70 chapter three
toward the fertile crescent. in this they resembled their kinsmen to
the north, whose ambitions took them in the same direction. here, to
the south-West, mamluk syria and palestine guarded the approach to the
mediterranean. access via anatolia and armenia was clearly not enough.
their goal was always to conquer egypt as well as syria, for the mongol
rulers of persia knew that these two countries were geopolitically linked.
the ilkhans faced the choice of either ruling egypt or giving up their
access to the sea.
Just as the geopolitical forces which shaped chinggisid policy in per-
sia were constant, so the results of their exertions were always the same.
all attacks on transoxiana and all invasions by the golden horde were
beaten back, but similarly, every ilkhanid offensive beyond persia’s tra-
ditional borders in the south-West was thwarted. these were the three
constants of foreign policy for the mongol state in persia.43
in setting out the situation of the fertile crescent, and underlining the
strategic connection between egypt and syria, spuler seems to have over-
looked syria’s prime strategic function for cilician armenia: syria became
the main theatre of war, and here the ilkhans tried to defeat mamluk egypt.
it was also here that they lost cilician armenia to the same enemy.
the cilician christian kingdom functioned as the “entryway to the silk
road,” which raised the stakes of the conflict enormously.44 it was in the
ilkhans’ interest that the great commercial artery continue to flow to their
advantage, which in turn meant that they had to maintain control over
its end point as well. at the same time the mamluks were determined to
capture and exploit this terminus: if they could not do this, the laws of
competition demanded that they destroy it.
the first link in the chain of events that made up the chinggisid strug-
gle with the mamluks for control of the fertile crescent was the battle of
‛ayn Jālūt in september 1260.45 although the sultan of egypt had defeated
a detachment of the mongol imperial army at a time when the ilkhan-
ate as such did not yet exist, once hülegü had founded the new state he
43 spuler, Mongolen, pp. 54–55. the german scholar further concludes that the mon-
gols’ powerful drive toward the mediterranean was a matter of Machtpolitik, which is not
in itself false, to the extent that every state is a power structure. in this instance though
the definition is too broad, and completely overlooks the emphatic commercial dimension
of their goal.
44 the phrase is from heyd, Histoire, ii, p. 73 (chapter ‘la petite-arménie, considerée
comme vestibule de l’asie centrale’).
45 cf. pp. 57–58.