Mamluk Sultanate

The only state in history run by and for former slaves, which stopped the Mongols and lasted two and a half centuries. Mamluks were boys bought as slaves on the steppe, converted to Islam, trained as heavy cavalry and manumitted into the ruling elite; the Ayyubids relied on them, and in 1250 the regiment killed the last Ayyubid sultan and took Egypt for itself. In 1260 at Ain Jalut in Galilee the Mamluks defeated a Mongol army, the first serious check the Mongols had received in the west, and the victory preserved Egypt and Syria from the destruction visited on Iraq and Iran. Baybars then went on to take the Crusader strongholds one by one, and the last, Acre, fell in 1291. The system was deliberately non-hereditary: sons of Mamluks were excluded from the corps, so each generation was recruited fresh from abroad, which kept the army effective and made the succession violent. The state grew rich on the spice trade passing between the Indian Ocean and Europe, and Cairo became the largest city west of China. Its architecture - mosques, mausolea and hospitals in banded stone - fills historic Cairo, a World Heritage site. The Black Death killed perhaps a third of the population. Portuguese ships rounding Africa after 1498 broke the spice monopoly. The Ottomans conquered the sultanate in 1517. Mamluk households survived in Egypt until 1811. The sultanate ruled Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz from 1250 to 1517. Cairo was its capital and may have held half a million people. Fewer than half its sultans died in office of natural causes. The Mamluks guarded the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

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