Al-Mustansir (Cairo)

Ahmad al-Mustansir (Arabic: أحمد المستنصر‎) Abu al-Qasim Ahmad was the first caliph of Cairo for the Mamluk Sultanate.

Ahmad al-Mustansir was a member of the Abbasid house who was imprisoned by his nephew the Caliph al-Musta'sim in Baghdad. Following the Sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, he escaped to the Arab tribes in the desert, where he hid out for a couple of years, until the Mamluks drove the Mongols from Syria in 1260. After making his way to Cairo, Mamluk Egypt, al-Mustansir was installed as Caliph there by the Mamluk Sultan Baybars I in 1261. He was sent with an army to the east to recover Baghdad, but was killed in a Mongol ambush near Hīt (modern Iraq) in 1261, and was succeeded by his rather distant Abbasid kinsman (and former rival caliph, having been proclaimed by the ruler of Aleppo) Al-Hakim I. Though he was not the direct ancestor of any of them, the line of Cairo caliphs he founded lasted until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, but they were little more than religious figureheads for the Mamluks.