Baybars

• 1. Introduction

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  Baybars was sold into slavery as a boy, watched his parents massacred by the Mongols, and died a sultan who had defeated both the Mongols and the Crusaders. His full name was Al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Bunduqdari, and in his native Turkic tongue his name meant "great panther" or "lord panther." He chose the panther as his personal emblem and stamped it onto coins and buildings across the land he ruled. He was the fourth Mamluk sultan of Egypt and Syria, holding power from 1260 to 1277. He rose from the slave markets of the Sultanate of Rum to command armies that ended the Seventh Crusade and halted the Mongol advance into the Eastern Mediterranean. How did a Kipchak slave become the dominant ruler of the medieval Muslim world? What kind of man could make promises to his enemies and break them without hesitation, then earn the devotion of entire peoples for centuries afterward? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From the Steppe to the Slave Market

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  Baybars was born somewhere in the steppe region north of the Black Sea, in a territory known as Dasht-i Kipchak. His birth year is disputed; one medieval chronicler, Ibn Taghribibirdi, recorded it as falling in 625 AH, which spans late 1227 to late 1228, but also noted that Baybars was about twenty-four years old in 1247, placing his birth closer to 1223. He belonged to a group called the Barli tribe. A fellow Cuman and eyewitness named Badr al-Din Baysari later described what happened: the Barli fled the advancing Mongol armies and attempted to settle in the Second Bulgarian Empire. They crossed the Black Sea from Crimea or Alania and arrived in Bulgaria around 1242. The Mongols followed. Baybars witnessed his parents being massacred during that invasion. He and Baysari were taken captive and sold into slavery at the slave market in Sivas, in the Sultanate of Rum. From there he was sold again, this time in Hama, to an Egyptian of high rank who brought him to Cairo. In 1247, that owner was arrested and the sultan of Egypt, As-Salih Ayyub, confiscated his property, including Baybars. The man who would one day command Egypt had entered it as a seized asset. He had olive skin, blue eyes, broad shoulders, slim legs, and a powerful voice. He also had a cataract in one eye. Those who described him did not describe a broken man.

• 3. The Making of a Commander

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  At the Battle of Al Mansurah in 1250, Baybars demonstrated the tactical intelligence that would define his career. He ordered a gate of the town opened to invite Crusader knights inside, making the city appear deserted. The knights rode in and found themselves enclosed on all sides by Egyptian forces and the town's own population. Robert of Artois, who took shelter in a house during the chaos, was killed. William Longespee the Younger was killed. Most of the Knights Templar died; only five escaped alive. That victory was followed quickly by the Battle of Fariskur, which ended the Seventh Crusade outright and delivered King Louis IX of France into Egyptian captivity. The Egyptian forces at Fariskur were led by Sultan Turanshah, the young son of the recently deceased As-Salih Ayyub. Shortly after that victory, Baybars and a group of Mamluk soldiers assassinated Turanshah. That act placed As-Salih Ayyub's widow Shajar al-Durr on the throne as sultana. Baybars was already learning that military achievement alone was insufficient; power required its own kind of ruthlessness. In 1254, a power shift in Egypt forced him to flee to Syria with another future sultan, Qalawun al-Alfi. By 1257, Baybars and his companions had deposed the governor of Jerusalem, plundered its markets, done the same in Gaza, and fought at Nablus. His years in exile sharpened him. When he was finally invited back to Egypt by Sultan Qutuz ahead of the Mongol threat, he returned not as a refugee but as a seasoned commander whom even a sultan needed.

• 4. Ain Jalut and the Throne

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  At the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, Baybars commanded the Mamluk vanguard against a Mongol army and handed that army its first substantial defeat. The location was significant: a spring in the Jezreel Valley, and the outcome stopped the Mongol expansion from going further into Egypt and North Africa. What followed the victory was as consequential as the battle itself. Sultan Qutuz was assassinated during a hunting expedition shortly afterward. Reports at the time held that Baybars was involved, motivated by his expectation of receiving the governorship of Aleppo as a reward for his battlefield performance. Qutuz, wary of Baybars's ambition, had refused that appointment. Baybars succeeded him. His authority as sultan was confirmed swiftly and without serious internal resistance, with one exception: Alam al-Din Sinjar al-Halabi, a Mamluk amir with enough popularity to claim Damascus for himself. Baybars marched on Damascus. On the 17th of January 1261, his forces routed Sinjar's troops outside the city. The citizens of Damascus were loyal to Sinjar and resisted, but their resistance did not hold. A separate rebellion in Cairo, led by a Shiite figure named al-Kurani, was suppressed quickly; al-Kurani and other rebel leaders were executed at Bab Zuweila. With internal threats neutralized, Baybars turned to a more delicate problem: the Muslim world had been without a caliph since the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. When an Abbasid refugee named Abu al-Qasim Ahmad arrived in Cairo in 1261, Baybars had him proclaimed caliph as al-Mustansir II and received investiture as sultan in return. That caliph died later the same year during an ill-fated attempt to retake Baghdad. A successor, proclaimed as al-Hakim I in 1262, inaugurated a line of Abbasid caliphs based in Cairo that would endure until 1517. The arrangement gave Baybars a legitimizing ceremonial framework, even if most of the Muslim world understood the caliphs as instruments of the sultan's will.

• 5. War Against the Crusaders

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  Baybars's campaigns against the Crusader states ran across most of his reign and were driven, in part, by the fact that several Christian kingdoms had allied with or submitted to the Mongols. He began with the Principality of Antioch, which had participated in attacks on Islamic targets in Damascus and Syria. In 1263, he laid siege to Acre, the capital of the remnant Kingdom of Jerusalem, then abandoned the siege and sacked Nazareth instead. The Fall of Arsuf lasted from the 21st of March to the 30th of April; after breaking into the town, Baybars offered the Knights Hospitaller free passage if they surrendered their citadel. They accepted. He enslaved them anyway and razed the castle. At the fortress of Safed, held by Templar knights, Baybars again promised safe passage to Acre in exchange for surrender. There, he kept the fortress intact because of its strategic value and installed a new governor, but his assurances to the knights did not protect them. In 1266, he invaded the Christian kingdom of Cilician Armenia, whose king, Hethum I, had submitted to the Mongol Empire. After defeating Hethum's forces at the Battle of Mari, Baybars ravaged the cities of Mamistra, Adana, and Tarsus. Hethum was forced to negotiate the release of his son Leo by ceding Armenia's border fortresses to the Mamluks. Hethum abdicated in favor of Leo in 1269 and died a year later. On the 18th of May 1268, Baybars captured Antioch. He had promised to spare the inhabitants. He broke that promise. The city was razed; men, women, and children were killed or enslaved. Contemporary accounts called the massacre at Antioch the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era. Priests were killed inside their churches. Women were sold. The Principality of Antioch ceased to exist. Jaffa fell on the 7th of March after twelve hours of fighting; most of its citizens were killed, though Baybars allowed the garrison to leave unharmed. On the 30th of March 1271, after capturing surrounding castles including Chastel Blanc, Baybars besieged the Krak des Chevaliers, held by the Hospitallers. Peasants sheltering inside were kept in the outer ward. Baybars erected mangonels immediately. Two days in, his forces captured the first line of defenses. After a pause of ten days, the garrison received a letter purportedly from the Grand Master of the Hospitallers in Tripoli, Hugues de Revel, granting them permission to surrender. Whether the letter was genuine or a forgery Baybars arranged, the garrison capitulated. Their lives were spared. The Hospitaller chapel inside was converted to a mosque and fitted with two mihrabs. When the Ninth Crusade arrived in Acre in May 1271, led by Prince Edward of England, Baybars declared a truce and waited. Edward was never able to take any territory from him. According to some accounts, Baybars attempted to have Edward assassinated by poison. Edward survived and left in 1272.

• 6. The Mongol Diplomacy

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  Baybars understood that defeating the Mongols on the battlefield was only one part of the problem. He pursued a sustained diplomatic relationship with the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that sat to the north and was a rival of the Ilkhanate, which threatened Egypt and Syria from the east. He warmly received the first two hundred Golden Horde soldiers who visited Egypt and worked to convert them to Islam. When Berke, the Khan of the Golden Horde, converted to Islam, he sent word to Egypt. Baybars arranged for more Golden Horde people to travel to Egypt, where they also converted. In around October to November 1267, Baybars wrote to the new Golden Horde Khan, Mengu-Timur, urging him to fight the Ilkhanate leader Abaqa. He kept close correspondence with Mengu-Timur's general Noqai, who was Muslim and unusually cooperative. Baybars was deliberate about not becoming entangled in the internal politics of the Golden Horde, staying on good terms with both Mengu-Timur and Noqai simultaneously. He also brought the Assassin fortresses under Mamluk control by 1271, taking Masyaf, al-Ullaiqah, ar-Rusafa, and eventually all remaining strongholds. Once the Assassins were under his authority, Baybars used them as an operational instrument against incoming Crusader forces during the Ninth Crusade. In 1277, he invaded the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, then controlled by the Ilkhanate Mongols, and defeated a Mongol army at the Battle of Elbistan. After the battle, he said that "How can I be happy? Before I had thought that I and my servants would defeat the Mongols, but my left wing was beaten by them. Only Allah helped us." His acknowledgment of near-failure in victory was unusual for a ruler of his standing.

• 7. Nubia and the South

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  In 1272, King David of Makuria marched east and attacked the port town of Aidhab, a stop on the pilgrimage route to Mecca. The destruction of Aidhab was described at the time as a blow to the very heart of Islam. A Mamluk punitive expedition was sent but did not reach beyond the second cataract. Three years later the Makurians attacked and destroyed Aswan. This time Baybars responded differently. He set off from Cairo in early 1276 with a well-equipped army, accompanied by Mashkouda, a cousin of King David. The Mamluks defeated the Nubians in three successive engagements: at Gebel Adda, at Meinarti, and finally at the Battle of Dongola. David fled south along the Nile into a territory called al-Abwab, a former province of Alodia that had by then become an independent kingdom. The king of al-Abwab handed David over to Baybars, who had him executed. Under the terms Baybars imposed, Makuria was required to pay the jizya tribute. In exchange, its people were permitted to keep their religion and were recognized as People of the Book under Islamic law. They were also allowed to keep a king from their own royal family, but the specific king was chosen by Baybars himself: a Makurian noble named Shakanda. Makuria had become a vassal state. Its existence as an independent kingdom was over.

• 8. Legacy and Death

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  Baybars died in Damascus on the 30th of June 1277, at age fifty-three. The circumstances of his death have drawn academic debate ever since. The most widely reported account holds that he drank poisoned kumis that had been prepared for someone else. Other accounts suggest he died from a wound sustained while campaigning, or from illness. He was buried in the Az-Zahiriyah Library in Damascus, a building that still holds a wealth of manuscripts across many fields of knowledge. He left behind a cat garden in Cairo as a waqf, an endowment that provided Cairo's cats with food and shelter. He had commissioned a mounted message relay capable of carrying dispatches from Cairo to Damascus in four days. He had built bridges, irrigation and shipping canals, improved harbors, and built mosques. He supported the medical research of his Arab physician, Ibn al-Nafis. His memoirs were recorded in Sirat al-Zahir Baibars, a popular Arabic romance that documented his battles and achievements. The medieval Christian world largely reviled him for his conduct against the Crusader states. In the Muslim world, he has been regarded as a national hero for centuries; in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Kazakhstan, that reputation endures. He was also, according to some historians, arguably the first to deploy explosive hand cannons in war, at Ain Jalut, though that claim is disputed by scholars who place the arrival of hand cannons in the Middle East no earlier than the fourteenth century. His school, Al-Madrassa al-Zahiriyya, was built directly adjacent to his mausoleum in Damascus, placing education and burial in the same precinct.