From the mid-thirteenth century onward, the crusader states of the east entered a terminal decline. Geopolitics in Syria and Palestine were changing radically, in part thanks to disruptions caused by the rise of the Mongols. In 1244 the city of Jerusalem was invaded and sacked by the Turks of Khwarazm, who had been displaced and forced out of central Asia by the Mongol advance. Then from the 1260s, a new ruling dynasty in Egypt—a Turkish slave-soldier caste known as the Mamluks—began to chip away at the remaining coastal redoubts and fortresses of the kingdom of Jerusalem, county of Tripoli,
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