Baibars

Baibars was born on July 19, 1223, into the Kipchak Turkish tribes that grazed their herds on the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas ^[1]. The exact place of his birth is not recorded. His childhood coincided with the westward advance of the Mongols, whose campaigns of the 1230s and early 1240s shattered the Kipchak confederations and drove thousands of refugees toward the Crimea and the Balkans. Like many boys of his generation, Baibars was captured amid this upheaval and sold into slavery ^[2].

Sold in the markets of Anatolia and Syria, he eventually reached Egypt, where the Ayyubid sultan al-Salih Ayyub was buying large numbers of Kipchak slaves to build a corps of elite soldiers. Chroniclers noted his tall build, dark complexion, and a distinctive white fleck in one blue eye, a blemish that reportedly lowered his price at sale ^[1]. One early owner was an officer known as al-Bunduqdari, from whom Baibars took the name by which he was later known.

He entered the sultan's Bahri regiment, so called because its barracks stood on Roda Island in the Nile (bahr in Arabic). There he received the standard mamluk formation: conversion to Islam, instruction in the faith, and years of drill in horsemanship, archery, and the lance ^[3]. This system, which turned enslaved boys into professional cavalrymen loyal to their master, was the school in which the future sultan learned both war and politics.

Baibars first appears in the sources as a capable field officer in the 1240s. He fought at the battle of La Forbie near Gaza in 1244, where an Egyptian and Khwarazmian force crushed the combined armies of the Crusader states, a defeat from which Frankish military power in the Holy Land never fully recovered ^[4]. His performance in these campaigns earned him command responsibilities within the Bahri corps.

His reputation was sealed during the Seventh Crusade. When King Louis IX of France invaded Egypt in 1249 and pushed toward Cairo, Baibars helped organize the defense of the town of Mansurah. In February 1250 the crusader vanguard charged into the town's streets, where Mamluk troops ambushed and destroyed it; Louis himself was captured soon afterward ^[2]. Weeks later, Baibars was among the Bahri officers who murdered the new Ayyubid sultan Turanshah, an act that ended the dynasty in Egypt and opened the era of Mamluk rule ^[1].

The following decade was precarious. After a quarrel with the strongman Aybak, Baibars fled to Syria and spent years in exile serving various princes. He returned to Egypt only in 1260, reconciling with the reigning sultan Qutuz as a Mongol army under Kitbuqa advanced through Syria. At Ain Jalut in Galilee on September 3, 1260, Baibars commanded the vanguard of the Egyptian army that lured, encircled, and destroyed the Mongol force ^[5]. The victory halted Mongol expansion into Egypt and Palestine. On the march home, Baibars and a group of conspirators assassinated Qutuz, reportedly after the sultan refused him the governorship of Aleppo, and Baibars was acclaimed sultan in his place ^[1].

Any account of Baibars achievements begins with his war against the Crusader states. Between 1265 and 1271 he conducted almost annual campaigns along the Levantine coast. Caesarea and Arsuf fell in 1265, the great Templar fortress of Safed in 1266, and Jaffa early in 1268 ^[4]. In May 1268 his army stormed Antioch, one of the oldest and richest Crusader possessions; the city was sacked, its population killed or enslaved, and the principality effectively extinguished ^[2]. In 1271 he took Krak des Chevaliers, the Hospitaller castle long thought impregnable, using a forged letter purporting to order its surrender ^[4]. When he died, the Frankish presence had been reduced to a narrow coastal strip around Acre and a few towns.

He fought on other fronts with equal energy. He campaigned against the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, a Mongol ally, devastating its heartland in 1266, and repeatedly raided the Seljuk territories of Anatolia, defeating a Mongol and Seljuk force at Elbistan in 1277 shortly before his death ^[5]. In 1265 he brought the Ismaili Assassin castles of Syria under Mamluk control, ending their independence. To the south he asserted authority over Nubia, pushing Mamluk influence up the Nile ^[3].

His statecraft matched his generalship. In 1261, after the Mongols had destroyed Baghdad, Baibars installed a surviving Abbasid prince as caliph in Cairo, gaining religious legitimacy for his regime and making Egypt the symbolic center of Sunni Islam ^[1]. He negotiated an alliance with Berke, the Muslim khan of the Golden Horde, against their common enemy the Ilkhanate, and secured treaties with Byzantium and trade arrangements with Aragon and Sicily ^[5]. Within his realm he rebuilt fortresses, dredged harbors, dug canals, and organized a famed postal relay system (the barid) that could carry a letter between Cairo and Damascus in about four days ^[3].

Baibars married several wives, as was usual for a ruler of his rank, and fathered a number of children. His favored son Baraka Khan (also written Berke Khan), born of a marriage to the daughter of a Khwarazmian chief, was groomed as heir and formally recognized as co-ruler during his father's lifetime ^[1]. A younger son, Salamish, briefly held the throne as a child after Baraka's deposition.

Contemporary chroniclers describe a ruler of relentless energy who traveled constantly between Egypt and Syria, inspected fortifications in disguise, and demanded detailed reports from his governors ^[3]. He was known for personal austerity in some respects, prohibiting wine and closing taverns during parts of his reign, and for a piety expressed in patronage of Sunni institutions. He established the four chief judgeships in Cairo, one for each Sunni legal school, an arrangement that endured throughout the Mamluk period ^[3].

He was also a builder. In Cairo he endowed the great congregational mosque that still bears his name in the Husayniyya quarter, along with a madrasa near the old Fatimid palaces ^[6]. Bridges, caravanserais, and restored shrines across Egypt and Syria carried inscriptions with his heraldic emblem, a striding lion or panther, a device that archaeologists still use to identify his works ^[6].

The final years of the reign were dominated by the Mongol frontier and by dynastic planning. Baibars strengthened the Euphrates defenses, kept up his intelligence network inside Ilkhanid territory, and welcomed Mongol defectors, known as wafidiyya, into his army ^[5]. In 1276 and 1277 he mounted his most ambitious northern expedition, crossing the Taurus mountains into Anatolia, defeating the Mongols at Elbistan in April 1277, and briefly occupying the Seljuk capital of Kayseri, where coins were struck in his name ^[5].

Aware that Ilkhanid reinforcements were gathering and that his supply lines were long, he withdrew to Syria. In Damascus that June he fell suddenly ill and died on July 1, 1277, at the age of 53 ^[1]. The most widely repeated account holds that he drank poisoned kumiss, fermented mare's milk, that he had intended for another prince, though medieval and modern writers have also suggested illness alone; the truth cannot be established ^[2].

His body was buried in Damascus beneath the dome of what became the Zahiriyya madrasa and library, a building later famous as one of the great manuscript collections of the Arab world ^[6]. His son Baraka succeeded him but lacked his father's grip on the emirs and was pushed aside within two years, after which the veteran commander Qalawun took the throne and founded his own line.

Historians generally treat Baibars as the real founder of the Mamluk sultanate as a durable state. The first Mamluk rulers had seized power in 1250, but it was Baibars who gave the regime its institutions: the revived caliphate, the reorganized army and navy, the postal and espionage services, the judicial structure, and the twin capitals of Cairo and Damascus bound by rapid communication ^[3]. The state he shaped went on to expel the last Crusaders in 1291 and to hold off the Mongols until the Ilkhanate itself dissolved.

Anyone asking who was Baibars in the popular imagination finds a second, larger figure. Within a century of his death he had become the hero of Sirat Baibars, a vast Arabic folk epic recited by professional storytellers in the coffeehouses of Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo into the twentieth century, in which the historical sultan is transformed into a wandering champion of the poor and defender of Islam ^[7]. In modern Kazakhstan, which claims him as a Kipchak ancestor, statues and films have renewed his fame.

Baibars facts continue to draw scholarly attention because his career compresses the great themes of the thirteenth century: the slave trade of the steppe, the Mongol cataclysm, the end of the Crusades, and the rise of a soldier caste to sovereign power. A biography of Baibars written from the chronicles of Ibn Abd al-Zahir, his own secretary, and later historians such as al-Maqrizi shows a ruler who was ruthless, tireless, and inventive, and whose seventeen year reign redrew the political map of the eastern Mediterranean ^[4].