Baybars exterminated Saladin’s fourteen sons to end the Arab line of sultans.

Evidence

The author of De statu describes the violence and intrigues of the Mamluk sultans, in particular Baybars, whose cruelty he compares to that of Nero and Herod. “This Herod,” he says “lest anyone of the race [genere] of Arabs should rise up who could be called king or sultan, extirpated the whole royal seed, that is to say the fourteen sons that Saladin had left to be kings when he died; he murdering and suffocating them in any way he could.” Baybars delights in the murder of his subjects, boasts that he is greater than Muhammad, and claims he can take on the kings of the French, English, Romans, Greeks, and Tartars, all at once. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1063

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Baybars as a figure of brutal sacrificial-scale power politics resonates with ‘On Sacrifice’ insofar as eliminating a royal line is dynastic slaughter rather than ritual sacrifice, but the comparison is loose.
• QUESTION: Historically accurate that Baybars had Saladin’s sons killed, or is this a Christian polemic exaggeration? Worth checking against Mamluk chronicles.