Mamluk sultan of Egypt (1279-1290), and founder of a dynasty that lasted for 100 years. Qalawun’s reign saw the Mamluk victory in the Second Battle of Homs (1282), which ended the immediate Mongol threat to the eastern Mediterranean region and enabled the Mamluks to concentrate their military efforts on the final destruction of the Frankish states of Outremer. He died while mounting an expedition against Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel), which under his son and successor Khalil ended the Frankish occupation of the Near East.
Qalawun was a Kipchak Turk by origin. In his twenties, he was purchased by a member of the household of al-Kamil, Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, for the price of 1,000 dinars, and hence came to be called al-Alfi, after the Arabic word for thousand. Later he served al-Salih Ayyub as one of the Bahriyya corps of soldiers, and became an emir under Sultan Baybars I. After Baybars’s death, Qalawun succeeded to the throne following a brief power struggle, and set about consolidating his position. This consolidation involved setting aside the mamluks (slave soldiers) of Bay-bars in favor of his own, as well as some of the Salihis who had not previously held important positions. He also successfully confronted a revolt in Syria by Sunqur al-Ashqar with the support of the Bedouin leader ‘Isa ibn Muhanna.
In 1281, Qalawun faced a long-expected invasion of Syria by the Ilkhan Abaqa, who had sought to break Mamluk power in the region. Qalawun’s victory in the Second Battle of Homs (1282), followed by Abaqa’s death shortly thereafter, left him free to continue the Mamluk military campaign against Outremer, which was politically weak and divided. The sultanate had concluded a number of truces with individual Frankish powers; now, Qalawun simply found pretexts for declaring them void and eliminating his enemies one at a time.
In 1285, the sultan accused the Hospitallers of Margat of attacking Muslims, and after a brief campaign he took the stronghold in late May. He then moved against the castle of Maraclea, which Prince Bohemund VII of Tripoli ordered to be surrendered so as to preserve his own truce with the Mamluks. In 1287, after an earthquake destroyed some of the fortifications at Laodikeia in Syria, Qalawun took the city, claiming that it was not covered by his truce with Bohemund, as the city lay outside the boundaries of the county of Tripoli. In 1289 Qalawun attacked Tripoli (mod. Trablous, Lebanon), eventually storming the town and massacring much of the population. He then razed the city and ordered it rebuilt on a new site. In an attempt to save Acre, the last Christian possession in the area, Pope Nicholas IV called a crusade in February 1290, though many Western monarchs simply used the crisis to strengthen their economic interests in Egypt. During the preparations for his campaign against Acre, however, Qalawun died. The city’s capture was left to his son Khalil, whom he had successfully installed as heir.
-Brian Ulrich
Bibliography
Amitai-Preiss, Reuven, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Holt, Peter M., The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London: Longman, 1986).
Irwin, Robert, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250-1382 (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
Northrup, Linda S., From Slave to Sultan: The Career of al-Mansur Qalawun and the Consolidation of Mamluk Rule in Egypt and Syria (678-689 A. H./1279-1290 a. d.) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998).
World History
