Baybars
Baybars was sold as a slave for a low price because of a flaw in one eye, and became the sultan who stopped the Mongols. He was a Kipchak Turk from the steppe north of the Black Sea, taken in a Mongol raid as a boy and sold in Syria into the Mamluk corps - a standing army of purchased slave soldiers who were freed on completing training and who ended by ruling the state that bought them. He commanded at Mansura in 1250, where the Seventh Crusade was destroyed and Louis IX taken prisoner. At Ain Jalut in September 1260 he led the vanguard that drew Kitbuqa's Mongols into a feigned retreat and then into the main Mamluk force under Qutuz. It was the first strategic defeat the Mongols had suffered, and it fixed the western limit of their empire. He murdered Qutuz on the march home and took the sultanate himself, which was the ordinary way it changed hands. He then spent seventeen years dismantling the crusader states - Caesarea, Safed, Jaffa, Antioch in 1268 - and beating the Mongols repeatedly in Syria, while installing a refugee Abbasid as caliph in Cairo to give the regime a legitimacy the sword did not. He built the postal relay that carried a message from Cairo to Damascus in four days, dug canals, and endowed schools. He died in Damascus in 1277, reportedly by drinking poison he had prepared for somebody else. He is a hero of a popular Arabic romance still told, and of the Egyptian state's own account of itself.
- Lived: 1223 CE – 1277 CE
- Nationality: Mamluk
- Roles: head_of_state, military
