Mamluk History through Architecture

Monuments, Culture and Politics in Medieval Egypt and Syria

Nasser Rabbat

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781786723864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The most enduring testament to the Mamluk Sultanate is its architecture. Not only do Mamluk buildings embody one of the most outstanding medieval architectural traditions, Mamluk architecture is actually a key to the social history of the period. Analysing Mamluk constructions as a form of communication and documentation as well as a cultural index, "Mamluk History Through Architecture" shows how the buildings mirror the complex - and historically unique - military, political, social and financial structures of Mamluk society. With this original and authoritative study, Nasser Rabbat offers an innovative approach to the history of the Mamluks - through readings of the spectacular architecture of the period. Drawing on examples from throughout both Egypt and Syria, from the Citadel and Al-Azhar Mosque of Cairo to the Mausoleum of al-Zahir Baybars in Damascus, Rabbat demonstrates how Mamluk architecture served to reinforce visually the spirit of the counter-Crusade, when the Muslim world rebounded from the setbacks of the First Crusade. Both holistically and in case studies, Rabbat demonstrates how history is inscribed into and reflected by a culture's artefacts.
This is a groundbreaking work in the study of architecture and social history in the Middle East and beyond.

Part 1

UNPACKING MAMLUK SOURCES

1. THE CHANGING CONCEPT OF MAMLUK IN THE MAMLUK SULTANATE IN EGYPT AND SYRIA

The rise of Mamluk elites to political power in the medieval and early modern Islamic world is generally seen as a distinctly Islamic phenomenon that has very few parallels elsewhere. While the reasons for the appearance of the Mamluk institution in the first place are still hotly debated, there is a general consensus that by the eleventh century Mamluk elites had pervaded all existing state structures in the Islamic world from the tribally based principalities to the vast caliphal and imperial domains. This indisputable historical fact has encouraged an uncritical acceptance of a general model of Mamluk that is applied everywhere Mamluk elites were prominent, despite clear differences in the circumstances of their formation, their accession to power and their structures. This chapter will try to counter this tendency by critically examining the historical particularities of one case, the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria (1250–1517), which is perhaps the most outstanding example of a Mamluk elite and the one most assiduously studied and analysed.

First, however, we need to briefly consider the evolution of the Mamluk institution in Islamic history up to the eve of the Egyptian Mamluk coup in 1250. The word mamluk is an adjective meaning ‘owned’; it can be applied to either a person or a thing. When it is applied to a person, it corresponds to the word ‘abd, the common term for slave. Mamluk, however, and its functional equivalent ghulam (youth), were used exclusively, at least from the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Mu‘tasim, to designate a particular kind of owned person – a young man serving in a military capacity.¹ The Abbasids, and after them many Islamic states, imported huge numbers of young white men from pagan countries bordering on the Dar al-Islam (Central Asia, southern Europe, Russia, the Crimea and Caucasia) to serve in their armies.² In time, most, but by no means all, Mamluks tended to come from the Turkic tribes of the Asiatic steppes, who were famous as fierce warriors, agile horsemen and archers.³ Mamluk and Ghulam regiments of mounted Turkish archers became a ubiquitous component of most Islamic armies from Egypt to Transoxania; they even served in non-Islamic armies such as the Georgian and the Byzantine.⁴ These regiments, however, were but few among many. They were not even the only slaves troops; many armies, especially in the Western Islamic world, had units composed entirely of black slaves named al-Sudan and of Saqaliba slaves (Slavs or perhaps Europeans in general).⁵ But the word mamluk was never used for black slaves, even when they served exclusively as warriors, as they did in the Fatimid period in Egypt. Thus, the word mamluk came to have geographic and ethnic connotations: it meant white, mostly Turkish or Turkicised young men, at least in the Seljuq and post-Seljuq Eastern Islamic world.

The concept of mamluk underwent yet another decisive change by the middle of the thirteenth century. Many of the Ayyubid princes, who had ruled Egypt and Syria since the death of Salah al-Din as a constantly disputed family appanage had come to rely heavily on Mamluk units in their armies. This development coincided with the eruption of the Mongols across Central Asia under Chengiz Khan which drove many tribes – notably the group of tribes, or nation, of Qipchaq – west and north and reduced many to slavery.⁶ The Ayyubid princes seem to have taken advantage of the overflow of Qipchaq Mamluks onto the slave markets of Syria and Egypt. But al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub (r. 1240–1249), an overly ambitious and particularly ruthless and cunning Ayyubid prince, by far outdid his peers and predecessors in the number of Qipchaq Mamluks he purchased, trained and enlisted. After a number of serious set-backs early in his career when he was deserted by some of his free troops, al-Salih realised that he could only depend on the loyality of his Mamluks. An elite unit made up almost completely of young Qipchaqs and named al-Bahriyya became his most trusted unit; the soldiers were used in the most delicate and important tasks. Al-Salih kept them around him at all times and showered them with all kinds of financial and political favours. They distinguished themselves against a particularly serious Frankish attack on Damietta in 1249, but al-Salih’s untimely death during that campaign must have left them fearful for their acquired privileges and mounting political independence and military dominance, especially after they grasped the gravity of the threats posed by his son and successor Turan Shah. The new sultan began promot-ing his own Mamluks and – outrageously in the opinion of contemporary commentators – his black eunuchs against the Salihis (i.e. the Mamluks of al-Salih including the Bahriyya) and, particularly when drunk, proclaimed his intention of ridding himself of the Bahriyya. They struck first and assassinated Turan Shah in 1250.⁷

The Salihi Mamluks who killed the son of their master seemed not to have any clear plan for ruling or a candidate for the sultanate. They twice resorted to the tried and tested formula of installing a legitimising figurehead while they sorted out their differences behind the scenes. First they chose Shajar al-Durr, the wife and ex-Mamluka of al-Salih Ayyub, who, extraordi-narily for a woman, ruled as a sultana for three months in 1250. On the coins she struck and the decrees she issued, she styled herself Umm Khalil (Mother of Khalil), the by-then dead son she bore al-Salih; perhaps as a claim to an (obviously illusory) Ayyubid continuity. Internal and external – both Ayyubid and caliphal – hostility to the rule of a woman and a Mamluka soon forced her to abdicate. The various Mamluk factions of al-Salihiyya then elevated to the sultanate Aybak al-Turkmani, a Mamluk amir and a former jashinkir (taster) of al-Salih Ayyub, who married Shajar al-Durr, obviously in recognition of her enduring hold on political power in Egypt. Aybak’s election, however, did not satisfy all dissenters, especially the Bahriyya, who rightly felt that they were the real power brokers in the country. Less than a week later, they forced Aybak’s demotion to the position of atabek and installed a minor Ayyubid prince, al-Ashraf Musa, as a nominal sultan ostensibly to appease the Ayyubid clan in Syria. Aybak, lacking a real military and political counterbalance to the Bahriyya, acquiesced. It took him four years (1250–54) of manoeuvering to fend off the Ayyubids of Syria, stabilise the new regime in Egypt, obtain caliphal recognition from Baghdad and, most importantly, acquire a body of Mamluks of his own, the Mu‘izziya (from his regnal title al-Mu‘izz). He then felt strong enough to move against his opponents, the Bahriyya, eliminate their leader, and finally dismiss the Ayyubid titular ruler and install himself as sovereign sultan.⁸

This momentous decision ushered in a new regime which, although it continued to follow the patterns of organisation established by al-Salih Ayyub or inherited from the earlier systems of the Seljuqs, Zengids, Ayyubids or even Fatimids, was, in a more fundamental and conceptual sense, revolutionary. This was not merely because the Mamluks ruled without a mediator; that practice had a long history and deep roots in Egypt and elsewhere in Islamic lands.⁹ But this was the first, and arguably the only, time when a consciously perceived and carefully formulated Mamluk system became the structural backbone of a new and long-lived polity and political culture.¹⁰ This barely recorded and almost completely overlooked process was not immediately applied, nor was it even conceived, at least not by Aybak, the first Mamluk sultan or his entourage. We do not find any hint at it in the sources during his reign. Nor did his two immediate successors, his adolescent son al-Mansur ‘Ali or his Mamluk Qutuz, the hero of the battle of ‘Ayn Jalut, during their short and eventful rules have the vision or time to institute the transformation. It took the genius, farsightedness, perseverance and good luck of two outstanding rulers, Baybars and Qalawun, and their allies among the Bahriyya or their own Mamluks, to distill from the Mamluk principle and system, combined with some external sources including the Mongol regime, a whole new political and military regime. That they did it so successfully is evident from the long-lasting Mamluk rule, which, to any casual modern observer, appears over and over to have been fatally shaken, yet always managed to survive.¹¹

Perhaps a more congenial measure of their success is that their contemporary chroniclers, who were otherwise so disdain-ful of the Mamluk class, appear to have adapted to the profound upheaval in the structure of their society with minimal fuss. Many simply carried on recording their annals or biographies with only the most perfunctory notice of the passing of the rule from the Ayyubids to the Mamluks.¹² Some, especially among the fuqaha’ (jurists), were disturbed by the Mamluks’ usurpation of rule, but not by the mechanisms with which the Mamluks imposed and sustained their restructuring of the power apparatus. They only attempted to reconcile the end result, the Mamluk rule itself, with their established and almost sacred social and political order. They did so by either postulating a legally dubious doctrine, the bay‘a qahriyya (allegiance under duress), to sanction the Mamluk rule in the interest of the Islamic community or by linking it (unconvincingly at times) to early Islamic precedents.¹³

Only a few chroniclers tried to link the rise of the new Mamluk regime to the events of that tumultuous period. They sought an almost preordained cause for it in the need to counter the onerous threat to Islam and Muslims posed by the seemingly invincible Mongol invasion and the annihilation of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258. We find the earliest formulation of such a rationale in some of the panegyrics recited after the battle of ‘Ayn Jalut in September 1260. Only the Mamluk Turks, a couplet asserts, could have defeated the Mongols because they were kin, shared battle tactics and fighting skills and therefore were predisposed to know and exploit their weaknesses.¹⁴

This justification of the Mamluk takeover, anachronistic as it was (the Mamluk revolution occurred eight years before the Mongol invasion), was eagerly taken up in the official Mamluk discourse as a powerful tool for legitimisation. It was to frequently resurface, particularly in critical moments of change or succession. This is especially evident in the khutba of investiture delivered in 1261 by the first Egyptian Abbasid caliph al-Mustansir II, installed by Baybars; in the second khutba of the second caliph, al-Hakim, installed again by Baybars in 1262 after the death of al-Mustansir in his illfated campaign against the Mongols; and by the fact that the same khutba was again delivered by al-Hakim, more than thirty years later, when al-Ashraf Khalil released him from house arrest in 1291 and ordered him publicly to praise his conquest of Acre.¹⁵ The same justification was also adopted, for obvious reasons, by the historian Baybars al-Mansuri, the closest representative we have of a Mamluk viewpoint. He revived the old topos of the Turks’ higher military prowess both as archers and horsemen and their glorious military record and presented it as the reason why God had willed the passing of the rule to the Turkish Mamluks to preserve Islam and resurrect the caliphate.¹⁶ Much later, Ibn Khaldun connected the idea to the role of ‘asabiyya (a polyvalent Khaldunian term which signifies solidarity in all its permutations) in his metahistorical cycle of the formation and decline of states. He perceptively noted that the Mamluk system of one-generation aristocracy ensured the survival of the state for it preserved the intensity of a primitive ‘asabiyya and its concomitant fighting instinct among the freshly uprooted Mamluks; a characteristic that would have been definitely lost among their more refined and decadent offspring.¹⁷

But what is really revealing is that, on the whole, the chroniclers fail to list or even to mention the sociopolitical changes in the Mamluk realm that had become glaringly obvious by the third quarter of the thirteenth century. The new Mamluk system, which was to endure in its basic tenets until the early sixteenth century, is nowhere described in the Mamluk sources.¹⁸ A new ruling class, new elite language, new behavioural codes, even new legal and organisa-tional rules, which the chroniclers definitely witnessed and sometimes suffered from, are passed over in silence. Only al-Maqrizi in the first quarter of the fifteenth century summarises in a quite convoluted and perhaps anachronistic description – as is usual in his Khitat – some of the innovations of Baybars, Qalawun and al-Ashraf Khalil.¹⁹ The other organising steps undertaken in the formative period have to be teased out of the chronicles and biographies of the Mamluk sultans and their great amirs, which renders the prospect of determining the system’s chronological unfolding emi-nently dim. As for noting the system’s cultural underpinnings and their historical premises, the sources are even more vague. The few Mamluk historians other than al-Maqrizi who mention in passing some of Baybars’ or Qalawun’s ‘inventions’ in terms of the army, the administration or the Mamluk duties and privileges, offer only sporadic, and at times probably fanciful, explanations and contextualisations of these inventions. Among the most famous examples are two dubious part-legal, partmythical justifications for influential Mamluk actions which otherwise seemed incomprehensible to the chroniclers. The first is the ‘Law of the Turks’, cited to explain the mechanism for succession adopted after the killing of Qutuz, and attributed to Aybak al-Musta‘rib, the assassinated sultan’s atabek al-‘asakir (army chief).²⁰ The second is the Chengisid legal code, known as the Yasa and alleged by al-Maqrizi to have been copied from some original in Baghdad and vitupera-tively invoked as the source of Mamluk judg-ments that did not conform to the Islamic shari‘a.²¹

STRUCTURING THE NEW MAMLUK SYSTEM

The Mamluk revolution generat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part 1: Unpacking Mamluk Sources
• Part 2: Architecture as History
• Part 3: Architecture and Language
• Part 4: Architecture as Cultural Index
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography