Masson Smith, Ayn Jālūt - Mamlūk Sucess or Mongol Failure

Harvard-Yenching Institute

Ayn Jālūt: Mamlūk Sucess or Mongol Failure?Author(s): John Masson Smith, Jr.Source: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Dec., 1984), pp. 307-345Published by: Harvard-Yenching InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2719035 .

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CAyn Jalit:

Mamliuk Success or Mongol Failure?

JOHN MASSON SMITH, JR.

University of California, Berkeley

Plus grant pens6e avoient les

Tartars de leur chevaus que de soi

meismes....

Haithon, p. 200.

THE battle of cAyn Jalit, where the Mamluiks of Egypt defeated the invading Mongols on 3 September 1260, is usually presented

as the turning point in the tide of Mongol conquest. This, it is usually suggested, was the Mongols' only opportunity to complete the sub- jugation of the Middle East, and the opportunity was lost. Hulegu had to withdraw most of his troops from Syria owing to the death of the supreme khan, Mongke, and the incipient struggle over the succession; the small army he left under Kedbuqa to secure and extend his conquests in the Levant was then overwhelmed by the numeri- cally-superior Mamluiks. Thereafter, because of the divisive outcome of the succession struggle, the hostility of the Golden Horde prevented the Mongols of Persia from using their full power against the Mam- liks.1 Examination of the Mongol campaigns in detail, however, will show that these interpretations are inaccurate or inadequate.

1 R. Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

New Jersey, 1970), pp. 363-366; S. Runciman, A History ofthe Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1951-1955) 3:309-313; C. Brockelmann, History of the

307

308 JOHN MASSON SMITH, JR.

Let us look at first into the numbers of troops engaged in the cAyn

Jaluit campaign, and into the sizes of the Mongol and Mamluik

armies. The Mamliuk victory is usually attributed to superior num-

bers. This supposed superiority seems to derive from Howorth's

mistranslation or misprinting of information from D'Ohsson, that

makes 120,000 Mamlfiks out of "douze mille."2 This mistake has in

turn escaped notice, I believe, because most modern scholars have

concluded that the Mongols were often, if not usually, outnumbered

by their enemies.3 However this may have been, at cAyn Jaliit they

Islamic Peoples, J. Carmichael and M. Perlmann, trans. (New York: Capricorn, 1960),

p. 251; B. Spuler, The Muslim World, vol. 2: The Mongol Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960),

p. 20; 0. Lattimore, "Chingis Khan and the Mongol Conquests," Scientific American

(August 1963), pp. 55-68, see p. 55; L. Kwanten, Imperial Nomads (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 160.

2 H. H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, 4 parts in 5 vols. (London: Longmans, Green,

1888), pt. 3:167; C. D'Ohsson, Histoire des Mongols, 4 vols. (The Hague and Amsterdam:

Van Cleef freres, 1834), 3:334. 3 This conclusion stems from misunderstandings in, and misinterpretations of, the

sources. The Mongols made estimates (and in conquered lands took censuses) of the adult

male enemy population, and these data were sometimes understood as meaning military

manpower (as they did for nomads). This is why Rashiduddin, in The Successors of Genghis

Khan, J. A. Boyle, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 57, claims that

the Mongols in Eastern Europe faced Hungarian forces of 400,000 men. The 400,000

troops of Khwarezm, cited originally by Rashiddudin, according to H. Desmond Martin,

in The Rise ofChingis Khan and His Conquest of North China (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1950),

p. 333, n. 15-although I have not tracked this down-probably also derive from a

Mongol estimate or census of the nomads of the Tien-shan/Chaghatai region that is

reflected in Haithon, Flos Historiarum Terre Orientis, in Recueil des Hiutriens des Croisades,

Documents Armeniens, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906), 2:214; all of these were

then retrospectively and mistakenly made subjects and soldiers of the Khwarezmshah.

Modern scholars have made similar misinterpretations. Martin has Chingis facing superior

forces, first of Hsi-hsia (p. 115), and then of Chin (p. 126) because he counted their useless

infantry together with their cavalry, and overestimates their cavalry as well. Their cavalry,

consisting of nomads from Inner Mongolia (about equal in number to those of Outer

Mongolia) and sedentaries from Manchuria, would have outnumbered Chingis'-

except that it was divided between Hsi-hsia and Chin, and probably underutilized and

immobilized within Chin by the distrust and antagonism between its principal con-

tributors, Jurchen and Kitan.

A more sensibly skeptical approach to the idea of large Mongol forces is taken by D. 0.

Morgan, in "The Mongol Armies in Persia," Der Islam 56 (1979): 85-86 and n. 35 who

cites a text assigning each campaigning Mongol 5 horses and 30 sheep, and wonders

whether (to take his example) an army of 300,000 men could find pasture for 1.5 million

horses and 9 million sheep. They could do so, I believe, on the steppes of Inner Asia and

its extensions into the Middle East-with exceptions to be noted below. On the Khwarezm

campaign, for instance, the Mongol forces were dispersed to a degree in various task forces,

so that the pastoral burden would have been distributed and diminisbed, and moved,

in proper nomadic fashion, from lowland winter pastures to summer highlands. And

they were campaigning in country that still supported some 1.1 million nomads in 1897:

CAYN JALUT 309

were not. Several sources state or imply the size of the Mongol force.

Bar Hebraeus and Haithon give 10,000 men; Kirakos has 20,000;4

some 900,000 Kazaks along the northwestern flanks of the Tien-shan, and 249,000

Turkmen, as I calculate from the data in L. Krader, Peoples of Central Asia (Bloomington

and The Hague: Mouton for Indiana University, 1963), pp. 199-200, reworking it to

fit the regions attacked by the Mongols, and omitting the out-of-the-way Kirgiz and

Karakalpaks. A population of 1.1 million nomads should have as a decent minimum of

animal capital (assuming 5 persons per family) some 22 million sheep or their equivalent,

and they probably had something like this in fact as well as theory. Russian Central

Asia in 1911 had a total of 85.9 million sheep-equivalents (s-e): 28.5 million sheep, 2.9

million goats, 5.6 million cattle, and 5.3 million horses, taking 1 horse or cow as the

equivalent of 5 sheep or goats: data from R. A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 160-61. Although the animal

population is not broken down by region or people, we might subdivide it in accordance

with the proportions of the nomad populations. The 1.1 million Kazaks and Turkmen

were about 26% of the total nomad population of Russian Central Asia (Kazak, Kirgiz,

Turkmen and Karakalpak); 26% of the 85.9 sheep-equivalents would be 22.3 million s-e.

Chingis would not have had difficulty campaigning in a region that could support such

numbers when the "ecological weight" of his own force (at 5 horses and 30 sheep-or

55 s-e--per man) would have been only 5.5 million s-e per 100,000 men-16.5 million s-e

for Morgan's 300,000, and 22 million exactly for 400,000 (which I suggest, in an article

forthcoming in one of the Oxford-Pennsylvania Middle East conference volumes, to be

Juvaini's veiled estimate of the size of the Mongol army used against Khwarezm).

As for Iran, the figures cited by Morgan for the animal population in 1970, 48 million

sheep and goats, reveal a theoretical capacity for the country as a whole to support (at

100 s-e per family) 480,000 nomad families or 48 tamens. Excluding southern Iran, and

allowing it half of these animals (which is probably too many, since northern Iran has the

best pastures), would still give the parts occupied by the Mongols 24 million sheep

and goats-about the same number as the total population of all animals in Outer

Mongolia-which could support 240,000 families or 24 tumens. The sheep and goat popula-

tion of Turkey in 1965 was 53 million, plus 13 million cattle and 1.2 million horses, these

latter the equivalent of 71 million more sheep; I have not counted in the buffaloes,

mules, donkeys and camels. These figures can only be used suggestively, since the Mongols

did not occupy the whole of Anatolia, and the modern Turks provide some fodder as well

as pasture for some of these animals (although not the sheep and goats): see J. D. Dewdney,

Turkey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), pp. 107-10. The Syrian animal population

in 1949, according to Syria, Ministry of National Economy, Department of Statistics,

Statistical Abstract of Syria, 1950, pp. 158-59, was some 8 million sheep-equivalents,

enough to support 80,000 nomad families or 8 tumens. The pastures in Afghanistan that

the Mongols also used are not counted.

Morgan's observation that the Mongols needed pastures along their invasion routes,

which would seem to deny them much of the pasture supporting these modern animal

populations, puts the matter backwards. The Mongols had to route their invasions through

pasture, but, not being road-bound, could move wherever there was pasture and thus use

much, rather than just a little, of it. 4 Kirakos of Ganja in At. Dulaurier, "Les Mongols d'apres les historiens Arm6niens,"

Journal Asiatique, 5th ser., 11 (1858): 498; Haithon, p. 172; Gregory Abu'l-Faraj

Barhebraeus, The Chronography, E. A. W. Budge, trans. (London: Oxford University Press,

1932), p. 436.


Rashiduddin does not enumerate the Mongols directly, but describes

the campaign and the army in a way that makes possible the recon-

struction not only of the size of the army, but of the changes in that

size during the campaign. For the convenience of their generally

illiterate commanders, the Mongol armies consisted of decimal units,

Tens, Hundreds, Thousands and Ten Thousands. Therefore when

we have enumerations of Mongol commanders in the sources we

usually have also the "order of battle"-the number and frequently

the disposition of the major military units involved, which are

normally tiumens, Ten Thousands. Thus we can count Htilegii's

troops. For the campaign of 1257-58 against Baghdad, 15 com-

manders are named, implying a force of 15 tiumens and 150,000 men.5

For Htilegui's Syrian campaign that ended at cAyn Jluit, six com-

manders are named, including Htilegii himself and Kedbuqa, the

loser at cAyn Jalilt.6 Accordingly the Mongol force at the outset was

six tumens or 60,000 men.

Htilegii opened his attack on Syria in September of 1259, about a

year before cAyn Jluit, and marched from the Alatagh in eastern

Anatolia via Diyarbekir and Edessa to Aleppo, a distance of 575

miles covered in some four months. He took and frightfully sacked the

city of Aleppo after a short siege in late January 1260. The citadel

held out for another month, but upon its fall the other rulers and

commanders in Syria gave up the struggle and fled to Egypt or joined

the Mongols. Their cities, U[oms, IjamTh and Damascus, yielded to

Htilegui. In late April, probably, while the Mongols were still con-

solidating and rounding out their conquests, and despite the presence

of the undefeated Mamluiks in Egypt, Huilegii withdrew to Iran,

taking many of his troops with him, and leaving Kedbuqa to hold

5 I have discussed the reconstruction of the Mongol "order of battle" further in "Mongol

Manpower and Persian Population," Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient

18 (1975). Those who doubt that Mongol tumens actually included ten thousand men

should consider the information in V. Minorsky, "A Civil and Military Review in Fars

in 881/1476," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 10.1 (1939), and J. E.

Woods, The Aqquyunlu (Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1976), pp. 122

and 131, n. 122, which shows that the actual numbers in Aqquyunlu tiimens closely

approximated their nominal manpower. If the Aqquyunlu could keep their tiimens up to

strength, so surely could the Mongols.

6 Rashiduddin, Jdmic al- Tawdrzkh, B. Karimi, ed. (Tehran: Eqbal, 1338/1957), p. 719;

(hereinafter RaD/K).

cAYN JALCT 311

Syria.7 In July or August, having made sure that Hilegu was gone,

the Mamliiks came out of Egypt to cAyn Jalit.8

Kedbuqa had been named among the commanders at the begin-

ning of the campaign, and thus he must have commanded a tumen of

Ten Thousand. Associated with him in the garrison of Syria after

Hiilegui's departure was another commander, Baidar, who was not

named in the initial order of battle, and whose ordinary position may

have been that of commander of a Thousand in Kedbuqa's tumen.

But since he is named in both Mongol and Mamliuk accounts of cAyn

Jaliut, he must by then have had a greater military importance.9 He

had been made governor of Damascus, as Kedbuqa was governor of

Aleppo, and I imagine that he led not only a Mongol contingent but

also the Syrian, ex-Ayytibid troops that had gone over to the Mon-

gols, and locally-recruited nomads, Turkish and perhaps Arab.

Baidar was probably promoted to commander of a tamen and autho-

rized to raise the men needed to make one. Accordingly the Mon-

gols at cAyn Jluit from the original invading army, Kedbuqa's

tiumen, numbered 10,000, and the total Mongol force, including Bai-

dar's nominal locally-recruited tiimen, was supposed to be 20,000.10

Bar Hebraeus, Haithon and Kirakos were all correct in different

ways.

The Mamluiks had 12,000 men at cAyn Jliit, according to

D'Ohsson, apparently citing Nuwairl, an historian of Mamliuk

Egypt who died in 1332. 11 The most nearly contemporaneous account

of cAyn Jliit, by Baybars' biographer, Ibn cAbduzzahir, gives no

7 RaD/K, pp. 718-20. 8 Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks, M. Quatremere, trans., 4 vols. in 2 (Paris:

Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1837, 1845), 1:103. 9 Ibid., pp. 100, 104; RaD/K, p. 722. 10 Owen Lattimore, in "Chingis Khan," p. 55, attempts to excuse the Mongol defeat at

CAyn Jaliit by claiming that the "Mongols" involved were in fact only Turkish auxiliaries.

The sources say nothing of the ethnic composition of Kedbuqa's force; Lattimore is

only making a guess based on the known Mongol practice of recruiting non-Mongol

troops, and on the general scholarly opinion that most of the "Mongol" soldiery in the

westerly parts of the empire were derived in this way from the local Turkish nomads.

Lattimore's more serious mistake is to undervalue these Turks, whose nomad and warrior

background was the same as the Mongols', and who, under Mongol organization, com-

mand and inspiration, were quite the equals of the Mongols themselves. 11 D'Ohsson, 3:334.


numbers for the Mamliiks in the version that has been translated.12

The figure of 12,000 is a plausible one. The studies of the Mamliuk

army by Poliak and Ayalon have shown that the nominal forces of

the Egyptian Mamliiks, as of their Ayyuibid predecessors, were

24,000 cavalry based on 24 military districts (qirat) supplying 1,000

troops each. These forces seem, judging especially by the assignments

of the qirdts during the second half of the thirteenth century, to have

been composed of some 4,000 royal mamliiks, 10,000 amirs' mamluiks,

and 10,000 men of the 4alqa (regular troops of various origins).1-3 In

addition there were soldiers from defeated Khwarezmian, Ayyuibid

and Kurdish forces that had taken refuge in Egypt from the Mon-

gols. 14 The armies of Egypt would thus in theory somewhat have out-

numbered those of Kedbuqa. But although Maqrizl says that Qutuz

led the whole power of Egypt against the Mongols,16 we may doubt,

I believe, that the actual numbers approached the theoretical. Some

12 Ibn cAbduzzahir, Baybars I of Egypt, F. Sadeque, trans. (Dacca: Oxford University

Press, 1956). Hereinafter material from Ibn cAbdu zahir will be cited under his name,

and information provided by his translator under Sadeque.

18 During the second half of the thirteenth century, the numbers of royal mamluks

seems to have varied between 2 (an-Nasir, beginning of the fourteenth century) and 4

thousand (Baybars); of amirs' between 10 and 13 thousand; and of talqa between 9 and

10 thousand. Syria, which did not become part of the Mamlu:k realm until after CAyn

Jaluit, nevertheless contributed some, although probably not much, further manpower

for the Mamluiks. Although az-ZAhiri's list (in Ayalon, "Studies", pt. 3) enumerates

23,000 Syrian halqa, this figure seems implausibly large. The list was compiled (at an

unknown date) to daunt a potential (but unnamed) Mongol invader, and systematically

overstates Mamlfik strength: the Egyptian forces, for instance, were inflated by double-

counting the mamlfiks, who were tacitly included among the 24,000 halqa, and then

counted again as a separate and seemingly additional item of 18,000. See A. N. Poliak,

Feudalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Lebanon, 1250-1900 (London: Royal Asiatic

Society, 1939), pp. 6-9, and the three articles of D. Ayalon entitled "Studies on the

Structure of the Mamluk Army," of which Parts 1 and 2 are in BSOAS 15 (1953) and

Part 3 in BSOAS 16 (1954), especially 1:222-223, 2:452, and 3:70-72. In Saladin's time

and the later Ayyuibid period, Syrian forces appear to have numbered about 4,000 men,

according to H. A. R. Gibb, "The Armies of Saladin," Cahiers d'histoire igyptienne, ser. 3,

fasc. 4 (May, 1951), and a similar strength is suggested for Mamlik Syria in the early

fourteenth century by the Mamlhk order of battle at Shaqbab in 1303, in which only four

of the 18 amirs-nominally doubtless commanders of a Thousand-led Syrian troops

(Maqrizi, 2.4:199-200). At the time of cAyn Jiluit these forces would have been reduced

by the destruction of a considerable fraction at the siege of Aleppo, by the attrition of

retreat to Egypt, and by the conscription of many into the Mongol army.

14 For the Khwarezmians, see RaD/K, pp. 721-22; for the Kurds, Maqrizi, 1:79-80;

for the Syrians, ibid., pp. 91-95. 16 Maqrizi, 1:103.

cAYN JALOT 313

force would surely have been left behind to guard Egypt against any

renewed Christian assault after the manner of the recent Crusade of

Saint Louis; Saladin, earlier, had left half of his Egyptian man-

power behind for such defense.16 Then, too, it is questionable how far

the various troops in Egypt were able and willing to campaign abroad.

Most of the fugitives, after the attrition of defeat and retreat on

equipment and especially mounts, would not have been equipped

adequately to take on the Mongols-and the Mamliuk arsenals and

studs probably lacked the resources to make good these losses.

Moreover, the soldiers in Egypt knew the Mongols' record and feared

meeting them; many surely evaded doing so. Finally, the figure of

12,000 coincides, probably for logistic reasons, with that of the

Ayyuibid period: Saladin had already found that an army of this

size was the largest that he could field in Palestine17-and that this

was large enough.

Hiilegti obviously believed that Kedbuqa could hold Syria with

his own tiimen and the odd ex-Ayyiibid trooper. He would probably

not have done so had he thought the Egyptian army to be up to its

nominal strength or known the quality of its mamliiks. Mongol

military intelligence, questioning captive and allied soldiers from

Syria (doubtless including some of the exiled Bahr! mamliuks), would

have discovered the numbers and kinds of troops before them in

Egypt. The good ones were mamliiks, perhaps 14,000 in number;

the rest were the 4alqa, whom the mamliks seem to have looked down

on, and unreliable, underequipped fugitives. Almost all of them were

Turks apparently of the same sort that the Mongols had met from

Central Asia to Russia and Anatolia and had always beaten. Be-

cause of this experience they could not evaluate their information

about Egypt properly. They could count, but not appraise, the mam-

luks.

The Mongols had not, in fact, met the Egyptian kind of mamliuk

army before. They had encountered some small mamluak contingents

in Ayyiibid service, and probably some more among the Khwarez-

mians, but most of their Turkish opponents, and the bulk of the

Khwarezmian forces, had been nomad tribal troops, mass armies

indifferently equipped and haphazardly trained, much like those of

10 Gibb, "The Armies of Saladin," pp. 310-11. 17 Ibid., p. 315.


the Mongols themselves. The mamlulks in Egypt were different. The

difficulty of procuring and mounting suitable troops in Egypt, distant

from the Turkish lands and lacking the great pastures needed by a

large cavalry, made the Egyptian governments rely on small armies

of picked men, finely armed and highly trained in tactics conceived

to withstand the Mongols. In fact, the Mamlfiks used methods

that were part of an ancient Middle Eastern military tradition for

coping with Inner Asian nomads, of whom the Mongols were only

the latest, if worst.

The Mongols' tactics may best be understood first by counting their

horses and inspecting their arrows. Each Mongol had from six to

eight, to as many as 18 horses, according to Marco Polo; the troops

mobilized by Ghazan to invade Syria in 1299 were ordered to bring

five horses each.18 All these horses made it possible for the Mongols

to keep up a fast pace in cavalry combat. Other nomads with similar

numbers of horses could match this pace-it is nomadism, not being

a Mongol, that provides abundant horses-but the armies of seden-

tary powers, including Mamluik Egypt, could not. John of Plano

Carpini counselled avoidance of any long pursuit of retiring Mon-

gols ". . . so as not to tire the horses, for we have not the great

quantity which they have." 19 This horsepower superiority enabled the

Mongols, like other nomads in similar circumstances, to outmaneuver,

outflank and surround their sedentary enemies, and to outpace them,

18 Marco Polo, The Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), pp. 100, 152. Vaif, Kitdb-i Va,s.df (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1338/1959), p. 373, lines 20-22.

19 John of Plano Carpini, History of the Mongols, in C. Dawson, ed., The Mongol Mission

(London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 47. The rules and requirements of the equestrian

game of polo suggest, I believe, the capacities of horses in high-paced cavalry combat.

Polo demands much all-out effort of the horses, and accordingly the game is divided into

"chukkas" reflecting the length of time that a horse can keep up with the demand. As

the modern game was developing, at the turn of this century, a chukka ended with the

first out-of-bounds ball struck after 10 minutes of play, resulting often in play lasting for

12 or 13 minutes; this soon came to be recognized as placing an excessive strain on both

horses and men, and so the chukka was reduced to 10 minutes, and later to the present

standard of 71 minutes. During this time a horse may cover as much as 3 miles at the

gallop. Since there are 6 chukkas to the game, each player must have, at minimum, 3 horses

to be able to participate effectively: each horse is ridden for 2 chukkas, with a rest for

some 36 minutes between them. Players prefer to use more than 3 horses. See The En-

cyclopaedia Britannica (191 1; 1973), "Polo". Consider also the remuda system employed in

Western American cattle round-ups and requiring seven mounts per cowboy: see C.

Chenevix-Trench, A History of Horsemanship (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970),

p. 231.

CAYN JALQT 315

avoiding their charges and hounding their retreats.20 It gave the

Mongols the tactical initiative.

Mongol arrows suggest the uses made of these advantages. "Every

[Mongol] is ordered to carry into battle sixty arrows, thirty smaller

ones for piercing and thirty larger with broad heads for discharging

at close quarters. With these latter they wound one another in the

face or arms and cut through bow-strings and inflict heavy losses.''21

It is clear that for Polo the heavy arrows were much the more im-

portant, and I believe that in fact the "smaller" arrows for "piercing"

may be largely disregarded. Contemporary depictions of Mongol

combat exclusively show the heavy arrows, with the broad heads Polo

mentions, and with long, high-standing feathers.22 The Mongols

knew and to some extent doubtless used light arrows for long-range

shooting, as in the sport of flight-shooting or especially during sieges.23

But most of their shooting was done at short ranges to which the heavy

arrows were better suited. Hunting with the bow is usually done at

ranges under thirty yards; since the Mongols usually shot from

horseback, and usually at the gallop, whether hunting or fighting,

they had little occasion for long-range shooting, which is effective

only against very large targets, and consequently little need for

arrows suited to it. And since most Mongols made their own arrows,

they would not have made many of a kind very limited in utility.24

Arrows of the heavy kind that they did make and use in large num-

bers are very-and almost only-good for close range shooting. Large

arrowheads and heavy shafts increase the weight, cutting and pene-

tration of an arrow, but reduce its effective range; heavy fletching in

20 The same methods were used by the first Turkish nomad invaders of the Middle

East: see R. D. Smail, Crusading Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1956), pp. 77-83. 21 Polo, p. 314. 22 E. D. Phillips, The Mongols (New York: Praeger, 1969), plates 19, 20, 21, 25;

M. S. Ip?iroglu, Painting and Culture of the Mongols (New York: Abrams, 1966), plates 8

(= Phillips' plate 19), 9 (= 20), 10 (= 25), 43.

23 Different kinds of arrows for long- and close-range shooting are named, and per-

formances with them described in hyperbolic terms in the Secret History of the Mongols,

sect. 195. A Mongol stele of the early thirteenth century commemorates achievement

in a flight-shooting competition of a shot of 335 alda (fathoms), perhaps 530 meters: see

Igor de Rachewiltz, "Some Remarks on the Stele of Yisiingge," in the volume, Tractata

Altaica (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976), honoring Denis Sinor. 24 Plano Carpini, p. 18; William of Rubruck, Journey, in Dawson, p. 103.

Masson Smith, Ayn Jālūt - Mamlūk Sucess or Mongol Failure

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