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Mamluk style Mihrab, al-Azhar, Cairo |
It was the Sultan Ayyub (ruling from 1240-1249) who set the stage for the Mamluk era in Egyptian history by building up an army of Turkish Kipchak slaves whom he had brought from regions north of the Black Sea and had installed in the barracks of a citadel on Cairo's Roda Island in the middle of the Nile. They came to be known as Bahri Mamluks ("river slaves"). The commander of this army was a Mamluk named Baybars, later to become sultan himself (1260-1277). Baybars would go on to defeat the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in Palestine in 1260 and bring a final end to the Mongol threat. The Mamluks (from an Arabic word meaning "the owned") were non-Arab, mostly Turkish or Kurdish slaves owned by men who had themselves once been slaves. After being purchased in the slave markets as young boys, they were raised in special, segregated barracks in Spartan fashion, their education consisting almost wholly of military and religious training. When they reached adulthood, they were freed, issued a horse and weapons, and then admitted into the service of their amir ("commander"), their former owner, whom, almost without exception, they served until the end of their lives with loyalty and devotion. The Mamluk emphasis on youth and vigor is reflected in the fact that their salaries decreased as they grew older. When the reigning sultan, himself a former slave raised in this manner, died, one of the amirs replaced him, but usually not without a bloody power struggle between himself and other ambitious amirs.
So begins the history of the Mamluk sultans, a series of rulers who governed Egypt for nearly three hundred years, from the death in 1250 of Shajrat al-Durr ("Tree of Pearls", one of the few women rulers in Islam - Razziya Sultana was another - and the first to rule Egypt since Cleopatra until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. The Bahri Mamluks, Kipchak Turks based at Roda, ruled from 1250 1382, and were then succeeded by the Burgi ("tower") Mamluks, Circassians based at the Citadel, led by Barquq (1382-89). The Burgis ran Egypt until their removal by the Ottoman Turks in 1517 under Selim I.
The Mamluks are a case study in the principle of survival of the fittest. The paradoxes of their character defy many of the standard lessons of history. No one quite knows how the constant Mamluk conspiring, intrigue, and in-fighting (the average reign of Mamluk sultans was only six years), and the dog-eat-dog approach to determining who would become the next sultan could have produced so long and stable a period of rule and such a wealth of artistic, commercial, and cultural life.
The Mamluk personality is a study in contradictions. An obsession with cruelty and death (the favored mode of execution was impalement) coexisted alongside an apparently genuine, sublime, and heartfelt piety, including a deeply-felt compassion for society’s poor and destitute, The Mamluks also had the capacity to produce some of the most breathtaking art in Islamic history. On the one hand unlettered and uncultured, the Mamluks were at the same time enthusiastic promoters of the arts and builders of some of the most magnificent architecture in the world. Stories of the intrigues and excesses of this period make gruesomely entertaining reading. See Desmond Stewart’s book, Great Cairo: Mother of the World (Cairo, 1968), where he describes the complexity of Mamluk rule as, "the coexistence of cruelty with piety, of barbaric display with exquisite taste (129)."
In Cairo, work was completed in 1284 on the Mamluk sultan Qalawun's masterpiece, his maristan ("hospital") in Cairo, to which was connected a mosque, a madrassa ("school"), and his tomb. This is one of the most interesting of all Mamluk building complexes in Cairo. It is the site of Cairo's first sabeel, a "public fountain," added to the structure in 1366 by al-Nasir Muhammad. The water from these asbila was free to the public, but was especially intended for the poor. Quranic schools were sometimes attached to them: water for the spirit as well as the body. Such an arrangement was called a sabeel kutub ("fountain of books"). One beautiful example, still in use as a school, but no longer as a fountain, is the sabeel kutub of Abd al-Rahman Kutkhuda, an Ottoman structure built in 1744.
The madrassa of Qalawun was built with stone cannibalized from the pyramids and other buildings, and included a public library. Public lectures were held, sponsored by each of the four orthodox Islamic schools: Hanafi, Shafii, Maliki, Hanbali (today most northern Egyptians are Hanafites while the Malikites predominate in the south). There was also an orphanage, a children's religious school, and a kindergarten. The maristan had large wards and well-stocked laboratories. All the latest treatments were practiced there. Fifty readers chanted the Koran in the mausoleum. Included in the maristan were special wards for segregating diseases, such as fevers, ophthalmia, and dysentery. There were baths, a dispensary, kitchens, and storerooms. Lectures in medicine were given in a special lecture hall. Climbing the minaret affords the visitor excellent views of the skylines of Cairo, medieval and modern.
The years 1293 - 1294, 1298 - 1308, 1309 - 1340 mark the three reigns of the Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, son of Qalawun, and Mamluk ruler of Egypt. Coming first to the throne at age nine, he was deposed a year later, reinstated at age fourteen, deposed again ten years later, then reinstated for the third time in 1309. The nearly fifty years of his era mark the height of Mamluk power, and the cultural height of Egypt since ancient times. One hundred thousand men toiled on the canal which he dug in 1311 connecting Alexandria with the Nile. He also erected an aqueduct to conduct water from the Nile to the Citadel. He built thirty mosques, in addition to monasteries, baths, and schools. His own mosque in the Citadel (1318) was decorated with stone from the ruined cathedral of Akko. In the opinion of many, his mosque and school represent the pinnacle of Islamic architecture.
Mamluk rule in Egypt ended abruptly, but not without flair. Tuman Bey II, the last Mamluk sultan, had been bought and raised as a mamluk by Qait Bey. Reluctant to don the black robe, turban, and bedouin sword (the symbols of office), Tuman Bey even doubted he could afford to pay the Mamluk emirs surrounding him the customary donation sultans presented upon accession to power. In the end, he reigned only three months, overtaken by the flush of fresh energy from the Ottoman north. The first ultimatum delivered to Tuman Bey from the Ottoman, Selim I, was a somber one:
"From the part of Our Majesty whom fate has favored, to the Emir Tumanbey: God has revealed to me that I shall take over the world, that I shall master all its regions, from east to west, as was done before by Alexander of the Two Horns. "
Selim went on to say that while Tuman Bey was a slave (mamluk), he, Selim, was a prince. Selim offered Tuman Bey the choice of becoming an Ottoman vassal. Tuman Bey, after heated discussions with the emirs, refused. Battle was joined with the Ottomans on a plain near Mattaria, in sight of the obelisk of Amun Re. The Mamluks, though they fought with astonishing valor against vastly superior weaponry, were routed. A second battle, lasting two days, was fought near the pyramids. Again, the Mamluks were routed. Tuman Bey took refuge with a bedouin whose life he had saved on a prior occasion. The bedouin sold him to the Turks who then led him in chains to Selim.
Bab Zuweila, Cairo
Taken from the Ottoman headquarters in Bulak by four hundred soldiers, the last Mamluk sultan of Egypt was brought to the Bab Zuweila, the southern gate of the city of Cairo, to be hanged. Not until they arrived did Tuman Bey know his fate (no one had informed him where he was being led or why). When they got there, Tuman Bey saw the hangman and then he knew. He shouted out to the crowd to join him in reciting the first line from the opening chapter of the Qur'an: Bismillah ar-rahman ar-raheem!, "in the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful!" Three times he led the crowd in the chant. Then he turned to the executioner and said, "Now, hangman, do your work." The execution was botched. The rope broke twice before the sultan was finally dispatched (see Desmond Stewart, Great Cairo: Mother of the World, 152-154). Hereafter, the Mamluks were demoted to the status of tax collectors for the central Ottoman authority.
When the Ottoman sultan, Selim I, conquered Egypt in 1517, he appointed a viceroy to rule as pasha over the country supported by an army of five thousand Janissaries. This was the only change. Otherwise, the administration of the country was left untouched. Philip Hitti explains the setup:
"The twelve sanjaqs into which Egypt was then divided remained under the old Mamluks. Each Mamluk bey surrounded himself with a coterie of slave warriors who did his bidding and upheld his authority. Mamluk blood was kept fresh by the importation of slaves mainly from the Caucasus. As in the preceding regime, Mamluks collected taxes and levied troops, but now they acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty through the payment of annual tribute." (History of the Arabs, 719).
In 1805 Muhammad Ali (died 1848), an Albanian by birth and an Ottoman military officer by trade, was appointed pasha in Egypt. He established a dynasty that grew to challenge Ottoman authority. This dynasty lasted until the abdication of Egypt's last king, Farouk, in 1952.
On March 1st, 1811, Muhammad Ali, having grown weary of sharing power with the Mamluks, employed a variation on the old banquet trick. Four hundred and eighty Mamluks were invited to the Citadel for a reception with "Muhammad Pasha" after which they were to take part in a public ceremony marking the investiture of his son, Tussun.
James Webster, an Englishman who happened to be in Cairo at the time, wrote that Muhammad Ali, received them with the greatest affability. They were presented with coffee and he conversed with them severally, with openness of heart and serenity of brow. But the serpent lay hidden in its bed of roses!
"'For, after the reception was over, Webster continues, The procession was ordered to move from the Citadel, along a passage cut in the rock. The Pasha's troops moved first, followed by the Mamluk corps. As soon, however, as they had passed the gate, at that end of the rocky passage that leads to the Citadel, it was shut suddenly against the latter, and Muhammad's forces were ordered to the top of the rocks, where they were perfectly secure from the aim of their victims, and whence they leisurely fired upon the defenseless [sic] Mamelukes and butchered them in cold blood, almost to a man... (quoted by Desmond Stewart, Cairo: Great Mother of the World (Cairo, 1968), 185).'"
Egyptian historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid maintains that the massacre has been grossly exaggerated by "so-called eyewitness accounts of people who were nowhere near the scene of the crime." (Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 72) She says the actual number killed was 64, the ears and heads of whom were delivered to the sultan.