Baybars

Baybars, a Kipchak Turk sold into slavery as a boy, rose through the Mamluk army of Egypt to become sultan of Egypt and Syria from 1260 until his death in 1277. He fought in the victory over the Mongols at Ain Jalut, took a long series of Crusader towns and castles, and played a central part in establishing the Mamluk Sultanate as the leading power of the eastern Mediterranean.

Baybars came from the Barli, a Kipchak (Cuman) tribe of the steppe north of the Black Sea. His birth year is uncertain: the historian Ibn Taghribirdi gives the Islamic year corresponding to 1227–28, but also says he was about 24 in 1247, which points to around 1223. When the Mongols overran Bulgaria, where his people had taken refuge, Baybars saw his parents killed and was taken captive and sold at the slave market of Sivas, and eventually reached Cairo in the household of an Egyptian emir. In 1247 the Ayyubid sultan as-Salih Ayyub confiscated his master's slaves, and Baybars entered the sultan's elite corps of mamluks, slave soldiers.

In 1250 he helped defeat the crusade of Louis IX of France in Egypt. At Mansurah he is credited with luring the Crusader knights into the town and trapping them there; at Fariskur the Crusade ended with the king's capture. The same year Baybars and other mamluks murdered the new sultan, Turanshah. After a rival mamluk leader, Aybak, killed the head of their faction in 1254, Baybars fled to Syria and spent several years fighting against Egypt from there, until the sultan Qutuz invited him back.

In 1260 Baybars commanded part of the Egyptian army that destroyed the Mongol force left in Syria by Hulegu Khan at the Battle of Ain Jalut. Soon afterwards Qutuz was killed while out hunting, and Baybars, reportedly denied the governorship of Aleppo he had hoped for, is said to have been involved. He took the throne in October 1260, and in January 1261 defeated a rival claimant at Damascus. When a member of the Abbasid family arrived in Cairo in 1261, the new sultan installed him as caliph and received the title of sultan from him, founding a line of shadow caliphs in Cairo that lasted until 1517.

Baybars treated the Crusader states, some of which had sided with the Mongols, as permanent enemies. From 1263 he campaigned against them repeatedly, taking Caesarea, Arsuf, Haifa and the Templar fortress of Safed, and in 1266 he ravaged Cilician Armenia, a Mongol ally. In 1268 he captured Jaffa and then Antioch, where, despite a promise to spare the inhabitants, much of the population was killed or enslaved; one historian has called it the worst massacre of the whole crusading era. In 1271 he took the great Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers. When a new crusade led by the English prince Edward, the future Edward I, reached Acre in 1271, Baybars agreed truces with Edward and with Tripoli; Edward went home the next year having gained no territory.

After the Christian kingdom of Makuria attacked the Red Sea port of Aidhab and then Aswan, Baybars sent a large army south in 1276, won three battles and installed a client king who paid tribute. In 1277 he invaded Anatolia and defeated a Mongol army at Elbistan, but withdrew for fear of a larger Mongol counterattack.

Baybars died in Damascus on 30 June 1277. Many sources say he drank poisoned kumis (fermented mare's milk) meant for someone else; others mention a wound or illness. He was buried in Damascus, in the library that bears his name. He also built bridges, canals and harbours and set up a relay of mounted couriers that could carry messages from Cairo to Damascus in four days. A popular romance of his life, the Sirat Baybars, made him a folk hero, and he is still celebrated in Egypt, Syria and Kazakhstan.

The Mamluk Sultanate he consolidated appears on our 1279 map, shortly after his death, holding Egypt and most of Syria.