Mamluks Defeat Mongols

In September 1260, a Mamluk army from Egypt defeated a Mongol force at Ain Jalut ("Spring of Goliath") in the Jezreel Valley of Palestine. The battle did not end Mongol power, which remained immense, but it halted the Mongol advance into the Levant and North Africa and established the Mamluk Sultanate as the leading Muslim power of the eastern Mediterranean. The older description of it as the first major Mongol defeat is an oversimplification, since Mongol armies had suffered earlier reverses, but it was a rare and consequential check on their westward expansion.

The background lay in the Mongol conquests of the Middle East. In 1258, a Mongol army under Hulagu Khan captured Baghdad and ended the Abbasid Caliphate, killing the caliph and a great many of the city's inhabitants. Mongol forces then moved into Syria, taking Aleppo and Damascus in 1260. Several Muslim and Christian rulers in the region submitted or allied with the Mongols. Hulagu sent envoys to Cairo demanding submission, and the Mamluks, a military elite of former slave soldiers who had seized power in Egypt a few years earlier, reportedly executed them.

The timing favored the defenders. News arrived that the Great Khan Möngke had died, prompting Hulagu to withdraw with much of his army to take part in the succession question. He left a smaller force in Syria under the commander Kitbuqa. The Mamluk sultan Qutuz, supported by the general Baibars, marched out of Egypt and advanced up the coast. Crusader states in the region, though wary of the Mongols, did not oppose the Mamluk passage and allowed them to obtain supplies.

Accounts of the battle itself are limited and partly conflicting. The Mamluks seem to have used the terrain and a feigned retreat, tactics the Mongols themselves often employed, to draw their opponents into an unfavorable fight. Kitbuqa was killed, and the Mongol force was broken. Historians debate the relative sizes of the armies, and older claims that the Mongols were heavily outnumbered are now treated cautiously. Qutuz was assassinated on his way back to Egypt, and Baibars soon took the throne.

The consequences were lasting. Mamluk forces retook Damascus and Aleppo, and Syria came under Mamluk control. The Mongols returned in later campaigns, and there were further clashes over the following decades, but they never conquered Egypt. Under Baibars and his successors, the Mamluks went on to eliminate the remaining Crusader strongholds, culminating in the fall of Acre in 1291. Cairo also became a center of Islamic learning and a refuge for Abbasid claimants after Baghdad's destruction. Meanwhile, the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia and the Golden Horde to the north increasingly turned against each other, which further limited Mongol ambitions in the region.