Download PDF | Robert Irwin - The Middle East in the Middle Ages_ the early Mamluk sultanate, 1250-1382-Southern Illinois University Press (1986).
200 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Why another history of the Mamluk Sultanate?’ I can (with difficulty) imagine some readers asking. ‘Do we not already have Gustav Weil’s Geschichte des Abbasidenchalifats in Egypten?’ Well, yes, but Weil’s history was, as its title suggests, unduly preoccupied with the affairs of the shadow caliphate in Egypt at the expense of the Mamluks themselves. Many readers now find the heavy gothic print of the Geschichte hard going, and besides the book was written over 120 years ago.
The pace of Orientalist scholarship 1s extremely slow, its fields are broad and few people work in them. Weil’s was the first and last history of the period to provide a scholarly apparatus of regular references. Later general surveys of the period, those of William Muir, Gaston Wiet and John Bagot Glubb, have not rendered Weil’s scholarship obsolete, nor did they seek to do so. Nevertheless, though the advance of scholarship in this area has been patchy, important and often brilliant work has been done on particular aspects of Mamluk history in recent decades. (Ayalon on armies, Lapidus on towns, Haarmann on sources and folklore and Garcin on provincial life are among the examples that come to mind.) Interest in Mamluk institutions and culture has certainly increased in recent years and, while this book was nearing completion, new studies have appeared, of which I have not been able to take full account.! New sources have also come to light and a few of them have even been printed. It is time, after 120 years, fora new work of synthesis.
This work offers a chronological survey of the history of the Bahri Mamluk Sultanate and a narrative framework within which recent research and, perhaps, future research may be understood. In it political events are matched to administrative reforms and both to cultural developments. The notes and bibliography direct the reader’s attention to the massive body of primary and secondary materials that bear on the subject. The subject is of some importance. For over two and a half centuries the Mamluk Sultanate was one of the world’s great powers. The decisions its sultans took not only affected the fortunes of their subjects — in Egypt, Syria, Tripolitania, the Hejaz, Cilicia and Eastern Turkey — but also the destinies of those in the Crusader principalities, Byzantium, the European trading powers, the sultans of India and the vast Mongol empire.
The spice trade which flowed through Egypt and Syria was of crucial importance for the economic development of medieval and renaissance Europe. For a long time the region was a major source of cotton and linen textiles, and the Mamluk period is of the first importance for the history of Islamic architecture, book production and metalwork. Much of what we think of as distinctively Islamic was not really the product of some earlier and rather notional ‘Golden Age of Islam’, under the first four caliphs, or the Abbasids, or the Fatimids. Rather the shape of such things as the layout of Cairo, the structure and content of the Arabian Nights and the development of dervish orders are really products of the Mamluk age. Moreover, the unique system by which the governing white slave elite was recruited, trained and promoted to the highest positions in the state, is, or should be, of particular interest to students of comparative political science and sociology. The weakness of hereditary principle and the rise of something like a meritocracy reveals in a peculiarly distinct form the factional nature of politics in the Near East. Potentially, the area and the field provide a superb testing ground for theories about faction and feud.
The tenure of power at the top was very insecure — at first sight the history of Egypt and Syria is little more than a sequence of sultans, whose often obscure reigns are embellished only by their own assassination, by the spectres of strangled emirs and slaughtered viziers; yet paradoxically the system itself was very stable. Indeed, in many respects, the mamluk system survived the Mamluk regime and lived on in Egypt until the nineteenth century. The period is peculiarly rich in sources — chronicles, biographical dictionaries, topographical surveys, encomia on individual sultans, chancery encyclopedias, archival material relating to waqfs and legal transactions, poetry and popular romances, manuals of instruction on warfare, falconry, etc. Nor are the sources only literary.
Epigraphy, archaeology and numismatics have important contributions to make. If I have made almost no use of the latter type of source material, it is only because the literary materials are so rich and so overwhelming in their bulk. Where possible in the text I have given references to secondary sources in European languages which can take the interested reader further. But often this has not been possible and reference has been made to medieval source material, though preferably to published texts, even if those texts are often relatively late compilations. Many of the best sources for the period remain unpublished and doubtless in many cases undiscovered.
Those that have been published have often not been edited or read with the attention they deserve. No extended discussion of chronicle and biographical source material is offered here, but since this is one of the areas in which a great deal of interesting work has been done recently, important studies in source criticism are noted at the end of the introduction.” Until the publication of all the best sources (among them al-‘Ayni, the remaining volumes of al-Safadi, al-Dhahabi’s history, al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, the rest of al-Yunini, etc.) any history of the period will be premature.
This history is certainly premature, but since I do not expect to see all or many more of the best sources published in my lifetime, I thought it desirable to bring out this interim report. Many of its hypotheses and conclusions are undoubtedly wrong and will be challenged in time. That was why it was written. I should like to thank my typists, Fiona Pankhurst and Rosemary Mead. I am also grateful to Helen Irwin and to Doctors Patricia Crone, Martin Hinds, Hugh Kennedy and David Morgan for reading the work in typescript. I have not always heeded their wise suggestions and the errors that remain are, obstinately, my own.
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