Mamluks Seize Egypt

In 1250, a corps of slave soldiers known as the Mamluks brought the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt to an end and took power for themselves. The Mamluk sultanate that emerged would rule Egypt, and for much of its history Syria and the Hijaz as well, until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. It is one of the rare cases in history where a military slave class became a ruling aristocracy, and it reshaped the politics of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Mamluks were mostly young men, often of Turkic origin from the Eurasian steppe, who were purchased, converted to Islam if necessary, and trained as professional cavalry. Rulers valued them because they owed loyalty to their master rather than to local families or tribes. The Ayyubids, the dynasty founded by Saladin's family, relied heavily on such troops. Sultan al-Salih Ayyub built up an elite regiment, the Bahri Mamluks, whose name is usually linked to their barracks on an island in the Nile. By the late 1240s they were both the dynasty's chief military strength and its greatest potential threat.

The crisis came during the Seventh Crusade. Louis IX of France invaded the Nile Delta in 1249, and al-Salih Ayyub died while the Crusaders were advancing. His widow, Shajar al-Durr, concealed his death while the army prepared its defense, and his son Turanshah was summoned from the east. The Mamluks played a decisive part in defeating the Crusaders at Mansura and later in capturing Louis himself. Turanshah, however, threatened the Mamluks' position by favoring his own entourage. In 1250 a group of Bahri officers killed him, and the Ayyubid line in Egypt effectively ended.

Power then passed, briefly, to Shajar al-Durr, who became sultan for a short time, an unusual event in the medieval Islamic world. Opposition, including from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, pushed the Mamluks to put forward male leaders, and Aybak became the first of the new line of sultans. Sources differ on details of these early maneuvers, and the Ayyubid name lingered for a while through nominal co-rulers.

The consequences were far-reaching. In 1260 the Mamluks, under Qutuz and Baybars, defeated a Mongol army at Ain Jalut, helping halt Mongol expansion into the Mediterranean. Baybars and his successors went on to dismantle the Crusader states, with Acre falling in 1291. After the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258, Cairo became a center of Sunni learning and the home of a shadow Abbasid caliphate. The system's defining feature was that sultans were usually chosen from among the mamluks rather than inherited by their sons, which produced frequent instability but also remarkable longevity. Mamluk patronage left Cairo with some of its most celebrated architecture.