Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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Baybars took a number of masterful steps to consolidate his hold on the sultanate. To ground the new Mamluk regime within the framework of Islam’s traditional legal and spiritual hierarchy, he reestablished the Sunni Abbasid caliphate. In June 1261, Baybars claimed to have found one of the few surviving members of the Abbasid dynasty. The man’s pedigree was carefully assessed by a hand-picked committee of Cairene jurists, theologians and emirs and then confirmed as the new Caliph al-Mustansir. Baybars then made a ritual oath of allegiance to the caliph, swearing to uphold and defend the faith; to rule justly, according to the law; to serve as a protector of Sunni orthodoxy; and to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam. In return, al-Mustansir invested Baybars as the sole, all-powerful sultan of the entire Muslim world, an act that not only confirmed his rights to Egypt, Palestine and Syria, but also provided tacit authorisation for a massive campaign of expansion. In a final public affirmation of his regime’s legitimacy, Baybars was invested with sultanly apparel: a black rounded turban of the sort customarily worn by the Abbasids; a violet robe; shoes adorned with golden buckles; and a ceremonial sword. Dressed in this finery, he and the caliph rode, in state procession, through the heart of Cairo. From this point onwards, Baybars took great care to endorse caliphal authority, so long as it did not impinge upon his own power. Both the caliph and sultan were named in the Friday prayer; likewise, Mamluk coinage bore both their names.

To reinforce the aura of tradition and continuity developing around the sultanate, Baybars consciously sought to connect himself with two Muslim rulers. The first, al-Salih Ayyub (Baybars’ own former master), was now presented as the last legitimate Ayyubid sultan, with Baybars as his direct and rightful heir–an agile manipulation of the past that conveniently ignored the bloody turmoil of the 1250s. The sultan also modelled himself upon Saladin, the conqueror of the Franks and idealised mujahid. Imitating his famed generosity as a patron of the faith, Baybars set about restoring Cairo’s now dilapidated al-Azhar mosque. In addition, he established a new mosque in Cairo and a madrasa beside al-Salih’s tomb. The sultan also visited Jerusalem and there restored the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque–both of which had become somewhat run down under later Ayyubid rule.

Similar echoes were present in a number of civil measures adopted in these early years. Styling himself as the archetypal ‘just ruler’, Baybars abolished the war taxes imposed by Qutuz, established palaces of justice in Cairo and Damascus and also ordered fair prices to be paid to merchants for goods sequestered by the state. By these diverse means, the sultan engendered widespread popular support among his subjects in the Near East and this helped to insulate his position against other mamluk challengers.⁷

Centralised power in the Mamluk state

While working to legitimise the Mamluk sultanate and his own claim to power, Baybars also took bold steps towards governmental and administrative centralisation. Mamluk Cairo was turned into the unquestioned capital of the Muslim Near East, and the office of sultan was imbued with a degree of despotic authority never before witnessed in the medieval era. In stark contrast to many of his predecessors, Baybars carefully monitored state finances and controlled the Mamluk treasury–measures that gave him the wealth to pay for critical reforms.

As sultan, Baybars expected his will to be obeyed without hesitation across the Mamluk world, and he made ready use of both direct force and propaganda to ensure submission and compliance on the part of regional governors. Emirs who failed to levy troops for war in short order, for example, were hung by their hands for three days. Anyone foolish enough to attempt insurrection could expect summary punishment, with torments ranging from blinding or dismemberment to crucifixion. Like other rulers before him–including Nur al-Din and Saladin–Baybars drew upon the fear of external threats to justify his autocratic behaviour, but new emphasis was placed upon the Mongols as the prime enemy of the state. Thus, when the sultan wished to remove the petty Ayyubid princeling al-Mughith from power in Transjordan in 1263, accusations of consorting with the Ilkhanate of Persia were levelled, and letters supposedly from Hülegü to al-Mughith were produced as evidence.

But even beyond guile and brutality, the true cornerstone of Baybars’ authority in the Near East was communication. He was the first Muslim in the Middle Ages to master the business of ruling a pan-Levantine empire from Egypt because he made huge investments in message-carrying networks. Many centuries earlier, the Byzantines and early Abbasids had made use of a courier-based postal structure, but this had long since fallen out of use. Baybars created his own barid, or postal system, using relays of horse-borne messengers, hand-picked and well rewarded for their reliability. Changing mounts at carefully maintained post stations positioned along key routes through the Mamluk realm, these men could routinely bring a message from Damascus to Cairo in four days, or three in an emergency. Use of the barid was strictly limited to the sultan, and letters were always brought directly to Baybars, no matter what he was doing–on one occasion he even had a messenger report to him in the bath. To ensure the smooth and swift transfer of information, major roads and bridges were carefully repaired, and the barid was also supplemented by pigeon post and a system of signal fires. This remarkable (and admittedly costly) feat of organisation allowed Baybars to maintain contact with the far reaches of the Mamluk state–in particular the northern and eastern borders with the Mongols–and meant that he could react to both military threats and civil disorder with unprecedented speed.⁸

Allied to Baybars’ own particularly forceful and energetic brand of rulership, this raft of practical and administrative reforms served to consolidate the Mamluk state and cement ‘royal’ power by the mid-1260s. However, Baybars’ regime was not without its faults. The success of this intensely centralised approach to government depended heavily upon the sultan’s personal qualities and skills, and this raised obvious questions about how readily the mantle might be passed on to a successor. Seeking to overturn the notion that a Mamluk sultan should be elected, Baybars tried to lay the foundations for his own familial dynasty in August 1264 by appointing his four-year-old son Baraka as joint ruler. Given the emphasis placed on merit rather than heritage among the mamluk elite, it remained to be seen whether this plan would be realised.

Baybars also developed a potentially disruptive association with the sufi (holy man) mystic Khadir al-Mihrani in these early years. Supposedly a prophet, but regarded by many in the Mamluk court as a philandering fraud, Khadir befriended Baybars in 1263 during one of the sultan’s visits to Palestine. Impressed by the sufi’s predictions of numerous future Mamluk conquests (many of which later came true), Baybars soon rewarded him with property in Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. Khadir was given unfettered access to the sultan’s inner circle and was said to have been privy to matters of state, all to the chagrin of Baybars’ leading mamluk lieutenants. This strange relationship suggests that even a cold-blooded despot like Baybars could be seduced by flattery–it also was a chink in his defences that, in time, would have to be sealed.

Mamluk diplomacy

Given the time and resources Baybars expended within the Muslim Levant while building his Mamluk state in the early 1260s–and the strident militarism evident in his later career–it would be easy to imagine that the sultan adopted an insular approach to the outside world, turning inwards to spurn diplomacy. In fact, he was an active and adept player on the international stage. Baybars used negotiation to pursue three interlocking goals: to forestall any possibility of an alliance between the Latin West and the Mongols; to sow dissension within the Mongol ranks by encouraging rivalry between the Golden Horde and the Persian Ilkhanate; and to maintain access to a ready supply of slave recruits from the Russian steppes.

Within his first year in office, Baybars established contact with the late Emperor Frederick II’s bastard son, King Manfred of Sicily (1258–66). Seeking to perpetuate the tradition of close relations between Egypt and the Hohenstaufen, and to support Manfred’s anti-papal policies, the sultan dispatched envoys to the Sicilian court with exotic gifts, including a group of Mongol prisoners, complete with their horses and weaponry–testament to their shattered reputation for invincibility. After Manfred’s death, Baybars renewed contact with his rival and successor, King Louis IX of France’s acquisitive brother, Charles of Anjou.

The sultan likewise opened channels of negotiation with the Golden Horde in 1261. The Mongol ruler of this region, Berke Khan (1257–66), had converted to Islam and was engaged in a heated power struggle with the Ilkhanate of Persia. Baybars flattered Berke’s religious affiliation by including his name in the Friday prayers at Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and by establishing equitable relations he retained access to the steppe-land slave markets within the Golden Horde and secured the Mamluk sultanate’s northern borders with Asia Minor. To ensure the safe and efficient passage of Kipchak slaves from the Black Sea to Egypt, the sultan also forged pacts with the Genoese–the main transporters of slave cargo in the Mediterranean basin. These Italian merchants had recently lost the so-called ‘War of St Sabas’–a two-year struggle with Venice over economic and political pre-eminence in Acre and Palestine. When this fractious civil war ended with Genoese defeat in 1258, they relocated to Tyre and, through the 1260s and beyond, proved only too happy to trade with the Mamluks. To ensure that Genoese ships continued to enjoy unhindered access to the Bosphorus Strait, Baybars forged additional contacts with the newly reinstated Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, who had returned to Constantinople in 1261 with the final collapse of Latin Romania.⁹

For a mamluk inculcated in the arts of war rather than the intrigues of court politics, Sultan Baybars managed this tangled web of diplomatic interests with a surprisingly deft and assured hand–all the while manoeuvring to isolate the Mongol Ilkhanate and Latin Outremer.

Perfecting the Mamluk military machine

Between 1260 and 1265 Baybars was phenomenally active in the fields of diplomacy and statecraft. But ever mindful of the need to undertake urgent and extensive preparations for war, he simultaneously set the Mamluk state on the path to militarisation. The sultan’s underlying goal was to prosecute jihad against the Mongols and the Levantine Franks–scoring victories that would cement further his position and reputation, achieving conquests that would secure Muslim dominion over the Levant.

From the start, work proceeded apace to strengthen the Mamluk world’s physical defences. In Egypt, Alexandria’s fortifications were bolstered and the mouth of the Nile at Damietta was partially sealed to prevent another naval incursion up the delta akin to that mounted by Louis IX. Across Syria, battlements destroyed by the Mongols at the likes of Damascus, Baalbek and Shaizar were repaired. To the north-east, along the course of the Euphrates River–now the effective frontier with the Persian Ilkhanate–the castle of al-Bira became a strategic linchpin. The fortress was strengthened and heavily garrisoned, and its security closely monitored by Baybars via the barid. Al-Bira proved its worth in late 1264, when it successfully withstood the first serious offensive by Ilkhanid forces. This attack, brought on by a lull in the war between the Golden Horde and Mongol Persia, caused the sultan to rally his forces for war, but even as he prepared to march from Egypt reports arrived indicating that the Ilkhanids had already broken off their fruitless siege of al-Bira and retreated.

Above and beyond any reliance on castles, however, Sultan Baybars regarded the army as the bedrock of the Mamluk state. Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.

Baybars ploughed massive financial reserves into building, training and refining the Mamluk army. In total, the number of mamluks was increased fourfold, to around 40,000 mounted troops. The core of this force was the 4,000-strong royal mamluk regiment–Baybars’ new elite, schooled and honed in a special practice facility within the citadel of Cairo. Here recruits were taught the arts of swordsmanship–learning to deliver precise strikes by repeating the same cut up to 1,000 times a day–and horse archery with powerful composite recurve bows. The sultan emphasised rigid discipline and rigorous military drilling across every section of the Mamluk host. In the course of his reign, two massive hippodromes were constructed in Cairo–training arenas where the essential skills of horsemanship and combat could be perfected. Whenever in the capital, Baybars himself came daily to practise the warrior craft, setting a standard of professionalism and dedication. His mamluks were encouraged to experiment with new weapons and techniques, some archers even attempting to use arrows doused in Greek fire from horseback.¹⁰

Once of adult age, mamluks were paid, but also were expected to maintain their own horses, armour and weaponry. To ensure his forces were outfitted properly, Baybars instituted troop reviews, in which the entire army, in full martial regalia, would parade past the sultan in a single day (in part to ensure that equipment was not being shared). Failure to attend these displays was punishable by death. Fear was also used to maintain order while on campaign. The drinking of wine was banned on many expeditions, and any soldier caught contravening this injunction was summarily hanged.

To reinforce the human component of the Mamluk armed forces, Baybars invested in some forms of heavier armament. Close attention was paid to the development of siege weaponry, including sophisticated counter-weight catapults, or trebuchets. These engines became the mainstay of Mamluk siegecraft. Capable of being dismantled, borne to a target and then readily reconstructed, the largest could propel stones weighing in excess of 500 pounds. In addition to raw military power, Baybars also placed great value upon accurate and up-to-date intelligence. He therefore maintained an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near East and received reports from agents embedded in Mongol and Frankish societies. The sultan also showed generous patronage to the nomadic Bedouin Arabs of the Levant, and thereby won their valuable support, both in military conflicts and in the gathering of information.

Through these diverse methods, Baybars constructed the most formidable Muslim army of the crusading era; a force more numerous, disciplined and ferocious than any yet encountered in the war for the Holy Land–the perfect military machine of its day.¹¹ Having carefully legitimised and consolidated his hold on power, the sultan turned in 1265, with a united Islamic Near East behind him, to wield this deadly weapon in the name of jihad.

THE WAR AGAINST THE FRANKS

Unlike his Ayyubid predecessors, Sultan Baybars showed little or no interest in reaching an accommodation with Outremer. Rather than appease the Franks to preserve commercial links and stave off a western European crusade, he sought simply and completely to eradicate the Latin presence in the Levant. Baybars calculated that, by this means, the flow of trade might be forced back through Mamluk Egypt and that, with no bridgehead in the Holy Land, any attempts by the West to mount an invasion would surely fail. The sultan was always conscious of the need to maintain a watchful eye on the Mongol threat, but this did not prevent him from initiating a series of merciless strikes against the crusader states.

While the work of preparation proceeded apace in the Mamluk world through the early 1260s, Baybars carried out a number of incidental exploratory raids into Frankish Palestine, the only notable product of which was the destruction of the church in Nazareth. To preclude any premature outbreak of full-scale hostilities, the sultan agreed to some limited truces with various factions within the Latin kingdom–a realm that was now in an appallingly disunited and feeble state. The most useful pact was that forged with John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa, one of the last great barons of Outremer. In 1261, Baybars accepted John’s entreaties for peace, and in return used the port at Jaffa to transport grain supplies from Egypt to Mamluk territories in Palestine. By 1265, however, with the Mongol siege of al-Bira having faltered, Baybars’ offensive against the Franks began in earnest.

A path of destruction

For the next three years, Sultan Baybars prosecuted a brutal campaign of conquest and devastation, waging war on a scale not witnessed since the days of Hattin in 1187. To provide a formal justification for his attack, the sultan accused the Franks of encouraging the recent Mongol invasion of Mamluk territory to the north. Then, in early 1265, he initiated his own assault. In the past, Baybars’ first objective might have been to confront the Frankish field army, but now only a tattered remnant of this force remained. The sultan thus was free to begin the task of eliminating Latin settlements relatively unhindered.

In February the Mamluk host made camp in the woods near the fortified coastal town of Arsuf. Baybars had a massive tent erected next to the royal pavilion, within which five trebuchets were reassembled in secret. With the siege train prepared, the army marched on the Latin port of Caesarea on 27 February. Appearing suddenly and unheralded, the Muslims quickly secured control of the lower town, while the Christian populace retreated into the citadel–one of those recently refortified with the aid of King Louis IX. The sultan deployed his trebuchets, commencing heavy bombardment with stones and Greek fire, while a siege tower was raised, upon which he himself fought. By 5 March, the battered defenders had taken flight in a number of ships sent from Acre, abandoning Caesarea, and Baybars ordered the town and citadel to be razed to the ground.

Again, without announcing his target, the sultan moved south on 19 March and laid siege to Arsuf, which by this date was encircled by a major moat and possessed a sturdy keep. At first, Mamluk units under the direction of Qalawun tried to create a path to Arsuf’s walls by filling sections of its moat with vast quantities of wood (felled from local forests), but the defenders managed to burn these piles of timber during the night. After this initial setback, Baybars subjected the town to an incessant aerial barrage, and the garrison eventually capitulated on 30 April 1265 and was taken captive. In the face of this terrifying offensive, the hopelessly outnumbered Franks based in Acre were all but impotent. Even when the nominal ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Hugh of Lusignan, arrived from Cyprus on 23 April with a small party of reinforcements, no move was made to counter the Mamluk invasion. In early May Baybars instructed his troops to demolish Arsuf, and, in triumph, led his Christian prisoners back to Egypt, forcing them to enter Cairo with broken crosses hung around their necks. That summer, the sultan wrote to inform Manfred of Sicily of these successes. In a stark demonstration of the casual disregard for Outremer’s future now prevalent in some western circles, Manfred responded by sending congratulatory gifts to Egypt. Others, including the papacy, began to consider action upon hearing of the Mamluk aggression.

In this first wave of attack, Baybars struck with speed and efficiency. His methods and achievements revealed the Mamluks’ grasp of siegecraft and their overwhelming numerical and technological supremacy. The sultan had also indicated an ability to employ stealth so as to prevent his Latin quarry from preparing for an attack. In future campaigns Baybars took extreme steps to maintain this element of surprise. Always suspicious of enemy spies and scouts, he used messengers to deliver sealed orders to his generals, containing details of the next target that were only to be read once on the march. Most crucially of all, the sultan had shown that, in the case of Caesarea and Arsuf, his intention was destruction, not occupation. All along the Mediterranean coast his policy would be to wipe the Latin ports from the face of the Holy Land, closing, one by one, the doorways that linked Outremer with the West.

Breaking the Franks

Baybars renewed his attacks in spring 1266. One army of around 15,000 troops was sent north under Qalawun to ravage the county of Tripoli, where it swept up a number of minor fortresses, all of which were razed. Later that summer, a second Mamluk force was dispatched, this time to punish the Armenian Christians of Cilicia for their alliance with the Mongols. The Muslim host invaded in August 1266 and proceeded to lay waste to a succession of Armenian settlements. This unrelenting campaign left Hethum’s Cilician kingdom in a severely weakened state.

Meanwhile, the sultan led the bulk of his forces on a series of scouring raids up the coast, enacting a devastating scorched-earth strategy around the likes of Acre, Tyre and Sidon. The Mamluk host then turned inland to attack the major Templar fortress of Safad in Galilee, the last Latin bulwark in the Palestinian interior. According to Baybars’ chancellor, this castle was targeted because ‘it was a lump in Syria’s throat, and an obstacle to breathing in Islam’s chest’. The siege began on 13 June 1266 with a mixture of bombardment and sapping, and though the Templars put up strong resistance, they were eventually forced to sue for terms on 23 July. Conditions of surrender were agreed that supposedly allowed the Franks safe conduct to the coast, but these were never realised. Whether through blunt deceit or, as most Muslim sources suggest, because the Templars were found still to be armed as they marched from Safad, Baybars ordered the garrison’s execution. Some 1,500 Christians were duly led to a nearby hill–the site upon which the Templars traditionally themselves had executed Muslim captives–and the entire party was beheaded. One sole surviving Frank was spared and sent to Acre to relate the news of these events, and thus inspire fear.¹²

In the aftermath of this massacre, Baybars refortified Safad with great care and at considerable expense, and garrisoned the fortress with Muslim troops. In addition to the strengthening of battlements, two mosques were also built within its confines. This established the second arm of the sultan’s strategy: the retention of major inland strongholds to act as centres of Mamluk administration and military domination. In the months that followed, he overran a series of other castles and settlements in Palestine, including Ramla. By the end of the summer, Galilee and the Palestinian interior were under Mamluk control.

Having suffered two years of unmitigated defeat, the Latins of Outremer were left in total disarray, unsure of how to react to this seemingly unstoppable enemy. In October 1266 Hugh of Lusignan bravely tried to lead a raiding party of about 1,200 men into Galilee, but around half of this force was butchered by the Muslim force now stationed at Safad. From this point onwards the Franks began clamouring to secure terms of peace with the Mamluks, no matter how punitive. In some cases, Baybars was happy to neutralise and isolate potential opponents while the work of conquest and destruction progressed elsewhere. In 1267, for example, the master of the Hospitallers agreed a humiliating ten-year treaty covering the castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Marqab, agreeing to forsake the tribute monies traditionally extracted from local Muslims and acknowledging Baybars’ right to annul the treaty whenever he wished. However, when the Franks of Acre desperately tried to negotiate a truce in March that same year, Baybars flatly refused and, in May, made another destructive incursion into the city’s environs, terrorising the population and burning the harvest. According to one Latin chronicler, the Mamluks ‘killed more than 500 of the common people’ taken prisoner in the fields, and then ‘sliced all the hair off their heads, to below their ears’. These scalps were then supposedly hung from a ‘cord around the great tower at Safad’. This story is not confirmed in any Muslim source, but it indicates clearly the level of horror either experienced or imagined by the Christians during Baybars’ dreadful assaults.¹³

The fate of Antioch

Baybars’ assiduous preparations in the early 1260s had borne considerable fruit. The outposts of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem were being picked off virtually at will and the power of Cilician Armenia had been all but broken. Even so, the Mamluks had yet to conquer one of Outremer’s great cities–to crush a crusader state and drive home the message that the days of Latin dominion in the Levant were ending. In 1268, with the Ilkhanid Mongols still showing no sign of launching a new invasion, the sultan decided that the time for such a statement was ripe. As his target, he chose the territory of Bohemond VI, lord of Tripoli and Antioch–the Frankish prince who had collaborated with the Mongols in 1260.

With his sights firmly set on the north, Baybars marched out of Egypt that spring. He briefly paused at Jaffa. The truce agreed with John of Ibelin had elapsed (and John himself had died in 1266) and the sultan brusquely refused to renew terms of peace. The port promptly fell to his attack in half a day, and was demolished. After this short interruption, Baybars led his armies into the county of Tripoli, marching up the coast in early May, leaving a trail of desolation behind them. Contemporary Muslim testimony described how ‘the churches [were] razed from the face of the earth…the dead were piled up on the shore like islands of corpses’.

Bohemond VI was ensconced in Tripoli, readying himself to resist a siege, but the Mamluks bypassed the city. Baybars’ target was Antioch. Advancing north via Apamea, he arrived outside the ancient city on 15 May 1268. Antioch’s power as a crusader state had long since waned, but its great walls still stood, holding a population numbered in the tens of thousands. The sultan appears at first to have encouraged the Antiochenes to negotiate terms of capitulation, but they brazenly refused, choosing to rely upon the same walls that had held back the First Crusaders for eight months and had later repelled numerous Muslim warlords, from Il-ghazi to Saladin. This was to prove a foolish and fatal error. The Mamluk host surrounded the city on 18 May and, within a day, Baybars’ troops broke in near the citadel on Mount Silpius. A bloody and savage massacre followed, echoing that enacted by the Franks at the moment of their own conquest, almost exactly 170 years earlier. In retribution for their stubborn refusal to submit, the sultan locked the city gates so that none could escape.

Glorying in the triumphant horror of this moment, Baybars wrote to Bohemond VI to describe Antioch’s sack. In mocking terms he congratulated the Frankish ruler for not having been in the city, ‘for otherwise you would be dead or a prisoner’, and described how, if present, ‘you would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves…flames running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world, before going down to the fires of the next’. The city’s fall brought the Mamluks a huge amount of plunder–it was said to have taken two days simply to divide the loot–but, once they had picked it clean, Baybars’ men left Antioch in a state of utter ruination; one from which it would not recover for centuries. The few remaining Templar outposts to the north were immediately abandoned, while the Antiochene patriarch was permitted to linger in his castle at Cursat (just to the south) for a few more years, but only as a Mamluk subject. The principality of Antioch–once Outremer’s great northern bastion–had been overwhelmed, reduced to a tiny, isolated enclave at the port of Latakia. Only the imperilled husks of two crusader states now remained: the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem.¹⁴

In three years of hardened campaigning, Sultan Baybars had demonstrated the unrivalled strength of the Mamluk military machine, laid bare his own hunger for conquest and for the prosecution of jihad, and exposed the wretched weakness of the Franks. In 1269 he allowed his victorious armies to pause for breath, and, that same summer, permitted himself the luxury of performing the Hajj, although even then he travelled in secret so as not to leave the sultanate unduly vulnerable to any threat, external or internal. With this affirmation of his Islamic faith completed, Baybars returned to Syria and began touring his dominions through the autumn. At this moment, he seems to have been absolutely confident of his ability finally to eliminate the last vestiges of Latin settlement and to resist any renewed threat of Mongol invasion.