At the outset of their offensive, however, the Franj scored a decisive success. Damietta, which had resisted the last Frankish expedition so courageously thirty years before, was this time abandoned without a fight. Its fall, which sowed disarray in the Arab world, starkly revealed how weak the legatees of the great Saladin had become. Sultan Ayyūb, who was immobilized by tuberculosis and unable to take personal command of his troops, preferred to adopt the policy of his father al-Kāmil rather than lose Egypt: he proposed to Louis that Damietta be exchanged for Jerusalem. But the king of France refused to deal with a defeated and dying ‘infidel’. Ayyūb then decided to resist, and had himself transported by litter-bearers to the city of Manṣūra, ‘the victorious’, which had been built by al-Kāmil on the very spot at which the previous Frankish invasion had been defeated. Unfortunately, the sultan’s health was sinking fast. Racked by fits of coughing so severe that it seemed that they would never end, he fell into a coma on 20 November, just as the Franj, encouraged by the receding waters of the Nile, left Damietta for Manṣūra. Three days later, to the great consternation of his entourage, the sultan died.
How could the army and the people be told that the sultan was dead while the enemy was at the gates of the city and Ayyūb’s son Tūrān-Shāh was somewhere in northern Iraq, several weeks’ march away? It was then that a providential personality intervened: Shajar al-Durr, or ‘Tree of Pearls’, a female slave of Armenian origin, beautiful and crafty, who for years had been Ayyāb’s favourite wife. Gathering the members of the sultan’s family together, she ordered them to keep silent about his death until the prince arrived, and even asked the aged emir Fakhr al-Dīn, Frederick’s old friend, to write a letter in the sultan’s name summoning the Muslims to jihād. According to Ibn Wāṣil, a Syrian chronicler and one of Fakhr al-Dīn’s associates, the king of France soon learned of the death of Ayyūb, which encouraged him to step up the military pressure. In the Egyptian camp, however, the secret was kept long enough to prevent the troops becoming demoralized.
The battle raged around Manṣūra throughout the long winter months. Then on 10 February 1250 the Frankish army, aided by treason, penetrated the city by surprise. Ibn Wāsil, who was then in Cairo, relates:
The emir Fakhr al-Dīn was in his bath when they came and told him the news. Flabbergasted, he immediately leapt into the saddle—without armour or coat of mail—and rushed to see what the situation was. He was attacked by a troop of enemy soldiers, who killed him. The king of the Franj entered the city, and even reached the sultan’s palace. His soldiers poured through the streets, while the Muslim soldiers and the inhabitants sought salvation in disordered flight. Islam seemed mortally wounded, and the Franj were about to reap the fruit of their victory when the Mamluk Turks arrived. Since the enemy had dispersed through the streets, these horsemen rushed bravely in pursuit. Everywhere the Franj were taken by surprise and massacred with sword or mace. At the start of the day, the pigeons had carried a message to Cairo announcing the attack of the Franj without breathing a word about the outcome of the battle, so we were all waiting anxiously. Throughout the quarters of the city there was sadness until the next day, when new messages told us of the victory of the Turkish lions. The streets of Cairo became a festival.
In subsequent weeks, from his post in the Egyptian capital, the chronicler would observe two sequences of events that were to change the face of the Arab East: on the one hand, the victorious struggle against the last great Frankish invasion; on the other, a revolution unique in history, one that was to raise a caste of officer-slaves to power for nearly three centuries.
After his defeat at Manṣūra, the king of France realized that his military position was becoming untenable. Unable to take the city, and constantly harassed by the Egyptians in a muddy terrain crisscrossed by countless canals, Louis decided to negotiate. At the beginning of March he sent a conciliatory message to Tūrān-Shāh, who had just arrived in Egypt. In it he declared that he was now prepared to accept Ayyūb’s proposal to abandon Damietta in exchange for Jerusalem. The new sultan’s response was not long in coming: the generous offers made by Ayyūb should have been accepted during Ayyūb’s lifetime. Now it was too late. At this point, the most Louis could hope for was to save his army and get out of Egypt alive, for pressure was mounting on all sides. In mid-March several dozen Egyptian galleys inflicted a severe defeat on the Frankish fleet, destroying or capturing nearly a hundred vessels of all sizes and removing any possibility of the invaders’ retreating towards Damietta. On 7 April the invading army tried to run the blockade and was assaulted by the Mamluk battalions, swelled by thousands of volunteers. After several hours of fighting, the Franj had their backs to the wall. To halt the massacre of his men, the king of France capitulated and asked that his life be spared. He was led in chains to Mansūra, where he was locked in the house of an Ayyubid functionary.
Curiously, the new sultan’s brilliant victory, far from enhancing his power, brought about his downfall. Tūrān-Shāh was engaged in a dispute with the chief Mamluk officers of his army. The latter believed, not without reason, that Egypt owed its salvation to them, and they therefore demanded a decisive role in the leadership of the country. The sovereign, on the other hand, wanted to take advantage of his newly acquired prestige to place his own supporters in the major posts of responsibility. Three weeks after the victory over the Franj, a group of these Mamluks met together on the initiative of a brilliant 40-year-old Turkish officer named Baybars, a cross-bowman, and decided to take action. A revolt broke out on 2 May 1250 at the end of a banquet organized by the monarch. Tūrān-Shāh, wounded in the shoulder by Baybars, was running towards the Nile, hoping to flee by boat, when he was captured by his assailants. He begged them to spare his life, promising to leave Egypt for ever and to renounce any claim to power. But the last of the Ayyubid sultans was finished off mercilessly. An envoy of the caliph even had to intervene before the Mamluks would agree to give their former master a proper burial.
Despite the success of their coup d’état, the slave-officers hesitated to seize the throne directly. The wisest among them racked their brains to find a compromise that would confer a semblance of Ayyubid legitimacy on their nascent power. The formula they devised would go down in history in the Muslim world, as Ibn Wāsil, an incredulous witness to the singular event, remarked.
After the assassination of Tūrān-Shāh, he relates, the emirs and mamlūks met near the sultan’s pavilion and decided that Shajar al-Durr, a wife of Sultan Ayyūb, would be placed in power, becoming queen and sultana. She took charge of the affairs of state, establishing a royal seal in her name inscribed with the formula ‘Umm Khalīl’ (‘mother of Khalīl’), a child of hers who had died at an early age. In all the mosques, the Friday sermon was delivered in the name of Umm Khalīl, sultana of Cairo and of all Egypt. This was unprecedented in the history of Islam.
Shortly after she was placed on the throne, Shajar al-Durr married one of the Mamluk chiefs, Aybeg, and conferred the title of sultan upon him.
The replacement of the Ayyubids by the Mamluks marked a clear hardening of the Muslim world’s attitude towards the invaders. The descendants of Saladin had proved more than a little conciliatory toward the Franj, and their declining power was no longer capable of confronting the perils threatening Islam from East and West alike. The Mamluk revolution soon appeared as an enterprise of military, political, and religious rectification.
The coup d’état in Cairo did not alter the fate of the king of France. An agreement in principle reached during the time of Tūrān-Shāh stipulated that Louis would be released in return for the withdrawal of all Frankish troops from Egyptian territory, Damietta in particular, and the payment of a ransom of one million dinars. The French sovereign was indeed released several days after the accession to power of Umm Khalīl, but not before being treated to a lecture by the Egyptian negotiators: ‘How could a sensible, wise, and intelligent man like you embark on a sea voyage to a land peopled by countless Muslims?
According to our law, a man who crosses the sea in this way cannot testify in court.’ ‘And why not?’ asked the king. ‘Because’, came the reply, ‘it is assumed that he is not in possession of all his faculties.’
The last Frankish soldier left Egypt before the end of May.
Never again would the Occidentals attempt to invade the land of the Nile. The ‘blond peril’ would soon be eclipsed by the far more terrifying danger of the descendants of Genghis Khan. The great conqueror’s empire had been weakened somewhat by the wars of succession that had flared after his death, and the Muslim East had enjoyed an unexpected respite. By 1251, however, the horsemen of the steppes were united once again, under the authority of three brothers, grandsons of Genghis Khan: Möngke, Kubilay, and Hülegü. The first had been designated uncontested sovereign of the empire, whose capital was Karakorum, in Mongolia. The second reigned in Peking. It was the ambition of the third, who had settled in Persia, to conquer the entire Muslim East to the shores of the Mediterranean, perhaps even to the Nile. Hülegü was a complex personality. Initially interested in philosophy and science, a man who sought out the company of men of letters, he was transformed in the course of his campaigns into a savage animal thirsting for blood and destruction. His religious attitudes were no less contradictory. Although strongly influenced by Christianity—his mother, his favourite wife, and several of his closest collaborators were members of the Nestorian church—he never renounced shamanism, the traditional religion of his people. In the territories he governed, notably Persia, he was generally tolerant of Muslims, but once he was gripped by his lust to destroy any political entity capable of opposing him, he waged a war of total destruction against the most prestigious metropolises of Islam.
His first target was Baghdad. At first, Hülegü asked the ‘Abbasid caliph, al-Musta‘ṣim, the thirty-seventh of his dynasty, to recognize Mongol sovereignty as his predecessors had once accepted the rule of the Seljuk Turks. The prince of the faithful, overconfident of his own prestige, sent word to the conqueror that any attack on his capital would mobilize the entire Muslim world, from India to north-west Africa. Not in the least impressed, the grandson of Genghis Khan announced his intention of taking the city by force. Towards the end of 1257 he and, it would appear, hundreds of thousands of cavalry began advancing towards the ‘Abbasid capital. On their way they destroyed the Assassins’ sanctuary at Alamūt and sacked its library of inestimable value, thus making it almost impossible for future generations to gain any in-depth knowledge of the doctrine and activities of the sect. When the caliph finally realized the extent of the threat, he decided to negotiate. He proposed that Hülegü’s name be pronounced at Friday sermons in the mosques of Baghdad and that he be granted the title of sultan. But it was too late, for by now the Mongol had definitively opted for force. After a few weeks of courageous resistance, the prince of the faithful had no choice but to capitulate. On 10 February 1258 he went to the victor’s camp in person and asked if he would promise to spare the lives of all the citizens if they agreed to lay down their arms. But in vain. As soon as they were disarmed, the Muslim fighters were exterminated. Then the Mongol horde fanned out through the prestigious city demolishing buildings, burning neighbourhoods, and mercilessly massacring men, women, and children—nearly eighty thousand people in all. Only the Christian community of the city was spared, thanks to the intercession of the khan’s wife. The prince of the faithful was himself strangled to death a few days after his defeat. The tragic end of the ‘Abbasid caliphate stunned the Muslim world. It was no longer a matter of a military battle for control of a particular city, or even country: it was now a desperate struggle for the survival of Islam.
In the meantime the Tartars continued their triumphant march towards Syria. In January 1260 Hülegü’s army overran Aleppo, which was taken rapidly despite heroic resistance. As in Baghdad, massacres and destruction raged throughout this ancient city, whose crime was merely to have stood up to the conqueror. A few weeks later, the invaders were at the gates of Damascus. The Ayyubid kinglets who still governed the various Syrian cities were naturally unable to stem the tide. Some decided to recognize the suzerainty of the Great Khan, even contemplating the futile dream of forming an alliance with the invaders against the Mamluks of Egypt, enemies of their dynasty. Views were divided among the Christians, Oriental and Frankish alike. The Armenians, in the person of their king, Hethoum, took the side of the Mongols, as did Prince Bohemond of Antioch, Hethoum’s brother-in-law. The Franj of Acre, on the other hand, took a neutral position generally favourable to the Muslims. But the prevalent impression in both East and West was that the Mongol campaign was a sort of holy war against Islam, a pendant to the Frankish expeditions. This impression was enhanced by the fact that Hülegü’s chief lieutenant in Syria, General Kitbuga, was a Nestorian Christian. When Damascus was taken on the first of March 1260, three Christian princes—Bohemond, Hethoum, and Kitbuga—entered the city as conquerors, to the great consternation of the Arabs.
How far would the Tartars go? Some people were convinced that they would goall the way to Mecca, thus dealing the coup de grâce to the religion of the Prophet. In any event they would reach Jerusalem, and soon. All Syria was convinced of this. Just after the fall of Damascus, two Mongol detachments quickly seized two Palestinian cities: Nablus in the centre of the country, and Gaza in the south-west. When Gaza, which lies on the edge of Sinai, was overrun in that tragic spring of 1260, it seemed that not even Egypt would escape devastation. Even before his Syrian campaign had ended, Hülegü dispatched an ambassador to Cairo to demand the unconditional surrender of the land of the Nile. The emissary was received, spoke his piece, and was then beheaded. The Mamluks were not joking. Their methods bore no resemblance to those of Saladin. These sultan-slaves, who had now been ruling for ten years, reflected the hardening, the intransigence, of an Arab world now under attack from all directions. They fought with all the means at their disposal. No scruples, no magnanimous gestures, no compromises. But with courage and to great effect.
All eyes were now turned in their direction, for they represented the last hope of stemming the advance of the invader. For twelve months, power in Cairo had been in the hands of an officer of Turkish origin named Quṭuz. Shajar al-Durr and her husband Aybeg had governed together for seven years, but had finally killed each other. There have been many conflicting versions of the end of their rule. The one favoured by popular story-tellers is a mix of love and jealousy spiced with political ambition. The sultana, it says, was bathing her husband, as was her custom. Taking advantage of this moment of détente and intimacy, she scolded the sultan for having taken a pretty 14-year-old girl slave as his concubine. ‘Do I no longer please you?’ she murmured, to soften his heart. But Aybeg answered sharply: ‘She is young, while you are not.’ Shajar al-Durr trembled with rage at these words. She rubbed soap in her husband’s eyes, while whispering conciliatory words to allay any suspicion, and then suddenly seized a dagger and stabbed him in the side. Aybeg collapsed. The sultana remained immobile for some moments, as if paralysed. Then, heading for the door, she summoned several faithful slaves, who she thought would dispose of the body for her. But to her misfortune, one of Aybeg’s sons, who was fifteen at the time, noticed that the bath-water flowing through the outside drain was red. He ran into the room and saw Shajar al-Durr standing half-naked near the door, still holding a bloodstained dagger. She fled through the corridors of the palace, pursued by her stepson, who alerted the guards. Just as they caught up with her, the sultana stumbled and fell, crashing her head violently against a marble slab. By the time they reached her, she was dead.
However highly romanticized, this version is of genuine historical interest inasmuch as it is in all probability a faithful reflection of what was being said in the streets of Cairo in April 1257, just after the tragedy.
However that may be, after the death of the two sovereigns, Aybeg’s young son succeeded to the throne. But not for long. As the Mongol threat took shape,
the commanders of the Egyptian army realized that an adolescent would be unable to lead the decisive battle now looming. In December 1259, as Hülegü’s hordes began to roll across Syria, a coup d’état brought Quṭuz to power. He was a mature, energetic man who talked in terms of holy war and called for a general mobilization against the invader, the enemy of Islam.
With hindsight, the new coup in Cairo could be said to represent a genuine patriotic upheaval. The country was immediately placed on a war footing. In July 1260 a powerful Egyptian army moved into Palestine to confront the enemy.
Quṭuz was aware that the Mongol army had lost the core of its fighters when Möngke, Supreme Khan of the Mongols, died and his brother Hülegü had to retreat with his army to join in the inevitable succession struggle. The grandson of Genghis Khan had left Syria soon after the fall of Damascus, leaving only a few thousand horsemen in the country, under the command of his lieutenant Kitbuga.