When was the Battle of Ain Jalut?

It was fought on 3 September 1260 (25 Ramadan 658 in the Islamic calendar) near the spring of Ain Jalut in the Jezreel Valley of Galilee.

Why is Ain Jalut important?

It halted the Mongol advance into the Middle East, saved Egypt from conquest and broke the belief that the Mongols could not be beaten.

Did the Mongols fight with their full army at Ain Jalut?

No. Hülegü had withdrawn most of his army after the death of the Great Khan Möngke, leaving Kitbuqa with a force of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 men.

What tactic won the battle?

The Mamluks hid much of their army in the hills and used a feigned retreat, a classic Mongol trick, to draw Kitbuqa on. When a Mamluk wing broke, Sultan Qutuz rallied his men in person.

What happened to Qutuz after Ain Jalut?

He was murdered on the march back to Cairo by Baybars and other emirs, and Baybars became sultan in his place.

Where is Ain Jalut today?

The spring, called Harod in Hebrew, rises at the foot of Mount Gilboa in northern Israel, in today's Ma'ayan Harod National Park.

Battle of Ain Jalut 1260: Who Won and How the Mongols Lost

Q: Who won the Battle of Ain Jalut?

The Mamluks of Egypt under Sultan Qutuz and his general Baybars defeated the Mongol army of Kitbuqa, who was killed.

Sayf al-Vahidi, manuscript painted in Herat, 1430, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

By the numbers
Side	Strength	Losses
Mamluk Sultanate	About 20,000, roughly even with the Mongols (Medievalists.net, Britannica); EBSCO says the Mamluks outnumbered them¹	unknown
Mongol Empire (Ilkhanate)	~10,000-20,000	Heavy; Kitbuqa killed

Quick answer

Who won the Battle of Ain Jalut?

The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt won. On 3 September 1260, at Ain Jalut in the valley below Mount Gilboa in Galilee, Sultan Qutuz and his general Baybars routed a Mongol army under Kitbuqa, who was killed or, by another account, captured and beheaded. The Mongols had lost battles before, but after this one they never again held Syria for long: it marked the lasting limit of their advance to the west.²

In four years the Mongols had destroyed the Assassins of Alamut, taken Baghdad, killed the last caliph of the Abbasids and swept through Syria to Gaza. Egypt was next. Then, in a valley in Galilee on a September morning in 1260, an army of former slave-soldiers met them head on. One wing of the Egyptian army broke; the sultan threw his helmet to the ground, called on Islam and charged. By evening the Mongol commander was dead and the myth of Mongol invincibility with him.³

Who stopped the Mongols in the Middle East?

The army of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, led by Sultan Qutuz and his general Baybars, stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260. On the other side stood Kitbuqa, the general Hülegü had left in charge of newly conquered Syria, with a detachment rather than the main Mongol army. The victory did not end the Mongol wars, but it halted their advance in the Middle East for good.⁴ › Battle of Legnica, 1241

Dark locator map with a gold star in a glowing circle marking the approximate site of the Battle of Ain Jalut, the coasts, rivers and lakes of the region, and a small world map inset with the area boxed — Ain Jalut lies in the valley that runs from the Jezreel plain down to the Jordan, below Mount Gilboa: the road from Egypt and the coast to Damascus passed close by. Drawn for this article from Natural Earth data, with no modern borders. Location map: © Echoes of Battle (data: Natural Earth, public domain)

Background: the Mongol tide

In 1251 the new Great Khan Möngke sent his brother Hülegü, a grandson of Genghis Khan, to bring the Islamic lands of the west under Mongol rule. Hülegü took a vast army, by Reuven Amitai's reading two out of every ten Mongol soldiers, with their families and herds. In 1256 he destroyed the Ismaili fortresses of Alamut; in 1258 he took Baghdad, sacked it and put to death al-Mustasim, the last Abbasid caliph.⁵ › Battle of Talas, 751

Persian miniature of Mongol troops and siege engines before the walls of a city, with soldiers on the ramparts — Mongol siege engines and troops before Baghdad in 1258, a double-page painting from an early fourteenth-century copy of Rashid al-Din's *Jami al-tawarikh*. Rashid al-Din, Jami al-tawarikh, Tabriz, early fourteenth century, Diez Albums, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

At the beginning of 1260 the Mongols turned on Syria. Aleppo fell quickly and Damascus followed, and the Mongols were joined by vassal troops from the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia under King Hethum and by the Franks of Antioch under Bohemond VI. Mongol patrols reached Gaza. Hülegü sent envoys to Cairo to demand the submission of Egypt.⁶

Then came news that Möngke had died. Hülegü withdrew from Syria with most of his army, and in Mongolia and northern China his brothers Kublai and Ariq Böke began a war over the succession. Historians give several reasons for the withdrawal: the succession, the threat of an attack by the Golden Horde through the Caucasus, and the lack of summer pasture in Syria for the horses of a huge army. He left Kitbuqa behind with a force that Adam Ali puts at 10,000 to 20,000 men.⁷

Armies and commanders

Egypt was ruled by the Mamluks, soldiers of slave origin, mostly Turks, trained for war and freed, who had seized power from the Ayyubid sultans they once served. Their sultan was al-Muzaffar Sayf al-Din Qutuz. His best general was Baybars, commander of the Bahriyya, the elite Mamluk regiment, which formed the spearhead of the vanguard in the coming battle.⁸

A Mamluk was made, not born. Turkish-speaking slaves were prized above all others as soldiers; they were trained for war, freed when their training was done and given commands. Under the Mamluk sultans the system was enlarged and the drill made stricter still, and it turned out disciplined and highly efficient horsemen. Baybars himself had come up through it, from a boy sold as a slave to a commander of the sultan's guard.⁹

Persian manuscript painting of a crowned ruler seated cross-legged on a throne under a blue tent, with courtiers kneeling and musicians playing, and lines of Persian text above and below — Hülegü, the grandson of Genghis Khan who took Baghdad and Syria, holds court at Shiburghan in a later copy of Rashid al-Din's history of the Mongols. He had left Syria with most of his army before Ain Jalut was fought. Rashid al-Din, Jami al-tawarikh, Persian manuscript, sixteenth century, National Library of Russia, St Petersburg, MS Dorn 289, fol. 241r. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Qutuz answered the Mongol ultimatum by having the envoys cut in half and their heads hung on the Zuwayla gate of Cairo. On 26 July 1260, by al-Maqrizi's date of 15 Shaban, the army of Egypt marched out. Baybars led the vanguard and cleared a Mongol post out of Gaza. The Franks of Acre, who might have been a danger on the army's flank, promised to stay neutral, and the Mamluks passed along the coast through their territory.¹⁰

Kitbuqa, a Christian, gathered his forces and came south with Armenian and Georgian contingents. Both armies were built around mounted archers, so this was cavalry against cavalry from the first arrow, a battle that also features in our ranking of the largest cavalry battles in history. Medievalists.net and Britannica see the two sides as roughly matched at about 20,000 each; EBSCO thinks the Mamluks had the larger army.¹¹

The battle in phases

The skirmish and the feigned retreat

Baybars met the Mongol scouts first and began to skirmish with them, by al-Maqrizi's account now advancing, now falling back, until Qutuz came up with the main army near the spring of Ain Jalut. On Friday 25 Ramadan 658, 3 September 1260, the armies met in the valley. Britannica and EBSCO describe the Mamluk plan: a small force in plain view to draw the Mongols on, the bulk of the army hidden in the hills, and a feigned retreat, the Mongols' own favorite trick, to lead Kitbuqa into the trap.¹²

The unstoppable Mongols were stopped by former slaves, using the Mongols' own trick.

"O Islam!"

Kitbuqa charged, and the fight went the Mongols' way at first. They broke one wing of the Mamluk army; Adam Ali writes that twice the Mongols pushed the Mamluk lines back and nearly broke through. Then Qutuz tore off his helmet, threw it to the ground and cried out "O Islam!", and he and his escort rode into the fight. Al-Maqrizi and Britannica both tell the story, and in al-Maqrizi's telling the sultan's example turned the battle. Britannica adds that the Mamluks used hand cannon, midfa, to frighten the Mongol horses; al-Maqrizi's account does not mention them.¹³

Detail of a survey map showing the valley below Mount Gilboa, with streams, villages and the spring of Ain Jalud — The spring of Ain Jalut (Ain Jalud) below the slopes of Mount Gilboa, on the Palestine Exploration Fund's survey map of the 1870s. The Mamluks met the Mongol army in this valley on 3 September 1260, and the Mongols fled east toward Beisan. Palestine Exploration Fund, Survey of Western Palestine map, 1880. Public domain

Kitbuqa's last stand

The Mamluks closed in from all sides. Al-Maqrizi says simply that he was killed in the battle; EBSCO and Britannica report another version, that he was taken prisoner, defied his captors with the promise of the khan's revenge and was beheaded. The Mongols fled east toward Beisan. There they turned and fought again, harder than before, and were beaten a second time.¹⁴

Turning point: the sultan's charge

Ain Jalut was won by discipline at the moment of crisis. When a wing gave way, the Mamluk army did not dissolve; it rallied on its sultan. Adam Ali credits the Mamluks' professionalism, training and discipline, which, he writes, would win almost every later battle between the two powers. The victors made the most of it: Kitbuqa's head was sent to Cairo.¹⁵

Aftermath

The Mongol governors left Damascus in haste, and the Mamluks took over Damascus and then Aleppo; after a minor fight near Aleppo the Mongols were out of Syria, and Egypt's rule reached the Euphrates. Amitai notes that Hülegü wanted revenge, but the civil war among the Mongols and his own war with the Golden Horde kept him busy, and he had to settle for raids across the frontier. Before the year was out a Mongol force crossed the Euphrates again, briefly retook Aleppo and was beaten near Homs in a smaller battle. The Mamluks, for their part, found an ally in the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate of the Russian steppe, which was at war with Hülegü.¹⁶

Qutuz did not live to enjoy the victory. On the march home Baybars and a group of emirs murdered him, and Baybars was proclaimed sultan in his place. He ruled until 1277, fought the Mongols of Persia again and again, and took the Crusader towns one after another.¹⁷ › The Battle of Hattin, 1187

Sixty years of war with the Mongols

Ain Jalut opened a long struggle rather than ending it. The Ilkhanate, the Mongol state Hülegü founded in Persia, invaded Syria again and again. Baybars carried the war into Anatolia and beat a Mongol army at Elbistan in 1277. The Mamluks won a hard-fought second battle at Homs in 1281 against an army led by the Ilkhan's brother Möngke Temür, lost at Wadi al-Khazandar in 1299, the Ilkhans' one great victory in the field, after which the Mongols briefly occupied Damascus, and won decisively at Marj al-Saffar south of Damascus in 1303. A peace was finally signed in the early 1320s, and the Ilkhanate fell apart in 1335.¹⁸

Medieval manuscript illustration of two armies of horsemen clashing, Mamluks on one side and Mongols on the other — Mamluk and Mongol horsemen clash at the second Battle of Homs in 1281, in a fourteenth-century manuscript of Hayton of Corycus's *Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient*. Hayton of Corycus, Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient, fourteenth-century manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Legacy and memory

Ain Jalut broke the myth of Mongol invincibility and saved Egypt and the surviving heartland of Islam from conquest. In the war that followed the Mamluks presented themselves as the defenders of Islam against the infidel Mongols, and Baybars set up a surviving member of the Abbasid family as caliph in Cairo in 1261 to give his rule legitimacy. The battle also sealed the fate of the Crusader states: with Egypt and Syria now under one Muslim power, their last strongholds fell over the following decades.¹⁹

Historians still argue about how much the battle decided. Adam Ali notes that it was far from the largest clash between the two powers and that Kitbuqa had only a fraction of Hülegü's strength; Amitai stresses that the Mongols were held back as much by their own wars as by Mamluk arms. Still, after Ain Jalut the Mongol expansion in the Middle East was over.²⁰

Visiting the battlefield today

The battle is placed near the spring of Harod, as Ain Jalut is called in Hebrew, which rises in a cave at the foot of Mount Gilboa in northern Israel. The spring and its stream are now part of Ma'ayan Harod National Park.²¹

Set Ain Jalut beside the other great fights of its century in the greatest medieval battles, then test yourself with the medieval battles quiz or play today's Battle of the Day.