According to the records, Baybars torched Antioch and emptied the city of its inhabitants. Fourteen thousand Christians were killed, and a hundred thousand were taken into slavery. This is an atrocity on par with the First Crusade’s massacre in Jerusalem. I was not expecting this, as the narrative I had always heard was that the crusaders were the only ones perpetrating atrocities, not Muslims. It occurred to me that the only way to vindicate my inherited narrative was if this massacre was belated retribution for what the crusaders had done in 1099, so I started studying the context of the
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