mongol emperor. The Great Priest and the Great Khan were each convinced of his own right to personal supremacy over the whole world. Their customary means of communication was by giving orders. Friar John began by presenting the two letters from the pope to the khan. The first letter instructed the khan to become a Christian. The pope explained that he had sent the holy men to provide the necessary evangelical information, “so that following their salutory instructions you may acknowledge Jesus Christ the very Son of God and worship His glorious name by practicing the Christian religion.”
The second letter was much stronger, as the pope recited the Mongol crimes: “. . . we are driven to express in strong terms our amazement that you . . . have invaded many countries belonging both to Christians and others and are laying them waste in a horrible desolation, and with a fury still unabated you do not cease from stretching out your destroying hand to more distant lands and . . . sparing neither age nor sex, you rage against all indiscriminately with the sword of chastisement.”
Next the pope ordered that “for the future you desist entirely from assaults of this kind and especially from the persecution of Christians, and that after so many and such grievous offenses you conciliate by a fitting penance the wrath of Divine Majesty, which without doubt you have seriously aroused by such provocation.”
The papal letters made no sense whatever to the Mongol leader, whose grandfather, Genghis Khan, had told his followers that the greatest happiness a man could experience was to kill his enemies and then watch the wretched weeping of their wives and children. Guyuk Khan gave Brother John a letter to take to the pope, expressing the only answer that made sense to a Mongol lord who believed that all men should submit to the all-powerful Khagan: “Thou, who art the great Pope, together with all the Princes, come in person to serve us. At that time I shall make known all the commands of the Yasa [the Mongol code of law].
“You have said that supplication and prayer have been offered by you, that I might find a good entry into baptism. This prayer of thine I have not understood. Other words which thou hast sent me: ‘I am surprised that thou hast seized the lands of Christians and others. Tell us what their fault is.’ These words of thine I have also not understood. The eternal God has slain and destroyed these lands and peoples because they have neither adhered to Genghis, nor to the Khagan, both of whom have been sent to make known God’s command, nor have they adhered to this command of God. Like thy words, they were impudent, they were proud, and they slew our messenger emissaries. How could anybody seize or kill by his own power contrary to the command of God?
“Though thou also sayest that I should become a trembling Christian, worship God and be an ascetic. How knowest thou whom God absolves, in truth to whom he shows mercy? How dost thou know that such words as thou speakest are with God’s sanction? From the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could do this contrary to the command of God?
“Now you should say with a sincere heart, ‘I will submit and serve you.’ Thou thyself, at the head of all the Princes, come at once to serve and wait upon us! At that time I shall recognize your submission.”
Stalemate. And so much for the prospect of understanding between east and west. The visit of the papal envoys was no more than an amusing interlude for the Mongols. They were preparing for more war, but they were held in check by the untimely death of Guyuk Khan in 1248. Guyuk’s widow wanted the supreme post for one of her three sons, but none of them was highly regarded, and their mother was too preoccupied by her fascination with sorcery to have gained the respect of the leaders. A strong opposition party was led by Prince Batu, who as the oldest living direct descendant of Genghis, even though illegitimate, enjoyed great prestige. He favored the sons of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, Tului, whose wife was a devout Nestorian Christian. Their four extraordinary sons, Mongu, Kublai, Hulagu, and Ariqboga, were much admired.
In 1251, in spite of the scheming of Guyuk’s widow, who even planned the assassinations of her opponents, Tului’s son Mongu became the Khan of Khans. His brother Kublai was given the government of China and, as Kublai Khan, became the most famous of the four brothers, through the journal of Marco Polo. The youngest, Ariqboga, stayed home to administer the homeland. Hulagu was given the territory of Central Asia and Persia. Their uncle and sponsor, Prince Batu, was given the lands to the far west. His were the legions of Mongols remembered in history as the Golden Horde. As for Guyuk’s scheming widow, she was tried, found guilty of attempted assassination, and sentenced to a bloodless royal death by drowning.
As soon as King Hethoum of Armenia learned about the new Khagan he made the long journey to Mongolia to offer his personal submission. An alliance with the Mongols made much more sense to him than an alliance with the shrinking Crusader states, which fought each other as often as they fought the Muslims. The current internal struggle was the war of San Sabas, which pitted the Venetians and the Knights Templar against the Genoese and the Hospitallers. The conflict offered an ideal opportunity for a Muslim war against the divided Christians, but turning their faces to the Crusader states would mean that the Muslims had to turn their backs on the Mongols, who were on the move again.
Hulagu, brother of the Great Khan and commander of the Mongols in Central Asia and Persia, had been given firm orders to move into Mesopotamia to take the city of Baghdad, where he was to destroy the religious power and leadership of the Sunni caliph. He also had a shock in store for the Shiites, in his total dedication to the destruction of the sect of Assassins. To the Mongols they were guilty of an unforgivable crime.
Years earlier, Genghis Khan’s son Jagatai had ruled over part of Persia, the homeland of the Assassins. Certain Muslim practices required by the Koran were contrary to Mongol custom and so were outlawed. Jagatai would not permit the ritual ablutions before prayer and forbade the practice of hallal, the ritual throat-cutting by which the Prophet had decreed that food animals must be slaughtered. The Sunni Muslims were upset, but the Shiites were outraged. The most dedicated fundamentalists of them all, the Assassin sect of the Ismailis, decided that Allah wanted them to act according to their custom. The assassination of Jagatai was carefully planned and successfully executed.
To the Mongols the murder of an envoy or ambassador could only be punished by war. The murder of a son of the Great Khan was a crime infinitely more heinous than the murder of an ambassador, so something more punishing than mere conflict was required. Only one level of vengeance could match the enormity of the crime: Every member of the Assassin sect must die.
Supported by additional Mongol forces from the Golden Horde, together with contingents of Armenians and Georgians who were happy to kill fundamentalist Muslims, Hulagu launched his campaign. The Assassins controlled a wide area of mountains and valleys with a dozen strong fortresses, all of which Hulagu ordered to be taken. The mountain fortress-cities of Mazanderan and Meimundiz fell, and then the main Mongol army turned on the Assassin headquarters at the fortified city of Alamut. When it became obvious that the city would fall within a matter of days, the Assassin grand master Rukn ad-Din Khurshah came to Hulagu’s pavilion to surrender, in the hope of saving his own life. He asked permission to go to Karakorum to negotiate peace terms directly with Mongu Khan, which Hulagu granted. Weeks later at Mongu’s base, Khurshah was refused admission to the court. He was advised to return home to arrange the total submission of all Assassin fortresses before coming to the Khagan. On their way back to Persia, the Assassin grand master and his entire party were murdered.
Mongu also sent a message to Hulagu, criticizing his brother’s negotiations with the Assassins. His orders had been clear: Kill them all. Hulagu complied with the command by overseeing the death of every human being in every Assassin city or town as it was taken. Many members of the sect lived outside the cities in villages or on farms, so word was sent out to all of them to come to a great census-taking. When the rural Assassin familes had assembled, Mongol horsemen with drawn swords rushed in among them and butchered them all. The only Assassins who escaped immediate death were the relatives of the grand master. They were bound and sent off to Jagatai’s widow, so that she might have her personal vengeance by arranging their deaths in any manner that her anger suggested.
While the Mongols were exterminating the Persian Assassins and the Christians were occupied in a civil war, the Mameluke court of Egypt was having its own problems. The first Mameluke sultan, Aibek, had legitimized his rule by marriage to the widowed sultana Shajar ad-Durr; she was a heroine to all Egyptians because of her actions that had saved the country from defeat in the Crusade of Louis of France. She had ruled the country then and saw no reason not to continue to rule now. Aibek felt that he alone should rule and that Shajar ad-Durr should content herself with the traditional role of dutiful wife, a status that conflicted with Shajar ad-Durr’s nature. She was also angrily jealous and had forced Aibek to divorce his first wife, who had borne him a son and heir. Their incessant quarreling increased in intensity until, during one argument, Aibek responded to a verbal attack with a suicidal reply.
He proposed to take another wife, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the emir of Mosul. Shajar objected. Why should he want another wife? “Because,” he replied, “she is not only more beautiful than you, but she is much, much younger.” The insult was more than Shajar was willing to take. She planned carefully for the murder of Sultan Aibek by her faithful eunuch slaves, who drowned the sultan in his bath.
Shajar tried to pass off the drowning as an accident, but under agonizing torture her slaves revealed the truth. Shajar was confined to the Red Tower in Cairo, where she spent her time hammering her jewels to powder, so that no other woman could ever wear them. At the end of three days she was led before Aibek’s first wife, who then sat and watched as the women slaves of her household beat Shajar to death with hundreds of blows of their wooden clogs. They threw her half-naked body out of a tower window into the ditch below, where dogs were allowed to gnaw on the corpse for days, until someone gathered the remains for burial.
Because no crime was considered greater than the murder of the supreme ruler, the forty slave eunuchs involved in Sultan Aibek’s murder were sentenced to a particularly horrible form of punishment. One by one, in full view of the rest, each man was dragged before the executioners, who stood waiting with sharp swords and axes. One by one, each slave took his turn at having his body slowly sliced at the waist and then chopped into two separate parts. While Hulagu was slaughtering the Shiite Assassins in Persia, the Egyptian court paid homage to the new sultan, Nur ad-Din Ali, the frivolous fifteen-year-old son of the murdered sultan Aibek.
Within a matter of weeks Hulagu had completed his extermination of the Persian Assassins and turned his attention to the conquest of Baghdad and the holy caliph. Following his instructions from Mongu, Hulagu first offered the caliph the chance to avoid war and death by total submission to the great Mongol Khan. Once again a leader spoke from a distorted view of his own supremacy. The caliph responded to Hulagu’s demands with, “O young man, who have barely entered upon your career, and who, drunk with a ten day success, believe yourself superior to the whole world, do you not know that from the East to the Maghreb, all the worshippers of Allah, whether kings or beggars, are slaves to this court of mine, and that I can command them to take up arms?”
The defiant response was welcome. The waiting Mongol army desired death, not diplomacy, for the Muslim religious leaders. Hulagu’s assault on Baghdad began in November 1257. In command of his left wing he placed his favorite general, Kitbuqa, a Nestorian Christian whom legend said was descended from one of the three Wise Men who had followed the star to Bethlehem. An attack on the far side of the city would be launched by the troops from the Golden Horde. The caliph sent a small army into the field outside the walls to halt the Mongol advance, but it was quickly hacked to pieces. By January 18 the Mongols had completely surrounded the city.
With the help of siege engines brought all the way from China, the outer wall was breached less than three weeks later. The people of the city surrendered, but the soldiers of the garrison attempted to escape. They were easily surrounded, captured, and bound. To spread the prize they were separated into groups and distributed to each segment of the Mongol army, so that all could share in their execution. The inhabitants were ordered to come outside the city to make their formal submission. Many obeyed, but once they had gathered, they were killed where they stood. They had been murdered outside the city to save the Mongols the bother of having to search them out house-by-house.
At the urging of his favorite wife, who was a devoted Christian, and in deference to his favorite general, the Christian Kitbuqa, Hulagu had permitted the Nestorians to deliver a message into the city, urging all Christians to go to their churches and stay there. These would be the only places where their safety could be guaranteed. Then orders went out to the army to spare only those in the houses of Christian worship.
Everyone else who had stayed in the city died in a massive orgy of looting, rape, and killing that went on for over two weeks, until almost a hundred thousand Muslim bodies covered the fields and streets. The caliph was led to believe that his life would be spared in exchange for revealing the hiding places of treasure that had been accumulating for five hundred years. When the greatest treasure he had ever seen was removed from the city, Hulagu ordered the death of the caliph, although as a mark of respect his death must be bloodless. The solution was to sew him up in a felt bag, which was then galloped over by succeeding troops of cavalry. Perhaps he was lucky enough to die of suffocation before his body was pounded to a pulp by the trampling blows of the Mongol horses.
The Christians were ordered out of the city, which the Mongols then set on fire, destroying what had been for centuries the center of the Sunni faith. The total devastation aroused wails of anguish throughout the Muslim world and brought fresh rays of hope to the Christians. The news indicated that the Mongols were bitter foes of Islam, and thus the saviors of Christianity. The Nestorians, Georgians, Armenians, and Greeks all gave thanks to God in their own services, and Hethoum of Armenia made approaches to Hulagu regarding the ultimate cession of Jerusalem to Christian care.
His request was timely, for now Hulagu proceeded with the next phase of his orders, the conquest of Syria and Egypt. He began with the siege of a city north of Syria (in modern Turkey) called Maiyafaqin, because its emir was proscribed for special punishment. He was al-Kamil Muhammad, a great-nephew of Saladin. His crime was his especially cruel treatment of a Jacobite priest who had been sent by Hulagu as a Mongol envoy. Brought before al-Kamil, the priest was used to demonstrate the young emir’s attitude toward both Mongols and Christians: He was condemned to death by public crucifixion. It did not matter to Hulagu that the victim was a Christian, only that he was a Mongol ambassador.
The siege was conducted by a combined force of Mongols and Georgians, with a contingent of Armenians. Once the city was taken, a special punishment was meted out to al-Kamil. Small pieces of his flesh were cut away and toasted in front of his eyes. As more bits of his own flesh were crammed into his mouth, he had to swallow them to avoid choking. Gagging and bleeding profusely, he must have longed for his death, which was not long in coming.
From his new base in Azerbaijan, Hulagu ordered Hethoum to gather his whole Armenian army for the coming war in Syria, assuring him that when Palestine was taken, Jerusalem would be returned to the Christians. Bohemond VI, prince of Antioch and count of Tripoli, decided to follow Hethoum’s example. He became a voluntary vassal of the Mongols and agreed to provide military support. In spite of their preoccupation with the Latin Christian civil war that had begun at San Sabas, the Knights Templar were following the events at the court of Hulagu closely. The grand master’s secretary, remembered only as the Templar of Tyre, recorded, “Hethoum, King of Armenia, spoke to Hulagu on behalf of Bohemond his son-in-law, and thereafter Bohemond stood high in Hulagu’s favor.”
Hulagu began his advance in September 1259, accompanied by Christian forces from Georgia, Armenia, and Antioch. The first major objective was Aleppo, although they paused to destroy cities along the way. They moved more slowly than usual because Hulagu decided to take with him a large siege train of wagons bearing the parts for twenty-four stone-throwing catapults. As they marched, there was plenty of time for the news of the invasion to reach the Egyptian court at Cairo, where it brought about another change of leadership. The whole Muslim world was in grave danger of annihilation, but the teenage ruler of Egypt spent his happiest hours at cockfights and harem parties. He knew nothing of war.
A man who did, the Mameluke general Qutuz, who had served as principal deputy to Sultan Aibek, deposed the boy and took the throne for himself with no significant opposition. Qutuz justified his action with the sensible announcement, “We need a fighting king.” He made no immediate military move to rescue Syria, but he sent agents to report back to him every step taken by Hulagu’s invading army. They took carrier pigeons with them to assure fast, safe delivery of information to Qutuz.
What the sultan learned first was that the Mongol army had arrived before Aleppo in January 1260. Although the citadel held out for several weeks, the city itself had fallen within seven days. The ruler had been out of the city, so the defense was conducted by Prince Turanshah, an elderly descendant of Saladin. After the city was taken Hulagu spared the old man out of respect for his age and unquestioned bravery. No such mercy, however, was shown to any other Muslim in Aleppo. The Mongol army was rewarded for its victory by being turned loose for five days and nights to rape, kill, and loot, with no restraints or control of any kind.
The Christians in the city were spared, and the Christians with the Mongol army were rewarded. Hethoum received territory previously taken from the Armenians by their Muslim enemies. Prince Bohemond was given all the lands and towns that had ever been a part of the principality of Antioch, lands that had been lost to Saladin generations before. This very substantial restoration of his territories helped to offset the shock that Bohemond felt on learning that the pope in Rome had burdened him with the shame of excommunication. Bohemond’s pope may have been unhappy with the prince’s spiritual crimes, but his people were delighted with his earthly rewards.
The news from Aleppo reduced Damascus to a state of panic and despair. Sultan an-Nasir Yusuf, sparing no thought for the defense of his city or his people, fled with his family across Palestine to Gaza. Citizens anxious to follow his example bid against each other for the available pack animals, until the price of a single camel rose to seven hundred pieces of silver. Many who couldn’t find animals took their most valuable portable possessions and fled on foot, becoming easy prey for the bandits who always spring up in the presence of affluent refugees. Calm was restored after a respected kadi (Koranic judge) went to Hulagu at Aleppo seeking mercy in exchange for surrender. He returned to Damascus with Hugalu’s written declaration of amnesty for all if the gates of the city were opened to him. On March 1, 1260, the Mongol army under Kitbuqa passed unhindered through the gates to occupy Damascus.
As the victorious army moved through the streets, local Christians were relieved to see the Christian contingents from Georgia, Armenia, and Antioch holding crosses on high. The crosses gave the invaders the appearance of a new but quite acceptable form of Crusade. The Templar of Tyre, who would have received his information directly from Templar agents in Damascus, recorded that the Christians were permitted to convert a principal mosque to Christian worship. The Christian Mongol general Kitbuqa gave official sanction by attending the church services personally.
The military garrison of the citadel, which had declined to participate in the surrender, held out until April 6. A formal ceremony was held in which Kitbuqa carried out Hulagu’s direct order that he should personally cut off the head of the governor of the castle. Sultan an-Nasir Yusuf lost his head as well, as a result of his attempt to flee from Gaza. He was captured and sent to Hulagu, who had no use for him.
Next on the Mongol agenda was the conquest of Egypt. Perhaps in the hope of repeating the easy victory at Damascus, Hulagu sent four ambassadors to the court of the sultan Qutuz. The letter, a cold, arrogant challenge, has been summarized by the English historian Sir John Glubb:
“From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. Qutuz is a mameluke who fled to escape our swords. . . . You should think of what happened to other countries . . . and submit your fate to us. We are not moved by tears or touched by lamentations. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Only those who beg our protection will be safe.
“Hasten your reply before the fire of war is kindled. . . . You will suffer the most terrible catastrophes, your countries will become deserts . . . and we will kill your children and your old men together.”
Sultan Qutuz knew full well that to kill a Mongol envoy was to invite immediate war. He ordered the Mongol ambassadors to be cut in half at the waist. Then he had their heads cut off and be nailed to the great Zuwila Gate of Cairo. Now irrevocably committed, he prepared for war with the Mongols.
Once again the course of history was abruptly changed by the death of a Great Khan, which automatically required all princes to attend a Kuriltai to elect his successor. Hulagu answered the call by pulling his main army far back to the east. He left Kitbuqa in charge in Syria with an army of twenty thousand Mongols and orders to continue to press on to Egypt.
Kitbuqa sent a raiding party into Palestine first, cutting the usual Mongol path of rape and murder through Nablus all the way to Gaza, but he stopped short of Jerusalem. The Crusader states were now completely surrounded by the Mongol hordes, although they were in no danger from the Christian Kitbuqa, who apparently expected them to recognize the suzerainty of the Mongol Khan. And so they might have, had it not been for Count Julian of Sidon and Beaufort, whose rash conduct called to mind an earlier occasion and the reckless behavior of Reynald of Chatillon toward Saladin.
Julian was a big, handsome man who had the income of a lord but the personal tastes of an emperor. He was flamboyant in his dress, his equipment, and his entertainment, maintaining a lifestyle far beyond his means. As he ran out of cash he refused to reduce that lifestyle, preferring to turn to the Knights Templar for substantial loans. For collateral they took Julian’s port city of Sidon and later, as his financial demands grew, his sizable castle at Beaufort.
To rebuild his fortune, Julian decided to take advantage of the Mongol-Muslim conflict to raid and loot some nearby Muslim towns and farms. Those Muslim lands were now under Mongol rule, and Kitbuqa took the position that, as administrator of the law, it was his duty to punish the lawbreaker. He sent a small punitive force under a favorite nephew to chastise the count. Julian called upon neighbors to join him, then set up an ambush in the hills. The Mongol police force was taken completely by surprise and scattered rapidly. Kitbuqa’s nephew was killed in the process.
Now Julian’s infraction of the law had become a serious crime. Kitbuqa sent an army this time, which moved all the way up to Sidon, where it plundered the town in wholesale massacre. The offshore Castle of the Sea was saved by reinforcements and supplies brought up from Tyre by a Genoese fleet. Julian had thoroughly ruined any prospect of an alliance between the Mongols and the Crusader states against their common Muslim enemy.
Banking, not battles, now added to the domains of the Knights Templar, as they called the loans against the destitute Julian, occupying the foreclosed properties at Sidon and Beaufort. The new acquisitions, however, hurt almost as much as they helped. The new fortresses meant that Templars had to be called in from already undermanned castles to garrison the new ones. Their available forces were being spread thin, since recruiting at the Templar preceptories throughout Europe had not completely filled the need for more members.
Meanwhile, all was not going well at the Mongol Kuriltai, where two rival factions among the princes were pitting Kublai Khan of China against his younger brother, Ariqboga. Hulagu backed Kublai Khan, but the khan of the nearby Golden Horde favored Ariqboga. Nor did the division stop there. Hulagu had leaned more and more in the direction of the Christians, while the Golden Horde looked favorably on the faith of Islam and did not hesitate to kill or persecute the Christians they encountered in the Caucasus. They disapproved of Hulagu’s actions at Baghdad and in Syria. When war broke out in Mongolia between the followers of Kublai and Ariqboga, Hulagu had to take care that it didn’t develop into a conflict between his own Mongol army and that of his cousins of the Golden Horde, camped to his north.
Sultan Qutuz of Egypt decided to make his move on the Mongols. With the major part of the Mongol army gone and the open conflict between the Mongols and the Christians at Sidon, it seemed to the sultan to be the time to strike.
On July 26, 1260, an Egyptian army began its march, with the Mameluke Baibars commanding the vanguard. His own military strength was sufficient to drive the small Mongol force out of Gaza without waiting for the main Egyptian army, and the war had begun. Kitbuqa, who had established his base to the north at Baalbek (in modern Lebanon), assembled his army and began a march to the south moving down the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee.
Qutuz, who wanted to travel north through the Crusader states to meet Kitbuqa, sent envoys to Acre to get official permission and, if possible, to arrange to purchase supplies along the way. The nobles of Acre were not in complete agreement on the Egyptian requests, nor on much else, for that matter, because their own internal strife was in full swing. They were very concerned about the Mongol raid on Sidon, but the Genoese who had backed Count Julian were not pleased that the Knights Templar had stepped in to repossess the city that Genoa had helped to save, at its own expense. After a long debate, part serious and part petty, the barons agreed to the requests of Qutuz, which they knew would make them open enemies of the Mongols.
Having reached agreement with the Latin Christians, Qutuz led his Egyptian army north to camp on the outskirts of Acre, where the merchants enjoyed a windfall of profits from the cash sale of huge stocks of food and supplies. It was while in camp there that Qutuz learned that the Mongols had circled the Sea of Galilee and were approaching the Jordan River, following the invasion route that Saladin had taken in 1183. Ordering his army to mount up, Qutuz rode southeast to meet them.
As Kitbuqa marched his army west across the Jordan and up the rising slope of the Plain of Esdraelon, Qutuz took his position at Ain Jalut, the “Spring of Goliath,” where the plain narrowed to just three miles wide, with the steep slope of Mount Gilboa to the south and the hills of Galilee to the north. By now Qutuz was aware that he greatly outnumbered the Mongol invaders, so he hid substantial units of cavalry in the nearby hills. Kitbuqa, apparently believing that the army in front of him was the entire Egyptian force, immediately ordered the charge, which he led himself. Riding to meet him, the Egyptian vanguard was led by Baibars.
After a fierce clash that seemed to stop both sides, Baibars signaled his cavalry to make its prearranged retreat to the rolling hills. The Mongols rode triumphantly in pursuit and in a matter of minutes found themselves surrounded, outnumbered and defeated by the Egyptian cavalry reserves hidden in the hills. Brought before Qutuz, Kitbuqa was humiliated and insulted by the sultan’s words to him. Unbowed and proud, the Mongol general replied, “Since I was born I have been the slave of my khan; I am not, like you, the murderer of my master!” Offended by such arrogance in a captive, Qutuz ordered that Kitbuqa’s head be struck off. It was immediately dispatched to Cairo as evidence of the Egyptian victory.
The fleeing Mongols were pursued by the Mameluke cavalry to the west side of the Jordan River, near Beisan. There they decided to make a stand, but by now both men and horses were exhausted and on the verge of collapse. At the first Egyptian attack the Mongols broke and rode off, disorganized, in all directions, in a frantic haste to escape. The Egyptian victory was complete.
It is a rare history class in the west that hears even a mention of the Battle of Ain Jalut, yet it was one of the most significant events to influence the course of the history of the Western world. Had the Mongols succeeded in conquering Egypt, they would have had no problem in storming to victory across North Africa, through all of the modern states of Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. They would have clamped Christian Europe in a ring of iron all the way from Poland to the Straits of Gibraltar, capable of invading from so many different points that no European army could possibly have been positioned to hold them back. (In contrast, the Battle of Ain Jalut is an important event to the history classes in the Middle East, where the name of the battle is also the name of a brigade in the Palestine Liberation army.)
After the victorious Egyptians had retaken Damascus, Aleppo, and the other major cities of Syria, accompanied by the vindictive slaughter of resident Christians, Baibars suggested that his services throughout the campaign entitled him to a special reward. He suggested that he should be given the emirate of Aleppo. Qutuz abruptly dismissed Baibars’s petition, and it soon became obvious that he had no intention of dividing the conquests with any of his victorious generals.
As the conquering army returned to Egypt, it paused for a day of relaxation on the edge of the Nile delta. Qutuz went off on a hunt, taking Baibars and a few other Mameluke generals with him. During a lull in the action one of the generals approached the sultan as though to make a petition. Following the custom, he took the sultan’s hand as though to kiss it, but as soon as he had taken the hand—the sultan’s sword hand—he gripped it tightly. At that moment Baibars, who had come up behind Qutuz with his sword drawn, ran the curved blade through the sultan’s body.
When the triumphant victory parade made its way through the massive gate, greeted by the cheering mob lining the main street of Cairo, the man leading the cavalcade was the new sultan of Egypt, Rukn ad-Din Baibars.