It will be recalled that Chegger-Eddour, the slave Sultana of Egypt, had continued her power by marrying Aibek, the Mameluke, and thus installing him as Sultan of Cairo. Whatever Aibek’s ability to rule men, he utterly failed to master a woman’s heart. Learning that he whom she had created her lord was proposing additional matrimonial alliance with a princess of Mosul, Chegger-Eddour stabbed him to death. While his dead body was lying at her feet she sent for the emir Saif Eddin, and offered him her hand and kingdom. Horrified at the bloody throne he was invited to sit upon, Saif fled away. Chegger-Eddour, with versatile affection, the same day lured two other emirs to look upon her bloody charms, but, as even a bird will flee the fascination of a serpent when once it sees its mate disappear in the devouring jaws, the emirs did not wait for the embrace of the beautiful enchantress. That night Chegger-Eddour’s body, red with her own blood, was tossed into the castle ditch, and the son of Aibek, a lad of fifteen years, came to the throne. But the news of the progress of the Tartars, who had already overthrown the caliphate of Bagdad and were marching through Syria upon Egypt, led the Mamelukes to put the reins into stronger hands. They chose for their leader Koutouz, renowned for ability and success on many a field. Koutouz met the advancing Tartars and utterly defeated them in a great battle on the plain of Tiberas. The Christians, having endeavored to make alliance with the Tartars as against the Egyptians, roused the Moslem spirit of retaliation. Koutouz for a while restrained his people in the name of Moslem fidelity to vows, since the treaty with the Christians was still in effect. Bibars, the victorious leader against Louis IX. in the affair of Mansourah, opposed the policy of Koutouz. Meeting him while hunting, he slew the sultan and claimed the throne on the ground of having thus made room for himself. Such was the reverence for brute power that the assassin’s stroke was recognized as the indication of the will of Allah. The preparations which had been made at Cairo for the triumphal return of Koutouz, the conqueror of the Tartars, were utilized for the coronation of Bibars as his successor. The elevation of Bibars was an omen of woe for the Christian cause. Pope Alexander IV. confessed that it would now be impossible for any Christian power to maintain itself in the Holy Land. Bibars inaugurated his reign over the Moslems by ravaging Palestine, destroying Nazareth, Cæsarea, Arsuf, and Safed, murdering the inhabitants, and dividing the land among his emirs. Returning to Egypt, he recuperated his army and made an incursion into Armenia, taking Jaffa and Antioch on his way (1268). So many were his captives that the Arabian chronicler says, “There was not a slave of a slave that did not possess a slave.”