Baibars

The Battle of Al Mansurah was fought from February 8 to February 11,
1250, between Crusaders led by Louis IX, King of France, and Ayyubid forces led
by Emir Fakhr-ad-Din Yusuf, Faris ad-Din Aktai and Baibars al-Bunduqdari.

The Mamluks under Baibars (yellow) fought off the Franks and the
Mongols during the Ninth Crusade.

The Sultan Baibars al-Bundukdari was a tall, heavy-set
Circassian with ruddy cheeks, brown hair, and blue eyes, and he was born on the
shores of the Black Sea. Sold into slavery, he was taken to Damascus where,
because he was handsome and powerfully built, he was bought for eight hundred
copper coins. As a Circassian, he had no loyalty to the sultans; he carved his
way to power by the simple expedient of murdering everyone in his path. He
killed Sultan Turanshah and went on to kill Sultan Qutuz, who had refused to
make Baibars governor of Aleppo. Qutuz was stabbed in the back. It was an
especially unpleasant murder. Immediately afterward, there was a great deal of
confusion, with people milling about and not knowing what to do. At last a
court attendant pointed to the throne and said, “The power is yours.”

Baibars sat on the throne like a man who had been expecting
it all his life. Sultans usually gave themselves titles intended to describe
their own characters and the future accomplishments of their reigns. Baibars’s
first thought was to call himself “the terrible” or “the one who inspires
terror.” He thought better of that, and chose “the victorious” instead. Both
titles suited him.

He had a curious white spot in one of his eyes, and a
penetrating gaze, both of which inspired fear. He condemned people to death
with equanimity. He forbade prostitution—on pain of death. He forbade the
drinking of alcoholic beverages—also on pain of death, for the Circassian
sultan embraced fundamentalist Islam with fervor. In the camp and in the palace
his loud voice could be heard denouncing the evils of his time. His secretary
complained that he was always on the move. “Today he is in Egypt, tomorrow in
Arabia, the day after in Syria, and in four days in Aleppo.”

Baibars provided Islam with something it had not possessed
since the time of Saladin: a core of iron, a relentless determination. But they
were men of totally different characters: Saladin was a rapier compared with
Baibars’s exuberant battle-ax. Saladin had a conscience; Baibars had none.
Saladin could murder in hot blood; Baibars could murder at any time of the day
and for any reason or for no reason at all. Baibars did not destroy the last
crumbling vestiges of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but he opened the way.

In the summer of 1266, Baibars appeared outside the walls of
Acre with a large and well-armed army. He had spies in the city from whom he
learned a good deal of disappointing news. He learned, for example, that the
garrison had recently been reinforced from France and was not likely to
surrender on any terms. He learned, too, that the double walls with their great
towers had been strengthened and that a much greater army than he had, with a
vast quantity of powerful siege enginees, would be needed to destroy them. He
therefore withdrew from Acre and marched on the Galilee. Here, by a ruse, he
captured the castle of Safed, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Having promised
the garrison that it would be allowed to go free, he then reneged on his
promise and had them all beheaded as they marched out. His chief weapons were
treachery and terror. He gave orders to his army to murder any Christians they
came upon; and he marched through the Galilee like a red-hot rake.

Meanwhile Qalawun, the best of his emirs, was fighting in
Cilicia. King Hethum of Armenia knew that Baibars’s Mameluke army was
advancing, and he hurried to the court of the Ilkhan in Tabriz to seek
reinforcements for his army. In his absence, in a series of lightning raids,
the Mamelukes captured Adana and Tarsus and sacked Sis, the capital of the
Armenian kingdom. The palace was plundered, the cathedral was burned to the
ground, and the inhabitants were slaughtered or taken prisoner. King Hethum
returned from Tabriz to find his capital in ruins, his son Leo, the heir to the
throne, a captive, and another son, Thoros, slain. It is significant that
Hethum had with him a small company of Mongols. For the first time the Mongols
and the Christians were acting in unison.

Baibars may have thought that his campaign against the
Armenian cities of Cilicia had put an end to Hethum’s kingdom. If so, he was
mistaken. The Armenians continued to fight and to maintain an alliance with the
Mongols, who were now well established in Persia up to the Euphrates and could
draw on immense reserves of troops throughout central Asia.

In the autumn of 1266, Baibars sent an army to attack
Antioch but failed to penetrate the city’s defenses. He was not present; his
generals had gathered so much booty that they felt no need to gather more; and
it is possible that the Antiochenes were able to bribe the generals to lift a
siege which had lasted only a few days. Baibars was incensed by the failure of
the army at Antioch.

In May 1267, he led his army right up to the walls of Acre.
He used a ruse that always pleased him. Possessing so many captured uniforms,
lances, and banners of the Crusaders, he could outfit thousands of troops to
resemble a Crusader army. In this disguise, his troops rode through the
orchards around Acre, killing Christians in the nearby villages, and destroying
everything in their path. But they could not destroy Acre because the guards in
the watchtowers had seen them coming and, realizing that they were Muslims in
disguise by the way they rode and by their darker features, had sounded the
alarm. The attack was repulsed, and Baibars withdrew to his castle at Safed.
When envoys came to Safed to sue for a truce, they found the castle encircled
by Christian skulls.

When, occasionally, Baibars’s deceptions failed him, he
resorted to terror. Massacre appealed to him, and whenever he attacked a city
he always threatened to massacre the inhabitants unless they surrendered
immediately. In February 1268, he attacked Jaffa, which resisted heroically for
twelve long days. He massacred the inhabitants but allowed the garrison to go
free. This unusual event may be explained by the fact that the fortress was
well defended and the siege of the stronghold would have cost many Egyptian
lives if it had been permitted to continue.

From Jaffa, Baibars marched to the castle of Beaufort, which
had passed into the hands of the Templars. After ten days of violent
bombardment, the castle was forced to surrender. With unaccustomed mercy,
Baibars offered to let the women go free, but the Templars were sold into
slavery.

Then it was the turn of Antioch, which had been in Christian
hands for more than 170 years. Bohemond VI, Prince of Antioch and Count of
Tripoli, had left the city in the care of the Constable, Simon Mansel, who was
quickly captured when he led a column of troops against the advancing
Mamelukes. Simon Mansel was ordered to command the garrison to surrender. The
garrison refused. There was heavy fighting, and on May 18, 1268, Baibars
ordered a general assault. The Mamelukes succeeded in breaching the walls, the
garrison troops fought bravely, and the inhabitants surrendered. Baibars was
encouraged by their surrender to order another general massacre, after closing
the gates so that none could escape. Those who survived the massacre were given
out as slaves to his soldiers. Christian Antioch vanished, never to be reborn.

Because he despised Bohemond VI, Baibars wrote him a
strange, taunting letter, which is a masterpiece of venom and invective.

EXCERPTS FROM A LETTER FROM THE SULTAN BAIBARS AL-BUNDUKDARI
TO BOHEMOND VI, PRINCE OF ANTIOCH, FROM ANTIOCH, MAY 1268.

THE GLORIOUS COUNT
BOHEMOND, magnificent and magnanimous, having the courage of a lion, being the
glory of the nation of Jesus, the head of the Christian church and the leader
of the people of the Messiah, who no longer bears the title of Prince of
Antioch, since Antioch has been lost to him, but is reduced to a mere count,
may God show him the way and give him a good death and help him to remember my
words.

. . . We
took Antioch by the sword on the fourth hour of Saturday on the fourth day of
Ramadan, and we destroyed all those you had chosen to guard the city. All these
men had possessions, and all their possessions have passed into our hands.

Oh, if only you had
seen your knights trampled by our horses, your houses looted and at the mercy
of everyone who passed by, your treasure weighed by the quintal, your women
sold in the market-place four for a gold dinar. If only you had seen your
churches utterly destroyed, the crucifixes torn apart, the pages of the Gospels
scattered, the tombs of the patriarchs trodden underfoot. If only you had seen
your Muslim enemy trampling down your altars and holy of holies, cutting the
throats of deacons, priests and bishops, the patriarchate irremediably abolished,
the powerful reduced to powerlessness! If only you had seen your palaces given
over to the flames, the dead devoured by the flames of this world before being
devoured by the flames of the next world, your castles and all their attendant
buildings wiped off the face of the earth, the Church of St. Paul totally
destroyed so that nothing is left of it, and seeing all this you would have
said: “Would to God that I were dust! Would to God! Would to God that I had
never received the letter with these melancholy tidings!”

If you had seen these things,
your soul would have expired with sighs, and the multitude of your tears would
have quenched the devouring flame. If you had seen those places which were once
opulent reduced to misery, and your ships captured by your own ships in the
port of Seleucia—your ships at war with your ships—then you would have realized
without the least doubt that God, who once gave Antioch to you, had now taken
it away from you, that the Lord who gave you this fortress had withdrawn it
from you and wiped it off the face of the earth. You must know that by God’s
grace we have regained the castles formerly lost to Islam. Know that we have
removed all your people from the country; we took them, as it were, by their
hair and dispersed them hither and thither. The only rebel now is the river
that flows through Antioch. it would change its name, if it could; its waters
are tears, once pure and limpid, now stained with the blood we have shed.

This letter is sent to
congratulate you that God has seen fit to preserve you and to prolong your
days. All this you owe to the fact that you were not in Antioch when we
captured it. If you had taken part in the battle, then you would either be
dead, or a prisoner, or riddled with wounds. You must take great joy in being
alive, for there is nothing so joy f ul as escaping from a great calamity.
Perhaps God gave you this respite so that you could make amends for your former
disobedience toward Him. And since no one from your city survived to tell you
the news, it has fallen upon us to give you these tidings; and since also no
one from your city is in any position to congratulate you on your own survival,
this too has been left to us. Nor can you accuse us of saying anything false,
nor do you need to go elsewhere to learn the truth.

The spectacle of the victor crowing over his victory is not
a pleasant one. What is chiefly remarkable about the letter is Baibars’s
enduring rage, his almost incoherent vituperation. Yet there is something in
his screaming that suggests that he is the victim, not the perpetrator, of the
crime.

The reason for his rage is not hard to discover. To enjoy
the vengeance he desired, it was necessary to have physical possession of the
prince, to kill him or to torture him, to see him suffering, to see him dead;
but the prince of Antioch had escaped his net.

Baibars thought of himself as the man destined to sweep the
Christians out of the Holy Land. He had conquered Antioch and Jaffa, he had
succeeded in weakening Armenia, he had made a near-desert of the Galilee, and
he had wrested the castle of Beaufort from the Templars. But these were small
things compared with what he wanted. The once-proud edifice known as the
Kingdom of Jerusalem resembled a palace riddled with mortar fire and without a
roof, with its cornices blown off and large areas reduced to rubble. He wanted
the palace destroyed utterly.

The strange kingdom actually possessed a king. He was Hugh
III, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, who had been crowned in Nicosia on Christmas
day, 1267. There were other contenders for the throne, including Maria of
Antioch, the daughter of Melisende of Lusignan. Later she would sell her claim
to the throne to Charles of Anjou. The following year, Charles executed
Conradin, the grandson of Frederick II, who claimed the titles of King of Jerusalem
and of Sicily, and Duke of Swabia, and whose crime was that he had attempted to
regain his Italian inheritance.

Like Conradin, Hugh III was young, vigorous, and
sweet-tempered. He was the grand conciliator, the one man who could ensure that
the little princedoms would live at peace with one another. He arranged truces,
mollified the more quarrelsome of the vassals, and continually appealed for
help from the West. The Templars and the Hospitallers distrusted him, and so
did the Commune of Acre, which had no patience with kings. He relied often on
the advice of Philip of Montfort, the most accomplished of the barons, and he
was devastated when Philip was murdered by the Assassins at the instigation of
Baibars.

By his ferocious cruelty Baibars had at first outraged the
Crusaders, but soon he inspired a fear that threatened to overwhelm them. They
remembered the circle of skulls around the fortress at Safed. The blue-eyed
sultan, without a trace of Egyptian blood in him, in love with murder, was more
like a destructive force of nature than a man. Having no ultimate loyalties, he
destroyed as he pleased.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was now reduced to a handful of
cities clinging to the seacoast. And for the first time we hear a note of total
despair in the voices of the Crusaders. We hear it in the letter written by
Hugh of Revel, the Master of the Hospital, to his friend, the prior of
Saint-Gilles in Provence.

EXCERPTS FROM A LETTER FROM HUGH OF REVEL, MASTER OF THE
HOSPITAL, TO FARAUD OF BORRASSIO, PRIOR OF SAINT-GILLES IN PROVENCE, FROM ACRE
IN THE FORTNIGHT OF PENTECOST 1268.

BROTHER HUGH OF REVEL,
by the Grace of God humble master of the Holy House of the Hospital of St. John
of Jerusalem, and guardian of the poor of Jesus Christ, sends greetings and
sincere love to his dearly beloved in Christ Brother Faraud of Borrassio, Prior
of St. Gilles, and to all the brethren attached to that priory.

We know not to whom we
should complain and show the wounds of our heart, so pierced and so anguished,
if not to those who to our knowledge are moved by deep compassion for our
sufferings. Nor do we need to describe the hardships we have endured in the
Holy Land for such a long period of time nor the magnitude of our losses in
property and lives. We believe that almost all of this must be known to you.
These sufferings, these losses, do not appear to be coming to an end; instead,
they increase and multiply daily. . . .

. . . [Y]ou
know very well what comes to us from overseas. We have received nothing from
Spain except for a few animals. From Italy and especially from Apulia we
expected aid, but our hopes have been shattered by the behavior of Brother
Philip of Glis, who used up everything we had for his own purposes as he
pleased, and because of this same Brother Philip of Glis everything we
possessed in Sicily has been ruined and devastated just because he led the
brothers of our Order in armed conflict with those who were fighting Charles of
Anjou. The houses we possessed in Sicily were therefore razed to the ground,
our fruit trees were cut down, our vines were uprooted, the contents of our
houses were stolen. I am sure you are aware of our war in Tuscia and how everything
we possessed in that region has been destroyed, and therefore little or nothing
is sent overseas to us from Italy. From the priory in France it is impossible
to obtain anything useful by reason of the debts contracted by the aforesaid
Brother Philip—debts that he promised to settle but failed to do so. The priory
of England, which formerly provided considerable aid and assistance, has
greatly reduced the sending of revenues by reason of the wars going on there

Consider therefore how
we can meet our expenses from the small revenues we receive from your priory
and from the priory in Auvergne, which is all that remains to us except for the
revenues from England, and there is nothing from Germany. We are not bringing
these matters to the attention of the brotherhood for any other reason except
to warn you not to be surprised if we inconvenience you by asking for your
help. Yet there is another reason: Whatever fate is reserved for our
fortresses—let us hope that they are spared the worst fate—or whatever fate
befalls our land—and much is spoken about this—you must excuse us for having
assumed these responsibilities, we and our house, since only a small number of
Christians remain here and we lack the strength to resist the unspeakable power
of the Saracens. We are quite certain that the city of Acre could not be
properly defended even if all the Christians beyond the seas were here to
defend it.

Because of the losses
sustained by the Christians and the losses they continue to sustain daily, they
are so distressed that they lack confidence in themselves to resist the enemy.
This year the city and fortress of Joppa were captured in an hour. The fortress
at Caesarea, a great stronghold, held out for only two days when attacked by
the Sultan. Safed, the pride of the Templars, gave up after sixteen days. They
said the fortress of Belfort was so strong that it would hold out for a year,
yet it fell in less than four days. The noble city of Antioch was
captured. . . .

Such is the condition
of our land, and such is the peril that overwhelms us! God will declare what
shall become of us. But for God’s sake be moved to pity us with all your heart.
Pray God to grant us as much aid as possible. . . .

Hugh of Revel’s letter is a classic of its kind, at once a
desperate plea for help and an acknowledgment that help was beyond hoping
for—and that if it came, it would probably come too late.

When Hugh of Revel complained that the West had lost
interest in the affairs of the Holy Land, he was speaking in relative terms. In
the autumn of 1269, there came the Crusade of King James I of Aragon, who
sailed out of Barcelona with a powerful fleet. It had scarcely left the harbor
when it was scattered in a storm. The king abandoned the enterprise but sent
his two sons with a much smaller fleet. The two sons reached Acre at a time
when Baibars was once more attacking the city. The small Spanish army,
thirsting to attack the Mamelukes, was prevented from fighting because it was
felt the soldiers were untrained and less useful in the field than in the
garrison. In a few weeks the Spaniards returned to Spain in disgust.

The English also sent their Crusaders under the command of
Prince Edward, son of Henry III and heir to the throne. He left England in the
summer of 1271, with only a thousand men. Like the Spaniards he wanted action,
and he took part in a daring raid into the Plain of Sharon. He was the first
Englishman to send an embassy to the Mongols: Reginald Russell, Godfrey Welles,
and John Parker went to the court of the Ilkhan to seek aid, which was promptly
forthcoming. A Mongol army swept out of Anatolia and captured Aleppo. Baibars,
with a huge army, set out from Damascus to give battle to the Mongols, who
withdrew wisely. But the Mongol alliance had been strengthened and there was
hope that they would return at a suitable time.

Prince Edward was handsome, restless, fond of jousting, capable
of compromise, yet utterly merciless against declared enemies. When he became
King Edward I, he attacked Scotland so implacably that he became known as the
“Hammer of the Scots.” But in Palestine he was kindly and efficient, and like
King Hugh III he attempted to unite the Crusaders, who were so often at each
other’s throats. Baibars, who saw him as another Philip of Montfort, a man with
the power to dominate and unite, ordered his assassination. An Assassin,
disguised as a Christian pilgrim, stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. He had a
strong constitution and recovered from the wound; but at about this time he
heard that his father, King Henry III, was dying. He returned to England to be
crowned. In England, he continued to give long-range support to the Christian
alliance with the Mongols.

Baibars continued his depradations. He conquered the Templar
fortress called Safita and went on to conquer Krak des Chevaliers, which even
Saladin had found impregnable. He invaded Anatolia, brushed against the forces
of the Ilkhan, and retired to Syria. Fortunately, and to the satisfaction of
the Christians, he died of poison in the summer of 1277, having accidentally
drunk from a poison cup he had prepared for someone else. But he was succeeded
by his chief general, Qalawun, who was equally determined to sweep the
Christians out of the Holy Land. It would be easier, now that Baibars had
conquered so many places.

In the last days of the kingdom a madness descended on the
Crusaders. Knowing that they must unite against the overwhelming force of the
Mamelukes, they fought each other instead, and contrived to weaken each other
with conspiracies and treacheries, thus playing into the hands of their
enemies. The kingdom was being destroyed from within long before it was destroyed
by the enemy. Blindly and voluptuously, the little princes who retained title
to the seaports on the Palestinian coast hurled themselves on one another
without any purpose except private vengeance.

In January 1282, Guy II Embriaco, Lord of Jebail, outfitted
three ships to transport a small army consisting of twenty-five knights and
four hundred foot soldiers to Tripoli. He hoped to take Tripoli by surprise and
to capture Bohemond VII, who had succeeded his father Bohemond VI in 1274, and
put him to death. He left Jebail at night and reached Tripoli before dawn,
anchoring his ships near the house of the Templars and coming ashore in the
darkness. With all his men, who were mostly Genoese, he entered the house of
the Templars. He had his agents there, including the Templar commander
Reddecoeur, but for some reason the commander was absent. Perhaps Reddecoeur no
longer wanted to take part in the plot, or perhaps there was a simple
misunderstanding about the time they would meet. Guy II Embriaco panicked, hastily
left the house of the Templars, and took refuge with his knights in the house
of the Hospitallers.

Dawn came up. The alarm bells were rung. Bohemond VII was
informed about the strange behavior of these visitors from Jebail, who had
taken possession of one of the towers of the house of the Hospitallers and
threatened to sell their lives dearly. All of Tripoli now gathered at the foot
of the tower, clamoring for the death of the invaders. The commander of the
Hospitallers offered to act as mediator. Before the tower could be stormed, an
agreement was reached that Guy’s life and the lives of all his knights would be
spared if they surrendered. Guy would serve a five-year sentence of
imprisonment, and at the end of that period all his possessions would be
restored to him.

Guy might have known that this was only a ruse to make him
descend from the tower, for Bohemond VII had given orders that the Genoese
should have their eyes put out. Guy and his brothers John and Baldwin, and his
cousin William, were kept in prison for six weeks while Bohemond considered the
various forms of punishment suitable for such an occasion. Then they were taken
to Nephin, where they were set down in a ditch. A wall was constructed around
them, the ditch was filled with earth, and they were left to die of hunger.

John of Montfort, Lord of Tyre, an ally of the lord of
Jebail, marched with all his knights to Jebail, hoping to protect the city from
the vengeance of Bohemond. He found that the city had already been captured and
the fires of victory were burning on the battlemented walls. He returned to
Tyre in disgust, realizing that his city might fall to Bohemond before it fell
to the Mamelukes.

The Pisans in Acre were overjoyed when they learned the fate
of the Genoese expedition to Tripoli. They celebrated with music, dancing, and
fireworks. It pleased them especially that Guy II Embriaco had been buried
alive; and their pleasure was a sign of the corruption of spirit that affected
all these coastal princedoms. None was immune. The Hospitallers hated the
Templars, who were also hated by Bohemond VII and by the king of Cyprus and
Jerusalem.

Vast triumphs and absolute disaster were close companions in
those times. To the north and east, a new power was entering the scene. A huge
Mongol army, numbering a hundred thousand men, was preparing, in alliance with
King Leo of Armenia and the Hospitallers, to do battle with the Mamelukes.
Qalawun commanded the Mamelukes, Mangu Timur commanded the Mongols, and Leo
commanded the Armenians. The battle of Hims, which took place on October 30,
1281, was one of the bloodiest ever known. A quarter of a million men took part
in it. When the advantage seemed to be going in the direction of the
Christian-Mongol forces, Mangu Timur was wounded. He panicked, and gave orders
for a retreat. Qalawun’s army had suffered too much to be able to follow the
Mongols beyond the Euphrates, so there was neither victory nor defeat. Leo
distinguished himself during the long and difficult retreat to Armenia. The
Mongols could fight another time and choose their own battlefield.

On the night of March 30, 1282, Charles of Anjou received
the greatest shock of his life. The Sicilians, exasperated by the behavior of
the French army of occupation, rose up and massacred every Frenchman they could
lay their hands on. The Sicilian Vespers came as an inevitable result of
Charles’s depradations, arrogance, and incompetence. With this uprising, his
dreams of a Mediterranean empire, with himself as emperor of Byzantium and king
of Jerusalem, crumbled. Charles would no longer play any role in Crusader
affairs.

Meanwhile, Qalawun continued to ravage the Christian
outposts in the Holy Land, capturing the great Hospitaller castle at Marqab,
but was not yet ready for the final assault on Acre. He watched from a distance
while the kings of Jerusalem succeeded one another. King Hugh III died. His
eldest son, John, a graceful and delicate boy of seventeen, followed him. John
died a year later, and his younger brother Henry was crowned at Tyre on August
15, 1286. His coronation was attended by elaborate festivities. Henry was
fourteen, handsome, gracious, very brave, and an epileptic. In less than five
years he would see the downfall of his kingdom in the ruins of Acre.