Mamluk Sultanate

The Mamluk Sultanate was a powerful Islamic state ruling Egypt, the Levant, and the Hejaz for some two and a half centuries, distinguished by its unusual governing class of manumitted slave-soldiers.

It was founded in 1250 when the Mamluks, military slaves of Turkic and later Circassian origin who had formed the elite of the Ayyubid army, seized power in Egypt following the death of the last effective Ayyubid sultan, raising one of their own, Aybak, to the throne. Mamluks were boys purchased from the steppe and Caucasus regions, converted to Islam, and rigorously trained as cavalrymen and administrators; rather than passing power through strict hereditary succession, the sultanate functioned largely as a military oligarchy in which rulers rose through martial prowess and factional politics. The new state proved its worth almost immediately: in 1260, at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine, Mamluk forces under Qutuz and his general Baybars decisively halted the previously unstoppable Mongol advance, one of the first major defeats inflicted on the Mongols and a turning point in the defence of the Islamic heartlands. Baybars, who became sultan, consolidated the state, campaigned relentlessly against the Mongols and the Crusaders, and by 1291 the Mamluks had eliminated the last Crusader strongholds in the Levant. Cairo, the Mamluk capital, became the foremost city of the Islamic world, a great centre of trade, scholarship, and architecture, and the seat of a revived Abbasid caliphate under Mamluk protection. The sultanate is traditionally divided into the Bahri (largely Turkic, 1250-1382) and Burji (Circassian, 1382-1517) periods. From the late fourteenth century it was weakened by recurrent plague, economic decline, internal factional strife, and a failure to adopt firearms and artillery at the scale of its rivals. In 1516-1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks and annexed their lands, ending the sultanate, though the Mamluks survived as a powerful regional elite under Ottoman rule.

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