Jerusalem. The Biography

Christian again until 1917. 23
    In 1248, King Louis XI led the last effective Crusade and once again, the Crusaders hoped to win Jerusalem by conquering Egypt. In November 1249 the Crusaders advanced on Cairo, where Sultan Salih Ayyub was already dying. His widow, the sultana, Shajar al-Durr, took control, summoning her stepson Turanshah back from Syria. The Crusaders overreached themselves and were routed by the mamluks, the crack regiments of military slaves. Louis was captured. But the new sultan Turanshah neglected his own soldiers: on 2 May 1250, he was holding a banquet to celebrate the victory, attended by many of the Crusader prisoners, when mamluks, led by a blond giant named Baibars, then aged twenty-seven, burst in, swords drawn.
    Baibars slashed at the sultan who fled bleeding down to the Nile as the mamluks fired arrows into him. He stood wounded in the river begging for his life until a mamluk waded in, cut off his head and slicedopen his chest. His heart was cut out and shown to King Louis of France at a banquet; no doubt he lost his appetite.
    There ended the dynasty of Saladin in Egypt, a downfall that condemned Jerusalem, now half-deserted, half-ruined, to ten chaotic years tossed between different warlords and princelings as they fought for power * while a fearsome shadow fell across the Middle East. In 1258, the Mongols, the shamanist hordes from the Far East who had already conquered the largest empire the world had ever known, sacked Baghdad, massacring 80,000 people and killing the caliph. They took Damascus and galloped as far as Gaza, raiding Jerusalem on the way. Islam would need a ferocious champion to defeat them. The man who rose to the challenge was Baibars. 24

MAMLUK
     
    Before the end of the world, all prophecies have to be fulfilled – and the Holy City has to be given back to the Christian Church.
    Christopher Columbus, Letter to King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain
    And she [the Wife of Bath] had thrice been to Jerusalem.
    Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
    In Jerusalem, there is not a place one calls truly sacred.
    Ibn Taymiyya,
In Support of Pious Visits to Jerusalem
    The practice [of the Holy Fire] is still going on. There occur under the eyes of Muslims a number of hateful things.
    Mujir al-Din,
History of Jerusalem and Hebron
    The Greeks [are] our worst and atrocious enemies, the Georgians are the worst heretics, like the Greeks and equal in malice; the Armenians are very beautiful, rich and generous, [and] the deadly enemies of the Greeks and Georgians.
    Francesco Suriano,
Treatise on the Holy Land
    We beheld the famous city of our delight and we rent our garments. Jerusalem is mostly desolate and in ruins and without walls. As for the Jews, the poorest have remained [living] in heaps of rubbish, for the law is that a Jew may not rebuild his ruined house.
    Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro,
Letters

1250–1339
     
    BAIBARS: THE PANTHER
     
    Baibars was a fair-haired and blue-eyed Turk from Central Asia sold as a child to a Syrian prince. But, despite his towering barrel-chested physique, he had an unsettling defect: a white cataract on the iris of one of his eyes which led his owner to sell him on to the sultan in Cairo. Salih Ayyub, Saladin’s great-nephew, bought Turkish slaves ‘in batches like sandgrouse’ to form his mamluk regiments. He could not trust his own family but thought ‘one slave is more loyal than 300 sons’. Baibars, like all these pagan slaveboys, was converted to Islam and trained as a slave-soldier, a mamluk. He excelled with the arbalest steel crossbow, winning the nickname the Arbalestier and joined the Bahriyya regiment, the crack soldiers who defeated the Crusaders and became known as the Turkish Lions and the Islamic Templars.
    When Baibars had won the trust of his master, he was manumitted – released from slavery – and climbed the ranks. The mamluks were loyal to their masters and even more loyal to each other – but ultimately each of these orphan-warriors owed nothing to anyone except himself and Allah. After his role in the killing of the sultan, Baibars lost out in the power struggle and fled to Syria where he offered his crossbow to the highest bidder in the civil wars raging between the local princelings. At one point, he seized and plundered Jerusalem. But the power was in Egypt and Baibars was finally recalled there by the latest general to seize the crown, Qutuz.
    When the Mongols raided Syria in force, Baibars commanded