Kitbuqa
Kitbuqa was a Christian Mongol general who lost the battle that ended Mongol expansion west. He was a Naiman, from a people among whom Nestorian Christianity was widespread, and that is the fact everything else about him has been hung on - in Europe he was reported as a friend of Christendom and evidence for the Prester John legend. He served under Hulagu in the campaign that destroyed the Assassins at Alamut and sacked Baghdad in 1258, and he took Damascus and Aleppo in 1260, entering Damascus alongside the Christian king of Armenia and the prince of Antioch. Then Hulagu withdrew east with most of the army when the great khan Mongke died, leaving him perhaps ten or twenty thousand men in Syria - a garrison, not an invasion. He killed the Mamluk envoys who came to him, which is what made the battle certain. At Ain Jalut on 3 September 1260 the Mamluks under Qutuz used the Mongols' own tactic against them: Baybars's vanguard withdrew, Kitbuqa pursued, and the main force closed on him in the valley. He refused to leave the field. Taken and brought before Qutuz, he is reported to have told him not to be proud of one victory, because when news of it reached Hulagu the horses would drink the Nile. He was beheaded. The horses did not, and the frontier between the Mamluks and the Ilkhanate stayed roughly where he lost it for the next sixty years of intermittent war. His Christianity made him useful to everyone writing about him afterwards, which is the reason to be careful with the sources: the Armenian chroniclers make him a protector of churches and the Muslim ones make him a destroyer of mosques, and both are describing the same campaign.
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: military
