The Sultanate drew upon concepts of martial skill, valor and aggression attributed to the Mongol Imperium and its unprecedented conquests. While idealizing these traits, Mamluk Sultans exploited them to thwart Mongol expansion into their territories. They welcomed renegades from Mongol armies (Wafidiyya) to mimic their prowess while limiting their aggression. Mamluk cadets were imported initially from the Qipjaq Steppe in Central Asia, subsequently from Circassia in the Caucasus, with numerous other regions represented. They were instructed in Arabic, Turkish and Islam prior to being trained in arms. The Mamluk military hierarchy consisted of elite Mamluks imported as cadets in the Sultan’s service, Mamluks of senior officers, soldiers of former rulers restive over their loss of status, and descendants of 1st-generation Mamluks who served as infantry and assimilated into Arabic civil society (awlad al-nas). Advancement through the military hierarchy was marked by endemic factional rivalry in which conspiracy was expected not repudiated. Whether conspiracy enhanced the Sultanate’s military prowess or destabilized its governance remains a debated issue.

An experiment in state-building during the medieval Islamic period, the Sultanate emerged in consequence of a junta by Mamluk slave-soldiers against their patron, the Ayyubid ruler al-Salih (647/1249). A junta participant, al-Zahir Baybars (r. 658/1260-676/1277), consolidated the coup into a stable government. His successor, al-Mansur Qalawun (r. 678/1279-689/1290), sustained the regime, but it was Qalawun’s son, al-Nasir Muhammad (3rd r. 709/1310-741/1341), who oversaw the Sultanate’s halcyon era. Egypt, Syria and the Red Sea were united as the leading imperial power of the central Arab lands. Al-Nasir terminated rivalry from the Sultanate’s main opponent, the Mongol Il-khanate in Iran. His descendants presided over the Sultanate as a quasi-dynasty until an officer of Circassian origin, al-Zahir Barquq (r. 784/1382-801/1399) restored the rule of 1st-generation Mamluks. Barquq and his prominent successors, al-Muʾayyad Shaykh (r. 815/1412-824/1421)and al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 825/1422-841/1438) upheld the regime’s sovereignty against resistance from insurgents in Syria and eastern Anatolia, while enhancing its role as a key participant in commerce with South and East Asia via the Red Sea. They also initiated policies of extraction and monopolies over lucrative commodities that met the fiscal demands of the military hierarchy but compromised the economy long-term. The Sultanate’s final rulers: al-Ashraf Qaʾitbay (r. 872/1468-901/1496) and Qansawh al-Ghawri (r. 906/1501-922/1516) continued these policies until the regime’s defeat by the Ottomans.

The Mamluks’ patronage of literary and scholastic arts inspired written products remarkable for theirdiversity. During the era of Mamluk rule, bureaucrats, jurists, essayists, poets, scholars, and theologians generated legal compendia, religious commentaries, political treatises, trust documents, literary anthologies, historical chronicles, manuals of diplomatic and statecraft, and handbooks of urban/rural topography. These works have enabled contemporary researchers to revise long-standing interpretations of traditional disciplines, and to reconsider subjects previously regarded as inaccessible due to a presumed lack of sources. Topics addressed: literary theory, popular culture, historical method, rural life, gender relations, and religious diversity. Since the Sultanate presided over the central Islamic lands during their transition from the medieval to early modern periods (7th/13th-10th/16th centuries), the insights provided by these sources, and their revisionists, are reshaping the field of Islamic History. The chapter analyzes the context of patronage of literary products by the Mamluk ruling class, and other social groups with the means and inclination to do so. It considers the audiences reflected in their contents, the evolution of languages in which they were written (primarily Arabic, but representation of Persian and Turkish as well), their principal genres (poetry/prose), and the development of Historiography.

Officials in the Sultanate may be classified as bureaucrats, judges, scholastics and clerics. Bureaucrats included the senior minister (vizier) whose fiscal authority diminished over time; bureau secretary (katib)—record keeper with fiduciary oversight; comptroller/supervisor (nazir) of fiscal departments; and chancellor (‘confidential secretary’: katib al-sirr) of the document bureau/foreign office. The civil judiciary was staffed by the judge/magistrate (qadi); notaries/court witnesses (shahid-s) who advised him on cases; market inspector (muhtasib) with oversight of commodity standards and pricing;and jurisconsult (mufti) charged with writing responses to legal queries (fatwas).Formal learning was conducted by the professor (mudarris) in a college of Law (madrasa); and repetitor (muʿid) who drilled textual recitation.Clerical offices included the prayer leader (imam); preacher of the Friday sermon (khatib); and Qurʾan reciter (muqriʾ). Individuals with leanings toward mysticism (Sufism) often joined an order (tariqa).

The Sultanate's political economy evolved continuously. Since the regime presided over an imperial union of territories that differed in their topography and ecology, the process of evolution in these regions exhibited contrasting patterns of change. Agriculture in the Nile Valley manifested procedures unlike crop raising or animal husbandry along the Syrian coast, upland valleys or semi-arid outback of the Syrian Sahel. Commodities imported from South or East Asia transited from ports in Yemen or Western Arabia through entrepôts on the Upper Nile to Alexandria, where they were transferred to European carriers that conveyed them to destinations on the Mediterranean north shore and beyond. Agents in each of these stages answered to differing sponsors, aligned their conduct of business with local politics and extracted revenues at levels fluctuating within the mechanisms that governed inter-regional trade throughout this period. Domestic commerce in both urban and rural settings dealt in the exchange of commodities produced locally in a workshop milieu. Control over (and profiteering from) marketing of lucrative staples that funneled revenues to the regime, such as spices, textiles or sugar, became a principal objective of governmental authority, with results that enhanced the Sultanate’s fisc in the short term but compromised its competitive position in the longue durée. These issues are considered from the perspective of agriculture or animal husbandry in Egypt and Syria, the varying extent of control exercised over them by the bureaucracy, interregional trade and its manipulation by the Sultanate over time, the domestic commercial economy, and finally the overt expropriation or clandestine extraction on which the regime relied as licit sources of revenuediminished in the Sultanate’s final century.

Research has proliferated on several topics that have invited new methodological approaches: the rural setting, gendered relations between men and women, communal status of minorities (Christians and Jews), and religious diversity among Muslims, in particular among those who identified as Sufi mystics. New sources and revisionist interpretations of them continue to transform the field of Mamluk Studies. Yet in many instances, findings on these subjects are confined to discoveries of information on discrete conditions or isolated events that do not lend themselves to comprehensive analysis. They often depend on a single source or fragmentary data set, and require imaginative speculation to formulate hypotheses that apply to questions about their broader contexts in society. The chapter will outline the state of research on these subjects and their potential to open new lines of inquiry by highlighting examples that have influenced revisionist interpretations.

In 784H/1382CE, North African historian and political philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) arrived in Alexandria, Egypt’s Mediterranean port, ostensibly on his way to pilgrimage in Mecca but in fact as a refugee from political controversy in the Maghrib. Ibn Khaldun’s fame had preceded him, and the reigning Sultan, al-Zahir Barquq, appointed him senior judge of the Maliki school of Islamic law in Cairo, the first of several prestigious offices he would hold as a jurist and scholar. Ibn Khaldun spent the rest of his life in the city revising his monumental history of North Africa and the central Islamic lands, Kitāb al-ʿibar. Ibn Khaldun is known to the modern world primarily for his analysis of social structures in a volume titled al-Muqaddima fi’l-taʾrīkh (Introduction to History), which he wrote as an explanatory preamble to his larger work (cf. Chapter 6).

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

The preceding survey revealed ongoing change with regard to the traits Ibn Khaldun attributed to the Mamluk military elite. Their evolution over time reflected the elite’s pragmatic adaptation to shifting circumstances of the political setting in which they pursued their careers, the economy they exploited to remunerate their hegemonic lifestyles, and the global environment they confronted that had altered profoundly in the course of 267 years. While contemporary observers sporadically disparaged the elite for lapsed martial skills, factional infighting, and fiscal corruption, their respect for its dedication to upholding the integrity of the Muslim Commonwealth was genuine, albeit tenuous in the Sultanate’s latter years. When the Sufi shaykh Abu Saʿud prodded the Mamluk officers, who accompanied Tuman Bay to his shrine in the face of impending invasion, to forswear betrayal in return for his reluctant acceptance of their acclamation, he also demanded they cease oppressing the masses – who were fellow believers (cf. Chapter 4). The shaykh’s ultimatum stressed abjuration of fiscal malfeasance but also a return to moral values that had allegedly lapsed. He laid emphasis on the elite’s fall from grace, their disrepute ubiquitous among Muslims regionally. To assuage it, they had to pledge themselves to a moral renewal and restoration of order according to Shariʿa. The officers’ acquiescence was predictable under the straitened circumstances. Whether they would have lived up to their oath cannot be known because of the Ottoman conquest the following year. This survey has aimed at tracing the circumstances behind the Mamluk cadre’s evolution on a distinctive path that led them to accept the shaykh’s admonition at this moment in time. It has underscored the cadre’s capacity to persevere in the face of daunting challenges from abroad and within. The fact of the cadre’s endurance has contributed to the Mamluks’ legacy as seen by its successors and its analysts in modern times. This legacy indelibly shaped the impression left by the Mamluks for posterity.