The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (72 page)

Allied to Baybars’ own particularly forceful and energetic brand of rulership, this raft of practical and administrative reforms served to consolidate the Mamluk state and cement ‘royal’ power by the mid-1260s. However, Baybars’ regime was not without its faults. The success of this intensely centralised approach to government depended heavily upon the sultan’s personal qualities and skills, and this raised obvious questions about how readily the mantle might be passed on to a successor. Seeking to overturn the notion that a Mamluk sultan should be elected, Baybars tried to lay the foundations for his own familial dynasty in August 1264 by appointing his four-year-old son Baraka as joint ruler. Given the emphasis placed on merit rather than heritage among the
mamluk
elite, it remained to be seen whether this plan would be realised.

Baybars also developed a potentially disruptive association with the
sufi
(holy man) mystic Khadir al-Mihrani in these early years. Supposedly a prophet, but regarded by many in the Mamluk court as a philandering fraud, Khadir befriended Baybars in 1263 during one of the sultan’s visits to Palestine. Impressed by the
sufi
’s predictions of numerous future Mamluk conquests (many of which later came true), Baybars soon rewarded him with property in Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. Khadir was given unfettered access to the sultan’s inner circle and was said to have been privy to matters of state, all to the chagrin of Baybars’ leading
mamluk
lieutenants. This strange relationship suggests that even a cold-blooded despot like Baybars could be seduced by flattery–it also was a chink in his defences that, in time, would have to be sealed.

Mamluk diplomacy

Given the time and resources Baybars expended within the Muslim Levant while building his Mamluk state in the early 1260s–and the strident militarism evident in his later career–it would be easy to imagine that the sultan adopted an insular approach to the outside world, turning inwards to spurn diplomacy. In fact, he was an active and adept player on the international stage. Baybars used negotiation to pursue three interlocking goals: to forestall any possibility of an alliance between the Latin West and the Mongols; to sow dissension within the Mongol ranks by encouraging rivalry between the Golden Horde and the Persian Ilkhanate; and to maintain access to a ready supply of slave recruits from the Russian steppes.

Within his first year in office, Baybars established contact with the late Emperor Frederick II’s bastard son, King Manfred of Sicily (1258–66). Seeking to perpetuate the tradition of close relations between Egypt and the Hohenstaufen, and to support Manfred’s anti-papal policies, the sultan dispatched envoys to the Sicilian court with exotic gifts, including a group of Mongol prisoners, complete with their horses and weaponry–testament to their shattered reputation for invincibility. After Manfred’s death, Baybars renewed contact with his rival and successor, King Louis IX of France’s acquisitive brother, Charles of Anjou.

The sultan likewise opened channels of negotiation with the Golden Horde in 1261. The Mongol ruler of this region, Berke Khan (1257–66), had converted to Islam and was engaged in a heated power struggle with the Ilkhanate of Persia. Baybars flattered Berke’s religious affiliation by including his name in the Friday prayers at Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and by establishing equitable relations he retained access to the steppe-land slave markets within the Golden Horde and secured the Mamluk sultanate’s northern borders with Asia Minor. To ensure the safe and efficient passage of Kipchak slaves from the Black Sea to Egypt, the sultan also forged pacts with the Genoese–the main transporters of slave cargo in the Mediterranean basin. These Italian merchants had recently lost the so-called ‘War of St Sabas’–a two-year struggle with Venice over economic and political pre-eminence in Acre and Palestine. When this fractious civil war ended with Genoese defeat in 1258, they relocated to Tyre and, through the 1260s and beyond, proved only too happy to trade with the Mamluks. To ensure that Genoese ships continued to enjoy unhindered access to the Bosphorus Strait, Baybars forged additional contacts with the newly reinstated Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, who had returned to Constantinople in 1261 with the final collapse of Latin Romania.
⁹

For a
mamluk
inculcated in the arts of war rather than the intrigues of court politics, Sultan Baybars managed this tangled web of diplomatic interests with a surprisingly deft and assured hand–all the while manoeuvring to isolate the Mongol Ilkhanate and Latin Outremer.

Perfecting the Mamluk military machine

Between 1260 and 1265 Baybars was phenomenally active in the fields of diplomacy and statecraft. But ever mindful of the need to undertake urgent and extensive preparations for war, he simultaneously set the Mamluk state on the path to militarisation. The sultan’s underlying goal was to prosecute
jihad
against the Mongols and the Levantine Franks–scoring victories that would cement further his position and reputation, achieving conquests that would secure Muslim dominion over the Levant.

From the start, work proceeded apace to strengthen the Mamluk world’s physical defences. In Egypt, Alexandria’s fortifications were bolstered and the mouth of the Nile at Damietta was partially sealed to prevent another naval incursion up the delta akin to that mounted by Louis IX. Across Syria, battlements destroyed by the Mongols at the likes of Damascus, Baalbek and Shaizar were repaired. To the north-east, along the course of the Euphrates River–now the effective frontier with the Persian Ilkhanate–the castle of al-Bira became a strategic linchpin. The fortress was strengthened and heavily garrisoned, and its security closely monitored by Baybars via the
barid
. Al-Bira proved its worth in late 1264, when it successfully withstood the first serious offensive by Ilkhanid forces. This attack, brought on by a lull in the war between the Golden Horde and Mongol Persia, caused the sultan to rally his forces for war, but even as he prepared to march from Egypt reports arrived indicating that the Ilkhanids had already broken off their fruitless siege of al-Bira and retreated.

Above and beyond any reliance on castles, however, Sultan Baybars regarded the army as the bedrock of the Mamluk state. Adopting and extending the existing system of
mamluk
recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as
mamluk
troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of
mamluks
were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier
halqa
reserves.

Baybars ploughed massive financial reserves into building, training and refining the Mamluk army. In total, the number of
mamluks
was increased fourfold, to around 40,000 mounted troops. The core of this force was the 4,000-strong royal
mamluk
regiment–Baybars’ new elite, schooled and honed in a special practice facility within the citadel of Cairo. Here recruits were taught the arts of swordsmanship–learning to deliver precise strikes by repeating the same cut up to 1,000 times a day–and horse archery with powerful composite recurve bows. The sultan emphasised rigid discipline and rigorous military drilling across every section of the Mamluk host. In the course of his reign, two massive hippodromes were constructed in Cairo–training arenas where the essential skills of horsemanship and combat could be perfected. Whenever in the capital, Baybars himself came daily to practise the warrior craft, setting a standard of professionalism and dedication. His
mamluks
were encouraged to experiment with new weapons and techniques, some archers even attempting to use arrows doused in Greek fire from horseback.
¹⁰

Once of adult age,
mamluks
were paid, but also were expected to maintain their own horses, armour and weaponry. To ensure his forces were outfitted properly, Baybars instituted troop reviews, in which the entire army, in full martial regalia, would parade past the sultan in a single day (in part to ensure that equipment was not being shared). Failure to attend these displays was punishable by death. Fear was also used to maintain order while on campaign. The drinking of wine was banned on many expeditions, and any soldier caught contravening this injunction was summarily hanged.

To reinforce the human component of the Mamluk armed forces, Baybars invested in some forms of heavier armament. Close attention was paid to the development of siege weaponry, including sophisticated counter-weight catapults, or trebuchets. These engines became the mainstay of Mamluk siegecraft. Capable of being dismantled, borne to a target and then readily reconstructed, the largest could propel stones weighing in excess of 500 pounds. In addition to raw military power, Baybars also placed great value upon accurate and up-to-date intelligence. He therefore maintained an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near East and received reports from agents embedded in Mongol and Frankish societies. The sultan also showed generous patronage to the nomadic Bedouin Arabs of the Levant, and thereby won their valuable support, both in military conflicts and in the gathering of information.

Through these diverse methods, Baybars constructed the most formidable Muslim army of the crusading era; a force more numerous, disciplined and ferocious than any yet encountered in the war for the Holy Land–the perfect military machine of its day.
¹¹
Having carefully legitimised and consolidated his hold on power, the sultan turned in 1265, with a united Islamic Near East behind him, to wield this deadly weapon in the name of
jihad
.

THE WAR AGAINST THE FRANKS

Unlike his Ayyubid predecessors, Sultan Baybars showed little or no interest in reaching an accommodation with Outremer. Rather than appease the Franks to preserve commercial links and stave off a western European crusade, he sought simply and completely to eradicate the Latin presence in the Levant. Baybars calculated that, by this means, the flow of trade might be forced back through Mamluk Egypt and that, with no bridgehead in the Holy Land, any attempts by the West to mount an invasion would surely fail. The sultan was always conscious of the need to maintain a watchful eye on the Mongol threat, but this did not prevent him from initiating a series of merciless strikes against the crusader states.

While the work of preparation proceeded apace in the Mamluk world through the early 1260s, Baybars carried out a number of incidental exploratory raids into Frankish Palestine, the only notable product of which was the destruction of the church in Nazareth. To preclude any premature outbreak of full-scale hostilities, the sultan agreed to some limited truces with various factions within the Latin kingdom–a realm that was now in an appallingly disunited and feeble state. The most useful pact was that forged with John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa, one of the last great barons of Outremer. In 1261, Baybars accepted John’s entreaties for peace, and in return used the port at Jaffa to transport grain supplies from Egypt to Mamluk territories in Palestine. By 1265, however, with the Mongol siege of al-Bira having faltered, Baybars’ offensive against the Franks began in earnest.

A path of destruction

For the next three years, Sultan Baybars prosecuted a brutal campaign of conquest and devastation, waging war on a scale not witnessed since the days of Hattin in 1187. To provide a formal justification for his attack, the sultan accused the Franks of encouraging the recent Mongol invasion of Mamluk territory to the north. Then, in early 1265, he initiated his own assault. In the past, Baybars’ first objective might have been to confront the Frankish field army, but now only a tattered remnant of this force remained. The sultan thus was free to begin the task of eliminating Latin settlements relatively unhindered.

In February the Mamluk host made camp in the woods near the fortified coastal town of Arsuf. Baybars had a massive tent erected next to the royal pavilion, within which five trebuchets were reassembled in secret. With the siege train prepared, the army marched on the Latin port of Caesarea on 27 February. Appearing suddenly and unheralded, the Muslims quickly secured control of the lower town, while the Christian populace retreated into the citadel–one of those recently refortified with the aid of King Louis IX. The sultan deployed his trebuchets, commencing heavy bombardment with stones and Greek fire, while a siege tower was raised, upon which he himself fought. By 5 March, the battered defenders had taken flight in a number of ships sent from Acre, abandoning Caesarea, and Baybars ordered the town and citadel to be razed to the ground.

Again, without announcing his target, the sultan moved south on 19 March and laid siege to Arsuf, which by this date was encircled by a major moat and possessed a sturdy keep. At first, Mamluk units under the direction of Qalawun tried to create a path to Arsuf’s walls by filling sections of its moat with vast quantities of wood (felled from local forests), but the defenders managed to burn these piles of timber during the night. After this initial setback, Baybars subjected the town to an incessant aerial barrage, and the garrison eventually capitulated on 30 April 1265 and was taken captive. In the face of this terrifying offensive, the hopelessly outnumbered Franks based in Acre were all but impotent. Even when the nominal ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Hugh of Lusignan, arrived from Cyprus on 23 April with a small party of reinforcements, no move was made to counter the Mamluk invasion. In early May Baybars instructed his troops to demolish Arsuf, and, in triumph, led his Christian prisoners back to Egypt, forcing them to enter Cairo with broken crosses hung around their necks. That summer, the sultan wrote to inform Manfred of Sicily of these successes. In a stark demonstration of the casual disregard for Outremer’s future now prevalent in some western circles, Manfred responded by sending congratulatory gifts to Egypt. Others, including the papacy, began to consider action upon hearing of the Mamluk aggression.