“The battles broadcast one indisputable lesson of seismic importance: The Mongols could be stopped.”

By Dr. Nicholas Morton

IN EARLY 1260, a huge Mongol field army crossed the Euphrates River and laid siege to Aleppo in modern-day Syria. Over the previous century, a number of armies had tried to conquer this massive commercial city by frontal assault and they had all failed. The crusaders tried repeatedly in the early 12th Century, but they never got inside the walls; it took Saladin almost a decade of raiding and negotiation to gain control. By contrast, the Mongols took Aleppo by storm in a matter of days. Soon afterwards, Hulegu (the Mongol commander) sent a flying column south to Damascus, which yielded without a fight.

By this stage the Near East was in the final stages of collapse. From the borders of the steppe country to the Mediterranean seaboard, the Mongols had overthrown the vast majority of the region’s sultanates, empires and kingdoms or forced them to become client states paying an annual tribute.

In that moment the Mongols seemed unstoppable. Virtually no-one managed to defeat them in battle and, on the rare occasion that their forces did encounter setbacks, this defiance was only ever short-lived. The Mongols were the new masters of Eurasia and they proved intent on reforming their vast empire to meet their needs. The continent’s trade routes realigned themselves to serve the Mongols’ great wagon cities; merchants began to select their trade goods according to the tastes of Mongol elites; and cities and rural communities learned to adapt themselves to the imposed reality of Mongol rule.

So how were the Mongols to be stopped?

In the Near East, by 1260 very few powers remained independent. The Kingdom of Jerusalem – one of the Crusader states – continued to hold out, although it was also sending emissaries to the Mongols. Its leaders knew very well that they lacked the strength to meet the Mongols in battle. The Byzantines came to terms with the Mongols in this same year after over a decade of prevarication.

And then there was the Mamluk Empire in Egypt.

The Mamluk Empire was a relatively new power in the region. Egypt had previously been ruled by the Ayyubid dynasty (Saladin’s successors) but during the early 13th Century they had come to rely too heavily on mamluk warriors to provide soldiers for their army. Mamluks were enslaved people who the Ayyubids purchased and then trained to become elite warriors. The number of mamluk regiments grew as the century progressed and proved very effective in defeating the armies of the Seventh Crusade in 1250. Later that year, the mamluks realized their strength, rose up against the Ayyubids, killed the reigning sultan and took power for themselves.

Ten years later in 1260, the now-independent Mamluks faced the threat of Mongol invasion. Unlike the region’s other powers, they did not either build up their defences in preparation or submit to Mongol authority. Instead they marched out beyond their borders to confront the Mongols directly. This was a daring move: the Mamluk army at this point probably only numbered between 10,000 and 15,000 troops, while the Mongol force at Aleppo was over 100,000 soldiers strong.

Yet events favoured the bold. Prior to the arrival of the Mamluk army, the bulk of the Mongol force withdrew eastwards. This move may have been driven by the need to secure grazing for the army’s vast herds of animals or perhaps also by the desire to move closer to the Mongol Empire’s central territories following the death of the Great Khan.

Hulegu (the Mongol army’s commander) was the late Khan’s brother and so he had a close interest in the succession. Whatever his motives may have been, his departure meant that the Mamluks faced only a garrison in Syria rather than the full Mongol field army. The Mamluks then defeated this force in a close-fought battle at a place called Ayn Jalut.

Traditionally, Ayn Jalut has been viewed as a great turning point in history: the moment when the Mongol advance westwards finally came to a grinding halt; the beginning of the end for their aspiration to rule the world; the event that heralded the rise of the Mamluks as a major power.

Was Ayn Jalut quite so momentous?

As is so often the case, its legacy was a little more complex. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Mongols never advanced further westwards following their defeat at Ayn Jalut and so – in a sense – the above verdict is correct. However, the Mamluks had defeated only a Mongol garrison and not the main army. The Mongol force remained intact and, following Ayn Jalut, was highly motivated to exact revenge on the Mamluks at the earliest possible opportunity. So, in the wake of the battle, commentators might reasonably have concluded that, while the clash had been a victory for the Mamluks, it would serve simply to provoke a crushing counter-strike that would flatten Mamluk Egypt at a single stroke. After all, this kind of scenario had happened before: Only a few decades previously, a commander called Jalal al-Din, ruler of the Khwarazmian Empire (then encompassing much of western Persia) successfully defeated a Mongol army in 1228 only to lose his entire empire to a subsequent Mongol invasion two years later. It would have been reasonable to suggest that Ayn Jalut might cause a similar chain of events.

Except this didn’t happen. The outbreak of a Mongol civil war between Hulegu (then building up his position as Mongol ruler of the Near East) and his rival Berke (whose lands lay further north encompassing much of modern-day Russia and Eastern Europe) coupled with a rash of local rebellions meant that two decades passed before a major new expedition could be sent against the Mamluks. In the meantime, some raiding expeditions and armies were sent against the Mamluk frontier, but none were pressed home in earnest or achieved much success. The Mamluks themselves used this time to build up their position in Syria and to attack the Mongols’ satellite states including: the principality of Antioch (one of the Crusader states) and the kingdom of Cilician Armenia. They also launched a devastating assault on Anatolia in 1277 (modern-day Turkey) defeating a large Mongol force outside the city of Elbistan and encouraging an ongoing anti-Mongol rebellion that was spreading across the area.

It was only following a two-decade hiatus in 1281 that the Mongols returned to Syria in strength. Their army was vast, with upper-end estimates putting the size of their force at 80,000 troops; a more probable estimate offered by the leading historian Reuven Amitai puts it at 40-50,000 troops. The Mamluks under Sultan Qalawun could only manage around half this number.

Here then was the crucial moment. Viewed from a long-term perspective, Ayn Jalut was merely a beginning. The true test took place on October 29, 1281 at a battle fought outside the town of Homs. This was the first time that the Mamluks had encountered a Mongol army at full strength.

As is true of so many of these encounters, the battle could so easily have gone either way. It opened with attacks by both the Mongol left and right flanks, the left making little progress, but the right routing the Mamluks’ entire left wing. At that moment, victory must have seemed within the Mongols’ grasp. But then a determined assault led by the Mamluks’ right wing and central contingents drove into the Mongol centre, forcing a retreat that soon became a rout. The Mamluks pursued the Mongols for hundreds of miles until the few survivors reached the sanctuary of friendly territory.

In many respects, the Battle of Homs was the decisive clash of this era, not Ayn Jalut. Yes, Ayn Jalut had signalled the Mamluks’ willingness to resist, making them a beacon of resistance to the Mongols’ enemies, but it was only 20 years later that they proved they could meet and defeat a full-scale Mongol invasion. In doing so they singled themselves out as the first power on the Mongols’ western frontiers ever to conduct a successful and, more importantly, a sustained resistance to the Mongols’ attacks.

The significance of this cannot be underestimated. During their early decades of war and conquest the Mongols’ advances had been enabled by a growing sense of inevitability and fear. The Mongols’ catalogue of victories demonstrated that no-one could stand against them, whilst the scale of the destruction visited upon those who tried to offer resistance provided a strong incentive for future opponents to yield without a fight. The Mamluk victories at Ayn Jalut, and still more at Homs, inverted this logic; now — plainly — the Mongols could be resisted.

Great turning points?

Stepping back from the cut-and-thrust of the Mamluk-Mongol war and considering its various campaigns against the broader panorama of military history, the battle of Homs provides a fascinating case-study for those interested in the role of battles as turning-point moments in the evolution of historical events. Some have suggested that major battles are rarely decisive in truly influencing a region’s long-term development; they generally claim instead that deep-rooted social, economic and environmental shifts have a greater explanatory power when really getting to grips with the forces that orchestrate long-term change. And sometimes they are absolutely right, but are they right in this case?

In some respects, the Battle of Homs makes the contrary case. When Sultan Qalawun marched out to fight the Mongols in October of 1281, he was taking an extraordinary risk. He had no second line of defence. In many respects, this was a case of ‘do or die’— the act of a ruler with his back against the wall chancing one last throw of the dice and winning. Viewed from this perspective, the Battle of Homs could be viewed as the moment which decided both the survival of the Mamluk Empire and therefore the continuation of successful resistance to the Mongols: a classic turning point battle.

There is however another way of looking at it. Many years later in 1299 a Mongol army succeeded where its predecessor had failed in 1281: it defeated a Mamluk field army in battle. Soon afterwards the Mongols marched triumphantly into Damascus. Yet this was not an act that presaged the complete fall of the Mamluk Empire. Soon afterwards the Mongol army simply abandoned Damascus and returned to its own territory. Many reasons have been advanced for this astonishing decision. Some suggest it was due to a lack of grazing for the Mongol armies’ vast herds. I myself have suggested that it was due to the logistical difficulties involved in maintaining control of a city like Damascus so far from friendly territory. Either way, this later example challenges us to consider whether it would have been any different if the Mongols had won their earlier encounter in 1281. Perhaps the basic landscape and tortuous logistics of the Near East – particularly in its southern margins – would have defeated the Mongols, even if the Mamluks hadn’t been able to. Certainly, Mongol forces struggled when passing through regions unsuited for their nomadic way of life. They made little progress in the jungles of south-east Asia and likewise the argument has been floated that the thick deciduous forests of Western Eurasia posed an insurmountable obstacle for their nomadic armies. Are we seeing the same thing here?

In the final analysis the reality probably lies somewhere between these two factors. Nevertheless, irrespective of whether Mamluk cavalry or the Near Eastern geography defeated the Mongols’ advances, the battles of Ayn Jalut and Homs broadcast one indisputable lesson of seismic importance: The Mongols could be stopped.

Dr. Nicholas Morton is the author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022). His previous work includes The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History (Oxford University Press, 2020). An associate professor in history at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K., he also runs the YouTube channel @MedievalNearEast where he offers insights on a wide range of topics concerning medieval military history. You can follow him on Twitter @NicholasMorto11.