Mamluk Sultanate

What does it look like to conquer another empire in 1500? Selim is the sultan who

conquers what we conventionally think of as the Arab world.

Complete changes the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire.

And as I argue in the book of world history, I want to think about that as a kind of world historical event.

event.

And, um, you know, that's a, that's a particular history that has its own shape.

Um, know as i developed as a scholar um and really in graduate school and then my own kind of research in the region came to see that you couldn't understand the modern period um the 19th and the 20th centuries without really understanding the 300 years that came before it that's a very historian move of course to say oh these things have a much longer history to them Um, but that, that became something that I was increasingly interested in.

Um, I'm not saying you can't study the 20th century Middle East without, um, any knowledge of the Ottoman Empire.

The norms that decide who controls violence are self-sustaining, so they can vary widely.

In Mamluk Egypt, the soldiers themselves ruled.

In Iran today, the armed forces answer to a cleric, and in China, to the Communist Party.

Money provides a helpful analogy.

It's an important part of the story that I think if we're really to understand the mindset of the people who open up the Atlantic world and begin this commerce that eventually becomes so heavily based on slavery, we have to understand this background that forms their worldview where they have no problem selling women into the Atlantic world and selling young boys to slaves.

the Mamluk Empire, knowing that they're probably going to be trained up as soldiers who will potentially fight against the Christian Europeans.

But it's all about maximizing your profits, and this is where they can do that.

In October 1483, John Cabot sold an enslaved woman in Crete whom he had bought in Egypt.

So they put a little bit more emphasis in expanding the networks that are already in the Atlantic.

The other thing that happens is slowly over the course of the next 60 years, the Mediterranean begins to fall into an increasingly turbulent state of warfare as the Ottomans are expanding.

There's going to be off and on war between the Ottomans and the Venetians and the Ottomans and the Mamluks until the Mamluk empire finally collapses.

So good entrepreneurial merchants looking at this are going to know it's At some point, trade is not going to be viable, maybe for five years, maybe 10 years.

And that's true in the Ottoman Empire, for example.

It's true in the Mamluk Empire and so on and so forth.

It's true with Saladin, for example.

And it's true of the kingdom's the empire, the Arab empires, the Umayyads and so on, the caliphates, you know, of those great Arab dynasties.

Within a short time, she married one of the leading Mamluk commanders, a man named Aibak, and power was transferred to him, with her still wielding great influence behind the scenes.

Thus was born the Mamluk Sultanate, a state ruled by a self-perpetuating military caste of former slave soldiers, a system unlike anything else in the medieval world.

New boys would continue to be bought, trained, and raised to arms, and the ablest of them would rise to command and even to rule.

There is a certain grim irony in it that is worth naming plainly.

The masters of Egypt had built their power on an army of men they owned, raised from childhood to obey, and that army had now simply taken the throne for itself.

The tool had picked itself up and become the hand.

The Mamluk Sultanate that emerged from this bloody year would prove to be one of the most formidable powers of the age.

Within a decade These same Mamluks would face the Mongols, the supposedly unstoppable horsemen whose alliance Louis had once hoped to win.

And if you've never heard of it, that's honestly a shame because it might be one of the most important missing links in this entire history.

The Mamluk Sultanate ruling over Egypt and parts of the Middle East during this period produced playing cards that have survived in only a handful of fragments today, mostly held in museum collections in Istanbul and elsewhere.

But those fragments tell us something remarkable.

The Mamluk deck had four suits: cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks.