A few words from Harold Lamb concerning Baibars the Panther.
This modern rendition reminds me of Sean Connery
THE PANTHER LEAPS
It is strange that the character who comes out before the curtain of this final act of the crusades should have been a clown. A gorgeous and sinister Pagliacci, who sang his own prologo and shook with inextinguishable laughter even when he crept across the stage with dagger drawn.
No doubt he appears mad, but he is not. He plays the tricks of a clown to amuse himself, but he is not a clown. He is delighted because he has driven the horsemen of the horde like wild mares across the stage at his entrance, yet it pleases him better to disappear altogether from our sight. He is quite capable of coming on again as a beggar or a wandering crossbowman, or a solitary feaster at a banquet - and woe to the fellow player who gives his identity away. He is, in brief, a true actor of the East that we have never understood, and he is a great actor. One of his audience, the friar William of Tripoli, said that, as a soldier, he was not inferior to Julius Caesar, nor did he yield in malignity to Nero.
Look at him in his natural person, and you will behold a giant in stature, his hair red, his broad face sun darkened; one eye blue, the other whitened by the scar that blinded it; all of his six feet clad in the colored silks, the velvet vest and wide girdle cloth, the gold-inlaid armor pieces, the black-and-gold khalat, the turban-wound helmet of a mamluk who was also sultan. His left hand is his sword hand.
Consider his past - a Tatar of the Golden Horde, a desert-bred fighter, sold at Damascus for a slave at a price of about ninety dollars and returned on account of the blemish in his eye. He called himself the Crossbowman when he joined the roistering White Slaves of the River and became a leader of men who were intolerant of leaders.
Probably Baibars himself could not have named over the full list of his battles. We know that he helped wipe out the crusaders at Gaza in 1244, that he was one of Pearl Spray's triumvirate, and that his counter-attack at Mansura broke the heart of St, Louis and overthrew the chivalry of France. Alone, he set himself across the path of the great khan and defeated a Mongol army. With his own hand he wounded one sultan of Egypt and slew another. His soldiers spoke of him as Malik Dahir, the Triumphant King.
But he is really the Commander of the Faithful, the good kalif of the Thousand and One Nights. True, the name in the tales is that of Haroun the Blessed; the deeds, however, are Baibars', He, not the cold and cautious Haroun of two centuries before, feasted gigantically and passed his days in disguise among his people; he appointed porters to be princes, and made princes into porters to gratify a whim; he assembled the fairest girls of that part of the world, to add variety to his harem. Eventually a Christian woman of Antioch became his favorite wife.
The real scene of the Thousand and One Nights is not Baghdad but Cairo. The river with its pleasure barges rowed by slaves is the Nile, not the Tigris. The unruly slaves are the Mamluks.
Among the many roles played by Baibars that of the sultan-in-disguise appealed most to the fancy of his people. Incognito, with his cup companions, he would raid the public baths to carry off the choicest women. Unattended, he would mount his horse and go off, to appear the next day in Palestine - on the fourth day in the Arabian desert. He had all a Tatar's ability to ride far and fast. He played court tennis at Damascus, and eight hundred miles away at Cairo in the same week. He would ride in at the triple gate of Aleppo's gray citadel when the garrison believed him feasting on the Nile.
His counselors were not enlightened as to his plans or else their noses were led to the wrong scent. For all his Moslems knew, their sultan might be listening at their elbow, or at sea a thousand miles away the building of a new fleet was one of his pet projects. He might be a tall mamluk sitting his horse under a gate, or a tall antelope hunter out with leopards beyond the sheep pastures, or a tall stranger from Persia rocking in prayer at the elbow of the kadi reading from the Koran in the chief mosque. His people took pains not to identify him, because Baibars, incognito, would cut off the head of a man who salaamed to him or cried his name in a moment of forgetfulness. They dreaded his coming, even while they listened exultingly to the growing tale of his exploits and shivered with terror.
Baibars was a sultan after their own hearts. The story teller of the bazaar corner and the blind man sitting in the sun of the mosque courtyard were his minstrels. Who could relate the full tale of his daring? Or his zeal for Islam? Or his championship of the holy war? The Thousand and One tales grew up around him, but they did not relate the whole.
He had Saladin's secret of victory, and he became as strict a Moslem as the son of Ayub although in his private excursions he allowed himself license enough. He closed the wine shops and burned the stores of hashish, but secretly he drank the fermented mare's milk of the Tatars. What Saladin had accomplished by will power, and Richard of England had achieved by nervous energy, the Panther surpassed by sheer abounding vitality.
He joined in the archery tests of his mamluks, and outdid them; he wielded his cane spear in the jousting field, and overthrew them; he hastened to the polo field; he hunted with leopards during a march, and his horses won the races. He surrounded his gigantic person with all the splendor of a conqueror with Viceroy, Master of the Horse, Lord of the Drums, Grand Huntsman, Polo-bearer, Slipper-holder, Lord of the Chair, and all the fellowship of the black eunuchs. Horns and drums heralded his approach, when he played his public role of sultan. To soldiers who caught his fancy, he gave emeralds or Christian girls or estates in Damascus, as the fancy struck him. At a suspicion of revolt he beheaded 180 lords of Cairo.
Harold Lamb, Crusades: The Flame of Islam, Garden City,pages 404-7, New York, 1931