Question to all.
The following is sans footnotes due to the general evilness of copying and pasting things to Livejournal. That said..
should I present this next Saturday to a bunch of Medieval Studies students?
Thoughts?
John Robinson
4/29/2009
The Second Fall of Goliath: Ain Jalut, 1260.
*The Mongol-Mamluke clash of civilizations, and what it meant for the Levant.
*The Importance of the Battle of Ain Jalut (1260)--and its effects on Mamluke, Mongol, and Frankish societies.
Setting the field:
Picture a region, say from Iran to Egypt, controlled largely by two polities whose goals naturally put them on a path towards war. These states stem from similar origins, each is run by a warrior caste, and this warrior caste comes from largely the same landscapes and cultural background (full of desert and grassland in equal measure). Great, you’ve got a picture in your head, a picture that still needs some fleshing-out if it is to be of any use. Give one warrior class, we will call them the Mongols, ponies and fifty years of continual conquest. Having started out with only a small stretch of grassland in the Asian interior, these guys have done pretty well for themselves, now controlling land from eastern China to the Ukraine and Iraq. However, they have left many burning cities in their wake. Equip these Mongols with horn-backed bows, arrows, and boiled leather armor. Give the other warrior class, whom we will call the Mamlukes, horses, and about a hundred years of being used as slave-soldiers by the previous Egyptian dynasty, the Ayyubids. Also make sure to give the Mamlukes the training and superb equipment that comes with a sedentary society devoted to having the best military possible.
In between these two societies throw some West European guys known loosely as Crusaders or Franks. These Franks are also on horseback, decked out in plate and chain mail, and carrying lances. Do not forget to give their horses armor as well. Place the Franks on land once controlled by the dynasties that came before the Mamlukes.
The Mamlukes have come to something of a truce with the Crusaders, but it is an uneasy one, and might break if, say, the Crusaders decide to throw in their lot with the Mongols. This is exactly what happened in 1260 at the Battle of Ain Jalut. Ain Jalut (the Well of Goliath) lies some fifty miles North of Jerusalem, and it was here the Mamluke and Mongol armies clashed after weeks of Mamluke maneuvering. The Mamlukes outnumbered the Mongols three to one, and, with superior training, equipment, and supply lines, would have been hard pressed to lose the battle. That did not mean that it was a cake-walk, though.
At Ain Jalut, the Mongols fell for a ruse they had used many times on their enemies, being led into a charge on a seemingly helpless position, only to find that they were ringed in by Mamluke cavalry (on horses, rather than the Mongol ponies) and archers. It was the archers--trained to fire withering volleys of arrows onto enemy positions, who decimated the Mongol ranks and allowed Mamluke cavalry another chance to break through those ranks, which it did.
While the Mamluke lancers exploited this breakthrough, the Mamluke and Mongol-allied infantry fought it out. The eventual winner, no matter how the battle itself was fought, was the Mamluke sultan Qutuz. Qutuz did not have time to enjoy his victory, as he was slain by Baybars, one of his lieutenants. Baybars took over as sultan and ruled for some years before dying naturally, a rare occurrence amongst the Mamlukes, and leaving the throne to his son. Sultan, it should be mentioned, meant “protector” in Turkish, and it was implied that the sultan was only protecting the caliph from outside influences that might dream of using control of the caliphate to support their personal political machinations.
The Mamlukes were the only polity capable of defeating the Mongol Ilkhanate, having both mounted skill equal to the Mongols themselves, and horses that could simply outrun the Steppe ponies of the Mongols. The Mamlukes also had the benefits of an established state army, namely centuries of military tradition and training.
The Mongols:
We have a horde advancing westward for the better part of the early and mid thirteenth century. This horde turns out to be a fairly unstoppable force when one considers the opponents it is facing--the trading kingdoms of Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand followed by a sweep through the Turk-run polities of the Khorsan ( in eastern Persia) and the Khwarzim Sultanate in western Persia and Iraq. The Khwarzim Turks had acted as a shield to the crippled Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad from the mid eleventh century onward. That shield removed, the Mongols under Huegelü , a descendent of Genghis Khan, moved on Baghdad, which dared to offer resistance. As with all the cities that had resisted the advance of the horde, Baghdad was put to the sword, with the last Abbasid Caliph himself being captured and trampled to death under the hoofs of Huegelü ’s horses.
While the sack of Baghdad, now a backwater compared to the glories of Damascus and Cairo further west, was a blow to the Islamic world, it was by no means the end of that world. Once Baghdad and the Caliphate lay in ruins, the Mongols kept on flowing westward towards the Mediterranean and the riches its kingdoms had to offer. This meant, in part, going across desert(s)--nothing new to the Mongols, but all the same, finding water for thousands of horsemen can be quite difficult. The Ilkhanate forces split, some of them going to the north and through the Caucasus range and into Asia Minor, while the other, smaller force moved on Damascus. As this second force, commanded by Kitbhuga, went through Syria, they received word of a possible ally, that of the Latin Kingdoms (known as the Franks/Rumi to contemporary Islamic sources)--who were struggling against the Mamlukes and Turks in an attempt to hold on to their crumbling kingdom in the Holy Land.
The Mamlukes:
As it happened, the Levant of the 1250s was already shot through with turmoil when the Mongols appeared from stage right. The Egyptian Ayyubid dynasty was on the way out, and the Mamlukes, soldier-slaves originally taken from the swirling vortex of Turkic horsemen that Central Asia had produced for centuries, were on the rise. The Mamluke generals had commanded the Ayyubid armies (of Mamluke infantry/cavalry) for decades before finally taking power for themselves. Recognizing the threat that the Mongols posed to Mamluke power in the region, and what that threat meant to the established Muslim society as a whole, the Mamlukes mobilized. Perhaps mobilized is the wrong word: the Mamlukes themselves were the standing army of greater Egypt--and as such, the troops were trained, outfitted, and paid directly by the nascent Mamluke state. That these troops were trained cannot be stressed enough. The Battle of Ain Jalut would have gone far differently if the Muslim army had been more of a citizen-militia such as existed in Baghdad. The Mamlukes were trained as soldiers from childhood. Soldiers--the very term suggests there needs to be an organized state (another thing that might have contributed to victory) to finance, outfit, and oversee the army. Keep in mind as well that the army in this case founded the state (well, deposed the Ayyubid ruler and set up a state more or less the same but with new leaders)--so the state is almost a tool of the army rather than the army being a tool of the state.
The Franks:
Through all the power plays of the Mamlukes and Mongols, the Franks, Christian knights of European extraction, were just trying to hold onto the remnants of the Latin Kingdoms of Antioch and Tripoli. Alliances with the Mongols were suggested, and a few Europeans (and Armenians from south eastern Anatolia) served under the collective banner of the Mongol army. Prince Bohemund VI of Antioch fought under the Mongols at the sieges of Aleppo and Damascus in 1260, and according to some chroniclers was very close to Kitbhuga. The Mongol-Frankish alliance benefited the Principality of Antioch immensely at first, as Kitbhuga returned territory that the Mamlukes and Ayyubids had conquered. However, after the Mongol defeat at Ain Jalut in 1260, the crusader state was in dire straits, as the Mamluke sultanate was looking to crush any Ilkhanid influence in the Levant. That meant getting rid of the Mongols’ troublesome Christian allies, already weakened by a waning enthusiasm for crusading in Western Europe.
Diplomacy:
While all of these struggles were going on in the Levant, Louis IX of France counted the Mongols as an ally, and even sent diplomatic feelers to Huegelu, asking him to support his second attempt to take Egypt in order to secure Jerusalem. That attempt was a disastrous failure. The Papacy also considered an alliance with the Ilkhanate, all of the khanates, actually. The various popes did this in an attempt to crush the Turks and Mamlukes, who menaced the borders of Christendom in a much more immediate fashion than the Mongols did. After the battle of Ain Jalut and the failed Mongol offensive--with the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks eventually gaining a hold on Anatolia (despite Mongol incursions into the region) and spreading out to take much of the old domain of the Eastern Roman Empire--territory which they would hold until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The initial Ottoman expansion would not have been possible with a strong Ilkhanate to the east and Crusader States to the south. While the Crusader kingdoms themselves might not have been all that powerful, they (especially the Knights of St. John from Rhodes and Cyprus) menaced the Ottoman sea lanes until the fall of Rhodes in the 16th century. A more powerful crusader state (backed by the Mongols) could have sewn destruction for the Turks.
Cultural impact: So, we have the Battle of Ain Jalut. A battle which the Mamlukes won, crushing the Mongol (and allied) forces. But what does one battle mean for the Levant at large?
A) The establishing of a secure Mamluke state which existed in one fashion or another until the 19th century. It first continued as a sultanate, then as a dominion of the Ottoman Empire after 1517--until Egypt’s separation from the Turkish power in the 19th century.
B) Persia. Though the Ilkhanate burned its way through much of Persia in their initial thrust to the Mediterranean, they ended up actually being decent rulers once they had settled down, embracing Persian culture, literature, and Islam. Though Persia would be wracked by Timur in the late 14th century, Persian culture would remain largely intact, and would continue on under the Shiite Safavid dynasty in the 16th century.
C)The demise of the Crusader States.
D)Theoretically protecting the rest of the Mediterranean world from further Mongol assaults. Since the Mongols were defeated, we can never be sure exactly what the world would have looked like if the Mongols had somehow managed to defeat the numerically and militarily superior Mamlukes.
1260: Aleppo was in ruins, burned like Baghdad (in 1258) and Nishapur (in 1221) before it. The citizens of the city refused the Mongol entreaty to surrender and paid the price. After Aleppo, the Mongols moved south, towards the bustling cities of Damascus and Jerusalem. Unlike Aleppo, Damascus capitulated and managed to avoid the fire and sword that the Mongols brought with them. The Khan Huegelu had been recalled to the Mongol capital of (?) to aid in electing a new Great Khan. For that reason, Kitbhuga, his lieutenant, was given command of the Mongol force advancing on Jerusalem and Mamluke-controlled Egypt. In a seemingly endless drive for land and power, the Mongols sent emissaries ahead of their main force to the Mamluke sultan Qutuz. Qutuz, possibly on the advice of Baybars (one of his advisors, and later successor) killed the two envoys. The murder of the two envoys, seemingly foolish in the face of a Mongol onslaught, might have been a deliberate provocation; John Keegan has theorized that the recently-established Mamluke state was simply spoiling for a fight to establish itself as the main power in the region.
The Mamluke sultans came to power in 1252, killing the last Ayyubid ruler, and ruling the Ayyubid kingdom from Cairo. The kingdom of Egypt was not peaceful; it had not been since the Ayyubids overthrew the Fatimids in 1170. Cairo itself started out as a garrison for Fatimid troops serving in the city of Cairo, and eventually grew to be a massive citadel from which the city’s rulers reigned. The Ayyubids, named for Saladin’s Arabic name: Salah-al-Din bin Ayyub, a Sunni dynasty, eventually replaced the Shiite Fatimids, bringing with them the Kurdish practice of using Mamlukes. Mamlukes were soldier-slaves captured from the wild frontiers of Islam on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea and in the Caucasus. From time immemorial, this territory had been the domain of Turkic nomads and Circassians respectively. These nomads were either captured or enticed into service with the early Ayyubid sultans, and their descendents were raised as soldier-slaves in turn--with a leader being chosen by skill rather than lineage. By the time of the last Ayyubid sultan, the dynasty of Saladin had become weak, and was being torn apart be internal strife. In order to end the feuds that were weakening the Ayyubid sultanate, the Mamluke generals wiped the Ayyubids off the face of the earth, assassinating not only the sultan (who had gained power by using the Mamlukes to kill his rival), but the sultan’s mother and cousins. This move, though rather brutal, ensured some modicum of stability--as no pretender to the throne could materialize with an army at his back and throw Egypt into the turmoil which the Mamlukes hoped to avoid. Of course, this version of events is rather favorable to the Mamlukes--a less generous writer might say that, in a bloody grab for power, the Mamlukes secured the Ayyubid throne for themselves, quashing any and all dissent. And that writer would be exactly right, for that was precisely what the Mamlukes did. Ridding themselves of direct claimants to the sultanate did not, however, prevent the soldier-slave generals from breaking off into their own factions, largely based on whether they had roots in the Caucasus or the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, and going at one another’s throats in a quest for the Cairo-based throne. Eventually one general, Aybeg, seized power by killing the sultan and, a few years later, marrying that sultan’s mother, who had been ruling in her own right. Some time after their marriage, the former sultana knifed Aybeg while she was bathing him. Bloody bathwater was noticed in a drainage pipe, and the sultana was killed in a fight with the late Mamluke sultan’s guards. More power struggles would follow, and eventually Qutuz, notable only for being the first commander to be able to hold power long enough to defeat the Mongols, took the crown.
The Mamlukes, rather than take issue with this way of gaining power, appear to have subscribed to a theory that the assassin was the more cunning, able, and stronger man, and therefore a better leader. While this gave the sultan some respect among his troops, it would not have prevented the commander of those troops from killing the sultan if said commander thought he could do a better job of running things. Baybars was one such commander. He managed to claw his way to prominence and fame in Qutuz’s campaign against the Mongols. A campaign which ended in victory at Ain Jalut in 1260. Qutuz had very little time to celebrate his victory, however, as, shortly after the battle, he was personally strangled by Baybars. Under Baybars, the Mamlukes prospered as they never had before. They went from being a fully militarized state focused only on the defeat of the Mongol Ilkhanate.
Unlike the Mongols, a people trained from birth in a nomadic style of warfare, the Mamlukes, though originally steppe nomads themselves, had embraced some of the benefits of sedentary life--mainly rigorous training and drilling with superior weapons and close order tactics.
Surviving accounts of the battle of Ain Jalut come from the victorious Mamlukes, who marked it as a clash that saved Islam from further Mongol assaults. While the contemporary sources might have been understandably anti-Mongol, the overall effects of the Ilkhanate on Muslim society are rather hard to divine. After losing at Ain Jalut, the Mongols seem to have been pretty much permanently discouraged from forcing their way westward: the logistics of such a push just were not worth the overall gain, even for a society as driven towards conquest as the post-Genghis Khan Mongols. Evidence of the lack of benefits can be seen in later Mongol campaigns into Palestine and Syria, where, despite aid from allies, the Mongols were driven back each time. Eventually, the message is driven home: the Mongols would not profit from attempting to break into the already entrenched Mediterranean world.
As far as the Ilkhanate was concerned, the question of conquering Egypt was pretty much shelved for the moment. Détente of a sort was reached between the Mongols and Mamlukes, giving each side the time and resources necessary to turn their energies elsewhere. In the case of the Mamlukes, they turned the full brunt of their considerable armies onto the surviving Crusader kingdoms (and, for that matter, the West‘s last few lackluster attempts at cobbling together crusading armies). Due to the lack of a serious Mongol threat this worked, and until 1517 the Mamlukes were the undisputed masters of the southern Levant. Of course, those are just the historical effects of the battle--now I need to figure out the cultural effects. --
So we have the battle of Ain Jalut itself. Historians have been debating its importance for years. It was once theorized that it was amongst the ten battles that defined or preserved Western civilization. That theory was brought into question, and the debate on Ain Jalut’s impact is still up for grabs. What can be known about the battle is that it did impact European and Levantine societies to some degree. Far-spanning effects of the single day of fighting aside, the Mamlukes won the battle through a combination of superior training and equipment, or the Mongols lost due to exhausted supply lines. The battle itself was rather one-sided, with the Mongol army being not only defeated but utterly broken by Mamluke feints and counter-charges.
The tactics that the Mamlukes used were surprisingly similar to those used by the Mongols against enemies in China and the Ukraine. The Mamlukes, relying on horses, simply had the power, even though the Mongol used remounts, to outride the Ilkhanate ponies--and since the Egyptians could afford to lose men to Mongol arrows, they were able to run the Ilkhanate into the ground, and, on pinning them, to bring in their own foot archers who could keep them pinned with masterful training and precision. From a tactical standpoint one thing the Mamlukes had in their favor going into the battle was sheer numbers, they had thirty thousand men to the eight thousand Mongols and perhaps four thousand allied Crusaders and Armenians. Combining those numbers with superior training and armament only weighted the odds even more in favor of the Mamlukes. The superiority of troops trained in a sedentary and organized state run by military leaders was a major factor in the battle of Ain Jalut. Though the Mongols had faced, and beaten armies in China, Persia, and at Baghdad, Ain Jalut was the first time the Mongols crossed paths with a rigorously trained, well organized, and loyal army with knowledge of the terrain and superior leadership.
So the battle had been won by the Mamlukes, and now came the far-reaching effects of a single day of fighting. The first effect was the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. Already divided into four feuding khanates this battle weakened the Mongols--especially the Ilkhanate, which was directly involved. Ain Jalut injured the Ilkhanate not only in terms of fighting strength, but in terms of prestige. The battle of Ain Jalut was the first time the Mongols had, in their sixty year spree of conquests, been utterly defeated and put to rout. Despite the defeat, the captured Ilkhanate general Kitbhuga prophesied that waves of Mongols would come after him, shortly before he was beheaded by Qutuz, something the sultan seemed to do to a number of captured Mongols. This prophesy turned out to be quite false, as infighting amongst the Mongol khanates, (before this point they had been mostly united), led to their fall from complete dominance of a large portion of Asia. This is not to say that they immediately vanished back to the steppes from whence they came, merely that their unified control of land from China to Poland and Persia waned after a time. The khanates were now at war with one another--and the protracted conflict which followed prevented the Mongols from future westward expansion. This division of the khanates gave rise to the second effect of Ain Jalut: the expansion of Mamluke power. The battle did not mean the Mongols were off the field for good; the Mamlukes still had to tussle with the Ilkhanate twice more (in the 1270s and from 1299 to 1301)--winning each time. We see the Mamlukes continue to militarize in the face of a theoretical Mongol threat. While the first two campaigns were played up as holy wars against a pagan foe by Mamluke propagandists, the last of these engagements was fought against Ghazan Khan, who had converted to Islam prior to attempting to invade Mamluke-held Syria. Even though the war itself was short and victorious for the Mamlukes, perhaps due to it being a Muslim on Muslim conflict it is largely glossed over by many contemporary Arab historians.
Swiftly working to gain back the land taken by the Mongols in the late 1250s, the Mamlukes, now under Baybars and his sons, were able to advance on both the Ilkhanate, which was still reeling from fighting in eastern Persia, and perhaps more importantly, though the Mamlukes secured more land from the Mongols, on the remnant of the Latin kingdoms, now pushed back to only the cities of Antioch and Tripoli and tiny strips of land around each port. Backing the wrong horsemen had proven to be a fatal mistake for Bohemond VI and the Principality of Antioch. By 1293 the Crusader forces had been pushed out of the Levant almost entirely, retaining only token garrisons on the islands of Cyprus and Rhodes. The Mamlukes, having secured control of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, looked to their own affairs and quickly reestablished what the sultans claimed was the ‘Abbasid caliphate. Though really just puppets of the soldier-slaves turned rulers, the new caliphate guaranteed some measure of validity to the sultans in power.
If…
If the battle had gone differently, if the Mongols had won the day, things would have been vastly different. The Mamelukes needed the victory at Ain Jalut to ensure that their rule was more than just a flash in the pan of Egyptian polities. If the Mamluke army had been defeated (which would have been an astounding victory for Kitbuga, having only 8,000 men, a third of the men Qutuz commanded) the Mongols (and their Crusader allies) would probably have laid siege to Jerusalem. With a massive Mamluke force already broken, the Mongols would have not encountered resistance until they reached…
Byzantium?
Milan?
Dijon?
Paris?
London?
Or maybe even
Your home town?
(Realizing that to reach your home town the Mongols would have had to build a gigantic fleet and sail it across the Atlantic--they almost pulled off two naval invasions of Japan. The key word there was almost. The Mongols almost accomplished a lot more than they actually did (which was quite a sizeable amount). Ain Jalut might have been just another notch in the Mongol tally of conquests. Instead it proved to be a stumbling block from which a portion of the Mongol empire could never recover.
An outline for the 4/15 presentation on Ain Jalut.
*The Levant at 1257. (How everything stands right before the Mongols take Baghdad and move eastward.)
*Rapid Ilkhanate advance--destruction of Baghdad. Although already a backwater, having lost out to the cities of Damascus and Cairo further west, the destruction of Baghdad--and the death of the last ‘Abbasid caliph was a clear indicator that the power in Iraq and Iran had transferred from Muslim to Mongol hands. As this happens, the Muslim world--what is left of it, spins in chaos.
Chaos like:
*Status of Latin Kingdoms (and where its cities are), attempted crusades.
*The fall of the Ayyubids. And the rise of the Mamlukes--soldier-slaves turned ruling class.
*Mamluke-Mongol diplomacy (prior to Ain Jalut)--envoys sent by Kitbuga to Qutuz, their murder, resulting hilarity.
*Ain Jalut. The battle itself. What happened?
The Mamlukes outnumbered the Mongols three to one, and, with superior training, equipment, and supply lines, would have been hard pressed to lose the battle.
That did not mean that it was a cake-walk, though.
The Mongols fell for a ruse they had used many times, being led into a charge on a seemingly helpless position, only to find that they were ringed in by Mamluke cavalry (on horses, rather than the Mongol ponies) and archers. It is the archers--trained to fire withering rains of arrows onto enemy positions, who decimate the Mongol ranks and allow Mamluke cavalry another chance to break through.
While the Mamluke lancers exploit this breakthrough, the infantry on both sides fight it out. The eventual winner, no matter how the battle itself was fought, was the Mamluke Sultan Qutuz--who did not have time to enjoy his victory, as he was slain by Baybars (who took over as Sultan and ruled for some years before dying naturally, a rare occurrence amongst the Mamlukes). Kitbugha killed by Qutuz. Hilarity and Mamluke power struggle ensues.
How did the Mongols lose? What were the consequences of the Mamluke victory. (For one thing, defeat of the Mongol westward advance. For another, ability, since not worrying about the Mongols as much, to focus on defeating crusader states. (Fall of Antioch in 1263 (after Antioch made a bad move in picking sides in the clash of the titans. Cyprus in 12xx, Acre in X) and so on.)
--And then examine:
*Mamluke Society--how was it affected by the Mongols. Under Baybars, specifically after the battle of Ain Jalut--we have the development of an actual state-level infrastructure. This means roads, couriers, and etc ).
-Resurrection of the Caliphate. Though largely a figurehead position elected by a council controlled by the Mamlukes, the reborn ‘Abbasid caliphate lent legitimacy to Mamluke rule.
*Mongol society--how was it affected by the Mamlukes. Keep in mind this is the first time that the Mongols have been summarily defeated while on campaign. This would also spell the end of their advancement into the West. For Ilkhanate society in Persia the defeat simply allowed the nominally Buddhist Mongol overlords to gradually merge with their Muslim subjects, eventually (with Ghazan,) leading to the conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam. Now we have two Islamic powers vying for control of the Levant, and in Anatolia a third power is rising, the Ottoman Turks--who will eventually subjugate the Mamlukes (in 1517 after a question of Mamluke neutrality in a war against the Safavid Dynasty of Persia.
So Ilkhanate society is allowed some introspection. And it uses this introspection to embrace and support certain aspects of Persian art, architecture and culture.
What does this halt mean for the West?--Well, loss of the Crusader states, for one.
*Mongol-Frankish diplomacy (before and after the battle)--siege of Damascus in 12xx (find Templar/Hospitaller sources). Consider the Battle of Ain Jalut in a more macro-historical lens. If the Mongols had won the battle, what would have happened to the Mamelukes.
*Argue: The Mamelukes needed the victory at Ain Jalut to ensure that their rule was more than just a flash in the pan of Egyptian polities. If the Mamluke army had been defeated (which would have been an astounding victory for Kitbuga, having only 8,000 men, a third of the men Qutuz commanded) the Mongols (and their Crusader allies) would probably have laid siege to Jerusalem.
Would the Crusader Kingdoms have seen more success? Or would the Mongols just steamroll over the rather damaged and bankrupt Levantine polities after realizing that they could. Also consider the possible success Louis IX in Egypt.--With Mongol aid, the landing at Damietta might have actually proved the first step to taking Cairo (and effectively eliminating Muslim influence in the Holy Land).
*Did the Mongols push the Turks (first Seljuk, later Ottoman) toward Constantinople?
-No. For as long as there had been Turks in Anatolia (since 1071), they have been gradually advancing on Constantinople--sometimes being pushed back by either the Byzantine, Latin, or Bulgarian forces, but eventually, in 1453, the Turks would win the long struggle for dominance of the Bosphorus.
*Maps and pictures (contemporary and modern) might prove useful. Or…I could always draw them. Yeah…that’d work. Much less chance of technological failure when you use a chalkboard. William Gibson would be amused.
---
Works cited:
*Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamluks. DS 38.7 .A46. Cambridge University Press. 1995 Pages 26-107.
*Jandora, John Walter. Militarism in Arab Society: An historiographical and bibliographical sourcebook. DS 37.8 .J36. London: Greenwood Press. 1997. Pages 75-78.
*Keegan, John. A History of Warfare.
*Latham, J.D. ‘Notes on Mamluk Horse-Archers.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Vol. 32, No. 2. 1969. Cambridge University Press.
*Lyons, U & M.C, Riley-Smith, J.S.C. Ayyubids, Mamlukes, and Crusaders Vol. 2.
DS 38.7 .I242. Pages 60-64, roughly.
*Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. 1984
*Masson Smith, John. ‘Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?’ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 44. No. 2 (Dec., 1984). Harvard-Yenching Institute.
*Riley-Smith, Jonathan. P.M. Holt, ed. Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of the Crusades.
*Walker, Bethany J. “Militarization to Nomadization: The Middle and Late Islamic Periods.” Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1999). Pages 202-232
should I present this next Saturday to a bunch of Medieval Studies students?
Thoughts?
John Robinson
4/29/2009
The Second Fall of Goliath: Ain Jalut, 1260.
*The Mongol-Mamluke clash of civilizations, and what it meant for the Levant.
*The Importance of the Battle of Ain Jalut (1260)--and its effects on Mamluke, Mongol, and Frankish societies.
Setting the field:
Picture a region, say from Iran to Egypt, controlled largely by two polities whose goals naturally put them on a path towards war. These states stem from similar origins, each is run by a warrior caste, and this warrior caste comes from largely the same landscapes and cultural background (full of desert and grassland in equal measure). Great, you’ve got a picture in your head, a picture that still needs some fleshing-out if it is to be of any use. Give one warrior class, we will call them the Mongols, ponies and fifty years of continual conquest. Having started out with only a small stretch of grassland in the Asian interior, these guys have done pretty well for themselves, now controlling land from eastern China to the Ukraine and Iraq. However, they have left many burning cities in their wake. Equip these Mongols with horn-backed bows, arrows, and boiled leather armor. Give the other warrior class, whom we will call the Mamlukes, horses, and about a hundred years of being used as slave-soldiers by the previous Egyptian dynasty, the Ayyubids. Also make sure to give the Mamlukes the training and superb equipment that comes with a sedentary society devoted to having the best military possible.
In between these two societies throw some West European guys known loosely as Crusaders or Franks. These Franks are also on horseback, decked out in plate and chain mail, and carrying lances. Do not forget to give their horses armor as well. Place the Franks on land once controlled by the dynasties that came before the Mamlukes.
The Mamlukes have come to something of a truce with the Crusaders, but it is an uneasy one, and might break if, say, the Crusaders decide to throw in their lot with the Mongols. This is exactly what happened in 1260 at the Battle of Ain Jalut. Ain Jalut (the Well of Goliath) lies some fifty miles North of Jerusalem, and it was here the Mamluke and Mongol armies clashed after weeks of Mamluke maneuvering. The Mamlukes outnumbered the Mongols three to one, and, with superior training, equipment, and supply lines, would have been hard pressed to lose the battle. That did not mean that it was a cake-walk, though.
At Ain Jalut, the Mongols fell for a ruse they had used many times on their enemies, being led into a charge on a seemingly helpless position, only to find that they were ringed in by Mamluke cavalry (on horses, rather than the Mongol ponies) and archers. It was the archers--trained to fire withering volleys of arrows onto enemy positions, who decimated the Mongol ranks and allowed Mamluke cavalry another chance to break through those ranks, which it did.
While the Mamluke lancers exploited this breakthrough, the Mamluke and Mongol-allied infantry fought it out. The eventual winner, no matter how the battle itself was fought, was the Mamluke sultan Qutuz. Qutuz did not have time to enjoy his victory, as he was slain by Baybars, one of his lieutenants. Baybars took over as sultan and ruled for some years before dying naturally, a rare occurrence amongst the Mamlukes, and leaving the throne to his son. Sultan, it should be mentioned, meant “protector” in Turkish, and it was implied that the sultan was only protecting the caliph from outside influences that might dream of using control of the caliphate to support their personal political machinations.
The Mamlukes were the only polity capable of defeating the Mongol Ilkhanate, having both mounted skill equal to the Mongols themselves, and horses that could simply outrun the Steppe ponies of the Mongols. The Mamlukes also had the benefits of an established state army, namely centuries of military tradition and training.
The Mongols:
We have a horde advancing westward for the better part of the early and mid thirteenth century. This horde turns out to be a fairly unstoppable force when one considers the opponents it is facing--the trading kingdoms of Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand followed by a sweep through the Turk-run polities of the Khorsan ( in eastern Persia) and the Khwarzim Sultanate in western Persia and Iraq. The Khwarzim Turks had acted as a shield to the crippled Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad from the mid eleventh century onward. That shield removed, the Mongols under Huegelü , a descendent of Genghis Khan, moved on Baghdad, which dared to offer resistance. As with all the cities that had resisted the advance of the horde, Baghdad was put to the sword, with the last Abbasid Caliph himself being captured and trampled to death under the hoofs of Huegelü ’s horses.
While the sack of Baghdad, now a backwater compared to the glories of Damascus and Cairo further west, was a blow to the Islamic world, it was by no means the end of that world. Once Baghdad and the Caliphate lay in ruins, the Mongols kept on flowing westward towards the Mediterranean and the riches its kingdoms had to offer. This meant, in part, going across desert(s)--nothing new to the Mongols, but all the same, finding water for thousands of horsemen can be quite difficult. The Ilkhanate forces split, some of them going to the north and through the Caucasus range and into Asia Minor, while the other, smaller force moved on Damascus. As this second force, commanded by Kitbhuga, went through Syria, they received word of a possible ally, that of the Latin Kingdoms (known as the Franks/Rumi to contemporary Islamic sources)--who were struggling against the Mamlukes and Turks in an attempt to hold on to their crumbling kingdom in the Holy Land.
The Mamlukes:
As it happened, the Levant of the 1250s was already shot through with turmoil when the Mongols appeared from stage right. The Egyptian Ayyubid dynasty was on the way out, and the Mamlukes, soldier-slaves originally taken from the swirling vortex of Turkic horsemen that Central Asia had produced for centuries, were on the rise. The Mamluke generals had commanded the Ayyubid armies (of Mamluke infantry/cavalry) for decades before finally taking power for themselves. Recognizing the threat that the Mongols posed to Mamluke power in the region, and what that threat meant to the established Muslim society as a whole, the Mamlukes mobilized. Perhaps mobilized is the wrong word: the Mamlukes themselves were the standing army of greater Egypt--and as such, the troops were trained, outfitted, and paid directly by the nascent Mamluke state. That these troops were trained cannot be stressed enough. The Battle of Ain Jalut would have gone far differently if the Muslim army had been more of a citizen-militia such as existed in Baghdad. The Mamlukes were trained as soldiers from childhood. Soldiers--the very term suggests there needs to be an organized state (another thing that might have contributed to victory) to finance, outfit, and oversee the army. Keep in mind as well that the army in this case founded the state (well, deposed the Ayyubid ruler and set up a state more or less the same but with new leaders)--so the state is almost a tool of the army rather than the army being a tool of the state.
The Franks:
Through all the power plays of the Mamlukes and Mongols, the Franks, Christian knights of European extraction, were just trying to hold onto the remnants of the Latin Kingdoms of Antioch and Tripoli. Alliances with the Mongols were suggested, and a few Europeans (and Armenians from south eastern Anatolia) served under the collective banner of the Mongol army. Prince Bohemund VI of Antioch fought under the Mongols at the sieges of Aleppo and Damascus in 1260, and according to some chroniclers was very close to Kitbhuga. The Mongol-Frankish alliance benefited the Principality of Antioch immensely at first, as Kitbhuga returned territory that the Mamlukes and Ayyubids had conquered. However, after the Mongol defeat at Ain Jalut in 1260, the crusader state was in dire straits, as the Mamluke sultanate was looking to crush any Ilkhanid influence in the Levant. That meant getting rid of the Mongols’ troublesome Christian allies, already weakened by a waning enthusiasm for crusading in Western Europe.
Diplomacy:
While all of these struggles were going on in the Levant, Louis IX of France counted the Mongols as an ally, and even sent diplomatic feelers to Huegelu, asking him to support his second attempt to take Egypt in order to secure Jerusalem. That attempt was a disastrous failure. The Papacy also considered an alliance with the Ilkhanate, all of the khanates, actually. The various popes did this in an attempt to crush the Turks and Mamlukes, who menaced the borders of Christendom in a much more immediate fashion than the Mongols did. After the battle of Ain Jalut and the failed Mongol offensive--with the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks eventually gaining a hold on Anatolia (despite Mongol incursions into the region) and spreading out to take much of the old domain of the Eastern Roman Empire--territory which they would hold until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The initial Ottoman expansion would not have been possible with a strong Ilkhanate to the east and Crusader States to the south. While the Crusader kingdoms themselves might not have been all that powerful, they (especially the Knights of St. John from Rhodes and Cyprus) menaced the Ottoman sea lanes until the fall of Rhodes in the 16th century. A more powerful crusader state (backed by the Mongols) could have sewn destruction for the Turks.
Cultural impact: So, we have the Battle of Ain Jalut. A battle which the Mamlukes won, crushing the Mongol (and allied) forces. But what does one battle mean for the Levant at large?
A) The establishing of a secure Mamluke state which existed in one fashion or another until the 19th century. It first continued as a sultanate, then as a dominion of the Ottoman Empire after 1517--until Egypt’s separation from the Turkish power in the 19th century.
B) Persia. Though the Ilkhanate burned its way through much of Persia in their initial thrust to the Mediterranean, they ended up actually being decent rulers once they had settled down, embracing Persian culture, literature, and Islam. Though Persia would be wracked by Timur in the late 14th century, Persian culture would remain largely intact, and would continue on under the Shiite Safavid dynasty in the 16th century.
C)The demise of the Crusader States.
D)Theoretically protecting the rest of the Mediterranean world from further Mongol assaults. Since the Mongols were defeated, we can never be sure exactly what the world would have looked like if the Mongols had somehow managed to defeat the numerically and militarily superior Mamlukes.
1260: Aleppo was in ruins, burned like Baghdad (in 1258) and Nishapur (in 1221) before it. The citizens of the city refused the Mongol entreaty to surrender and paid the price. After Aleppo, the Mongols moved south, towards the bustling cities of Damascus and Jerusalem. Unlike Aleppo, Damascus capitulated and managed to avoid the fire and sword that the Mongols brought with them. The Khan Huegelu had been recalled to the Mongol capital of (?) to aid in electing a new Great Khan. For that reason, Kitbhuga, his lieutenant, was given command of the Mongol force advancing on Jerusalem and Mamluke-controlled Egypt. In a seemingly endless drive for land and power, the Mongols sent emissaries ahead of their main force to the Mamluke sultan Qutuz. Qutuz, possibly on the advice of Baybars (one of his advisors, and later successor) killed the two envoys. The murder of the two envoys, seemingly foolish in the face of a Mongol onslaught, might have been a deliberate provocation; John Keegan has theorized that the recently-established Mamluke state was simply spoiling for a fight to establish itself as the main power in the region.
The Mamluke sultans came to power in 1252, killing the last Ayyubid ruler, and ruling the Ayyubid kingdom from Cairo. The kingdom of Egypt was not peaceful; it had not been since the Ayyubids overthrew the Fatimids in 1170. Cairo itself started out as a garrison for Fatimid troops serving in the city of Cairo, and eventually grew to be a massive citadel from which the city’s rulers reigned. The Ayyubids, named for Saladin’s Arabic name: Salah-al-Din bin Ayyub, a Sunni dynasty, eventually replaced the Shiite Fatimids, bringing with them the Kurdish practice of using Mamlukes. Mamlukes were soldier-slaves captured from the wild frontiers of Islam on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea and in the Caucasus. From time immemorial, this territory had been the domain of Turkic nomads and Circassians respectively. These nomads were either captured or enticed into service with the early Ayyubid sultans, and their descendents were raised as soldier-slaves in turn--with a leader being chosen by skill rather than lineage. By the time of the last Ayyubid sultan, the dynasty of Saladin had become weak, and was being torn apart be internal strife. In order to end the feuds that were weakening the Ayyubid sultanate, the Mamluke generals wiped the Ayyubids off the face of the earth, assassinating not only the sultan (who had gained power by using the Mamlukes to kill his rival), but the sultan’s mother and cousins. This move, though rather brutal, ensured some modicum of stability--as no pretender to the throne could materialize with an army at his back and throw Egypt into the turmoil which the Mamlukes hoped to avoid. Of course, this version of events is rather favorable to the Mamlukes--a less generous writer might say that, in a bloody grab for power, the Mamlukes secured the Ayyubid throne for themselves, quashing any and all dissent. And that writer would be exactly right, for that was precisely what the Mamlukes did. Ridding themselves of direct claimants to the sultanate did not, however, prevent the soldier-slave generals from breaking off into their own factions, largely based on whether they had roots in the Caucasus or the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, and going at one another’s throats in a quest for the Cairo-based throne. Eventually one general, Aybeg, seized power by killing the sultan and, a few years later, marrying that sultan’s mother, who had been ruling in her own right. Some time after their marriage, the former sultana knifed Aybeg while she was bathing him. Bloody bathwater was noticed in a drainage pipe, and the sultana was killed in a fight with the late Mamluke sultan’s guards. More power struggles would follow, and eventually Qutuz, notable only for being the first commander to be able to hold power long enough to defeat the Mongols, took the crown.
The Mamlukes, rather than take issue with this way of gaining power, appear to have subscribed to a theory that the assassin was the more cunning, able, and stronger man, and therefore a better leader. While this gave the sultan some respect among his troops, it would not have prevented the commander of those troops from killing the sultan if said commander thought he could do a better job of running things. Baybars was one such commander. He managed to claw his way to prominence and fame in Qutuz’s campaign against the Mongols. A campaign which ended in victory at Ain Jalut in 1260. Qutuz had very little time to celebrate his victory, however, as, shortly after the battle, he was personally strangled by Baybars. Under Baybars, the Mamlukes prospered as they never had before. They went from being a fully militarized state focused only on the defeat of the Mongol Ilkhanate.
Unlike the Mongols, a people trained from birth in a nomadic style of warfare, the Mamlukes, though originally steppe nomads themselves, had embraced some of the benefits of sedentary life--mainly rigorous training and drilling with superior weapons and close order tactics.
Surviving accounts of the battle of Ain Jalut come from the victorious Mamlukes, who marked it as a clash that saved Islam from further Mongol assaults. While the contemporary sources might have been understandably anti-Mongol, the overall effects of the Ilkhanate on Muslim society are rather hard to divine. After losing at Ain Jalut, the Mongols seem to have been pretty much permanently discouraged from forcing their way westward: the logistics of such a push just were not worth the overall gain, even for a society as driven towards conquest as the post-Genghis Khan Mongols. Evidence of the lack of benefits can be seen in later Mongol campaigns into Palestine and Syria, where, despite aid from allies, the Mongols were driven back each time. Eventually, the message is driven home: the Mongols would not profit from attempting to break into the already entrenched Mediterranean world.
As far as the Ilkhanate was concerned, the question of conquering Egypt was pretty much shelved for the moment. Détente of a sort was reached between the Mongols and Mamlukes, giving each side the time and resources necessary to turn their energies elsewhere. In the case of the Mamlukes, they turned the full brunt of their considerable armies onto the surviving Crusader kingdoms (and, for that matter, the West‘s last few lackluster attempts at cobbling together crusading armies). Due to the lack of a serious Mongol threat this worked, and until 1517 the Mamlukes were the undisputed masters of the southern Levant. Of course, those are just the historical effects of the battle--now I need to figure out the cultural effects. --
So we have the battle of Ain Jalut itself. Historians have been debating its importance for years. It was once theorized that it was amongst the ten battles that defined or preserved Western civilization. That theory was brought into question, and the debate on Ain Jalut’s impact is still up for grabs. What can be known about the battle is that it did impact European and Levantine societies to some degree. Far-spanning effects of the single day of fighting aside, the Mamlukes won the battle through a combination of superior training and equipment, or the Mongols lost due to exhausted supply lines. The battle itself was rather one-sided, with the Mongol army being not only defeated but utterly broken by Mamluke feints and counter-charges.
The tactics that the Mamlukes used were surprisingly similar to those used by the Mongols against enemies in China and the Ukraine. The Mamlukes, relying on horses, simply had the power, even though the Mongol used remounts, to outride the Ilkhanate ponies--and since the Egyptians could afford to lose men to Mongol arrows, they were able to run the Ilkhanate into the ground, and, on pinning them, to bring in their own foot archers who could keep them pinned with masterful training and precision. From a tactical standpoint one thing the Mamlukes had in their favor going into the battle was sheer numbers, they had thirty thousand men to the eight thousand Mongols and perhaps four thousand allied Crusaders and Armenians. Combining those numbers with superior training and armament only weighted the odds even more in favor of the Mamlukes. The superiority of troops trained in a sedentary and organized state run by military leaders was a major factor in the battle of Ain Jalut. Though the Mongols had faced, and beaten armies in China, Persia, and at Baghdad, Ain Jalut was the first time the Mongols crossed paths with a rigorously trained, well organized, and loyal army with knowledge of the terrain and superior leadership.
So the battle had been won by the Mamlukes, and now came the far-reaching effects of a single day of fighting. The first effect was the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. Already divided into four feuding khanates this battle weakened the Mongols--especially the Ilkhanate, which was directly involved. Ain Jalut injured the Ilkhanate not only in terms of fighting strength, but in terms of prestige. The battle of Ain Jalut was the first time the Mongols had, in their sixty year spree of conquests, been utterly defeated and put to rout. Despite the defeat, the captured Ilkhanate general Kitbhuga prophesied that waves of Mongols would come after him, shortly before he was beheaded by Qutuz, something the sultan seemed to do to a number of captured Mongols. This prophesy turned out to be quite false, as infighting amongst the Mongol khanates, (before this point they had been mostly united), led to their fall from complete dominance of a large portion of Asia. This is not to say that they immediately vanished back to the steppes from whence they came, merely that their unified control of land from China to Poland and Persia waned after a time. The khanates were now at war with one another--and the protracted conflict which followed prevented the Mongols from future westward expansion. This division of the khanates gave rise to the second effect of Ain Jalut: the expansion of Mamluke power. The battle did not mean the Mongols were off the field for good; the Mamlukes still had to tussle with the Ilkhanate twice more (in the 1270s and from 1299 to 1301)--winning each time. We see the Mamlukes continue to militarize in the face of a theoretical Mongol threat. While the first two campaigns were played up as holy wars against a pagan foe by Mamluke propagandists, the last of these engagements was fought against Ghazan Khan, who had converted to Islam prior to attempting to invade Mamluke-held Syria. Even though the war itself was short and victorious for the Mamlukes, perhaps due to it being a Muslim on Muslim conflict it is largely glossed over by many contemporary Arab historians.
Swiftly working to gain back the land taken by the Mongols in the late 1250s, the Mamlukes, now under Baybars and his sons, were able to advance on both the Ilkhanate, which was still reeling from fighting in eastern Persia, and perhaps more importantly, though the Mamlukes secured more land from the Mongols, on the remnant of the Latin kingdoms, now pushed back to only the cities of Antioch and Tripoli and tiny strips of land around each port. Backing the wrong horsemen had proven to be a fatal mistake for Bohemond VI and the Principality of Antioch. By 1293 the Crusader forces had been pushed out of the Levant almost entirely, retaining only token garrisons on the islands of Cyprus and Rhodes. The Mamlukes, having secured control of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, looked to their own affairs and quickly reestablished what the sultans claimed was the ‘Abbasid caliphate. Though really just puppets of the soldier-slaves turned rulers, the new caliphate guaranteed some measure of validity to the sultans in power.
If…
If the battle had gone differently, if the Mongols had won the day, things would have been vastly different. The Mamelukes needed the victory at Ain Jalut to ensure that their rule was more than just a flash in the pan of Egyptian polities. If the Mamluke army had been defeated (which would have been an astounding victory for Kitbuga, having only 8,000 men, a third of the men Qutuz commanded) the Mongols (and their Crusader allies) would probably have laid siege to Jerusalem. With a massive Mamluke force already broken, the Mongols would have not encountered resistance until they reached…
Byzantium?
Milan?
Dijon?
Paris?
London?
Or maybe even
Your home town?
(Realizing that to reach your home town the Mongols would have had to build a gigantic fleet and sail it across the Atlantic--they almost pulled off two naval invasions of Japan. The key word there was almost. The Mongols almost accomplished a lot more than they actually did (which was quite a sizeable amount). Ain Jalut might have been just another notch in the Mongol tally of conquests. Instead it proved to be a stumbling block from which a portion of the Mongol empire could never recover.
An outline for the 4/15 presentation on Ain Jalut.
*The Levant at 1257. (How everything stands right before the Mongols take Baghdad and move eastward.)
*Rapid Ilkhanate advance--destruction of Baghdad. Although already a backwater, having lost out to the cities of Damascus and Cairo further west, the destruction of Baghdad--and the death of the last ‘Abbasid caliph was a clear indicator that the power in Iraq and Iran had transferred from Muslim to Mongol hands. As this happens, the Muslim world--what is left of it, spins in chaos.
Chaos like:
*Status of Latin Kingdoms (and where its cities are), attempted crusades.
*The fall of the Ayyubids. And the rise of the Mamlukes--soldier-slaves turned ruling class.
*Mamluke-Mongol diplomacy (prior to Ain Jalut)--envoys sent by Kitbuga to Qutuz, their murder, resulting hilarity.
*Ain Jalut. The battle itself. What happened?
The Mamlukes outnumbered the Mongols three to one, and, with superior training, equipment, and supply lines, would have been hard pressed to lose the battle.
That did not mean that it was a cake-walk, though.
The Mongols fell for a ruse they had used many times, being led into a charge on a seemingly helpless position, only to find that they were ringed in by Mamluke cavalry (on horses, rather than the Mongol ponies) and archers. It is the archers--trained to fire withering rains of arrows onto enemy positions, who decimate the Mongol ranks and allow Mamluke cavalry another chance to break through.
While the Mamluke lancers exploit this breakthrough, the infantry on both sides fight it out. The eventual winner, no matter how the battle itself was fought, was the Mamluke Sultan Qutuz--who did not have time to enjoy his victory, as he was slain by Baybars (who took over as Sultan and ruled for some years before dying naturally, a rare occurrence amongst the Mamlukes). Kitbugha killed by Qutuz. Hilarity and Mamluke power struggle ensues.
How did the Mongols lose? What were the consequences of the Mamluke victory. (For one thing, defeat of the Mongol westward advance. For another, ability, since not worrying about the Mongols as much, to focus on defeating crusader states. (Fall of Antioch in 1263 (after Antioch made a bad move in picking sides in the clash of the titans. Cyprus in 12xx, Acre in X) and so on.)
--And then examine:
*Mamluke Society--how was it affected by the Mongols. Under Baybars, specifically after the battle of Ain Jalut--we have the development of an actual state-level infrastructure. This means roads, couriers, and etc ).
-Resurrection of the Caliphate. Though largely a figurehead position elected by a council controlled by the Mamlukes, the reborn ‘Abbasid caliphate lent legitimacy to Mamluke rule.
*Mongol society--how was it affected by the Mamlukes. Keep in mind this is the first time that the Mongols have been summarily defeated while on campaign. This would also spell the end of their advancement into the West. For Ilkhanate society in Persia the defeat simply allowed the nominally Buddhist Mongol overlords to gradually merge with their Muslim subjects, eventually (with Ghazan,) leading to the conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam. Now we have two Islamic powers vying for control of the Levant, and in Anatolia a third power is rising, the Ottoman Turks--who will eventually subjugate the Mamlukes (in 1517 after a question of Mamluke neutrality in a war against the Safavid Dynasty of Persia.
So Ilkhanate society is allowed some introspection. And it uses this introspection to embrace and support certain aspects of Persian art, architecture and culture.
What does this halt mean for the West?--Well, loss of the Crusader states, for one.
*Mongol-Frankish diplomacy (before and after the battle)--siege of Damascus in 12xx (find Templar/Hospitaller sources). Consider the Battle of Ain Jalut in a more macro-historical lens. If the Mongols had won the battle, what would have happened to the Mamelukes.
*Argue: The Mamelukes needed the victory at Ain Jalut to ensure that their rule was more than just a flash in the pan of Egyptian polities. If the Mamluke army had been defeated (which would have been an astounding victory for Kitbuga, having only 8,000 men, a third of the men Qutuz commanded) the Mongols (and their Crusader allies) would probably have laid siege to Jerusalem.
Would the Crusader Kingdoms have seen more success? Or would the Mongols just steamroll over the rather damaged and bankrupt Levantine polities after realizing that they could. Also consider the possible success Louis IX in Egypt.--With Mongol aid, the landing at Damietta might have actually proved the first step to taking Cairo (and effectively eliminating Muslim influence in the Holy Land).
*Did the Mongols push the Turks (first Seljuk, later Ottoman) toward Constantinople?
-No. For as long as there had been Turks in Anatolia (since 1071), they have been gradually advancing on Constantinople--sometimes being pushed back by either the Byzantine, Latin, or Bulgarian forces, but eventually, in 1453, the Turks would win the long struggle for dominance of the Bosphorus.
*Maps and pictures (contemporary and modern) might prove useful. Or…I could always draw them. Yeah…that’d work. Much less chance of technological failure when you use a chalkboard. William Gibson would be amused.
---
Works cited:
*Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamluks. DS 38.7 .A46. Cambridge University Press. 1995 Pages 26-107.
*Jandora, John Walter. Militarism in Arab Society: An historiographical and bibliographical sourcebook. DS 37.8 .J36. London: Greenwood Press. 1997. Pages 75-78.
*Keegan, John. A History of Warfare.
*Latham, J.D. ‘Notes on Mamluk Horse-Archers.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Vol. 32, No. 2. 1969. Cambridge University Press.
*Lyons, U & M.C, Riley-Smith, J.S.C. Ayyubids, Mamlukes, and Crusaders Vol. 2.
DS 38.7 .I242. Pages 60-64, roughly.
*Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. 1984
*Masson Smith, John. ‘Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?’ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 44. No. 2 (Dec., 1984). Harvard-Yenching Institute.
*Riley-Smith, Jonathan. P.M. Holt, ed. Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of the Crusades.
*Walker, Bethany J. “Militarization to Nomadization: The Middle and Late Islamic Periods.” Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1999). Pages 202-232