Another Mongol army invaded Eastern Europe and wiped out an
entire army of heavily armored Russian knights.x Genghis Khan died in 1227, having appointed as successor one of
his sons, Ogedei, who continued his policies.
o Under Ogedei, the Mongols completed the defeat of Jin China,
taking Jin’s southern capital after an epic siege and moving on
to invade Korea.o They began driving deep into southern China, ruled by the
Song dynasty.o In central Asia, they conquered Georgia and Armenia and
continued south into Kashmir and northern India.o They returned to Europe, overrunning much of Russia and
Poland and moving toward Germany and Hungary. This attack
was cut short when Ogedei died in 1241.x If the Mongols were unusually tough warriors, their opponents at Ain
Jalut, the Egyptian Mamluks, were similarly skilled. The Mamluk
warrior class was an interesting phenomenon of the Muslim world,
in which young slave boys, originally mostly of Turkic ethnicity,
were raised in what amounted to military academies and trained to
be highly professional and dedicated warriors.x Despite their technical condition as slaves, Mamluks enjoyed fairly
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power. During a time of internal turmoil in Egypt around 1250,
they seized control, establishing the Mamluk sultanate. The third
Mamluk sultan, the man who would confront the Mongols at Ain
Jalut, was Qutuz.The Prelude
x The origins of Ain Jalut can be found in the scheme of Mongke
Khan (a grandson of Genghis) for world conquest. This plan
involved dispatching Mongke’s brother Hulegu to complete the