This book is a study of the social and political processes of the cities of Egypt and Syria in the Mamluk era (1250–1517). It concentrates on Damascus and Aleppo with supporting studies of the Mamluk capital of Cairo. Occasionally, when it seemed that the situations of all the cities must be similar, information based on the study of Cairo has been used to answer important questions for which data on the Syrian cities are lacking. Other cities in the Mamluk Empire, Alexandria, Beirut, Tripoli, and smaller towns, are also discussed.

The sources for such a study are many. They include chronicles, biographies, inscriptions, descriptions of towns, administrative manuals, travelers' reports, diplomatic correspondence, treaties, works of art, and archaeological and artistic remains. Interpreting these materials poses many problems because they do not analyze the society out of which they came in terms which directly answer our present questions about historical reality. The information they give us about economic, social, and many political realities are but laconic references, abbreviations, clues which must have been meaningful to contemporaries but which are enigmatic for us. Any study of the period in which they were recorded requires gathering a multitude of tiny details, questioning their meaning, and using each one to cast light on the others until finally they begin to reveal the society which recorded them.

These sources are ordered and interpreted in terms of a number of concerns, some of which derive from studies of European medieval and renaissance city societies: how were urban societies governed; what institutions made them ordered communities?