The Battle of Ain Jalut the "Spring of Goliath", or Harod Spring, took place in September 1260 between Muslim Mamluks and the Mongols in the southeastern Galilee, in the Jezreel Valley, in the vicinity of Nazareth, not far from the site of Zir'in.
Due to the large number of sources in vastly different languages Mongol historians have generally focused on one limited aspect of the empire. From this standpoint, the Battle of Ain Jalut has been represented by numerous academic and popular historians as an epochal battle that was the first time the Mongol advance had been permanently halted, and even their first major defeat. However, Ain Jalut, placed in the broader scope of the Mongol conquests in more comprehensive recent research, was actually not a first or as pivotal as these earlier histories portrayed it to be.