THE SLAVES WHO BEAT THE MONGOLS | WHAT STOPPED THE MONGOLS?

History Onion · v13-test · 2:29

What happened. In 1260 a Mongol army stood in Syria waiting to invade Egypt, having never been beaten in the west. Then the Great Khan died in China, and by the family's own rule the commander — Genghis Khan's grandson Hulagu — had to ride home to help choose the next one. He left about ten thousand men behind, and the Egyptian army that destroyed them at a spring called Ain Jalut was led by two men the Mongols themselves had created: a sultan who claimed descent from a dynasty they had wiped out, and a general they had enslaved as a boy. Why it mattered. It was the first Mongol army destroyed in open battle in the west. The frontier it drew between the Mongol world and Egypt is roughly the one that held for the next sixty years. What is documented. Hulagu's command and the sack of Baghdad (Rashid al-Din, Juvayni); the Great Khan's death on campaign in Sichuan on 11 August 1259 (Chinese court records and Rashid al-Din); the withdrawal east and the force left under Kitbuqa; the battle on 3 September 1260, the feigned retreat, and Kitbuqa's capture and execution (Mamluk, Armenian and Syriac accounts). Baibars's enslavement after the Mongol conquest of the Kipchak steppe is recorded by the Mamluks' own historians. What we reconstructed or compressed. The messenger's arrival is a scene built around a documented fact — the courier and the date are not recorded. Hulagu's calculation is an inference from his behaviour. The battle's shape is the standard reconstruction; the sources differ on detail. No portrait of any of these men survives, so every face is an illustrated reconstruction from period dress. "Six thousand kilometres" is a computed distance, not a figure from a source.