Battle of Ain Jalut

Battle of Ain Jalut
Part of the Mongol invasions of the Levant
Map showing movements of both forces, meeting eventually at Ain Jalut
Date 3 September 1260 (26 Ramadan 658 H) Location Near Ma'ayan Harod (Hebrew) or Ayn Jalut (Arabic), Jezreel Valley, Israel Result Mamluk victory Territorial changes The Mongols withdraw from the Levant and cede occupied territories to the Mamluk Sultanate
Belligerents
Mamluk Sultanate Ayyubid emirs of Kerak and Hamah	Ilkhanate Cilician Armenia Kingdom of Georgia
Commanders and leaders
Qutuz Baybars Al-Mansur of Hamah	Kitbuqa †
Units involved
Light cavalry and horse archers, heavy cavalry, infantry	Mongol lancers and horse archers
Strength
15,000–20,000	10,000–20,000
Casualties and losses
Unknown	High

The Battle of Ain Jalut (Arabic: معركة عين جالوت, romanized: Ma'rakat ‘Ayn Jālūt), also spelled Ayn Jalut, was fought between the Bahri Mamluks of Egypt and the Mongol Empire on 3 September 1260 (25 Ramadan 658 AH) near the spring of Ain Jalut in southeastern Galilee in the Jezreel Valley. It marks as the first major loss of the Mongolian advances and halted their expansion into Arabia and Europe.

Continuing the westward expansion of the Mongol Empire, the armies of Hulagu Khan captured and sacked Baghdad in 1258, along with the Ayyubid capital of Damascus sometime later. Hulagu sent envoys to Cairo demanding Qutuz surrender Egypt, to which Qutuz responded by killing the envoys and displaying their heads on the Bab Zuweila gate of Cairo. Shortly after this, Möngke Khan was slain in battle against the Southern Song. Hulagu returned to Mongolia with the bulk of his army to attend the kurultai in accordance with Mongol customs, leaving approximately 10,000 troops west of the Euphrates under the command of Kitbuqa.

Learning of these developments, Qutuz quickly advanced his army from Cairo towards Palestine. Kitbuqa sacked Sidon, before turning his army south towards the Spring of Harod to meet Qutuz' forces. Using hit-and-run tactics and a feigned retreat by Mamluk general Baibars, combined with a final flanking maneuver by Qutuz, the Mongol army was forced to retreat toward Bisan, after which the Mamluks led a final counterattack, which resulted in the deaths of many Mongols, including Kitbuqa himself.

The battle has been cited as the first time the Mongols were permanently prevented from expanding their influence; it also marked the first of two defeats the Mongols would face in their attempts to invade Egypt and the Levant, the other being the Battle of Marj al-Saffar in 1303.

Background

When Möngke Khan became Great Khan in 1251, he immediately set out to implement his grandfather Genghis Khan's plan for a world empire. To lead the task of subduing the nations in the West, he selected his brother, another of Genghis Khan's grandsons, Hulagu Khan. Assembling the army took five years, and it was not until 1256 that Hulagu was prepared to begin the invasions. Operating from the Mongol base in Persia, Hulagu proceeded south. Möngke had ordered good treatment for those who yielded without resistance and destruction for the rest. In that way, Hulagu and his army had conquered some of the most powerful and longstanding dynasties of the time.

Other countries in the Mongols' path submitted to Mongol authority and contributed forces to the Mongol army. When the Mongols had reached Baghdad, their army included Cilician Armenians and even some Frankish forces from the Principality of Antioch. The Assassins in Persia fell, the 500-year-old Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad was destroyed (see Battle of Baghdad) and the Ayyubid dynasty in Damascus fell as well. Hulagu's plan was then to proceed southwards through the Kingdom of Jerusalem towards the Mamluk Sultanate, to confront the major Islamic power.

During the Mongol attack on the Mamluks in the Middle East, most of the Mamluks were Kipchaks, and the Golden Horde's supply of Kipchaks replenished the Mamluk armies and helped them fight off the Mongols.

In 1260, Hulagu sent envoys to Qutuz in Cairo with a letter demanding his surrender. Qutuz responded, however, by killing the envoys and displaying their heads on Bab Zuweila, one of the gates of Cairo. Hulagu withdrew from the Levant with the bulk of his army, leaving his forces west of the Euphrates with only one tumen (nominally 10,000 men, but usually fewer), and a handful of vassal troops under the Naiman Nestorian Christian general Kitbuqa. Contemporary Mamluk chronicler al-Yunini's Dhayl Mirat Al-Zaman states that the Mongol army under Kitbuqa, including vassals, numbered 100,000 men in total, but this was likely an exaggeration.

Until the late 20th century, historians believed that Hulagu's sudden retreat had been caused by the power dynamic having been changed by the death of the Great Khan Möngke on an expedition to the Song dynasty's China, which made Hulagu and other senior Mongols return home to decide his successor. However, contemporary documentation discovered in the 1980s reveals that to be untrue, as Hulagu himself claimed that he withdrew most of his forces because he could not sustain such a large army logistically, that the fodder in the region had been mostly used up and that a Mongol custom was to withdraw to cooler lands for the summer.

Upon receiving news of Hulagu's departure, Mamluk Sultan Qutuz quickly assembled a large army at Cairo and invaded Palestine. In late August, Kitbuqa's forces proceeded south from their base at Baalbek, passing to the east of Lake Tiberias into Lower Galilee. Qutuz was then allied with a fellow Mamluk, Baibars, who chose to ally himself with Qutuz in the face of a greater enemy after the Mongols had captured Damascus and most of Bilad ash-Sham.

Mongol invasion of the crusader states

The Mongols attempted to form a Franco-Mongol alliance or at least to demand the submission of the remnant of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, now centered on Acre; but Pope Alexander IV had forbidden it. Tensions between the Franks and the Mongols had also increased when Julian of Sidon caused an incident which resulted in the death of one of Kitbuqa's grandsons. Angered, Kitbuqa sacked Sidon. The Barons of Acre and the remainder of the Crusader outposts, contacted by the Mongols, had also been approached by the Mamluks and sought military assistance against the Mongols.

Though the Mamluks were the traditional enemies of the Franks, the Barons of Acre recognised the Mongols as the more immediate menace and so the Crusaders opted for a position of cautious neutrality between the two forces. In an unusual move, they agreed that the Egyptian Mamluks could march north through the Crusader states unmolested and even camp to resupply near Acre. When news arrived that the Mongols had crossed the Jordan River, Sultan Qutuz and his forces proceeded southeast, toward the spring called Ain Jalut, also known as Harod's spring in Hebrew, in the Jezreel Valley.

Battle

The first to advance were the Mongols, whose force also included troops from the Kingdom of Georgia and about 500 troops from the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, both of which had submitted to Mongol authority. The Mamluks had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and Qutuz capitalized on that by hiding the bulk of his force in the highlands and hoping to bait the Mongols with a smaller force, under Baibars.

Both armies fought for many hours, with Baibars usually implementing hit-and-run tactics to provoke the Mongol troops and to preserve the bulk of his troops intact. When the Mongols carried out another heavy assault, Baibars, who it is said had laid out the overall strategy of the battle since he had spent much time in that region earlier in his life as a fugitive, and his men feigned a final retreat to draw the Mongols into the highlands to be ambushed by the rest of the Mamluk forces concealed among the trees. The Mongol leader, Kitbuqa, already provoked by the constant fleeing of Baibars and his troops, committed a grave mistake. Instead of suspecting a trick, Kitbuqa decided to march forward with all of his troops on the trail of the fleeing Mamluks. When the Mongols reached the highlands, Mamluk forces emerged from hiding and began to fire arrows and attack with their cavalry. The Mongols then found themselves surrounded on all sides. Additionally, Timothy May hypothesizes that a key moment in the battle was the defection of the Mongol Syrian allies.

The Mongol army fought very fiercely and very aggressively to break out. Some distance away, Qutuz watched with his private legion. When Qutuz saw the left wing of the Mamluk army almost destroyed by the desperate Mongols seeking an escape route, he threw away his combat helmet, so that his warriors could recognize him and cried loudly three times "O Islam! O Allah grant your servant Qutuz a victory against these Mongols". He was seen the next moment rushing fiercely towards the battlefield yelling wa islamah! ("Oh my Islam"), urging his army to keep firm and advancing towards the weakened side, followed by his own unit. The Mongols were pushed back and fled to a vicinity of Beisan, followed by Qutuz's forces, but they managed to reorganize and to return to the battlefield, making a successful counterattack. However, the battle shifted toward the Mamluks, who now had both the geographic and psychological advantage, and some of the Mongols were eventually forced to retreat. Kitbuqa, with almost the rest of the Mongol army that had remained in the region, perished.

Aftermath

Hulagu Khan ordered the execution of the last Ayyubid emir of Aleppo and Damascus, An-Nasir Yusuf, and his brother, who were in captivity, after he heard the news of the defeat of the Mongol army at Ain Jalut. However, the Mamluks captured Damascus five days later after Ain Jalut, followed by Aleppo within a month.

On the way back to Cairo after the victory at Ain Jalut, Qutuz was assassinated by several emirs in a conspiracy led by Baibars. Baibars became the new Sultan. Local Ayyubid emirs sworn to the Mamluk sultanate subsequently defeated another Mongol force of 6,000 at Homs, which ended the first Mongol expedition into Syria. Baibars and his successors would go on to capture the last of the crusader states in the Holy Land by 1291.

Internecine conflict prevented Hulagu Khan from being able to bring his full power against the Mamluks to avenge the pivotal defeat at Ain Jalut. Berke Khan, the Khan of the Golden Horde to the north of Ilkhanate, had converted to Islam and watched with horror as his cousin destroyed the Abbasid Caliph, the spiritual and administrative center of Islam. The Muslim historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani quoted Berke as sending the following message to Mongke Khan, protesting the attack on Baghdad since he did not know that Mongke had died in China: "He (Hulagu) has sacked all the cities of the Muslims, and has brought about the death of the Caliph. With the help of God I will call him to account for so much innocent blood." The Mamluks, learning through spies that Berke was a Muslim and was not fond of his cousin, were careful to nourish their ties to him and his Khanate.

Later on, Hulagu was able to send only a small army of two tumens in his sole attempt to attack the Mamluks in Aleppo in December 1260. They were able to massacre a large number of Muslims in retaliation for the death of Kitbuqa, but after a fortnight could make no other progress and had to retreat.

After the Mongol succession was finally settled, with Kublai as the last Great Khan, Hulagu returned to his lands by 1262 and massed his armies to attack the Mamluks and avenge Ain Jalut. However, Berke Khan initiated a series of raids in force that lured Hulagu north, away from the Levant, to meet him. Hulagu suffered a severe defeat in an attempted invasion north of the Caucasus in 1263. That was the first open war among the Mongols and signaled the end of the unified empire. Hulagu Khan died in 1265 and was succeeded by his son Abaqa.

The Muslim Mamluks defeated the Mongols in all battles except one. Beside a victory to the Mamluks in Ain Jalut, the Mongols were defeated in the second Battle of Homs, Elbistan and Marj al-Saffar. After five battles with the Mamluks, the Mongols only won at the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar. They never returned to Syria again.

Legacy

Medieval

The large number of sources in vastly-different languages caused Mongol historians to have generally focused on one limited aspect of the empire. From that standpoint, the Battle of Ain Jalut has been represented by numerous academic and popular historians as an epochal battle. One that saw, for the first time, a Mongol advance that experienced their first major defeat and a permanent halt to forward movements.

According to Ahmad Yousef al-Hassan, Arabic military treatises of the 14th centuries state that the hand cannon was used by the Mamluk side in the Battle of Ain Jalut to frighten the Mongol armies, making it the earliest known battle for hand cannon being used. The compositions of the gunpowder used in the cannon were also given in those manuals. Hassan's claims are contradicted by other historians such as David Ayalon, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Joseph Needham, Tonio Andrade, and Gabor Ágoston. Khan argues that it was the Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world, and believes cannons only reached Mamluk Egypt in the 1370s. According to Needham, fire lances or proto-guns were known to Muslims by the late 13th century and early 14th century. However the term midfa, dated to textual sources from 1342 to 1352, cannot be proven to be true hand-guns or bombards, and contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365. Needham also concludes that in its original form the term midfa refers to the tube or cylinder of a naphtha projector (flamethrower), then after the invention of gunpowder it meant the tube of fire lances, and eventually it applied to the cylinder of hand-gun and cannon. Similarly, Andrade dates the textual appearance of cannon in middle eastern sources to the 1360s.

However, such claim contradicts other historians who claim hand cannons did not appear in the Middle East until the 14th century.

A recent study claims that the Mongol defeat was in part caused by a short term climate anomaly following the eruption of Samalas volcano a few years earlier, stating that "a return to warmer and dryer conditions in the summer of 1260 CE, [...] likely reduced the regional carrying capacity and may therefore have forced a mass withdrawal of the Mongols from the region that contributed to the Mamluks’ victory."

Modern

One of the three original brigades of the Palestine Liberation Army was named "Ain Jalut", after the battle. In July 1970, Yasser Arafat referred to the modern area in the context of the historical battle:

This will not be the first time that our people has vanquished its enemies. The Mongols came and swept away the Abbasid caliphate, then they came to Ain Jalut in our land – in the same region where we are today fighting the Zionists – and they were defeated at Ain Jalut.

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