170 chapter four
ibn Qalāwūn, after his initial plan to recover arran and azerbaijan, with
the priceless prize of tabriz, by his own efforts had failed. In 1304/5 an
embassy from Sarai disembarked at alexandria, bringing rich gifts, slaves
both male and female. the khan announced to the sultan that he had
warned the new Ilkhan, Kharbende,106 to surrender the lands “from
Khorasan as far as tabriz” and had threatened war if he did not comply.
he then proposed, “Let us unite and chase him [Öljeitü] from the realm.
the lands which your horsemen take shall be yours, and the lands which
our horsemen take shall be ours.”107 the sultan treated the Mongol envoys
well, but the honours shown them could not mask his—categorical—
refusal to accede to toqta’s request. “he answered that allah had called
Ghāzān to him, and that his brother Kharbende was already asking for
peace.”108
the Sarai khan’s next step underlines the cardinal importance of the
Mamluk element in Jochid foreign policy; although the mission to egypt
of 1304/5 had quite evidently failed, this did not destroy toqta’s hopes for
an alliance with the sultan: clinging stubbornly, and quite unreasonably,
to this anti-Ilkhanid handhold, he repeated the same diplomatic overtures
as early as 1306/7, with exactly the same result.109
the Sultan’s second refusal forced the khan to resort to extreme means
of persuasion, indeed the only means available to him: choking off the
export slave trade. It was entirely evident to all that such a step had the
gravest consequences for the Mamluk state, and the most perplexing
aspect is that there was absolutely no attempt to pass the blame onto the
Sultan in order to justify toqta’s actions. the only plausible explanation
106 Kharbende or Khodabende are further names for the Ilkhan Öljeitü.
107 al-Mufaḍḍal/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, p. 185; al-Maqrīzī, ibid., p. 424, adds that the
envoys reached cairo on 2nd September 1304, and left the city with gifts the following feb-
ruary; Baybars, ibid., p. 94 speaks of a single envoy, Kurukji, who accompanied an egyp-
tian embassy back from the horde; cf. Spuler, Horde, pp. 81–82, Labib, Handelsgeschichte,
pp. 108–109, Schmid, Beziehungen, p. 222, Zakirov, Otnosheniya, p. 68.
108 al-Maqrīzī/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, p. 424; al-Mufaḍḍal, ibid., p. 185, implies that
the Ilkhan had sought a peaceful arrangement with the sultan, fearing that the Jochid-
Mamluk alliance may become active and operational; a persian source confirms that an
Ilkhanid embassy left for egypt in January 1305 (Qāshānī/parvisi-Berger, p. 49; Öljeitü
allowed Mamluk merchants into persia as a sign of goodwill (Spuler, Horde, pp. 80–81 and
Mongolen, p. 106) and addressed the sultan of cairo as his “brother” (Schmid, Beziehungen,
p. 244); cf. also Spuler, Horde, p. 82, Zakirov, Otnosheniya, p. 68.
109 tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, pp. 95, 98 (Baybars), 144 (al-Nuwayrī), 181, 185 (al-Mufaḍḍal),
424 (al-Maqrīzī) 256 (‘the life of the Sultan al-Malik an-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn’);
Labib, Handelsgeschichte, p. 109, notes that this embassy was a simple repetition of the
previous one; cf. also Spuler, Horde, pp. 83–84, Zakirov, Otnosheniya, p. 70.