The Mamluks of Egypt destroyed a Mongol army under Kitbuqa at the spring of Ain Jalut in Galilee on 3 September 1260, recovering Syria and making their sultanate the dominant power of the Near East.
Ain Jalut, fought on 3 September 1260 beside the spring of Harod in the Jezreel valley, is the battle in which a Mongol army in the west was destroyed and the ground it had taken was held. The Mamluks of Egypt — slave soldiers who had seized the Egyptian state ten years earlier — marched into Palestine under Sultan Qutuz, met Kitbuqa’s force in open country, and broke it. Kitbuqa was captured and executed; Damascus and Aleppo returned to Cairo’s obedience within weeks.
The battle is usually told as the moment the invincible Mongols were stopped for the first time, which is not what happened and undersells what did. Mongol armies had suffered reverses before, and the force at Ain Jalut was an occupation garrison rather than the army that had sacked Baghdad two years earlier, because Hulagu had taken the bulk of his troops east months before. What Ain Jalut settled was who would govern Syria, and the answer — Cairo — held for two and a half centuries.
Hulagu came west with a mandate from his brother, the Great Khan Möngke, to subdue the Islamic lands. He destroyed the Assassins’ castles in 1256, took Baghdad in 1258 and killed the last Abbasid caliph, and in January 1260 stormed Aleppo. Damascus surrendered without a siege that March, its last Ayyubid ruler having fled; Kitbuqa entered the city, and a Christian mass was celebrated in the Umayyad Mosque, which tells you how completely the order of the Near East had been overturned.
Egypt was next, and Hulagu sent envoys to Cairo with a demand for submission phrased with the usual studied contempt — fortresses will not detain us, armies will not stop us, where will you flee. Qutuz, who had deposed the boy-sultan al-Mansur Ali in 1259 on the argument that a child could not lead the defence against the Mongols, had the envoys killed and their heads displayed on a gate of Cairo. That made the war unavoidable, which was the point.
The single most important fact about Ain Jalut happened before it. Möngke died in August 1259, and the succession fell into dispute between Kublai and Ariq Böke. Hulagu turned back east with the greater part of his army to be in reach of the politics, leaving Kitbuqa one tumen — ten thousand at establishment, in practice fewer — with Armenian, Georgian and locally raised auxiliaries to hold everything from the Euphrates to Gaza.
The succession crisis is the reason usually given and it is genuine, but historians add a second that is less dramatic and probably as important: Syria could not feed the horses. A Mongol field army needed enormous pasturage, several remounts per man, and it was standard practice to summer in cooler highland grazing. The Syrian interior in summer could not support the whole force whatever was happening in Mongolia. Both explanations point the same way, and the honest statement is that Hulagu left because the political crisis made it urgent and the logistics made it sensible — not that a Mongol army fled from the Mamluks.
Qutuz took the army out of Egypt in July 1260 and up the coast, which meant passing the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Franks of Acre had a choice, and they had been offered both sides: the Mongols had demanded their submission, and some crusader lords further north — Bohemond VI of Antioch above all — had already accepted Mongol overlordship. The barons of Acre decided on neutrality favourable to Cairo. They refused an alliance but allowed the Mamluk army to camp outside the city, buy supplies and pass unmolested.
It was a coldly practical judgement: the Mongols had killed a Frankish contingent near Sidon shortly before, and the Franks reckoned a Muslim neighbour they knew was less dangerous than a Mongol one they did not. It also meant the Mamluks arrived in Galilee rested and supplied rather than after a fighting march. Within eight years the sultan they had helped on his way would begin taking their cities apart.
The armies met on 3 September in the Jezreel valley by the spring the Arabic sources call Ain Jalut, the Goliath’s spring. Baybars commanded the Mamluk vanguard, and the tactic was one the Mongols themselves had used across two continents: he engaged, then pulled back in what looked like a broken retreat, drawing Kitbuqa after him into the valley where the main Mamluk army was waiting in the hills on either side.
The trap did not close cleanly. Kitbuqa drove his charge home hard enough to break the Mamluk left wing, and for a period the battle could have gone either way. What the Arabic accounts describe next is Qutuz throwing off his helmet so his men could see his face, crying out for Islam, and leading the rally in person that closed the line again. The Mongols, outnumbered and now enveloped, broke. Kitbuqa was unhorsed, taken alive and executed — defiant to the end, according to the sources, telling his captors that the khan’s vengeance would come.
It settled Syria. Damascus rose against its Mongol garrison within days and Aleppo followed; the frontier stabilised roughly on the Euphrates and stayed there. It also settled Egypt’s politics in the most direct way available: on the road back to Cairo in October, Qutuz was murdered in a conspiracy that included Baybars, who took the throne and ruled for seventeen years. The victory of Ain Jalut became the foundation of the Mamluk regime’s legitimacy, and Baybars spent the credit on the crusader states — Caesarea, Safed, Antioch in 1268.
What it did not do is end the Mongol threat, and the claim that the Mongols were invincible until this day does not survive contact with the record either. Reverses had happened before, in India and elsewhere, and this was a detachment rather than Hulagu’s main force. The Ilkhanate came back repeatedly: the Mamluks beat a second Mongol army at Homs in December 1260 and another at Elbistan in 1277, and in 1299 they were badly beaten at Wadi al-Khazandar, after which the Mongols held Damascus for a few months. The fighting only really stopped with the peace of 1323. Ain Jalut’s claim on the memory is narrower and solid: it was the first time a Mongol army in the west was destroyed in the field by a power that then kept the ground.