Sultan Baybars (his full name was al-Mālik al-Ẓāhir Rukn al-Dīn Baybars ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṣāliḥī al-Najmī al-Bunduqdārī) became one of the first rulers of the Mamluk kingdom located in what is now Egypt and Syria. However, he did not begin his life as part of noble family. Instead, he was born in a village on the Kipchak steppe north of the Black Sea and was apparently taken captive during the Mongol invasion of Russia and eastern Europe between 1236 and 1245. Rather than keeping him (see The Capture of Vardapet Vanakan by the Mongols) or allowing him to be ransomed, his captors sold him as a slave, and he ended up in the hands of military commander in Damascus, then one of the main cities of the Ayyubid sultanate (the state founded by Saladin in the twelfth century). Baybars was probably the name given to him by his first master. His birth name has not been recorded.

In Damascus, Baybars was trained as a mamluk, a military slave. When his master was arrested and had his property confiscated by the Ayyubid sultan al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb, Baybars was confiscated too and taken to Cairo. In the sultan’s household, Baybars completed his training, was manumitted, and became part of the elite Baḥrī regiment of formerly enslaved slave soldiers who guarded the ruler himself. He was thus part of the small group of former slaves who took effective control of the government when the sultan died suddenly in 1249 in the middle of a war against a crusading army led by King Louis IX of France. Afraid that news of the sultan’s death would cause panic, Baybars and the rest of the inner circle decided to keep it secret until the crusaders had been defeated. This took a little over two months. Unfortunately the sultan’s older son, Turanshah, died shortly afterwards in 1250, and his younger son, Yūsuf, died ten years later in the midst of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East. Baybars and Qutuz, by this time the leaders of the Baḥrī regiment, saved the day again, utterly defeating the Mongols at the battle of ʿAyn Jalūt and preventing their expansion from Syria into Egypt. Baybars won the subsequent power struggle and inaugurated a new state, the Mamluk kingdom, named by historians for the unusual practice of choosing its rulers from among the ranks of distinguished former mamluks rather than from among the sons of past rulers. His reign lasted from 1260 to 1277.

Because of his importance not only as a ruler, but as the founder of a new state, Baybars received lots of attention from contemporary historians. This brief account of his early life comes from a work called ­­The Fulfilling and Abundant Summer Pool (Al-Manhal al-ṣāfī wa-al-mustawfā baʿd al-wāfī), a biographical dictionary of important people from the Mamluk kingdom. It was written by Ibn Taghrī Birdī, a fifteenth-century historian and son of a mamluk who lived in Cairo. Other biographies of Baybars written during his lifetime are equally brief in their description of his childhood, preferring to move quickly into the details of his long and complex political career.  

Translated from the Arabic by Hannah Barker. Jamāl al-Dīn Yusūf Ibn Taghrī Birdī, Al-Manhal al-ṣāfī wa-al-mustawfā baʿd al-wāfī, edited by Muḥammad Muḥammad Amīn and Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿAshūr (Cairo: Al-Hayʾah al-miṣriyyah al-ʿāmmah lil-kitāb, 1986), 3:447-467, no.717. This translation CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The Early Life of Baybars

[Baybars] was born at the end of the 620s[1] approximately in the desert of Kipchak, and he was taken from his village as a child and offered for sale in Damascus. He grew up there with al- ʿImad al-Sa’igh, according to what is said. Then the commander ʿAla’ al-Din Aydakin al-Bunduqdari al-Salihi purchased him, and Baybars stayed in Aydakin’s possession until the king al-Salih arrested the said Aydakin and confiscated [his wealth]. Al-Salih took Baybars when he confiscated him from Aydakin, and that was in the month of Shawwal in the year 644.[2] King al-Salih Najm al-Din freed him, and he joined the Jamdariyya political faction.

[1] This date is given according the Islamic calendar calculated from the date of the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra to Medina. The decade 620-629 is equivalent to 1223-1232 C.E. Other sources give his birth year as 620 A.H., which is 1223 C.E.

[2] February 1247 C.E.

Discussion Questions

  1. If Baybars was such a towering figure in Mamluk history, why did Ibn Taghrī Birdī and other Mamluk historians have so little to say about his early life? We can assume that Baybars himself remembered his original name and at least a little bit about his childhood on the steppe. Why was that information not considered relevant to his biography?
  2. Modern historians have argued that Baybars was enslaved by the Mongols because of the timing of his birth and enslavement in relation to the Mongol invasion of what is now Russia and eastern Europe. If that is correct, why did Ibn Taghrī Birdī not name the Mongols as his captors?
  3. Baybars entered the sultan’s household and began his political career at the age of 24. How many other households had he lived in before that time? Think creatively based on what you know about slave raiding and slave trading from other sources to imagine what might have happened between his birth and his arrival in Damascus.

Related Primary Sources

Themes

Agency, Captives, Children, Elite Slaves, Social Death