Mamluk

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mamluks were enslaved soldiers who, in some places and periods, became kings. The word itself means "one who is owned." Yet a Mamluk in medieval Egypt could rank above the general population. He could carry weapons that ordinary slaves were forbidden to touch. He could rise to the title of sultan. For nearly 1,000 years, from the 9th century to the early 19th, Muslim rulers bought boys, converted them to Islam, and trained them into an elite warrior caste. The historian David Ayalon called this the "Mamluk/Ghulam Phenomenon." How does a system built on slavery end up producing rulers? Why did kings trust men they had purchased more than men born free? And how does a class of slave-soldiers survive a millennium, only to vanish in a single morning of betrayal in Cairo? The answers run from the slave markets of the Eurasian Steppe to a fleet of 50 ships sent against the Portuguese.

• 2. Owned Yet Above The Free

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  Mamluks were purchased as property, but their status was above that of ordinary slaves. The general population could not carry weapons or perform certain tasks. Mamluks could. In Egypt, from the Ayyubid dynasty to the time of Muhammad Ali, they were called "true lords" and "true warriors." They sat socially above the rest of the Middle Eastern population. They were not Arab. They were ethnically diverse, drawn mostly from Turkic, Caucasian, Mongol, and Eastern and Southeastern European peoples. The institution began with slaves of Turkic origin from the Eurasian Steppe. Over time it absorbed Circassians, Mongols, Abkhazians, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Hungarians. It reached into the Balkans for Albanians, Greeks, and South Slavs, the peoples grouped under the term Saqaliba. The system even recruited from the Egyptians themselves. Each recruit was bought as a military slave, converted to Islam, and trained in martial and courtly skills. On finishing, he was freed, but he stayed inside the ruling military caste. That paradox, owned then freed yet bound to power, would shape every regime the Mamluks touched, from Baghdad to Delhi.

• 3. Baghdad's Dangerous Experiment

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  By the end of the 9th century, slave warriors had become the dominant element in the military. Daniel Pipes argued the first signs trace back to early Muslims such as Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Uthman ibn Affan, who owned many slaves and practiced manumission. The Zubayrid army under Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr used freed slave retainers during the second civil war. Historians agree the massive version of this class developed under the 9th-century Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, under the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim. Conflict between these slave soldiers, the Ghilman, and the people of Baghdad pushed al-Muʿtaṣim to move his capital to Samarra. The move did not calm the tensions. The caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by some of these slave soldiers in 861, in the episode known as the Anarchy at Samarra. Since the early 21st century, historians have drawn a line between two systems. The earlier Ghilman system at Samarra had no specialized training and rested on pre-existing Central Asian hierarchies, with adult slaves and freemen both serving as warriors. The Mamluk system came later, after the caliphate returned to Baghdad in the 870s. It added the systematic training of young slaves in military skills. This is considered a small-scale experiment by al-Muwaffaq, meant to combine the slaves' efficiency with greater reliability. After the Abbasid Empire fragmented, these military slaves spread across the Islamic world as the basis of military power.

• 4. Raised To Be Loyal

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  Under the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo, recruits were purchased as young males and raised in the barracks of the Citadel of Cairo. They had no social ties and no political affiliations, and their training was austere, which made them trusted to be loyal. The boys were sons of non-Muslim parents from non-Muslim lands, bought on the slave market as children. Without families, they were raised to see the sultan as their father and the other Mamluks as their brothers. Their schooling ended with the kharj ceremony, when they were manumitted and given a post in the courtly administration or the army. A Mamluk was "bound by a strong esprit de corps to his peers in the same household." This is precisely why slave soldiers were preferred over freeborn ones. A freeborn soldier had a biological family that held his first loyalty. A Mamluk's loyalty ran to the household that raised him. Their daily life reinforced it. They lived within their garrisons and spent most of their time with one another. Their entertainments were sporting, including archery competitions and presentations of mounted combat skills, held at least once a week. Sultans owned the largest number of Mamluks, though lesser amirs kept their own troops. At first the status was not hereditary, and sons were prevented from following their fathers' role. Yet some recruits kept their old world close. Mamluks from Georgia retained their native language, followed the politics of the Caucasus, and received frequent visits from relatives. They sent gifts home, and money to build a defensive tower or even a church in their native villages.

• 5. Seizing The Sultanate

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  In June 1249, the Seventh Crusade under Louis IX of France landed in Egypt and took Damietta. When Egyptian troops retreated at first, the sultan had more than 50 commanders hanged as deserters. The Egyptian sultan as-Salih Ayyub then died. Power passed briefly to his son al-Muazzam Turanshah, and then to his favorite wife Shajar al-Durr, described by most historians as a Turk and by others as an Armenian. She took control with Mamluk support and launched a counterattack against the French. Troops of the Bahri commander Baibars defeated Louis's forces. The king delayed his retreat too long and was captured by the Mamluks in March 1250. He agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois, of which 150,000 were never paid. Political pressure demanded a male leader, so Shajar married the Mamluk commander Aybak. He was assassinated in his bath. In the power struggle that followed, the viceregent Qutuz, also a Mamluk, took over and formally founded the Mamluk Sultanate and the Bahri dynasty. That first dynasty took its name from a regiment, the Bahriyyah or River Island regiment, centered on Rhoda Island in the Nile. The regiment consisted mainly of Kipchaks and Cumans. The Ayyubids had watched this rise with worry. After Saladin, his brother al-ʿĀdil secured the whole empire by 1200, defeating and killing or imprisoning his brothers and nephews, and folding each defeated Mamluk retinue into his own. The same process repeated at his death in 1218 and at his son al-Kāmil's death in 1238, until the Ayyubids were surrounded by the very men they relied upon.

• 6. The Mongol Wars

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  When the Mongol troops of Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258 and pushed toward Syria, the Mamluk emir Baibars left Damascus for Cairo, where Sultan Qutuz welcomed him. Hulagu demanded that Qutuz surrender Egypt. Qutuz had the envoys killed and, with Baibars' help, mobilized his troops. Fortune then shifted. When Möngke Khan died in action against the Southern Song, Hulagu pulled most of his forces out of Syria to attend the kurultai. He left his Christian lieutenant Kitbuqa in charge with a token garrison of about 18,000 men. The Mamluk army under Qutuz drew this reduced force into an ambush near the Orontes River and routed them at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, capturing and executing Kitbuqa. After this triumph, Qutuz was assassinated by conspiring Mamluks. It was widely said that Baibars, who seized power, had a hand in the plot. Over the following centuries the Mamluks ruled discontinuously, with an average reign of about seven years. The fight with the Ilkhanate continued. The Mamluks beat them again at the First Battle of Homs and drove them east, fortifying Syria and building mail routes and diplomatic ties among local princes. Baibars' troops attacked Acre in 1263, captured Caesarea in 1265, and took Antioch in 1268. They repelled fresh Ilkhanate attacks in 1271 and at the Second Battle of Homs in 1281. They lost at the Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar in 1299 against the Ilkhanids and their Christian allies. Then they won again in 1303 to 1304 and in 1312. The long war finally ended when the Ilkhanids and the Mamluks signed a treaty of peace in 1323.

• 7. Circassians And The Sea

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  By the late fourteenth century, most Mamluk ranks were Circassians from the North Caucasus, whose young males had been frequently captured for slavery. In 1382 the Burji dynasty took over when Barquq was proclaimed sultan. The name Burji referred to their center at the citadel of Cairo. Barquq became an enemy of Timur, who invaded Syria, defeated the Mamluk army, sacked Aleppo, and captured Damascus. After Timur's death in 1405, the sultan an-Nasir Faraj regained Syria but, facing constant rebellions by local emirs, was forced to abdicate in 1412. In 1421 the Kingdom of Cyprus attacked Egypt, but the Egyptians forced the Cypriotes to acknowledge the suzerainty of the sultan Barsbay. By his reign, Egypt's population had fallen sharply, with one-fifth the number of towns it had held a few centuries earlier. Al-Ashraf came to power in 1453 with friendly Ottoman relations, and the Ottoman capture of Constantinople that year caused great rejoicing in Muslim Egypt. Relations soured under Khushqadam. In 1467 sultan Qaitbay offended the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, whose brother had been poisoned. Qaitbay died in 1496, several hundred thousand ducats in debt to the great trading families of the Republic of Venice. The sea brought a new enemy. In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean to Malabar and Kozhikode, attacking the fleets that carried freight and Muslim pilgrims from India to the Red Sea. The Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri was affronted by the attacks, the lost tolls, the indignities to Mecca and its port, and the loss of one of his ships. He sent monks from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as envoys, and threatened Pope Julius II that unless Manuel I of Portugal was checked, he would destroy all Christian holy places. The rulers of Gujarat in India and of Yemen also asked the Mamluk sultan for an armed fleet to guard their Red Sea trade routes. Jeddah was fortified as a harbour of refuge. Having little naval expertise, Al-Ghawri sought Ottoman help and fitted out a fleet of 50 vessels. In 1508 at the Battle of Chaul, that fleet defeated the Portuguese viceroy's son, Lourenço de Almeida. The next year the Portuguese won the Battle of Diu and took the port of Diu from the Gujarat Sultanate. Before Al-Ghawri's new fleet could exert much power, Egypt had lost its sovereignty.

• 8. Conquest And The Last Morning

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  On the 24th of August 1516, at the Battle of Marj Dabiq, Sultan Al-Ghawri was killed, and Mamluk cavalry proved no match for Ottoman artillery and Janissary infantry. The clash with the Ottomans had grown out of relations with the Safavid dynasty in Persia. Shah Ismail I had sent an embassy to Venice through Syria, inviting an alliance against the Ottomans, and Selim I charged Al-Ghawri with giving the Persian envoys passage and harboring refugees. After the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, Selim moved against Egypt. The Mamluk Sultanate survived until 1517, when Selim captured Cairo on the 20th of January. Syria's transfer to Turkish hands was welcomed in many places as deliverance from the Mamluks. Yet the Mamluks did not disappear. The Ottomans kept them as an Egyptian ruling class, as vassals, and the Burji family regained much of its influence. In 1768 Ali Bey Al-Kabir declared independence from the Ottomans, but the movement was crushed, and new slave recruits were brought in from Georgia. Then came the French. In 1798 the Directory of the Republic of France authorized a campaign in "The Orient," and Napoleon Bonaparte led an Armée d'Orient to Egypt. The French defeated a Mamluk army at the Battle of the Pyramids, where massed cavalry charges, changed only by the addition of muskets, broke against French infantry squares. Defeat of the French fleet by the British Royal Navy at the Battle of the Nile decided the larger issue. The Mamluks were so admired that the French raised their own from captured Turkish troops. On the 14th of September 1799, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber formed a company of Mamluk auxiliaries, later reorganized and renamed the "Mamluks de la République," and by decree of the 25th of December 1803 attached to the Chasseurs-à-Cheval of the Imperial Guard. The end in Egypt came from within. Muhammad Ali, appointed governor on the 26th of March 1806, knew the Mamluks were still the feudal owners of Egypt. On the 1st of March 1811 he invited the leading Mamluks to his palace to celebrate a declaration of war against the Wahhabis. Between 600 and 700 paraded through Cairo. Muhammad Ali's forces killed almost all of them near the Al-Azab gates, in a narrow road down from Mukatam Hill, in what became known as the Massacre of the Citadel. Contemporary reports say only one Mamluk survived, named variously as Amim or Heshjukur, when he forced his horse to leap from the citadel walls. Over the following week, an estimated 3,000 Mamluks and relatives were killed across Egypt. A surviving party fled south into what is now Sudan, where in 1811 they founded a slave-trading state at Dunqulah in the Sennar, a last outpost dispersed when the Pasha sent 4,000 troops to reclaim the region in 1820.