The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

Baybars (c.1220--1277), the great conqueror, began as a slave and ended, like his opponents Saint Louis and Edward I, as a ruler of immense contemporary renown. Hardly known today, he is in fact a key figure in world history: saviour of Islam and Christendom from the Mongols; destroyer of Crusader power in the Holy Land; and founder of the Mamluk Sultanate that ruled Egypt and the Levant until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Based on Arabic and European sources, this is the only available English-language account of Baybars's career -- the only full-length study of any medieval Moslem ruler, indeed, apart from Saladin -- and fills many important gaps in the current historiography of the medieval Middle East and Mediterranean.