Barquq and the Burji Mamluk Takeover
Barquq deposed the last Bahri sultan in November 1382 and founded the Burji Mamluk regime, which ruled Egypt and Syria for 135 years. The Mamluk system was unlike anything else in the medieval world. Boys were bought as slaves on the steppe or the Caucasus, converted, trained as cavalry, manumitted on completing it, and rose to command and to the sultanate itself — a state whose ruling class was recruited by purchase in every generation and could not, in principle, be inherited. The Bahri dynasty had held it since 1250, recruited chiefly from Kipchak Turks, and had beaten the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260 and expelled the last crusaders in 1291. Its later sultans were children installed by rival emirs, and eight held the throne in the ten years before Barquq. He was a Circassian, bought as a boy and risen through the regiments quartered in the towers of the Cairo citadel — the burj, which gives the regime its name — and he took power after several years as the effective regent. He was deposed in 1389 by a Syrian revolt, imprisoned, escaped, and recovered the throne in 1390. His achievement was survival. He faced Timur, whose campaigns destroyed everything from Delhi to Ankara, and kept him out of Syria by alliance and by killing his envoys. His son could not, and Timur sacked Aleppo and Damascus in 1400. The Ottomans destroyed the Mamluk state in 1517. The Mamluks then governed Egypt for the Ottomans as a provincial elite until Muhammad Ali massacred them in 1811.
- Year: 1382 CE
- Category: Political
