During the Mongol occupation of 1260, the kingdom of Jerusalem had remained untouched, with the exception of a single armed clash that occurred, we are told, as a consequence of Frankish provocation. Moreover, the Franks not only failed to co-operate with the invaders, many of wholm – notably Hülegü's chief wife ant Kit-buqa himself – were Christians, but actually aided the Mamlūks by revictualling their army prior to ‘Ayn Jālūt.
Jackson then goes on to note the thesis that the Franks missed an opportunity to ally with the Muslims here, which he attributes to René Grousset, who called Hulegu's expedition "a Nestorian crusade." Jackson: In the following study I shall challenge this highly pervasive assumption and try to demonstrate that the reality was in fact quite otherwise.
Regarding Eljigidei's mission to Saint Louis in December 1248, Jackson says: But at least one observer had been astute enough to perceive [Eljigidei's] real aim: to draw the crusading army away from territories such as Syria – which had already been invaded briefly, as we shall see, and was expected to be taken in on the next forward thrust – towards Egypt, an area where the Mongols had no immediate ambitions but could hope to profit at a later date from Louis's attack having at least sapped the sultan's strength. (He cites some other historians who agree with this assessment).
Jackson argues that Urban IV's reply to Hulegu dates to no earlier than 1263, and suggests that his war with Berke was the motivation for his desire for an alliance with the west. This cannot be used as evidence of Hulegu's attitude at the time of Ayn Jalut.
He discusses Hayton of Gorigos's La Flor des Estoires de la Terre d'Orient, which he characterizes as a propagandistic work seeking western aid for the Armenians against the Mamluks and encouraging cooperation with the Mongols. Jackson states that It is only in Hayton's work that we encounter such misleading statements as that Hulegu intended to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim hands and to restore it to the Christians. He was on the point of doing this, claims Hayton, when he learned of the death of his brother the Great Khan; whereupon he withdrew, leaving Kit-buqa...to guard Syria and issuing orders that 'all the lands which had belonged to the Christians should be returned to them.' Kit-buqa, the story continues, 'was labouring to recover the Holy Land when the Devil sowed a great discord between him and the Christians of Sidon': as the result of an unprovoked attack by the Frnaks of that city first on some Muslims who were under Mongol protection and then on a Mongol squadron sent to claim back the plunder and led by Kit-buqa's own nephew, who was killed, Sidon was put to the sack...There is no mention, incidentally, of the fact that the Mongols did occupy the Holy City, as we learn from a number of independent sources.
To a lesser extent, this same caveat [i.e. against later works] must apply also to the remaining Armenian, and to Frankish, sources. It is very probably such a later tradition which underlies the statement in the Gestes des Chiprois that Kit-buqa was accompanied into Damascus not only by King Het'um but by Bohemond VI of Antioch, and that the Frankish prince converted one mosque into a Latin church and desecrated many others. Bohemond had certainly accepted Mongol overlordship and collaborated with the invaders. [Jackson has earlier noted that Hethoum visited Hulegu's court in 1254 - no similar mention is made for Bohemond] But his subsequent relations with the Mamluk Sultan Baybars have been well documented in the biography of the sultan written by his secretary Ibn 'Abd al-Zahir (d. 1292). Here we find a number of references to Bohemond's activities at the time of the Mongol invasion, and also a letter from Baybars to the prince reproaching him for his past conduct. Nowhere is mention made of the outrages at Damascus; and had Bohemond actually behaved in this way, it is inconceivable that either Baybars or Ibn 'Abd al-Zahir should have remained silent.
By contrast, the more nearly contemporary Frankish sources, in so far as they have anything to say at all about the Mongol invasion, depict Hulegu's forces as a hostile power, with little mention even of Mongol favour towards non-Latin Christians. The letters, in particular, sent to the west by the leaders at Acre in 1260, appealing for help against this unprecedented menace, give absolutely no indication that the Mongols were prepared to act as the Heaven-sent auxiliaries against Islam that they were to have become half a century later.
The Franks of Syria had first come into contact with the Mongols as early as 1244. In the summer of that year, following a victorious campaign by the general Baiju against the Anatolian Seljuks, a Mongol division appeared before Antioch and ordered Bohemond V to raze the walls of his fortresses, to remit his entire revenue in gold and silver, and to provide the invaders with three thousand maidens. He proudly refused. Nevertheless, from fear that the Mongols would return, the prince neglected to send further assistance to the Latin Kingdom after the disastrous battle of Gaza in October 1244; and two years later Matthew Paris tells us that together with certain of his Muslim neighbours and King Het'um of Armenia Bohemond had become tributary to the Mongols.
Once again the invasion of Anatolia [in 1256] might be seen as a prelude to the next attack on Syria, where the warring sultans of Egypt and Damascus hastened to conclude a truce in view of the threat from the north; and it appears to have been precisely the collapse of the Seljuks that gave rise to fresh alarms at Acre.
When the Mongols finally moved into Syria in force in 1259-60, therefore, their arrival was hardly unexpected. Two decades of military activity in Iraq and Anatolia had prepared the Franks for the certainty that they and their more immediate neighbours would be called upon to withstand the next forward thrust. Nothing, in all this time, had indicated that the newcomers might serve as deliverers or allies. It is in a document of 1248 that we first encounter provision made for the conquest of the Latin Kingdom not only by the Muslims but also by 'other infidels'; and when eight years later de Basainville spoke of the Mongols as constituting no lesser a threat to Christendom in Outremer than to Islam and prophesied the annihilation of the Latin states, he was expressing a very widely held view.
With respect to Al-Nasir Yusuf's flight from Damascus after the fall of Aleppo, Jackson says, The rapid collapse of the power with which they had maintained an uneasy coexistence since 1192 was no less alarming for the Franks. He notes that residents of the interior were fleeing to the coast and taking refuge in the cities of Outremer. He goes on to note Mongol conquest of the Hawran, Nablus, Beth Gibelin, Hebron, Barkat Ziza, Karak, Gaza, Ascalon, and Banyas - by the end of the spring the Franks were completely shut in on the coast.
In February, the government at Acre had received a fresh ultimatum, to which Thomas Agni [the papal legate] refers and the tone of which, with its claims to world dominion, he found nothing less than blasphemous. It may have been subsequent to the despatch of his letter that gifts were sent to Kit-buqa, who ordered the Franks to dismantle the walls of their cities and fortresses; but they refused to comply. Jackson goes on to discuss the difficulties the Franks faced in defending their strong points, suggesting that only Tyre, Acre, and the Templar and Hospitaller fortresses could have been defended.
Yet the Mongol onslaught never came. As early as the first weeks of March, Hulegus's vast army, which the author of the Gestes des Chiprois set at 120,000, had retired from Aleppo and begun its slow progress back towards Azerbaijan. A much smaller force, numbering ten or possibly twenty thousand, was left in Syria under Kit-buqa to guard the new conquests. But this detachment in turn was to content itself with the sack of a single Frankish city, and that too at the height of the summer, when some months had passed. Why did the Mongols exhibit such restraint? It would be possible, of course, to adduce at this point the Christian sympathies of certain of their leaders. Kit-buqa was himself a Christian, a member of the Naiman tribe, among whom Nestorianism had come to predominate over the past few centuries...Yet it is noteworthy that a Muslim writer of the early fourteenth century, holding no brief for Kit-buqa, says that he did not make his own Christian leanings obvious, out of deference to Chinggis Khan's original ordinance on the equality of all faiths...Mongol rule in Syria was characterized not by especial favour towards Christianity per se, but by customary epmphasis on the equality of all religious faiths and sects.
In the contemporary correspondence we find little trace of the favour which later sources allege to have been lavished by the Mongols on Bohemond VI. Thomas Berard, it is true, was aware that Hulegu ahd received the submission of the commune of Antioch graciously, and that the prince had been allowed to reach a similar arrangement for his county of Tripoli: he was rumoured to be on the point of attending Hulegu in person. Jackson goes on to paraphrase a letter by Thomas Agni, the Papal legate, about Bohemond's behavior: If [Agni] had been dismayed by the collapse of the Ayyubids, the submission of Antioch without a struggle, even before the Mongols had taken Aleppo, is nothing less than scandalous, and its consequences a serious blow to the unity of Christendom: for at Hulegu's express order the Greek patriarch, who had been several times excommunicated by his Latin counterpart and exiled from the city by the temporal power, has now been brought back and restored to his office. Prince Bohemond, moreover, who had already submitted of his own free will, has seen his territories ravaged and has been compelled to wait on Hulegu and to taste 'the baseness of Tartar slavery'. Continuing, Jackson: Certain benefits undoubtedly accrued to Bohemond from his newly acquired client status. [note: described as "newly acquired" - whatever his father may have done in the 1240s, Bohemond is essentially a new Mongol vassal in 1260] Hayton claims, with his usual vagueness, that Hulegu restored to him 'all the lands of his principality that he had taken from the Muslims'. Ibn Shaddad supplies more details, telling us that the Mongols handed over to Bohemond a number of districts in the Orontes valley...which remained in his hands until Antioch fell to Baybars in 1268. But it is noteworthy that other districts acquired by the prince about this time, such as Laodicea, were annexed only after Ayn Jalut, when the Mongols had withdrawn. Hayton and the author of the Gestes assert that Bohemond enjoyed great favour with Hulegu as the son-in-law of his satellite King Het'um. Yet not even the Armenians – those most zealous agents of Mongol expansion in the Near East – were treated with unmitigated generosity. Het'um certainly had the privilege of setting fire to the Great Mosque at Aleppo; but when Hulegu learned of this, says Ibn Shaddad, he was angry and had a large number of the Armenian troops massacred. [quite an alliance, that!] Bohemond and the Armenian king alike fared well in comparison with their immediate Muslim neighbours because they had submitted voluntarily. The yoke upon them was nevertheless a heavy one.
