The Egyptian Mamluks won the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, beating a Mongol army in the hills of Galilee. It was the first time the seemingly unstoppable Mongols suffered a major, lasting defeat in open battle, and it marked the limit of their advance to the west.
By 1260 the Mongols had smashed empires from China to Baghdad and seemed unstoppable. Then, at Ain Jalut in the hills of Galilee, an army of Egyptian Mamluks, former slave-soldiers, met a Mongol force and beat it. It was the first time the Mongols suffered a major, lasting defeat in open battle, and it marked the limit of their westward advance.
The Mongol tide
In the 1250s the Mongols under Hulagu Khan tore through the Islamic Middle East, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and ending the Abbasid Caliphate1. Syria fell next, and it looked as though Egypt would follow. Then news came that the Great Khan Möngke had died1, and Hulagu withdrew east with much of his army, leaving a smaller force under his general Kitbuqa to hold Syria2.
The slave-soldiers of Egypt
Egypt was ruled by the Mamluks, elite soldiers of slave origin who had seized power. Rather than wait to be crushed, the sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars marched north to face the Mongols while they were divided. The two armies met at Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, in September 1260.
The trap in Galilee
The Mamluks used the Mongols' own favourite tactic against them. Baibars led a feigned retreat that drew Kitbuqa's cavalry into the hills3, where the main Mamluk army lay hidden. Springing the ambush, the Mamluks surrounded and destroyed the Mongol force, and Kitbuqa was captured and killed.2 Some later accounts claim the Mamluks also used early gunpowder devices to frighten the Mongol horses, though historians dispute this.
The limit of empire
Ain Jalut broke the myth of Mongol invincibility and saved Egypt and the surviving heartland of Islam from conquest. The Mongols would raid Syria again but never held it for long. Baibars soon murdered Qutuz and took the throne himself2, becoming one of the greatest Mamluk sultans and a scourge of the remaining Crusader states.
Sixty years of war with the Mongols
Ain Jalut opened a long struggle rather than ending it. The Ilkhanate, the Mongol state founded by Hulagu in Persia, invaded Syria again and again. The Mamluks won a hard-fought second battle at Homs in 12812, lost at Wadi al-Khazandar in 1299, when the Mongols briefly occupied the city of Damascus, though its citadel held out, and won decisively at Marj al-Saffar in 1303.1 After that the Ilkhanate never again seriously threatened Egypt, and a peace was finally agreed in the 1320s.
