31

The Mamlūks

648–92/1250–1517

Egypt and Syria

1. The Baḥrī line 648–792/1250–1390

2. The Burji line 784–922/1382–1517

The Mamlūks succeeded to the dominant position formerly held by the Ayyūbids in Egypt and Syria. Like most major Islamic dynasties of the age, the Ayyūbids had found it necessary to buttress their power with professional slave soldiers inherited from the Zangids (see below, no. 93) and other local powers of the Fertile Crescent, and the Mamlūks (mamlūk, literally ‘one possessed, slave‘) arose from the Turkish troops of al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb of Egypt and Damascus (see above, no. 30, 1–2). Within the two and a half centuries of independent Mamlūk rule, two lines of sultans are somewhat artificially distinguished: the Baḥri ones, so-called because these guards of the Ayyūbids originally had their barracks on the island of al-Rawda in the Nile (al-Bahr), and the Burjī ones, thus named because Sultan Qalāwūn had quartered his guards in the citadel (al-Burj) of Cairo. Various of the Baḥrī sultans, such as Baybars I and Qalāwūn (whose descendants managed to succeed him over three generations), tried to establish personal, hereditary dynasties, but not with much success, and in the last fifty years or so of Baḥrī rule a dozen sultans followed in rapid succession. Within the Burjīs, the pattern of rule tended to be that a great Mamlūk commander would usurp the throne and then at his death pass it on to his son; but within a few years another usurper would take it over. These leading commanders came mostly from the military households of previous sultans, with the followings of Barqūq and Qāyit Bay being especially productive of subsequent rulers.

Ethnically, the Baḥrīs were mainly Qïpchaq Turks from the South Russian steppes, with an admixture of other races, including from the Wāfidiyya, Kurds, other Turks and even Mongols arriving from the East to join the Mamlūk army. The Burjīs, on the other hand, were primarily Circassians (Charkas, Jarkas) from the Christian areas of the northern Caucasus. Up to the end of the Mamlūks as a social group in Egypt in the early nineteenth century, Circassia provided most of their manpower. Pace the assertions of some earlier historians of the Mamlūks that this class failed to perpetuate itself more than two or three generations, it seems that Mamlūk families reproduced themselves all right but that succeeding generations from them no longer followed a military career; instead, they fell back into civilian life, seeking careers in the ranks of groups like the ‘ulamā‘ and religious lawyers and the administrators of awqāf or charitable endowments. Fresh importations of slave soldiers were accordingly necessary to maintain the ruling élite of Mamlūk military leaders.

The slave origins of the Mamlūks were reflected in the rather complex system of nomenclature which evolved for them, the sultans included. The mamlūk fresh from the South Russian steppes started off with simply a personal name, generally a Turkish one, such as Azdamur/Özdemür, ‘choice iron’ = ‘best-quality iron’, or Mankūbars/Mengü-bars ‘eternal tiger‘, or Taghrībirdī/Tangrï-verdi ‘God gave’. But once within the Islamic military hierarchy, he could acquire a nisba relating to the slave merchant who had imported him into Egypt, such as al-Mujīrī, from the name Mujīr al-Dīn, or the circumstances of his purchase, such as al-Alfī ‘bought for 1,000 [dinars]’; then a nisba relating to the amīr of whose household or nexus of clientage he formed part, such as al-Sayfī, from Sayf al-Dīn, or al-Ṣaliḥī, from al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ‘ and finally, if he rose to eminence, a laqab or honorific of his own, such as Ḥusām al-Dīn ‘sword of religion’ or Badr al-Dīn ‘full moon of religion‘.

This ruling institution was a hierarchical construction, with the sultan’s own mamlūks at the apex of the structure. An origin in the non-Muslim lands of the north and slave status were essential for success in the power struggle, for the free elements, including the progeny of former mamlūks, had only an inferior place in the armed forces (a similar position obtained regarding the Ottoman Turkish slave institution, where in the heyday of the empire the Qapï Qullarï or ‘Slaves of the Porte’ had superior opportunities for advancement compared with free elements). The sultans’ arbitrary power was checked by the chief amīrs and the bureacracy, and the basic instability of the sultanate is seen in the rapid turnover of rulers at most periods and the three separate reigns of a sultan like Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn.

The Mamlūks continued the strongly Sunnī policy of the Ayyubids, with sultans, governors and amīrs founding numerous mosques, madrasas and other religious and charitable buildings in Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and other towns. They derived great prestige from their role as defenders of Islam against the infidel Mongols, against the remnants of the Frankish Crusaders (see below) and against heterodox Muslims like the Nuṣayrīs and Ismā‘īlīs of the mountains of western Syria. The Mamlūks’ maintenance in Cairo of a line of fainéant ‘Abbāsid caliphs (see above, no. 3, 3) is probably to be connected with this zeal for the Sunna.

The might and the achievements of the Mamlūk state were impressive and were lauded by contemporary historians, who stressed the role of the Turks as a people sent by God to preserve the fabric of the Dār al-Islām. Qutuz defeated Hülegü’s Mongols at ‘Ayn Jālūt in Palestine in 658/1260, and his successors consolidated the victory and set the new régime on its feet, although the threat from the Mongol Il Khānids did not recede until early in the fourteenth century. By the end of the thirteenth century, the last Crusader fortresses of the Syro-Palestinian coast had been mopped up; in the next one the Rupenid kingdom of Little Armenia or Cilicia was ended; and in the fifteenth century the Christian kingdom of Cyprus was made tributary for a time. The territories of the Mamlūks extended to Cyrenaica in the west, to Nubia and Massawa (Masawwa‘) in the south and to the Taurus Mountains in the north, while in Arabia they claimed to be protectors of the Holy Cities. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, the Ottomans emerged as the Mamlūks’ main enemies in place of the Mongols. Foes of the Ottomans like the Qaramānids (see below, no. 124) were supported and the Turkmen principality of the Dulghadïr Oghullarï or Dhu ’l-Qadrids (see below, no. 129) maintained in western Diyār Bakr as a buffer-state. But the superior élan and vigour of the Ottomans, and their well-developed use of artillery and hand-guns, worked in their favour, while the Mamlūks were still wedded to the ideal of the armed cavalryman with his lance and sword. The penultimate Mamlūk sultan, Qānṣawh II al-Ghawrī, died in battle with the Ottomans at Marj Dābiq near Aleppo in 922/1516, and in the next year Sultan Selīm I defeated the last Mamlūk ruler in Egypt. Syria and Egypt now became governorates of the Ottoman empire, although the military and social caste of the Mamlūks continued virtually to control Egypt internally until Muḥammad ‘All Pasha (see below, no. 34) destroyed their power in 1226/1811.

Certainly until the economic and demographic crisis of the fifteenth century, Egypt and Syria under the Mamlūks enjoyed considerable prosperity, and there was a great cultural and artistic efflorescence, with special achievements in the fields of architecture, ceramics and metalwork; the development of the science of heraldry goes back to Ayyūbid and especially Mamlūk times. There were close commercial links with the Christian powers of the Mediterranean, such as Aragon, Sicily and other Italian states, despite strongly anti-Christian policies in the Near East, so that the Mamlūk period as a whole saw a distinct worsening of the position of the Dhimmīs in Egypt, above all, of the Christians. However, the reckless spending and ambitious building policies in Cairo of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn overstretched the state’s resources for the future, and the Black Death affected Egypt and Syria particularly severely. Under the later Baḥrī and then the Circassian sultans, the revenue from land taxation shrank, while public security declined in the face of Bedouin depredations. The Mamlūks had further to bear expenses in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean region in a fruitless endeavour to check Portuguese expansion there and to preserve Mamlūk trade connections with India and the lands beyond, so that the failure of the once mighty Mamlūk state to withstand the onslaught of Ottoman imperialism becomes understandable.

Lane-Poole, 803; Zambaur, 103–6; Album, 23–6.

EI² ‘Mamlūks‘ (P. M. Holt).

P. Balog, The Coinage of the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt and Syria, ANS Numismatic Studies, no. 12, New York 1964.

idem, Supplement to The Coinage of the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt and Syria, in ANS Museum Notes, 16 (1970), 113–71.

P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades. The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517, London 1986, with genealogical tables at pp. 229–31.

R. Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages. The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250–1382, London 1986, with a list of rulers at p. 161.

U. Haarmann, ‘Der arabische Osten im späten Mittelalter 1250–1517’, in idem (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, 217–52.