October 24, 1260. The man who had just become the only commander in the world to beat a Mongol army in a pitched battle was murdered on a hunting trip by his own generals, seven weeks after the victory. He was clasping the hand of one of them when the knife went in. That is one version. In another he was giving his hand to somebody else and the killer came from behind. Either way, Baybars was there, and Baybars was sultan by the end of the week. To understand how big this is you need to understand where the world stood in 1260. The Mongols had destroyed everything in their path for forty years. Khwarazm, the Jin, Kyiv, Hungary and Poland raided and wrecked. In 1258 Hulagu sacked Baghdad, ended the Abbasid Caliphate that had stood for five hundred years, and reportedly had the last Caliph trampled to death. Then he came into Syria. Aleppo was taken and massacred. Damascus surrendered. There was nothing left between the Mongols and Egypt except the Mamluks. And the Mamluks were a strange thing to pin the survival of Islam on. They were a military caste of slave soldiers, mostly Turkic and Circassian, bought as boys, converted, trained to fight, and manumitted into the army. In 1250 they had simply taken Egypt and started running it themselves. Qutuz was one of them, and his biography is its own story. He was born a Khwarazmian prince, captured by the Mongols around 1231 as a boy, and sold into slavery in Egypt. The Mongols made him a slave. Then he beat them. He took the throne in November 1259 by deposing the boy sultan he had been governing for. Then Hulagu's letter arrived, demanding Egypt's submission in the usual terms, which were surrender or be destroyed. Qutuz had the envoys executed and their heads nailed up on the Bab Zuweila gate in Cairo. That is not bravado, it is a calculation. He was telling his own emirs that negotiation was off the table and nobody was going to be able to defect. Then he got lucky in a way nobody could have planned. The Great Khan died, Hulagu withdrew the bulk of his army east to deal with the succession, and left Kitbuqa in Syria with a much smaller force. Qutuz marched north with Baybars commanding the vanguard. They went through Crusader territory, and the Franks at Acre, who hated the Mamluks but were terrified of the Mongols, let them pass and resupply. At Ain Jalut on September 3, 1260, Baybars lured the Mongols forward with a feigned retreat, which is the Mongols' own favourite tactic used against them. The Egyptian left collapsed under the charge, and Qutuz personally rode into the break and rallied it, reportedly throwing off his helmet so his men could see him. The Mongols were broken and Kitbuqa was killed. Ain Jalut is one of the genuinely decisive battles of world history. It was not the end of the Mongol threat, and later Mamluk-Ilkhanid wars went on for decades, but the spell was broken. The Mongols were beatable. Damascus and most of the Levant were back in Mamluk hands within weeks. Qutuz had about seven weeks to enjoy it. He had promised Baybars the governorship of Aleppo and then gave it to a different emir. He had also, years earlier, been involved in the killing of Faris ad-Din Aktai, a Mamluk commander Baybars had been close to. On the march home, at Salihiyah in the Nile delta, the army stopped to hunt and Qutuz was killed. Al-Maqrizi names the emirs who struck him. Western historians generally hold that Baybars was in the conspiracy and bears direct responsibility, and the Mamluk chroniclers themselves give both the Aleppo snub and the Aktai revenge as motives. The accounts cannot agree on the physical details, which is itself telling. Whose hand he was holding when it happened was clearly already being argued about while people who were present were still alive. Baybars rode into Cairo during the victory celebrations for Ain Jalut and took the throne. One of his first acts was to cancel the war taxes Qutuz had levied, which made him immediately popular. And then he turned out to be one of the great rulers of the medieval world. He beat the Mongols again at Elbistan and elsewhere, took Antioch from the Crusaders in 1268 and destroyed it, fought the Armenians and the Assassins, and built the Mamluk state that ruled Egypt and Syria until the Ottomans arrived in 1517. Qutuz ruled for less than a year. He is still honoured across the Islamic world as the man who stopped the Mongols, and he was buried first at Al-Qusair and later moved to Cairo. Seven weeks between saving the Middle East and being killed by the man who helped him do it.