He sent his mother first to Gaza, where she was received with the greatest friendliness by the sultan, and sent back laden with costly presents; on her return to Kerak, corrupted by the hospitality and generosity of the sultan, she persuaded her son to wait on him, as did also his ambassador Alamjad with equal zeal.  Finally he set out from Kerak—­when he had made his troops do homage to his son El-Malik el-Aziz—­on a visit to the sultan, who wras then in Tur.  The sultan rode out to meet him as far as Beisan.  Malik Mughith wished to dismount when he perceived the sultan, but he would not permit this, and rode beside Mughith till he reached his own tent.  Here he was separated from his followers, thrown into chains, and brought into the citadel of Cairo (a.h. 660).  In order to palliate this crime, the sultan made public the correspondence of the Prince of Kerak with the Mongols, which it was thought would stamp the former as a traitor to Islam.  The judges whom he brought with him, and amongst whom we find the celebrated historian Ibn Khallikan, who was then chief judge of Damascus, declared him guilty, but we only have historical proof of the sending of his son into Hulagu’s camp to beg that his province might be spared, at a time when all the princes of Syria, seized with panic, threw themselves at the feet of the Mongolian general.  Be that as it may, he none the less committed a piece of treachery, since he had sworn not to call him to account for his former crimes.  Beybars hoped, now that he had disposed of Malik Mughith, that the fortress Kerak would immediately surrender to his emissary, Emir Bedr ed-Din Beisari, but the governor of the fortress feared to trust the promises of a perjurer and offered resistance.  Beybars therefore set out for Syria with all the necessary siege apparatus, constructed by the best engineers of Egypt and Syria.  The garrison saw the impossibility of a long resistance and capitulated.

The son of Malik Mughith, El-Malik el-Aziz, a boy of twelve, was honoured as prince and taken to Egypt, as also Mughith’s family.  His emirs and officials were treated with consideration, but the prince was later thrown into prison.  Nothing certain is known with regard to the death of Mughith.  According to some reports, because he offended the wife of Beybars, when as a wandering Mamluk he once was staying with him, he was delivered over to the sultan’s wives and was put to death by them; another account says that he died of hunger in prison.

After the conquest of Shekif, the sultan made an attack on the province of Tripoli because Prince Bok-mond, Governor of Antioch and Tripoli, was his bitterest enemy and the truest ally of the Mongolians, and had, moreover, at the time of Hulagu’s attack on Syria, made himself master of several places which till then had belonged to the Mussulmans.  The whole land was wasted, all the houses destroyed, all Christians who fell into the hands of the troops were murdered,