I'm looking for the major details over this. Apparently the Mongol ruler Ghazan, a Christian who would later convert to Islam for military support, attempted to fight along with the Christians against the Mamluks.
I'm currently looking for any reliable information over dates and context behind the Mongolians participating, or attempting to participate in the Crusades. Maybe even line the partnership didn't work out.
Thank you.
I'm not sure what you've looked at as far as sources, but the following may be a good place to start:
Amalric, … [was] at the head of a small force design to take part with an army of Ghazan … in combined operations against the Saracens. The mongols, who failed to arrive until February 1301, contented themselves with raiding nortern Syria as far as Homs and then went home, whereupon Amalric and his men returned to Cyprus, their purpose unfulfilled.
Tensions were already present, and before this point, the sultan al-Ashrf Khalīl declared war on the Mongols. See page 353 of the same source cited above, which gives a good summary of Ghazan, including points on the motivation for his part in these tensions.
…he rightly recognized the Mamluks as his principal external enemies. Several small-scale clashes and betrayals, in both camps, eventaully lead to Ghazan's incation os Syria.
And following up on this:
On December 22, 1299… the Mongols inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mamluks. Homs and Damascus soon surrendered, and by the end of January 1300 there were no Mamluk forces left in Syria
Their role in the Crusades, if you want to call it that, seems largely coincidental, the result of two conflicts occurring in the same area and at the same time. There's much more which I'm not really in a position to quote with any authority, but if you have a chance to hit up the library the following few pages go into more detail regarding his interactions with Christian leaders in the following years. The tl;dr is that things were largely amicable, with a fair number of correspondences, even after Ghazan's death.
Can you throw down a citation?
Basically what happened was, the Golden Horde allied with the Mamluks to fight the Il-Khanate, and the Il-Khanate allied with the Christians, who did it mainly to persuade the Il-Khanate into giving them Palestine and Lebanon.
tl:dr the Christians did it because they wanted Palestine and Lebanon
Source: Mendoza, Manuel. The Earth and its Peoples.