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Shahed
08-17-2003, 00:22
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Just found this on the net and felt it should be right here for all to read. I bring it to you for you to enjoy, and discuss. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

THE MONGOLS MEET THEIR MATCH: THE BATTLE OF AIN JALUT

Written by David W. Tschanz

Thirteenth century Cairo glistened jewel-like on the banks of the Nile. The winter of 1260 had given way to spring and the first touch of the coming summer heat hung in the air. Most of the city's inhabitants went about their daily business unaware that anything special was happening. A few other gossiped, gesturing towards the Sultan's palace and speculating on the meaning behind the strange envoy that now had the attention of Sultan Saif Al-Din Qutuz and his generals.

In the palace, Qutuz shifted uneasily in his chair and beheld the four men before him with a mixture of hatred and justifiable anxiety. The emissaries represented the Mongol prince Hulegu Khan and they laid before Qutuz a letter. It was not written in the tone by which one head of state normally addressed another:

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 arms 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 we will kill your children and your old men together. At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.

The Mongol ambassadors and Qutuz considered one another for long moments.Then Qutuz withdrew, commanding his Mamluk generals to follow him. The Mongols merely smiled.

The impromptu council of war was a somber affair as Qutuz's principal officers recounted the sober facts of the Mongol advance Qutuz reflected on the situation. A proud, decisive man he was not used to being addressed in terms of a coldly arrogant ultimatum. But he was also a realist, to his generals he admitted the Mamluks were probably no match for the Mongols. The commanders agreed and recommended capitulating to the Mongol demands.

But Qutuz's own opinion differed. The Sultan had come to power by knowing how and when to act. Observing the dissolute and vapid character of the 15 year old Ayubbid Sultan Nur al-Din Ali ibn Aibak in the face of the Mongol threat, Qutuz had deposed him the previous October. "Egypt needs a warrior as its king," he explained. To submit now would be an act of cowardice and treachery. He would not surrender, he defiantly told them. "If no one else will come I will go and fight the Tatars alone."

He barked out orders to his guards, who promptly seized the envoys. The Mongols, he knew, considered ambassadors to be untouchable. They treated those sent to them with utmost respect and expected theirs to be treated the same. To harm one they considered an act of unforgivable treachery. Qutuz commanded the ambassadors be cut in half at the waist, then decapitated and their heads placed on Cairo's great Zuwila Gate. The Mamluks were now bloodily and irrevocably committed to war with the Mongols.


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In the ensuing months, the events triggered that day by Qutuz would create a maelstrom whose center would come to rest at Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, where legend held that the shepherd David slew the Philistine giant Goliath.

Enraged Hulegu Khan gathered the horde for war for war while Qutuz made peace with old enemies and prepared Cairo for the inevitable onslaught. The fate of Islam as a political force was hung by a thread.

Then fate intervened. Hulegu Khan fell back to Iran on the news of the death of the Great Khan Monge, leaving a portion of the army under the command of a Christian general, Kitbuqa, who claimed descent from one of the Three Wise Men who visited the infant Jesus, while he contested for Mongol leadership. Emboldened Qutuz advanced, making overtures to the Crusader leaders who were being courted into an alliance by the Mongols against the "hated Muslims". As they wavered a papal decree, based largely on the opinions of a clerical spy, arrived in the Holy Land settling the issue.

The battle that followed was epochal, not in the way it was fought, but in the outcome and the ripples it sent through the world and the shaping of its history.

The clash of Mongol and Mamluk at Ain Jalut was one of the most significant battles in world history, yet it is a rare Western history class that even hears mention of it, even though it was as important for Western civilization as those fought at Marathon, Salamis, Lepanto, Chalons and Tours. Had the Mongols succeeded in conquering Egypt, they would have been able to storm across North Africa to the Straits of Gilbraltar. Europe would have been clamped in an iron ring all the way from Poland to the Mediterranean. The Mongols would have been able to invade from so many points that it is unlikely that any European army could have been positioned to hold them back.

Instead, the Mamluks stopped the westward Mongol advance and smashed the myth of Mongol invincibility. Qutuz's superior generalship had shown the vaunted Mongols were just as fallible as any army. The psychological impact worked both ways.

The Mongols were shaken. Their belief in themselves was never quite the same and Ain Jalut marked the end of any concerted campaign by the Mongols in the Levant. Except for a few small contingents sent into Syria to conduct revenge raids, the Mongols never attempted a reconquest of the lands that Sultan Qutuz had wrested from them.

The Muslim victory also saved Cairo from the the fate of Baghdad; destroyed the last hope of a Christian restoration in the Middle East; doomed the remaining Crusader states; and raised Mamluk Egypt to the status of leading Muslim power and the home of what was left of Arabic culture and learning.


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The Mongol Response

In mid-February Hulegu's vast army once again began to stir to life as he made preparations for the march on Egypt. The Mamluks, who numbered about 20,000, took steps to defend Egypt against the expected assault. Then fate intervened.

A messenger brought word to Hulegu that the Great Khan, Monge, had died. In keeping with Mongol tradition all the princes, including Hulegu, were summoned to Mongolia to attend a Kuriltai (Council) to elect his successor. Ironically the death of the previous Khan had caused the westernmost armies to pull back after conquering the Poles.

Qutuz also gained an unexpected ally. During his rise to power the sultan had murdered the leader of the Bahri Mamluks, Aqtay, earning the lasting enmity of the faction and its leader, Baibars. Baibars had withdrawn with a group of supporters to Syria from where he had been launching raids on Egypt. Qutuz and Baibars looked on each other with contempt, loathing and distrust. Nevertheless they realized that a Mongol victory would mean their mutual destruction. When Damascus fell, Baibars offered his support, which Qutuz accepted in early March.

Meanwhile Hulegu pulled his main army back to Maragheh, leaving Kitbuqa in Syria with two tumens or about 15-20,000 Mongols. Kitbuqa was ordered to press on to Egypt. A raiding party was sent into Palestine, cutting the usual Mongol path of pillage and slaughter through Nablus all the way to Gaza, but on Kitbuqa's orders, it did not attack the narrow strip of Crusader-held territory along the coast.

The Crusaders, who were too weak to provide any significant resistance against the Mongols on their own, were embroiled in a bitter debate over whether or not to ally themselves with the invaders. Some, like Anno von Sangerhausen, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, favored a Christian-Mongol coalition; others were as vehemently opposed. Kitbuqa hoped his show of charity would sway the argument in favor of the Mongols. He badly misunderstood them.

Two Crusaders leaders, John of Beirut and Julian of Sidon, responded with raids on the new Mongol-held territories. Kitbuqa sent a punitive expedition against Sidon. On entering the town the Mongols plundered the town and massacred its citizens. Only the Castle of the Sea and its garrison held out. Christian ardor for the Mongol cause cooled considerably. It turned frigid when word reached the Crusaders that another Mongol army under Burundai had invaded Poland. Almost simultaneously the French king Louis IX's envoy to the Mongols, William of Rubruck, returned from Mongolia with a complete report on the invaders. After reading it Pope Alexander IV sent word throughout Christendom. The Mongols were pagan, brutal savages who were not to be trusted he declared. Anyone making an alliance with them would be excommunicated. The matter of a Mongol alliance was settled for the Latin Christians.



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Qutuz Advances

When news reached Qutuz of Hulegu's withdrawal, he realized the military landscape had been completely transformed. He ordered a halt to defensive preparations and commanded his men to prepare to advance against the Mongols. In another audacious move he sent envoys to the Crusader leaders in Acre asking for safe passage and the right to purchase supplies.

For the surprised Franks the request presented a thorny question. To cooperate with Qutuz would mark the Crusaders as enemies of the Mongols, opening all their territory to the wrath of the Hordes - the full strength of which they knew they could not resist. On the other hand, Qutuz was the only hope of ridding the region of the foreign invaders. After a lengthy debate the Egyptian request was agreed to.

On July 26, 1260, the Egyptian army began its advance. Near Gaza, Baibars, in command of the vanguard, encountered and destroyed a small Mongol force on long range patrol. The war had begun.

Kitbuqa, from his base at Baalbek in modern Lebanon, assembled his army and began a march to the south, moving down the eastern side of Lake Tiberias.

Qutuz led his army north and eventually reached the outskirts of Acre. There, while the nervous Crusader leaders watched his army pitch their tents in the shadow of the city, he planned his next move and purchased supplies. Word soon arrived that the Mongols, and a large contingent of native Syrian conscripts, had circled Lake Tiberias and were approaching the Jordan River, following the same invasion route used by Saladin in 1183. Qutuz ordered the army southeast to meet them.

On September 3rd, Kitbuqa turned west across the Jordan and up the rising slope to the Plain of Esdraelon. Qutuz established positions at Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath (where local tradition held that David had slew Goliath). There the vast plain narrowed to just under five kilometers wide, protected on the south by the steep slope of Mount Gilboa and by the hills of Galilee on the north. Qutuz placed units of Mamluk cavalry in the surrounding hills, while ordering Baibars and the vanguard forward.

The Mamluks approached the coming battle with a desperate sense that there was no alternative to victory. One more significant Mongol victory and Islam, as a political power, was finished.

Ghengis Khan's policy of remorseless brutality and no mercy might have been effective in paralyzing lesser men, it had stiffened the resolve of the Mamluks and reinforced their determination. Before the advance, Qutuz, in a speech that brought tears to the eyes of his men, reminded them of the nature of Tatar savagery. There was no alternative to fighting, he said, "except a horrible death for themselves, their wives and their children." It steeled the souls of the Mamluks for the coming battle against an enemy that had never tasted defeat




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The Spring of Goliath

Baibars advanced quickly and made contact with Kitbuqa's force coming towards Ain Jalut. Seeing Baibars' force, Kitbuqa mistook it for the entire Mamluk army and ordered his men to charge, leading the attack himself. The two armies collided and both seemed to stop in the fierce clash that followed. Then Baibars ordered a retreat. The Mongols rode triumphantly in pursuit, victory in their grasp.

When they reached the springs, Baibars ordered his army to wheel and face the enemy. Only then did the Mongols realize they had been tricked by one of their own favorite tactics: the feigned retreat. As Baibars re-engaged the Mongols, Qutuz ordered the reserve cavalry out from its hiding places in the foothills and slopes and against the Mongol flanks.

Realizing that he was now committed to a battle with the entire Mamluk army, Kitbuqa ordered his ranks to charge the Muslim left flank. The Mamluks held, wavered, held again but eventually were turned, cracking under the ferocity of the Mongol assault.

As the Mamluk wing threatened to dissolve and it appeared the entire army might be routed, Qutuz rode to the site of the fiercest fighting and threw his helmet to the ground so the entire army could recognize his face. "O Muslims" he shouted three times in stentorian tones. His shaken troops rallied and the flank held. As the line solidified, Qutuz led a countercharge sweeping back the Mongol squadrons.

Kitbuqa was now faced with a deteriorating situation. When one subordinate suggested a withdrawal his response was brief: "We must die here and that is the end of it. Long life and happiness to the Khan."

Despite the relentless Mamluk pressure, Kitbuqa continued to rally his men. Then his horse took an arrow and he was thrown to the ground. Captured by nearby Mamluk soldiers he was taken to the Sultan amidst the sounds of battle. "After overthrowing so many dynasties you are caught at last I see," Qutuz exulted.

Kitbuqa, for his part, was still defiant - "If you kill me now, when Hulegu Khan hears of my death, all the country from Azerbijan to Egypt will be trampled beneath the hoofs of Mongol horses." In a move calculated to insult his captor, Kitbuqa added "All my life I have been a slave of the khan. I am not, like you, a murderer of my master" Qutuz ordered Kitbuqa executed and his head sent to Cairo as proof of the Muslim victory.

With their leader gone, the remaining Mongols fled 12 kilometers to the town of Beisan where they drew up to face the pursuing Mamluk cavalry. The resulting clash broke the remnants of the Mongol force and the few that could escaped crossed the Euphrates. Within days the victorious Qutuz re-entered Damascus in triumph, and the Egyptians moved on to liberate Aleppo and the other major cities of Syria.

Epilogue

For Qutuz, the ecstasy of victory was relatively short lived. After Aleppo was retaken, Baibars suggested that he be given the emirate of the region as recognition of his contributions. Qutuz refused. Baibars sulked.

When the Mamluk army was only a few days from its triumphal return to Cairo, Baibars went to see Qutuz on a matter of state. Reaching out in greeting he grabbed the Sultan's sword hand and withdrew a dagger from his belt then drove it into Qutuz' heart. When the army entered Cairo, Baibars rode at their head as Sultan - destined to be the greatest of all Mamluk warriors. But that is another story.



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The Mongol Tide

In the early part of the 13th century a new power appeared on the world stage, as Genghis Khan, the Mongolian warlord, organized his people for war and conquest. From a tiny insignificant kingdom in north central Asia, in less than two generations all the land from Vietnam to Poland would be trodden beneath the hooves of their cavalry, and the Mongols would leave an indelible mark on history - one characterized by slaughter, destruction and savagery. The medieval Islamic civilization would suffer crippling blows from their appearance and the ripples of the Mongol avalanche of destruction.

As the Mongols encountered the eastern Islamic world they wrought havoc. Samarkand, Bukhara and countless towns in between were leveled, their populations killed or enslaved. Nothing was able to stem the Mongol advance.

In 1253 Hulegu Khan, brother of the Great Khan Monge and a grandson of Ghengis Khan, had been told to gather his forces and move into Syria "as far as the borders of Egypt." His mission to conquer and annex the lands as part of Ghengis Khan's schema -- the entire world united under Mongol rule. Scholars debate the exact size Hulegu's force but it was enormous by the standards of the time. The ordu (horde) was comprised of approximately 300,000 warriors, who rode their ponies across the steppes to great effect. Adding women, children and other noncombatants the entire host numbered, by conservative estimate, about 2 million in all. It was not an army, it was more like a force of nature.

The Mongols arrived in Persia in 1256 and set about settling an old score. A few years earlier the Mongols had discovered a plot to send 400 dagger-wielding Assassins in disguise to their capital Qaraqorum with instructions to murder the Great Khan. It was a formidable task the Mongols had taken on, for over 100 years this Ismaili sect had terrorized the region. Their leader, Rukn ad-Din, was preceded by a herald who declared, "Make way for he who holds the life of kings in his hands." The 200 Assassin fortresses, called "eagle's nest" were placed in inaccessible locations atop mountains and rocky crags and considered impregnable. Crusader princes, atabeqs, emirs and even Saladin himself had been forced to come to terms with them or suffer the consequences.

Now the Mongols moved through the Elbruz mountains remorselessly seeking them out. For two years the Mongols moved from fortress to fortress with workmanlike efficiency. Chinese engineers set up siege engines and one by the one the eagle's nests fell. Hulegu showed no mercy, when a fortress was taken all the occupants, whether able-bodied men or babies in their cradles, were put to the sword. By the end of the campaign the Assassins were totally destroyed and Rukn ad-Din taken in chains to the Great Khan who had him executed.

The Assassins eliminated, Hulegu turned his attention to Mesopotamia and Baghdad. The Abassid capital was no longer the center of political power in the Islamic world, but it was still its intellectual heartland. Through a combination of Mongol skill, caliphal foolishness and treachery, Baghdad was captured, sacked and burned to its foundations in February 1258.

Hulegu now fell back to Tabriz while the aftershocks from Baghdad's fall shook the entire Islamic world. Emirs and sheiks along the Mongols' line of advance came and did homage. One, Kai Kawus, gave Hulegu a pair of sandals with the emir's face painted on the soles so the Khan could walk on his face.

Among those offering an alliance to Hulegu was Hayton, the Christian king of Armenia. Hayton thought of the Mongols as a new Crusade to free Jerusalem from the Muslims. This perception was encouraged by Hulegu's chief lieutenant, Kitbuqa who was not only a Christina but claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the three Magi who had brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Following his visit to the Mongol leader Hayton sent messages to his Crusader neighbors that Hulegu was about to be baptized a Christian and strongly urged they too ally themselves with this new force and turn it to the Crusader cause.

Only Kamil Muhammad, the emir of Mayyafarakin, had defied the Mongols, responding to their envoy's demand for submission by crucifying him. Hulegu dispatched a part of his army to the town and quickly breached its walls While Kamil Muhammad watched every living thing was killed. Then he was bound and pieces of his skin cut off, broiled over an open flame and fed to him piece by piece.

In September 1259 Hulegu moved again, gathering up all of Mesopotamia east of the Tigris in a lightning operation, then crossing the Euphrates on a pontoon bridge made of boats at Manbij. Word of the Mongol movement reached Sultan Al-Nasir, lord of Syria, who offered to submit to the coming army. Hulegu brushed it aside. Submission was not enough, the sultan was told, he was "doomed to fall."

Al-Nasir organized the defense of Aleppo then fell back to prepare Damascus. The Mongol army, 300,000 strong, arrived on January 13, 1260. Engineers set up catapults and the city fell in a matter of days. Aleppo suffered Baghdad's fate. The men were put to the sword and the women and children were marched to the slave markets of Karakorum. The city citadel, under the command of the elderly Turan Shah, held out for another month. Then, realizing there was no hope of rescue, it finally surrendered. In a rare act of compassion Hulegu ordered Turna Shah's life spared in recognition of his age and courage. The rest of the garrison was executed.

The fate of Aleppo rested heavy on Damascene minds and the citizens drove Al-Nasir out of the city, then sent their unconditional surrender to the advancing Mongols. Hulegu entered the city accompanied by Kitbuqa, Hayton and the Crusader Prince of Antioch, Bohemond IV, who had heeded Hayton's advice. A mosque was hastily converted to a church and a service celebrated there. Then Hulegu, with typical Mongol indifference to religion forced Bohemond, a Latin Christian, to name a Greek Orthodox Patriarch religious head of Antioch.

Al Nasir fled towards Egypt but Mongol soldiers hunted him through Samaria finally catching up with him near Gaza where he was captured and taken to Huelgu's court in chains.

Hard on their heels the Mongol envoys had come to Egypt and handed Qutuz a demand for submission.



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The Destruction of Baghdad

In 1258, Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulegu Khan, turned his army of 300,000 southwards from Azerbaijan. The orders of the Great Khan were clear. All the land southwards was to be placed under Mongol rule. The first major city in his path was Baghdad, indisputably the greatest city in the Islamic world.

For several years the Abbasids, under the Caliph Mustansir had repulsed Mongols raids into Mesopotamia. But with Mustansir's death in 1242, the caliphate had passed to his son Mustasim. Frivolous and cowardly he was exploited by ruthless officials who had gotten used to running the city while Mustasim concentrated on spiritual affairs.

Mustasim's vizier, Ibn al-Alkami assured him that the oncoming Mongol threat was small and Baghdad's defenses more than adequate. Bolstered by this assessment Mustasim scoffed at the Hulegu's demand that the caliph do obeisance and dismantle Baghdad's walls, telling the khan's envoy "When you have pulled off the hoofs from your horse's feet, we will demolish our fortresses." But unknown to Mustasim, al-Alkami was sending secret messages to Hulegu, urging him to attack and describing the true and pitiful state of the city's defenses. Persian accounts of this treachery contend that the chief minister, a Shia Muslim, had been motivated by his resentment of the Caliph's persecution of his Shia brethren. In the meantime ambassadors rode back and forth, offering to pay tribute to Hulegu but refusing to surrender, while behind the city walls there was growing fear and confusion.

Hulegu finally grew impatient with Mustasim's temporizing and commenced military operations. Joining Hulegu were Christian Georgians who saw an opportunity for plunder and revenge -- and since Hulegu's wife Doquz-khatun, was a Christian, some of them believed the Mongols were really on a new Crusade to free the "holy land" of the infidel.

With the Mongols only a day away, Mustasim finally woke to the peril. Orders were given to repair the walls and a contingent of 20,000 troops was sent to confront the enemy. As they camped in the fields in sight of the city walls the Mongols surprised them by smashing the dams and dikes nearby and flooding the encampment. Those who did not drown were cut to pieces by the Mongol cavalry.

The Mongol forces next moved into the western suburbs. On the eastern side, Hulegu's engineers used immense gangs of prisoner-slaves to construct a ditch and a rampart that eventually surrounded the city "like a bracelet round the arm of a girl." On January 30th the bombardment of Baghdad began. Events had moved so swiftly that the carts bringing up ammunition, hewn from the Jebel Hamrin Mountains, were still three days away. So the artillery units improvised with stumps of palm trees and foundations from the occupied suburbs.

Mustasim sent a message to Hulegu accepting all the khan's terms, but was curtly told the time for negotiation was past. The heaviest bombardment was directed against the southeast corner of the walls and by February 1st, the third day of the bombardment, the Persian Tower was in ruins. On February 6th, the Mongols stormed and took the east wall. There they remained, as gradually the city surrendered.

Mustasim continued to send envoy after envoy to Hulegu to beg for terms, but they were refused an audience. Instead Hulegu demanded that the commander of the caliph's army and the deputy vizier order the withdrawal of the Muslim army from the city. The two leaders accomplished the task by telling the troops that they would be allowed to march away to Syria. As soon as the whole army was assembled on the plain outside the walls, the Mongols closed round them and killed them all, then the army commander and deputy vizier were also killed. Baghdad, without one soldier left to defend it, lay entirely at Hulegu's mercy.

On February 10th, Mustasim, his three sons and a retinue of about 3000 nobles went to Hulegu's camp. They were received courteously. Mustasim was commanded to order the inhabitant to evacuate the city. The caliph sent messengers to Baghdad proclaiming that all who wished to save their lives should come out of the city unarmed. Vast crowds of people herded out through the city gates. As soon as they were gathered together on open ground they were mercilessly butchered. The number killed varies according to the source Persian accounts claim between 800,000 and 2 million slaughtered, while Hulegu, in a letter to Louis IX of France, boasted of 200,000 slain. In a display of the discipline which explains much of their success, Mongol troops had stood on the walls of the helpless city awaiting orders. On the 13th the Mongols entered the city in several columns at different points and told to do as they wished. What they wished was destruction and mayhem. Magnificent mosques were toppled; palace after palace was looted in the orgy of destruction that was the sack of Baghdad.

Though the city had lost its commercial preeminence, it remained an important cultural, spiritual and intellectual center. The city held more than thirty colleges, among them the Mustansiriya, the best appointed university in the world. The cityscape was dotted with magnificent mosques, vast libraries of Persian and Arabian literature, plus numerous palaces belonging to the Caliph and his family and perhaps one of the greatest personal treasures to be found anywhere. It was the greatest city the Mongols conquered in the Middle East, and into this oasis of civilization they brought sword and torch. Books were dumped into the Tigris until it ran black from their ink.

Most of the surviving women and children were herded together and transported to Qaraqorum, as was the wealth of the Caliph's treasure house.

On the 15th, while the pillage was underway, Hulegu visited Mustasim's palace and forced the caliph to host a banquet for the Mongol leaders while the city burned and the cries from the street echoed into the night. Mustasim was forced to surrender all his treasures of gold, silver, and jewels. A Muslim Mongol had warned Hulegu against killing Mustasim, saying that if "a drop of the caliph's blood touched the earth it would mean eternal damnation." Hulegu heeded the warning. When dinner was over he had Mustasim and his sons sewn into Mongol carpets then trampled beneath the hooves of the Mongol cavalry. The caliph's blood did not touch the earth.

Baghdad's agony lasted for seven days. On February 20th Hulegu was forced to strike his tents and march his army away because of the stench of rotting corpses hanging over the smoking rubble that marked what was left of the once great city.

Civilization Undone

The Mongols would move south from Baghdad, destroy Aleppo and occupy Damascus, only to be turned back on their way to Cairo by the Mamluks at ‘Ain Jalut. The nomad rulers from the steppes would control the land east of the Euphrates for several more decades before being driven out.

The havoc the Mongols wrought was not limited merely to the cities and townspeople. The complex irrigation systems of places like Khurasan (north of Persia), Persia itself, and Iraq (Mesopotamia) -- the product of up to 5,000 years of collective efforts that turned desert and grassland into probably the most productive agricultural lands on earth -- sustained extensive damage. In many places the irrigated area has still not returned to pre-Mongol level. Aerial photography, indicates that Iraq today probably irrigates and farms no more than 60% of the agricultural land in use under the Abbasid caliphs ca. 800.

Mongol rule, with its casual attitude toward farming and heavy taxation of peasants also discouraged repair. Iraq, which had enjoyed millennia of agriculture surplus as long ago as 3500 BCE drifted down to an agriculture that barely provided for subsistence. The evidence, suggests a catastrophic population drop which was every bit the equivalent of the worst disasters in history. Studies of the Iraqi province of Diyala, near Baghdad, indicate that this province, which probably had almost 900,000 inhabitants in the days of the Abbasids ca. 800, supported only around 60,000 persons ca. 1300 under Mongol rule. This 90% drop in population put the province back to the population levels of 1500 B.C. Apparently, less than half the land which had been cultivated in that province under the Abbasids could still be farmed in 1300. Nor was this province an isolated or extreme case. An Ottoman census of 1519 in what is modern Syria and Palestine shows fewer than 600,000 people living in an area that had a population of about 4 million in the days of the Arab Empire.

Military historian James Dunnigan showed that the impact of the Mongol invasions was world wide (see Table 1). In addition to outright slaughter, disease and starvation always followed in the wake of Mongol armies. Houses and farm equipment were destroyed on a vast scale. Since medieval farmers lived on the edge of survival; one or two bad harvests almost guaranteed mass starvation and death from disease. And this was not an accident, "the Mongols saw such destruction of agricultural resources as a means to prevent their victims from recovering and fighting back."

The wide ranging campaigns of the Mongols brought an even more deadly force into play. Epidemic diseases that had long stayed in one region, were now carried by the rapidly moving Mongol armies to places where the locals had no resistance to these alien plagues. The Black Death is the best known of these afflictions, but certainly not the only one.

The Mongol invasions and their subsequent rule in the lands east of the Euphrates left a legacy of shattered cities, population decline, and overturned technology that undercut the basis for prosperity and success that had sustained the Middle East for five thousand years.

Table 1. Population (in millions) for various regions at the beginning of 13th & 14th centuries
Year Region AD 1200 AD 1300 % Change
China 115.00 86.00 -25.2%
Korea 4.00 3.00 -25.0%
Manchuria 4.50 4.80 1.1%
East Turkestan 2.20 2.30 4.5%
Iran 5.00 3.50 -30.0%
Afghanistan 2.50 1.75 -30.0%
Iraq 1.50 1.00 -33.3%
Europe 58.00 79.00 36.2%
India 86.00 91.00 5.8%
Total 278.70 272.35 --




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Mongol Tactics

The Mongols were like a force of nature: unstoppable, punishing and devastating. In less than two generations they had spread from their tiny, insignificant homeland to trample all the land from Korea to Poland beneath the hooves of their cavalry.

The keys to this string of Mongol victories were superiority in training, discipline, reconnaissance, mobility, and communications, each honed to a level unheard of in any other pre-twentieth century army.

All men over the age of fourteen were enrolled in the military. When summoned they were expected to leave their flocks and homes, taken with them four or five changes of horses and travel to wherever the unit happened to be located. Wives and children were expected to follow with the herds.

The military camp was always laid out in a standard pattern and the troops grouped in units organized in decimal fashion. The basic group of ten was called an arban, ten arban made a jagun and so on up to 100,000 men called an ordu (from which came the word horde).

Training and drilling in riding and archery were primary components of the Mongol way of war and the troops were magnificently disciplined at a time when most armies were little more than quasi-organized rabble.

Mongol troops dressed and traveled very light. Each man wore a silk undershirt, atop which he wore a tunic. Members of the heavy cavalry would also wear chain mail and a cuirass made of leather covered iron scales. Each man carried a leather covered wicker shield and a helmet of either leather or iron depending on his rank. Weapons consisted of two composite bows, sixty arrows. Light cavalry carried a small sword and two or three javelins while the heavy force was equipped with scimitar, mace and a 4 meter (12 foot) lance. Soldiers also carried clothing, cook pots, dried meat, water and other smaller material. The saddlebag was made from a cow's stomach which, being waterproof and inflatable, could be used as a float when crossing rivers. The lightly encumbered cavalry was thus able to consistently advance up to 100 miles per day.

One of the great advantages the Mongols had was an extremely effective and reliable system of communications and coordination based on flags, torches and riders who carried messages over great distances, often changing horses in mid-gallop. Hence all Mongol units were able to remain in near constant contact with each other and, through their corps of couriers, under the control of a single commander even over thousands of miles. This level of integration of mobility and communication would not be equaled again until the combination of mechanized vehicles and radio communication in World War II.

Genghis Khan himself had stressed the importance of intelligence gathering. Before opening a campaign, he collected from merchants, travelers and spies exact information respecting conditions in the enemy country and roads, bridges and other thoroughfares were kept in constant repair to ensure rapidity of movement and communication. Scouts were sent forward, sometimes as much as a thousand miles away and sent back regular reports.

As the Mongol army advanced, they impressed the young men from the countryside into labor gangs to transport supplies and keep open the highways. The trained artisans or engineers among them were used to construct and maintain siege machinery.

The grimmest feature of Mongol military policy was the deliberate use of terror to frighten his foes into submission. If a place surrendered without resistance, it was commonly spared; if the garrison refused to capitulate, it was then surrounded with a rampart and ditch built by the prisoner-slaves. Catapults bombarded the walls. When a breach was made, the prisoners were forced to fill in the moat and lead the assault, while the Mongols followed.

When the city was captured, all the inhabitants were marched into an open space outside the walls and the town was given up to plunder. If the populace as a whole had manned the ramparts, every man, woman and child was put to the sword, and in at least one case the very cats and dogs as well were slaughtered. The policy, while savage, often meant the next towns along the way would surrender rather than resist.

On the battlefield the normal Mongol strategy was a direct rapid assault. Because their mobility and intelligence gathering systems were so much greater than their normally feudal opponents, the Mongols could usually concentrate quicker and overwhelm their foes. If this failed and they found themselves faced by an equal force, a strong enemy position, or by superior numbers, they would then utilize their superiority in maneuver and communications in order to bring the enemy on to more favorable ground. One favorite method was the feigned withdrawal, intended to lure an enemy holding a strong position into pursuing the Mongol force into a carefully prepared trap. Another tactic was to attempt to bypass or side step the enemy position and catch an enemy in the open while they try to reorient to the new Mongol position.

Mongol commanders would also send portions of their force well past and around the enemy lines while the main body engaged the enemy army. At a signal from the commander these detached units would wheel and strike their opponents on the flank or in the rear. One recurring result of this combination of mobility and communication revealed by careful analysis of Mongol battles is that they were normally close to achieving their objectives long before the enemy had any clue what those objectives were.



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Who Were the Mamluks

Mamluk means "owned." The term was originally applied to boys from the tribes of Central Asia who were bought by the Abbasid caliphs for training as soldiers. After their seizure of Egypt in 969, the Fatimids adopted the same practice as well.

When Saladin supplanted the Fatimids and founded the Ayyubid dynasty in 1174, he formed them into a distinct military body. Since the Ayyubids were strangers in Egypt, they probably felt more comfortable with the support of their fellow foreigners.

Dealers bought children of conquered tribes in Central Asia, promising them great fortunes in the West. After their purchase Mamluk boys were given several years of rigorous training in horsemanship and archery. They were then used both as bodyguards and to offset the dominating influence of the Arab military in the state. Eventually the Egyptian Mamluks moved from mere slaves to masters of the court and toppled the Ayyubid dynasty, seizing control of the country.

Power in the Mamluk realm was not based on heredity. Every Mamluk arrived in Syria or Egypt as a slave recruit. Converted to Islam he worked his way up from recruit to his eventual position based on merit alone. Every commander of the army and nearly all of the Mamluk sultans started life in this manner. The result was a succession of rulers of unrivaled personality, courage and ruthlessness.

After the Mamluks made themselves master of Egypt and Syria, they continued the same policy of recruitment. Agents were sent to buy and import boys from Central Asia for their armies. Mamluks looked on their Egyptian born sons as socially inferior and would not recruit them into regular Mamluk units which only admitted boys born on the steppes.

This constant influx of new blood provided a check on degeneration when the Mamluks became the rulers and possessors of wealth and power. An autocratic military caste they ruled with considerable harshness, imposed heavy taxation and held all political and military powers in their own hands. The Mamluks made use of the native born population in civil posts and many achieved high rank and honors in the civil administration.

The Mamluks held uncontested power in Egypt until 1517 when Cairo fell to the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman ruler, Selim, put an end to the Mamluk sultanate but did not, however, destroy the Mamluks as a class; they kept their lands, and Mamluk governors retained control of the provinces and were even allowed to keep private armies. In the 18th century, when Ottoman power began to decline, the Mamluks were able to win back an increasing amount of self-rule. In 1769 a Mamluk leader, Ali Bey, proclaimed himself sultan, declaring independence from the Ottomans. Although he fell in 1772, the Ottoman Turks still felt compelled to concede an increasing measures of autonomy to the Mamluks and appointed a series of them as governors of Egypt. The Mamluks were defeated by Napoleon Bonaparte during his invasion of Egypt in1798, and their power as a class was ended in 1811 by Muhammad Ali.



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References:


Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1998

Ashtor, Elihayu. Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (1976).

Dunnigan, James F. Impact of the Mongols on Medieval Population. Cry "Havoc" 23:25-26 (1998.

Glubb, John B. The Lost Centuries. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.

Glubb, John B. A Short History of the Arab Peoples. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.

Khowaiter, Abdul-Aziz. Baibars the First: His Endeavours and Achievements. London: Green Mountain Press, 1978.

Marshall, Robert. Storm from the East. London: BBC Books, 1993.

Muir, William. The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt AD 1260-1517. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1968.

Robinson, John. Dungeon, Fire & Sword. New York: M Evans & Compnay, 1991.

Saunders, JJ. A History of Medieval Islam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1965.

Von Grunebaum, GE. Classical Islam: A History 600-1258. Kathleen Watson trans. New York: Barnes & Nobles Books, 1996.

Guthwyn
08-17-2003, 03:42
Posts like that are why I love this forum. Thanks.

Guthwyn http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

khurjan
08-17-2003, 05:31
here bro you can have one version of the battle from a islamic source


The Battle of Ain Jalut
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In the 7th Hijri Century (13th Century CE) the Mongols launched one of their largest assaults on the land of the Islamic Khilafah.

Originating from a tiny insignificant kingdom in North Central Asia. The Mongols had taken all the land from Vietnam to Poland and left an indelible mark of slaughter, pillage and destruction on the territory they took.

Their brutal and barbaric nature is no more evident than in their ransacking of Baghdad, where after a long siege, they massacred the army of Baghdad by offering them the chance to withdraw and subsequently massacring them once they had assembled outside the city.

Once the city was undefended and had surrendered, the Mongol leader, Hulegu, ordered an evacuation of the city by proclaiming that anyone who wished to save their life should come out unarmed. Once the Muslims had gathered outside the city, they were mercilessly butchered by the Mongol army (Ibn Kathir states that 800,000 unarmed men, women and children were murdered).

After this, the Mongols entered the city and set about destroying the mosques, colleges, libraries and palaces within the city walls. Hence the greatest city in the world at the time was put to the sword and torch with the river Tigris running black from the books of the scholars and red from the blood of the people.

Following the ransacking of Baghdad, Muslims encountered a number of defeats with many cities falling to Hulegu and the Mongols. The Muslims were fragmented into semi-autonomous statelets, ruled by weak rulers who were incapable of defending themselves and their people. One, Kai Kawus gave Hulegu a pair of sandals with his face painted on the soles so the Khan could walk on his face.

After continuing their trail of destruction through Damascus, they approached Egypt – the very last stronghold of the Muslims at the time, which, if seized, would have meant the collapse of the whole Muslim Ummah.

Hulegu sent a letter to the Amir of Egypt – Sultan Saif-Ud-Din Qutuz:

“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 arms 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 we will kill your children and your old men together. At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.”

Qutuz knew the threats were not empty and had heard of the fate of Kamil Muhammad, the Amir of Mayyafarakin who had crucified the Mongol envoy ( - every living thing in Mayyafarakin was killed and Kamil Muhammad had been force fed his own cooked skin).

But Qutuz also feared no one except Allah (swt). He understood full well that victory comes from Allah alone and that the Muslims were capable of overcoming armies that outnumbered them many times over.

Qutuz’s response to the letter was to have the Mongol envoys cut to pieces, with their heads put on the gates of Cairo – an irrevocable declaration of war, which unsurprisingly enraged the Mongols who began preparations for the war.

Acting upon a hadith of the Prophet (saw): “The people who are attacked in the centre of their land (i.e. on the defensive) will be dishonoured”. Qutuz decided to take the battle to the Mongols.

On Friday 25th of the holy month of Ramadhan 658 H, the Muslim army encountered the Mongols near the Ain Jalut area to the north of Palestine.

On the battlefield, the Mongols had many logistical advantages over the Muslims such as superior numbers and weapons, a high morale due to the fact that they had never been beaten and the efficiency and experience gained from fighting many wars.

The Islamic army was characterised by the fact that it held the word of Allah above everything else and had a true will to fight to reclaim Muslim lands from the kafireen.

After the fighting was underway, the balance began to drift towards the Mongols and when the Muslims started to retreat, Qutuz threw down his helmet and shouted “Islamah, Islamah…” rallying the Muslims to fight against the enemies of Allah. He then charged at the Mongol lines, leaving behind him dozens of bodies. The Muslims followed his example and succeeded in defeating the Mongols.

The Mongols were chased and driven out of the land of As-Sham (Syria) within a month. The myth of Mongol invincibility was shattered and the victory of Islam was completed when many of them embraced the Deen of Allah and became Muslims.

khurjan
08-17-2003, 05:34
http://www.turan.tc/images/okatli-2.jpg

nokhor
08-18-2003, 04:53
wasn't kitbugha's rearguard force no more than 15,000-20,000 man strong? and the Mamluk army almost certainly outnumbered it heavily. the reason hulegu didn't avenge this defeat had more to do with the fact that after the death of the great khan mongke, the mongols suffered a civil war and they lost that unity of command they had had since the ascendency of genghis.
hulegu and his successors the il-khans had to keep their forces from invading egypt because those forces were needed to guard the borders against the golden horde mongols to the north of hulegu. so it was less the fact of the mamluk victory of ain jalut and more due to mongol disunity that kept the mongols from overrunning egypt. if hulegu had been able to concentrate his 300,000 man force against egypt without having to worry about mongol rivals, ain jalut would be seen more as a temporary setback, than as a major defeat for the mongols.
in a similar vein, charles martel's victory at tours is often seen as a last ditch effort that 'saved' western europe, when in fact, the objective of the islamic army was plunder not conquest, and islamic raids into france continued for years after tours.

Hakonarson
08-18-2003, 05:53
Oh...well if yuo like long posts this is for you http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

Nomads on ponies vs. slaves in horses

Smith, John Masson, Jr. Nomads on ponies vs. slaves in horses. (Mamluk-Ilkhanid War)(book review) Journal of the American Oriental Society v118, n1 (Jan-March, 1998):54 (9 pages). COPYRIGHT 1998 American Oriental Society

In 1256, a large reinforcement increased the Mongol presence in the Middle East to 150,000 troops, at least, accompanied by women and children (perhaps another 600,000) and herds (at least 15 million animals) - a population about equal to that of Chinggis Khan’s homeland. (Simultaneously, an even larger Mongol force attacked southern China; such were the military resources of the Mongol Empire.) Thereupon, the Mongols destroyed the strongholds and state of the Assassins, who had defied or imperiled all previous Middle Eastern powers since the eleventh century.

Next, the Mongols seized Baghdad, killed the caliph and essentially terminated the caliphate, the sometime and still theoretically ruling institution of the Muslim world. Then, in 1259, the Mongols sent an army of (nominally) 60,000 cavalry - over one-third of their Middle Eastern strength - against Syria. Aleppo was taken by force; the other cities, Homs, Hama, and Damascus, surrendered; and the various rulers and armies of Syria fled, joined, or were taken by the Mongols. Mongol units moved into Palestine and as far as the frontier of Egypt. So far, ordinary episodes in the extraordinary record of Mongol warfare.

But then, in the spring of 1260, most of the Mongols withdrew from Syria, leaving an occupying force of one tumen (a unit nominally of 10,000 men). That summer, the Egyptian Mamluk army engaged this unit at Ayn Jalut in Palestine and, fighting on advantageous terms, as the Mamluks saw it (more on this later), defeated and drove them from the Levant. The victory, while immensely heartening for the Muslims, was by no means conclusive. The defeated Mongol commander, ‘Ketbugha, stated the position to his Mamluk captors - according to the Mongols’ Persian historian, Rashid al-Din - as follows (in my paraphrase): “You’ve got me, but there are 300,000 more like me.” For the next six decades the Mamluks had to prepare and maintain a defense against the possibility - and on one occasion the actuality - of another gargantuan invasion.

Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ fine study helps us understand the Mamluks’ unlikely success in this daunting project, and in doing so, fills a significant gap in the scholarship on the Middle East of the thirteenth century. General histories of the Mamluks, Crusades, and Middle Eastern Mongols have not given close consideration to the wars of the Mongols and Mamluks, yet these determined the outcomes of Mamluk and Crusader history, and provide unique insight into Mongol society. Mongols and Mamluks also enlarges and improves on previous specialized discussions of the subject,(1) providing not only a detailed presentation of information from the sources, and reconstruction of a coherent story from their varied accounts, but analyses of the source materials to amplify his reconstruction. As the author puts it, this is “narrative history interspersed with chapters of a monographic nature.” An introduction discusses the scholarship and sources, two chapters then treat Mongol expansion and the rise of the Mamluks to power in Egypt, the Mongols’ invasion of Syria, and their defeat by the Mamluks at Ayn Jalut. The third and fourth chapters describe the Mamluks’ mobilization of internal and external resources: establishment of control over Syria, sponsorship of a renewed caliphate, enlistment of Beduin and Turkmen, enlargement and improvement of the Mamluk regular army, diplomatic and commercial engagement with the Mongol Golden Horde and Byzantium (the source and transit route, respectively, of slaves for the Mamluk army) - as well as the hostilities between the Mongols of the Middle East and the Golden Horde, and the attempts at cooperation between the Middle Eastern Mongols and the Crusaders. Narrative history resumes in the fifth chapter, on the border wars in Syria during 1262-77, and, after a special treatment of espionage in chapter 6, continues with Baybars’ invasion of Mongol/Seljuq Anatolia (chapter 7), the death of Baybars and his “posthumous victory” at the 1281 battle of Homs (chapter 8), which is as far as Dr. Amitai-Preiss follows the story in this volume. The ninth chapter discusses frontier defense, commerce and other traffic in general terms, drawing on details from chapter 5. Finally, chapter 10 considers the military methods of the Mamluks and Mongols, logistics, and the “dynamics” of the war: the Mongols’ dedication to world-conquest and the Mamluks’ stubborn and ultimately successful resistance. The old explanation of the Mamluks’ success gave them far superior numbers: 120,000 against 10,000 Mongols in the battle at Ayn Jalut, for instance. But these long odds derived from mistranslation; the source claimed only 12,000 Mamluks. The Mongol army in the Middle East, with some 150,000 regulars and at least an equal number of auxiliaries from the Mongols’ subject peoples (making up Ketbugha’s 300,000), in fact greatly outnumbered the Mamluks. In Mongols and Mamluks, after a thorough and skillful exploitation of the Mamluk sources and an able if less exhaustive use of those favoring the Mongols, Dr. Amitai-Preiss attributes the effectiveness of Mamluk resistance to their morale and determination, the leadership of Baybars, the failure of Mongol-Crusader cooperation, enlargement of the Mamluk army, and the distraction of the Mongols by internecine wars. The Mamluks’ morale, their disciplined desperation, certainly helped them win at Ayn Jalut and in the other hard-fought struggles covered in Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ book. From 1259, when Qutuz, the Mamluk ruler, expressed his defiance by executing Mongol envoys, the Mamluks knew that they had their backs to the wall, that they were fighting for their “home territory, for their [Muslim] religion, their kingdom and their lives.” In the battles of 1260, 1277 and 1281, therefore, the Mamluks persevered as the Mongols defeated elements of their army in the initial fighting; they rejected the conventional expedient of rapid flight, and finally prevailed.

Baybars’ leadership had many aspects. He gained power by murdering his commanding officer and sovereign, Qutuz, the hero of Ayn Jalut. He then improved his public image and provided the Mamluks with a mission by reestablishing the caliphate in the person of a fugitive Abbasid from Baghdad, and accepting from him the title “Associate of the Commander of the Faithful” and the duty of carrying on jihad against the infidel Mongols and Crusaders. This accomplished, Baybars sent the caliph, or let him go, to his death invading Mongol Iraq - with an army of only four hundred men Both the caliph and Baybars may have thought that the Mongols had withdrawn from Iraq as they had previously from Syria (more on this below), but Baybars had political and military motives for murder: a caliph, and a brave and active one at that, might not make a comfortable colleague in government - Baybars kept his next caliph mostly out of the way. And even a pin-prick attack on Iraq could win time for Baybars to build up Mamluk defenses.


As general, Baybars led his army out of Egypt into Syria almost every year of his reign, ostensibly, sometimes actually, to defend it against a Mongol incursion; usually, however, to seize Crusader fortresses or lay waste to Cilician Armenia, ally of the Crusaders and Mongols. These campaigns forestalled cooperation between the Mongols and the Crusaders, a factor that seems of less importance than Dr. Amitai-Preiss attributes to it, considering that before the Mongols’ overtures to the west finally brought a Mongol advance from Anatolia in (inconsequential) coordination with a Crusader landing at Acre in 1271, Baybars had already reduced the Crusaders to a toe-hold on the Levant coast. He had taken Caesarea, Haifa, and Arsuf (1264-65), Safad (1266), Jaffa and Beaufort (1268), and the major strongholds of the Crusading Orders, Chastel Blanc, Crac des Chevaliers, Gibelacar (1270); besides devastating Cilician Armenia (1266) and overwhelming the county of Antioch (1268). In his fifties and the last year of his life, 1277, Baybars even took the offensive against the Mongols, leading an invasion of Anatolia, destroying a Mongol army and occupying - briefly - the chief city of the Mongols’ vassal Seljuq dynasty. The force he had recruited, trained, and exercised then went on to inflict on the Mongols the major defeat of 1281, with which Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ story ends.


Baybars also created communications systems (a pony express, fire and smoke signals, and a pigeon-post), an espionage apparatus, and a program of fortification. This last involved demolishing strongholds and cities on the Levant coast to deny the Crusaders defensible places they might seize from the sea. In the zones adjacent to the Mongols, Cilician Armenia, Antioch, and even Aleppo, the Mamluks reduced populations by devastation or neglect, and urged or forced those remaining in northern Syria to flee whenever Mongols approached. (The Mamluks probably wanted no one, by inclination or compulsion, to provide invading Mongols with allies or “arrow-fodder.”) Baybars also strengthened castles in the interior and built up two powerful fortresses, al-Bira and al-Rahba, on the Mongol frontier of Syria. These fortresses served as lookouts against Mongol attack, as bases for Mamluk or Mamluk-sponsored raids into Mongol territory, and as intelligence-gathering centers; they also attracted several Mongol sieges, which failed - probably for lack of “arrow-fodder,” since the Mongols defended their side of the frontier by depopulation too. It should be noted that these fortresses could not block the Mongols, who simply bypassed them when invading Syria (more discussion below).
Baybars’ military achievements were the work of a much improved Mamluk army, enhanced qualitatively by increased recruitment of slave-soldiers, who could be trained intensively to remarkable levels of skill at arms. Paradoxically, these slaves, mostly Qipchaq Turks from what. is now Ukraine, were supplied to Egypt by the Mongols of the Golden Horde, rivals of the Middle Eastern (Ilkhanid) Mongols. Besides mamluks, the army also included free professional soldiers, the halqa, as well as fugitives (Mongols, Turks, Kurds, and others) from Mongol territory, and Beduin and Turkmen forces (Arab and Turkish nomads). In numbers, the army grew from a force of some 10,000 cavalry in ca. 1250 (and not many more by 1260) to perhaps 30,000 or (less likely, unless including Egyptian infantry) 40,000 during Baybars’ reign. In sheer size, this enlarged Mamluk army still did not match the Mongols’, but it could approximate the numbers that the Mongols could usually spare to attack Syria.
Units of the Mongol army needed for any invasion of Syria were also central to the defense of the
Ilkhanid Mongols’ northern frontier. The (Jochid) Mongol khans of the Golden Horde, who ruled the
Qipchaq Steppe (Ukraine and northern Caucasia), Russia, and northern Central Asia, believed -
almost surely correctly - that Chinggis Khan had bequeathed them much of the Middle East, especially
Azerbaijan (the best part, by nomad standards); they therefore viewed continued rule of these
territories by Hulegu, commander of the task force sent to complete the conquest of the Middle East,
as usurpation. (The Central Asian [Chaghadaid] Mongols had similar views about regions along the
Oxus/Amu Darya River and in Afghanistan, but the Ilkhanid units in those parts did not usually
participate in the Syrian campaigns.) The Huleguids countered this accusation by claiming - plausibly
that the Great Khan, Mongke (1251-59), had secretly awarded rule in the Middle East to Hulegu.

Mongke might well have concealed this grant during the lifetime of Batu (ruler of the Golden Horde) out of friendship, respect, and obligation: Mongke had served under Batu during the conquest of Russia and Qipchaq, and had received decisive support from him as candidate for Great Khan. The grant itself makes sense, given the concern that the Great Khans, starting with Guyuk (1246-48), must have felt as censuses revealed the great disproportion of assets in pastoral acreage and nomad manpower of the Golden Horde vis-a-vis the other regions of the Mongol empire. Conjoined to the Golden Horde, the Middle Eastern Mongols would now constitute an army equivalent (as mentioned above) to that of the Mongolian homeland; reassigned to Hulegu, Mongke’s younger brother, these troops would help restore the military balance in favor of imperial authority and the family of Mongke, Hulegu, and Qubilai.(2) The dispute generated a chronic state of hostility between the Ilkhanids and their Mongol neighbor which inhibited Ilkhanid efforts against the Mamluks - and perhaps distracted the Golden Horde from renewing the invasion of Europe. I used to discount the problems of the Ilkhans with the Golden Horde, since the latter used only small forces - 30,000 or so cavalry - against the fifteen or more tumens in the Middle East.

Further consideration suggests that even this apparently insubstantial threat could impede the Ilkhanids’ plans for Syria. The five or six Ilkhanid tumens based in Azerbaijan were essential for operations against Syria. The Ilkhanid units in Anatolia were too few and probably too busy watching the shifty Seljuqs and unruly Turkmen, while those in northeastern Iran and Afghanistan were very far away - the nearest about fifteen hundred miles and one hundred days from Aleppo - and already occupied with the watch on the Oxus. But the Azerbaijan tumens could not all be used because at least four of them had also to be prepared for a Golden Horde attack, such as that of 1262-63 which opened the war. These constraints usually prevented the muster of the six tumens that the Mongols thought necessary to overwhelm the Mamluk army.

Dr. Amitai-Preiss considers these factors - Mamluk morale, Baybars’ leadership, etc. - decisive: “The desire for Mongol expansion carried on through inertia, even if in reality it was no longer viable...” (p. 233). He argues against interpretations by David Morgan and myself that adduce other causes. We have asserted especially the Mongols’ logistical difficulties, and, in my case, also the Mongols’ inferiority in military skills, weaponry and mounts.(3) Amitai-Preiss presents these views fairly (as he does those of other scholars), generously acknowledges other ideas of ours that he has drawn upon, and helpfully contributes evidence supportive of them where available. His argument against these views, taking up the greater part of chapter ten, is likewise fair and careful, but since it seems to me that he goes too far in minimizing their importance, I shall attempt a detailed - and, in intention, entirely friendly - rejoinder. Amitai-Preiss believes the Mongol and Mamluk soldiers to have been a near match in quality: that not all the troops of the Mamluks had expert training, that there was more to Mongol weaponry than bows, arrows, and clubs, thanks to the Iranian arms industry, and that the sizes and numbers of Mongol and Mamluk horses had been evened out by Mongol acquisitions of Middle Eastern breeds and Mamluk use of at least some remounts. And he considers that problems with water supplies and insufficiencies of grazing “not as overwhelming as have been proposed.” His underappreciation of Mamluk training and tactics stems, I think, from the view of David Ayalon,(4) that the Mongols and Mamluks, because of their common steppenomad origin, used the same methods of mounted archery, and from his omission or dismissal of the information of the Mamluk archery instructor, Taybugha, which enables us to discern the considerable differences between the galloping archery that the Mongols (and other Inner Asian nomads) relied on, and the fast shooting with which the Mamluks countered it.(5) The galloping archer had to travel at least forty-four yards, and therefore took about four seconds, between shots; the Mamluks were trained to shoot, while standing, three arrows in one and a half seconds The Mongols had to approach to within fifty yards’ range to endanger the armored Mamluks (if not their horses), and to about thirty yards to shoot straight from their galloping ponies. The Mamluks, however, on standing mounts, could shoot accurately to seventy-five yards, and fast enough to hit the approaching Mongols (and their ponies) with several volleys before they could come close enough to shoot back. As Dr. Amitai-Preiss says, not all the soldiers in the Mamluk army were royal mamluks, nor trained to the highest standards - although his view on pp. 71 ff. is more optimistic than on p. 217. But I imagine that the amirs’ mamluks and the free professionals of the halqa who used the training facilities in Egypt were (at this period of Mamluk history) very good; the provincial troops, the fugitives, and the nomads much less so. But all of them, excepting the beduin auxiliaries, who did not learn mounted archery (but see p. 198, n. 70), were capable of carrying out the simple Mamluk battlefield tactics:
“When they are within range of you, shoot at them with arrows and do not draw your swords till they come upon you” (Ibn al-Furat). With their horses at a standstill, their shooting would have been still faster, and straighter at longer range, than that of galloping archers. As for the archery of the royal mamluks, its effect may be imagined from al-Jahiz’s appraisal of earlier (Abbasid) mamluks’ practice:
“if a thousand [Turkish] horsemen are hard-pressed they will loose all their arrows in a single volley [burst] and bring down a thousand enemy horsemen. No body of men can stand up against such a test.” The royal mamluks thus provided Mamluk armies with a hard core that the Mongols could attack directly only at great cost. It was not only high morale that enabled the Mamluks to withstand the Mongols.

Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ suggestion that Iranian weapons manufacturers would have brought the Mongols up to the Mamluks’ level of armaments is contradicted by the statement of Rashid al-Din, the Persian historian and chief minister of Ghazan Khan (1295-1304), that the Mongol government’s arms-procurement program, until reformed by Ghazan early in the fourteenth century, was inadequate to the army’s needs. Most of the Mongols, therefore, if they came to blows with the Mamluks at all, had only clubs and axes - no swords or lances and, especially important, no armor - with which to resist the Mamluks, who had all of these arms.

The Mongols could not have made good use of better weaponry even had it been available. For the Mongols’ Syrian campaign of 1299-1300 (which Amitai-‘Preiss mentions but does not fully treat), each soldier was to bring five mounts. This clearly indicates that the Mongols still rode ponies. Horses raised only on pasture do not grow large. Modern Mongolian ponies, raised like their thirteenth-century forebears, weigh around 600 pounds; since the burden appropriate to a horse is some seventeen percent of body-weight, the average rider is too heavy for such ponies. Mongol soldiers kept several ponies and rode them in turn to compensate for overwork: “The horses the [Mongols] ride on one day they do not mount again for the next three or four days” (Plano Carpini). Amitai-Preiss thinks that the Mongols’ seizures of beduin and Armenian horses may have provided them with larger mounts.

Remembering that the Ilkhanid army had 150,000 men needing horses, it seems quite implausible that the Armenians and beduin, neither noted for large cavalry forces, could have provided replacements for the Mongols’ ponies. Nor could suitable mounts have been bred from captured stock and raised by traditional Mongol methods. Larger animals need more grazing time, and may take too long to graze their fill to be of substantial use. For the pregnant and especially lactating mares among them, even a day’s grazing might not suffice, preventing their offspring from attaining full size. Only ponies, with modest nutritional requirements, can both sustain themselves on the steppe and provide useful service, as for instance in military campaigning. The Mongols probably used the horses they plundered not as mounts, but as rations, such as they offered to their prisoner, Kirakos of Ganja.

Mongolian ponies, then, are overloaded by their riders, who weigh perhaps half again as much as the ponies should carry. A rider further weighted with extra weaponry and especially with armor would burden his pony with twice the appropriate load. Consequently, the Mongols for the most part could not use armor (cost was also a problem), although armored - and doubtless rather immobile-contingents seem to have backed up the light cavalry and provided it with shelter from pursuing enemies at the end of the “running” phase of standard nomad “hit-and-run” tactics. This lack of armor and reliance on ponies left the Mongols quite vulnerable to the Mamluks, exacerbating the impact both of the already-superior Mamluk archery, and of the charging Mamluk with his sword, lance, and mace, his armor, and most important, his large horse. The Mamluks raised their horses on fodder, since Egypt had too little pasture to support them, and this meant that, while they could not afford to keep as many horses as the Mongols, their horses could grow larger. The fine performance of these horses in equestrian exercises, carrying heavily armed and armored Mamluks, suggests that they had to have been full-sized, probably around 1000 pounds. The Mongols could not therefore hope successfully to engage the Mamluks in hand-to-hand combat: they and their ponies would be overthrown by the Mamluks’ horses. (Consider the analogous problem and likely tactics of a putative American football team of 150-pound players facing 250-pounders.) The Mongols’ ponies were not useless against the Mamluks. With far more ponies than the Mamluks had horses, the Mongols could hope to outrun a Mamluk charge and wear down - or shoot down, using the “Parthian” shot - the Mamluks’ horses. This forced the Mamluks to exercise restraint in galloping and charging, thus giving the Mongols the tactical initiative at the outset of most battles.(6) Dr. Amitai-Preiss notes that-many Mamluks had remounts, but since many did not (and few if any would have had as many as the Mongols), their tactics had to accommodate the least well mounted - just as the fact that some Mongols had swords and armor, as Amitai-Preiss also mentions, did not mean that they could adopt shock tactics unsuited to the less well armed majority. As the battles went on, however, and the Mamluks withstood the Mongol attacks that invariably opened them, the Mongols would have suffered losses of men and ponies, used up their (home-made) arrows, and tired out their surviving ponies, while the Mamluks, shooting from their standing horses, retained the capacity for the effective counter-attack that usually concluded their battles with the Mongols. Dr. Amitai-Preiss suggests that these counter-attacks deserve more study, although his summary description (p. 221) is quite convincing: “they were trained to launch a frontal attack at the right time, letting off arrows (whether or not in concert is another question) at their enemy. Then, relying on their heavier horses, armor and weapons, they would bear down on the enemy line, hoping to drive them back.” We may imagine that such a charge by the Mamluks would force the nearest Mongols, engaged in hit-and-run archery attacks, into an extended “run” to evade the Mamluks, thus wearing down their horses. But the larger the Mongol force, the more difficult it would be to modulate the “running”: the front-line Mongols might need more space to outrun their pursuers than was available before coming up against their own rear elements and throwing their whole unit, wing or army, into reverse flight, or crowded, defenseless confusion. (The Mongols themselves very successfully exploited such difficulties on the part of Hsi Hsia and Chin armies, and of the Russo-Qipchaq force at the Kalka River battle.) On some occasions, perhaps to avoid the difficulties of evasion, the Mongols attempted a stand,(7) using dismounted archery against the charging Mamluks. This failed in 1277, but worked very well in 1299 when, although surprised at Wadi al-Khaznadar while at pasture by the Mamluks (attacking sword-in-hand according to al-Maqrizi), the Mongols dismounted, sheltered behind their ponies, shot down the Mamluks’ (unarmored) horses, broke the attack - and eventually won the battle. Consideration of the battle of 1299 raises other questions. Dr. Amitai-Preiss has sensibly decided to follow the Mongol-Mamluk wars only to 1281, when the important battle of Horns and the recent death of Baybars provide a good point at which to break a story that requires two volumes for a treatment of such care and detail. However, understanding the first part of the story sometimes requires information from the second; Amitai-Preiss acknowledges (p. 223, n. 53) that “a full discussion on Mongol tactics should take into consideration [the battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar in 1299] and [the battle of] Marj al-Suffar (702/1303),” but decides that “this is beyond the scope of the present study.” From the vantage point of 1281 and the defeat in that year by the Mamluks of a major Mongol onslaught, following several earlier Mamluk victories over lesser Mongol forces, it appears to Amitai-Preiss (as also to David Ayalon) that Mamluk supremacy, deriving from the factors that he has so thoroughly described, had been firmly established: “It was to take the Mongols some sixty years after Ayn Jalut to realize that they could not defeat the Mamluks. . .” (p. 233). But this interpretation is, I believe, premature. Further expansion had not been made less viable by the defeats of 1260 or 1281: the second overwhelming attack (allegedly) threatened by Ketbugha had not yet been delivered, and when it was, in 1299, the Mongols did defeat the Mamluks, as they had always, and with reason, believed they could.

In 1259, the first Mongol invasion of Syria had employed six tumens of the fifteen-odd making up the main Mongol force in the Middle East; this meant a nominal 60,000 men and actually (in accordance with the Mongols’ rule of thumb of seven in ten for troop-readiness) perhaps only 40,000. The Mamluks did not challenge these invaders until most of them had withdrawn and the remainder could be engaged - successfully - on more even, perhaps more advantageous, terms at Ayn Jalut in 1260.(8) The Mongols’ second major attack, in 1281, seems to have been on the same scale as that of 1259, but by this time, thanks to the efforts of Baybars, the Mamluk army was almost as large as the Mongols’. Amitai-Preiss (p. 194) plausibly estimates the Mongols and their auxiliaries at 40,000-50,000, and the Mamluk troops as numbering “several tens of thousands,” apparently intending more than 30,000, since he also says that estimates of 25,000-30,000 Mongols would give them fewer men than the Mamluks. With this near-parity in numbers, the Mamluks were able to confront and overcome the whole invading force. The Mongols had put over half of their force in their right wing, enabling it to drive the insufficiently reinforced Mamluk left so far from the field as to take the Mongol wing out of contact with the rest of their army, and leaving their center and left without an adequate superiority in numbers over the Mamluk center and right. This inadequacy was turned into defeat by confusion in the Mongol command, which was divided between the inexperienced prince Mongke Timur (standing in for the alcoholic Ilkhan Abaqa, who died of drink the following year) and two Mongol generals, and by the misfortune that the prince was wounded or injured in the battle, which led to the Mongols’ retreat and disaster.

From these and the other smaller-scale defeats that they had suffered at the hands of the Mamluks, the Mongols concluded that they needed to bring a still larger force to bear. They believed that they had the resources to do so, as we see from Rashid al-Din’s story (mentioned above) of Ketbugha taunting the Mamluks. Since Ketbugha was in fact killed in the battle, not captured, the story, made up by Rashid al-Din, reflected the optimistic strategic understanding of the Mongol leadership at the end of the century, rather than of Ketbugha in 1260.

Deployment of the Mongols’ superior power became possible from 1299 to 1303, when civil war immobilized the Golden Horde, and the oftentimes hostile Mongols of Central Asia came under attack from the east. In 1299 Ghazan Khan was able to call up 65,000 men: five thousand each from thirteen tumens (a similar partial mobilization was perhaps used also for the 1281 campaign, to the confusion of the sources as to the size of the Mongol force), insuring that each contingent would be at full (rather than seventy percent) strength, and that some troops would remain to protect each tumen’s home territory. This army, probably outnumbering the Mamluks by two-to-one, reached Syria, and despite suffering the surprise attack mentioned above, defeated the Mamluks, who “fled the battlefield in complete disarray” (but thereby salvaged a good part of their strength, although their cautious tactics in 1303, even against a smallish, three-tumen, Mongol force, suggest reduced strength and morale damaged from the 1299 defeat). But then the Mongols again, as in 1260, withdrew most of their forces from Syria.

This brings us to the matter of logistics, which, in light of the Mongols’ seasonal migrations in the Middle East,(9) the general pattern of their Syrian operations, and the details of their 1299 campaign, may be seen as the crucial obstacle to Mongol success. Marco Polo described the migrations: “In summer all the armies of the [Mongols] of the Levant are stationed in [Greater Armenia], because it has the best summer pasturage for beasts. . . . The [Mongols] depart with the onset of winter and withdraw to a warmer region, where they find plenty of grass and good pasturage for their beasts.” Het um, the Mongols’ Armenian ally, confirms this pattern, assuring potential Crusaders that the Mongols would be trustworthy allies because they wanted only winter pastures in the Levant and would leave the rest to the Franks. The importance of such migrations may also be deduced from Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ discussion of the Mamluks’ Turkmen auxiliaries on pp. 69-71: the Mongols drove large numbers of these nomads - one source has 40,000 households, implying more warrior manpower than the whole Mamluk army - from Anatolia into Syria, where the Mamluks welcomed and enlisted them; but they subsequently played little part in Mamluk military affairs. This was probably because, unlike the Arab nomads, their Inner Asian-style horse-keeping methods (similar to the Mongols’) were unsuited to the Syrian climate and geography, and could not provide them with enough mounts to make them militarily effective.

Consideration of Mongol nomadism helps to clarify several episodes of Mongol and Mamluk history. Baybars probably encouraged his caliph’s doomed invasion of Iraq in 1261 not to get rid of him, but because his spies reported that no Mongols could be found in Iraq; because of unfamiliarity with the Mongols’ migratory ways, their information was mistakenly taken to mean that the Mongols were gone for good, continuing the withdrawal begun in 1260, rather than merely away for the summer. The caliphal campaign in October and November, therefore, probably coincided with the migratory return to winter pastures around Baghdad of a Mongol tumen, which sent the five thousand troops who destroyed the caliph and his four hundred men. Once the Mamluks did understand this nomadic cycle, however, they took advantage of it. The Mamluks concentrated forces against the Crusaders and Cilician Armenians while the Mongols were far away in, and essentially confined to, highland pastures in spring and summer. They prevented convenient concentration of Mongol forces on the Euphrates frontier - and indeed kept the Mongols from developing Anatolia’s full nomadic potential - by building fortresses at al-Bira and al-Rahba, strongholds that could not block Mongol invasions, but that could deny the Mongols, by threatening their slow-moving sheep, goats and families, use of this plains steppe region as winter pastures. “Burners” sent by the Mamluks to fire the grasslands in northern Iraq and even south-eastern Anatolia were probably intended similarly to discourage nomadic occupation by threatening to delay migrations, which would normally have taken place in fall, until winter, when new grass appeared - along with the first snows that might jeopardize herds still up in the hills. It is not clear whether tactical burning, intended to impede invasion (as in 1262 and 1272), ever succeeded in delaying (and thereby abbreviating) Mongol campaigns. The conformation of Mongol campaigning to a similar pattern, uphill and downhill, season by season, may be discerned in Juvaini’s account of the war against the Khwarezmshah (1219-23). Then, in Syria, we have the spring withdrawals of victorious Mongol troops in both 1260 and 1300, leaving armies of occupation inadequate to withstand the Mamluks’ counterattack. The retirement in 1260 is sometimes explained as a precaution against attack by the Golden Horde, although hostilities did not break out until later. Claims that Hulegu was preparing to lead his army east to participate either in the choice of a successor to Mongke or in the war of succession that actually ensued seem unlikely, since this would have entailed, along with other political, strategic, and logistical difficulties, abandonment of his newly conquered Middle Eastern domain. Hulegu himself attributed his withdrawal to shortages of pasture and fodder. The pull-out in 1300 is a clearer case. There was no threat to counter, as the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were distracted or exhausted, and Ghazan’s forces were able to return to Syria in both 1300-1 and 1302-3. The allegation of such a threat by Het um must have been a disinformational excuse (like his more obvious one blaming the failure of the 1302-3 campaign on an attack from the east by Qaidu, then actually dead for over a year). The Mongols withdrew from Syria in 1300, as Rashid al-Din tells us, because of the approach of summer, a perfectly plausible explanation, given the geography and climate of the Middle East. The Mongols had achieved victory in 1299, as we have seen, in very large force - 65,000 men - and with a very much larger number of ponies - 325,000. Such numbers could not be supported for long in Syria under campaign conditions. David Morgan has suggested the inadequacy of Syrian pastures, on Hulegu’s authority.(10) Amitai-Preiss rightly comments that the pastures of Syria, supplemented by grazing on croplands and plundering fodder, were more than adequate to the needs of the Mongols’ ponies. Syria in 1949 had a domestic animal population, most of it undoubtedly at pasture, equivalent to eight million sheep; 325,000 Mongolian ponies amount to only 1.6 million sheep-equivalents. But the Mongols could not make use of all of Syria’s pastures while keeping their forces concentrated against a Mamluk counterattack.

Here the matter of water supplies comes in. The 325,000 ponies needed (at a minimal five U.S. gallons each) 1.6 million gallons a day. Such a quantity could be easily obtained in Syria during the rainy season, roughly November-March, from the major rivers: the Quwaiq, flowing past Aleppo at an average rate of 1.8 million gallons a day, and at 167 million gallons in rainy season spate; the Orontes, flowing on average at 7.1 million gallons at Homs, and 89 million in spate; and the Barada-A waj by Damascus with an average flow of 2.2 million gallons, and 8.9 million in spate. In the dry season, however, these flows drop drastically: the Barada-A waj to about half its average - hence to around 1.1 million gallons - and the others probably likewise (although I have not seen figures for these), say to 0.9 for the Quwaiq and 3.6 for the Orontes - and this at a time when the ponies would have needed more water because of very high temperatures. (As I write on May 23rd, the temperature in Damascus is at 99 [degrees] F.) (Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ doubts [p. 226] about the importance of water shortages arise from his consideration only of average river-flows, not minimal.) During the dry season, therefore, the 325,000 ponies could only have been concentrated by the Orontes near Homs or Hama - which is probably why the Mamluks chose to fight for Horns in 1281 and 1299.

But thus concentrated, the ponies would not have had access to enough pasture to support them until the coming of the next rainy - and grassy - season, and the army would have been forced in mid-summer into a dangerous dispersal - some units to Aleppo and others to Damascus, say, separated by two hundred miles and two weeks march - or risky retreat to the Euphrates and beyond. The plains-steppe zone accessible from the Orontes is about forty miles wide, east to west, near Horns and Hama, and extends about forty riffles south from Hama, giving some sixteen hundred square miles of possible grazing land.(11) If this land yielded 534 lbs. of (dry) grass a year per acre (as good Inner Asian pastures do), it could have supported 325,000 ponies, each needing 9.33 lbs. (dry weight) of grass a day, for about six months. The Mongol army arrived in the Hama region on 20 December in 1299; it could not have remained there in full strength past June - and it did not plan to do so. As a final indication that climate shaped the Mongols’ strategy, they brought only six months’ rations on the 1299 campaign, only enough to last until April (the month when nomads still leave the Antioch region for central Anatolia in distant imitation of the Mongol withdrawal). Dr. Amitai-Preiss (p. 228) makes two more arguments against the logistical-difficulties thesis: the adequacy of Syria’s pastures is implied by the success of the Turkmen fugitives in reestablishing nomadism on them, and by the Mongols’ persistence in disregarding allegedly insuperable logistical hazards in campaign after campaign. His own materials have in effect answered his Turkmen argument; as discussed above, the large numbers of Turkmen coming to Syria, and their small military significance, indicate their pastoral failure. Why the Mongols kept coming back, knowing that logistics prevented occupation, may be explained by their expectation that, under the proper circumstances, they could destroy the Mamluk army or damage it so badly that even a small Mongol force could hold Syria; that there was something to this may be seen from their victory in 1299, and the defensive tactics of the weakened Mamluks in 1300. In any case, if Syria could have supported the Mongol army, as Amitai-Preiss believes, it should not have needed to withdraw after winning in 1299. In sum, the Mongols could invade in great strength, they could defeat the Mamluks, but they could not stay in Syria long enough to exploit their success.

These differences in no way diminish my admiration of Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ book, the best study of this subject that we have, nor my eagerness to see volume II.

1 I See especially the many contributions of D. Ayalon in Mamluk studies and related topics, and R. Amitai-Preiss, “Ayn Jalut Revisited,” Tarih 2 (1992); P. Jackson, “The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire,” Central Asiatic Journal 32 (1978); idem, “The Crisis in the Holy Land in 1260,” English Historical Review 95 (1980); D. O. Morgan, “The Mongols in Syria, 12601300,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. W. Edbury (Cardiff, 1985); J. M. Smith, Jr., “Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 (1984); and P. Thorau, “The Battle of Ayn Jalut: a Re-examination,” in Edbury, Crusade and Settlement.

2 These considerations lead me to believe the statement of Grigor of Akner that Hulegu possessed a document from Mongke in which was decreed Hulegu’s Middle Eastern sovereignty; see Jackson, “Dissolution.” Jackson believes that since Hulegu displayed the document just before the start of the war with the Golden Horde in 1262 (or, according to Jackson, 1261) it must have been issued by Qubilai, as Mongke had been dead for some time. If, however, Hulegu possessed a decree from Mongke yet unpublished at the time of Mongke’s unexpected death, he would surely have produced it during the struggle for succession, to validate his authority.

3 Morgan, “The Mongols in Syria,” and Smith, “Ayn Jalut” - the latter work will be complemented by his chapter 9, “Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East: Antecedents and Adaptations,” in War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th-15th Centuries, ed. Y. Lev (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 24966. I draw largely on these works in my arguments below.

4 “The European Asiatic Steppe: A Major Reservoir of Power for the Islamic World,” in Proceedings of the 25th Congress of Orientalists, Moscow, 1960 (Moscow, 1963), 2: 49. Ayalon repeats his view in “Aspects of the Mamluk Phenomenon,” Der Islam 53 (1976): 218, n. 43; this article contains a subsection on “The Turkish Volley of Arrows,” in which examples (items 2 and 5) of high-volume shooting by Seljuq troops are provided. It should be noted that the “Turkish volley” would be better renamed the “mamluk burst” or perhaps “Sassanian shots.” Taybugha and the anonymous author of Arab Archery (on whom see the following note) show that high-volume archery depended on a very fast succession of shots, a burst rather than volley; and this “shower shooting” (as Arab Archery calls it) was a mamluk, rather than general Turkish, specialty (Ayalon’s examples date from the reigns of the Seljuq sultans Malikshah and Muhammad, by which time the principal Seljuq soldiers were mamluks) of Persian - Sassanian - invention, as I discuss in “Mongol Society and Military.”

5 Taybugha’s work has been translated and edited as Saracen Archery by J. Latham and W. Paterson (London: Holland, 1970); the material on galloping archery is in ch. 15, especially pp. 76-77 for the distance covered (and thus time spent) preparing to shoot; the treatment of fast shooting on pp. 138 and 142 should be read in conjunction with Arab Archery, ed. and tr. N. Fads and R. Elmer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945), 150-51. These works are the only omissions from Dr. Amitai-Preiss’ bibliography that I have noticed.

6 As for instance at Ayn Jalut; see Amitai-Preiss’ persuasive reconstruction of the battle in “Ayn Jalut Revisited.”

7 Perhaps literally a “sit”: Amitai-Preiss (p. 222, n. 47) notes Ibn Khaldun’s description of “Turkish” archers shooting from a seated position. This apparently unlikely procedure makes sense considering the equipment that went with galloping archery (and thus with nomad “Turks,” including Mongols, not Mamluks). The archer wore a quiver containing six or so arrows for use during “hit-and-run” maneuvers, and topped this up at intervals, while changing mounts, from a storage quiver or quivers holding the rest of his sixty or so arrows. For dismounted shooting, when quick shooting was essential, neither kind of quiver helped: the one he wore held too few arrows, and the storage quiver hampered access to its arrows. Consequently, the archer poured out the arrows from the quiver(s) onto the ground (as did the warrior-princess Saljan with her ninety arrows in Dede Korkut’s story of Kanli Koja: The Book of Dede Korkut, tr. G. Lewis [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974], 131), and the archer sat handily next to them. Such seated archers - as targets - also make sense of the Mamluks’ mounted archery practice called qighaj, “shooting at a slant,” in which the archer shoots down parallel to his left thigh at a mark on the ground approximately below his left knee (described and discussed in Saracen Archery, 73, 78-79).

8 The numbers of Mamluks and Mongols at Ayn Jalut have been variously estimated, in recent scholarship, within the limits of 10,000-20,000 each. Peter Thorau, in “The Battle of Ayn Jalut: A Reexamination,” suggests 10,000-20,000 Mongols and 15,000-20,000 Mamluks. Amitai-Preiss (pp. 36-37) thinks there were perhaps 10,000-12,000 Mongols and 10,000-12,000 Mamluks from Egypt plus an unknown number of auxiliary and Syrian troops. I opined, in “Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?” that 12,000 Mamluks faced 10,000-20,000 Mongols. Our unanimity on 10,000 as the minimum number of Mongols is based on several sources that implicitly (and Shafi - cited in Mongols and Mamluks, 27, n. 12 - explicitly) give Ketbugha’s tumen its full nominal value. But since Mongol tumens were often understrength (as mentioned by Amitai-Preiss, p. 15, n. 43) or, as I would prefer to see it, could not always field all of their men - we should probably downsize Ketbugha’s tumen, perhaps to 7000 men, possibly to fewer still; the 6000 Mongols at the battle of Horns in 1260 and the 5000 troops led by Qara Bugha against the Caliph in 1261 (Mongols and Mamluks, 51, 58) may have been tumens. This would explain why, as Amitai-Preiss notes (p. 37), some Mamluk sources say that the Mamluks had the larger force at Ayn Jalut: the battle may have featured 12,000 Mamluks against only 5000-7000 Mongols.

9 My study, “Mongol Nomadism and Middle Eastern Geography: Qishlaqs and Tumens,” will appear in The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, ed. D. O. Morgan. See also Charles Melville, “The Itineraries of Sultan Oljeitu, 1304-16,” Iran 28 (1990).

10 “The Mongols in Syria,” quoting from a letter of 1262 from Hulegu to St. Louis, published by P. Meyvaert: “An unknown letter of Hulagu, Il-Khan of Persia, to King Louis IX of France,” Viator 9 (1980).

11 See the maps of “Turkey and Syria” and “Vegetation” in the Oxford Regional Economic Atlas: The Middle East and North Africa (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), 11, 23.

Shahed
08-18-2003, 19:26
Well thanks a lot for that Info Hako and Khurjan.

I really enjoyed reading those articles, specially the second one.

Nokhor I don’t think the Mongols were on a raiding party. The Mongols were out to destroy Mamluke military power and civilization, as is clearly stated in the letter from Hulegu to Qutuz. Therefore I do not believe that the parallel holds.

The victory of Ain Jalut is very prominent in Islamic history. I liked the first article becuase it, although written by an Occidental presents the story from an Arab viewpoint. Somthing to be grateful for these days. I believe that had the Mongols crushed the Mamluke, the Islamic world would certainly have been very different now.

btw the first article comes from: strategypage.com (http://www.strategypage.com/articles/default.asp?target=mongol.htm)

Thanks again for those articles. Great Read. Please keep em coming with weblinks if possible. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/pat.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

Hakonarson
08-19-2003, 02:37
I would have posted a web link - but AFAIK the artile isn't on the web anywhere - there are still some limitations

Shahed
08-19-2003, 10:50
Hey NP Hako. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif That's a good article and the sources seem sound to me. That article is available at ezlibrary.com IIRC, but you have to be a member to view it. I'm not complaining. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

Spino
08-20-2003, 17:07
Good reading gentlemen. Thanks http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

Shahed
08-20-2003, 17:23
Pleasure.

i have some maps of the battle, but it's from some Polish author I never heard of. Checking him out is tough, but I think the maps may be worth a view, whether accurate or not.

Does anyone have a weblink to a nice description of the place where the battle took place ?. This would help me to "authenticate" the maps I have.

Cheers All http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

kaaskop
08-20-2003, 20:32
Quote[/b] ]Mamluk means "owned."
This could come in handy at sof2
tnx sinan http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif

Shahed
08-20-2003, 20:46
Hey long time no see


Quote[/b] ]This could come in handy at sof2

LOL ROFL

Try AAO (http://www.americasarmy.com) it's more realistic than SOF2. More slow too mind you.

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

A.Saturnus
09-02-2003, 13:08
In my opinion, what actually saved the Muslim world was the vast distance between Karakorum and Arabia, just as it was for Europe. The Mamluks defeated only a small army. If the main interest of the Ka-Khan had lain on them, they would have been crushed. The main problem of Mongol-Ulus (the Mongol empire) was to controll so many cultural diversive lands across such distances.

Nowake
09-04-2003, 21:38
Quote[/b] (A.Saturnus @ Sep. 02 2003,15:08)]In my opinion, what actually saved the Muslim world was the vast distance between Karakorum and Arabia, just as it was for Europe. The Mamluks defeated only a small army. If the main interest of the Ka-Khan had lain on them, they would have been crushed. The main problem of Mongol-Ulus (the Mongol empire) was to controll so many cultural diversive lands across such distances.
Of course. Lets remember that even with the huge losses taken in Vietnam, the mongols emerged victorious. A lost battle could not stop them.

Shahed
09-04-2003, 22:10
Yes. Internal discord and the death of their Khan was a major factor, as can be noted from both articles above. Yet this small force was not that small to the Mamluke who had at best 20,000 men in their entire army.

This result of this battle and the circumstances surrounding it was that the Muslim world was saved from the Mongol Horde, like Europe was. We cannot speculate with much accuracy but one thing is certain: if Qutuz lost the Battle of Ain Jalut, Islam may never have risen from the ashes, as the Mamluk were the last Arab force to face the Mongols.

Nowake
09-04-2003, 22:18
The poles say the same thing when it comes to Liegnitz. But I have to give it to you, Ain Jalut made a difference.

Shahed
05-24-2007, 03:58
Hi everyone !

I'm looking for a battle MAP for this battle. If anyone can provide a link I'd appreciate it greatly.

Many thanks in advance. Salute !

Snite
05-24-2007, 04:47
Once again, they mix and match time periods for Mongolian history.

Ghenghis Khan did not have a policy of brutal savagery. Many khans after him did, yes(especially Timur the Lame whose reign is really responsible for the brutal portrayl of Mongolian history), but not Temujin. This is why I mention the mix and match.

Islam would not have died. Freedom of religion was law in the Mongol Empire, Ghenghis Khan actually built a city composed entirely of temples of different faiths at one point I believe. Or maybe it was his son. I'm not sure, but the damn thing was built. Mongke Khan(a Chrisitan unlike his Shamanist father) even enjoyed theological debates as regular entertainment in his court.

An d just to get one thing straight: Ghenghis Khan never started a war unprevoked. All of his enemies pushed his buttons before he pushed theirs starting with the Jurched Empire(his first conquest after uniting the Mongolians) and ending with the Kwarzhim Empire(did I get that right?). The last being particularly stupid as by this point in time the undefeated Ghenghis Khan had created a vast empire and was victorious to such an extent that many religious leaders of many religions began to declare him God/Heaven sent and it was blasphemy to resist him. Who the Hell butts heads with/insults/steals from someone like that?

Civilization fluorished under Ghenghis Khan and his first two successors: Jochi and Mongke. Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Math were all "cross-talked" across the Empire. Slavery and kidnapping were illegal and law and order was the focus of Empire to such an extent an unaccompanied 14 yr old girl could have walked from one end of the empire to the other with a bag of gold in her hand unmolested. The Silk Trade Route was a joke until Ghenghis Khan made it his personal project. Physicians, Teachers, Clerics, and many other jobs that impacted social growth and progression were tax-free professions.

The worst thing Ghenghis Khan did was his decision to re-organize the Middle East during his conquest of the Kwarzhim. Entire cities were destroyed and the populations relocated in an attempt(successful) to establish more efficient trade routes and economies.

And I can't count the number of sources I've read that state no fielded Mongolian army ever numbered more than 100,000 cavalry. Mongolia was sparsely populated and the Mongolian people numbered just under a million at this point in time and even today barely scrapes by at 2.8 million.

I can't cite any sources because this is shit I've gathered over the years. I do have one book on hand, but I would have to dig through a hundred others just to find it.

seireikhaan
05-24-2007, 05:19
Tres merci, Snite. Many people, imo, don't give Genghis enough credit for exploits other than military. I believe you're thinking of Karokorum(sp?) when you mentioned the city of temples. It was written by, if I remember right, a Hungarian missionary to the capital that there were temples for 12 different temples. For another thing, Genghis also banned torture, which is something that can't be said for Europeans. In addition, the Mongols didn't just give people titles and ranks just because of bloodline(though unfortunately this would backfire to a point regarding the Kuriltai). There is a story in which an enemy soldier shot down Genghis's horse, knocking him to the ground. When the battle was over and the soldier was captured, Genghis was so impressed by his feat that he gave him a position of importance in the Mongol military. Considering how much the Mongols valued their horses(many of the elite were buried with their horses), this is an incredible statement.

Personally, I think the thread's title is misleading and incorrect. The Mongols didn't "meet their match". This would indicate that the Mamelukes beat them one on one, with both sides at full strength, which is obviously not true. While the battle certainly has importance, had Mongke not died with such incredible timing(which, as stated earlier, is eerily similar to the timing of Ogedei's death), I have no doubt that Helegu, with his force whole and under his command, would have defeated Qutuz.

And lastly, just because I'm anal regarding this subject, it's actually Chinggis Khaan, not Genghis. I watched a history channel show, Digging for the Truth . The host went to Mongolia, and all references in the country were to Chinggis Khaan, not Genghis. Apparently French scholars mistranslated the name when analysing texts. I only referenced him here as Genghis so as to avoid confusion.

Very interesting thread, though.

Shahed
05-24-2007, 07:30
Does anyone have a link to a map which shows how the battle progressed ?

Snite
05-25-2007, 00:37
As I understand it, Ghenghis Khan is the Indian spelling of his name/title. I only use Ghenghis because people got confused when I used Chinngis, which I understand as the only source I know of that explains his real name is the one book I have on hand.


Snite
Peace, One Love

Orda Khan
06-02-2007, 01:16
Yet again an overglorified coverage of Ain Jalut. Written like a novel even with supposed dialogue between Kit Buqa and Qutuz. Strange how these things happen, historians do not know if he was captured and executed or if he died on the field. He is now seen as the leader of an invasion which is quite untrue and the 'Mongol' army he led has become much larger.

'Mongols meet their match' is such a cliche. This never happened before then?
I suggest reading about the Mongol struggle to overcome Korea if you would like to learn about 'meeting their match', or the Mongol army driven back by the Volga Bulgars. Why even back in the time of Jebe and Subedei they were forced to withdraw by a Khwarazmian army.

So many very important facts have been conveniently omitted. 'Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia' by Michal Biran will shed some light on the real reasons why Hulegu's advance was halted. Facts that the above author seems totally oblivious to or most likely conveniently overlooked for fear they shatter this illusion of the Mamluks as 'the saviours of Islam'.
Since Berke had himself converted to Islam and allied with/supplied troops to the Mamluks, are we to believe that without Ain Jalut the Golden Horde would also have been crushed?
People do love a heroic story and Ain Jalut has certainly become one of them. It's right up there with LOTR

.....Orda

Shahed
06-02-2007, 02:03
I posted this year's ago when my own view was different from today. Look at the date on the original post.
I agree this is one of those heroic stories.

Orda do you have a map of this battle ? i.e deployment, attacks etc

Orda Khan
06-02-2007, 11:32
Sinan
I recall seeing something years ago, I'm afraid I do not have those details and I have no recollection of its source, it's so long ago my aging brain cells fail me.
Yes, I remember this original post and so many others about this subject but it has been resurrected and with additional posts (apologies to the posters) that are so inaccurate.

The Korean campaigns were an even greater embarrasment to Mongol supremecy and ignoring them while perpetuating the Ain Jalut myth is an injustice to the incredible resistance that was right on the Mongol doorstep. The Koreans were sold out by inept rulers even as they repulsed more attacks. I'd say the political capitulation caused a huge sigh of relief among the Mongol hierarchy.

I read the other loooong account, which mentions the 'supposed' threat from an already dead Qaidu, who in 1302-3 'had been dead for more than a year'. This may or may not have been the case since most sources cannot agree on a precise date. The Yuan shi mentions only that Qaidu died shortly after battle with Yuan troops in. Qarshi suggests the date as late 1301, yet Qashani gives the date as Feb-March 1303; Mirkhwand gives the same date and place. Rashid al-Din states the news reached Ghazan in March 1303, so the best anyone can state about his death is 'probably' late 1301. Even so it is a fact that this news was not heard until at least 1303.
In 1302/3 Bayan of the 'White Horde' was proposing a coalition and the Golden Horde were free of strife at this time with Toqto'a no longer worried by Nogai.

In short, I do not accept the lack of pasture argument; neither do I believe in Mamluk superiority. The one and only reason why the Mongol Empire did not expand further was political disunity which had begun through petty jealousy and treacherous meddling as far back as 1238. That the Empire held together and even expanded after 1241 is quite an achievement

....Orda

Shahed
06-03-2007, 10:01
Cool, thanks.

Shahed
06-03-2007, 11:16
Orda do you have images or links of maps that show detailed phases of combat for any cavalry heavy army, preferably Eastern ?

I'm looking to make a movie from M2:TW focusing on cavalry tactics (not propaganda) and need some background basis.