The Mamluks: The Slave Soldiers Who Ruled an Empire (Hidden Histories of the Islamic World) - Softcover

Khalil, Asmahan Mostafa Tawfik

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798166933652

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

On an April day in 1517, the sultan of Egypt stood beneath Bab Zuwayla, the great gate of Cairo, with a rope around his neck. He asked the crowd below to recite the opening chapter of the Qur'an for him three times. Then the Ottomans hanged him, and the whole city wept.

He was the last of the Mamluk sultans. Like most of the sultans before him, he had come to Egypt as a boy, bought in the slave markets of the Black Sea.

For two hundred and sixty-seven years, the most powerful state in the Islamic world was ruled by men who had been sold as children. They were carried across the sea, given new names, trained as horsemen, and set free. Then they took the throne for themselves, and held it against every enemy the age could send.

• They captured a king of France and released him for a fortune in gold.
• They placed a woman on the throne of Egypt and struck coins in her name.
• At Ain Jalut they met the Mongols, the army that had just destroyed Baghdad, and broke them.
• At Acre they closed the last chapter of the Crusades.
• They gave the Abbasid caliphate a new home in Cairo and carried its banners for two and a half centuries.
• They survived the Black Death, faced Timurlenk's invasion of Syria, and grew rich on the pepper of India.
• They filled Cairo with mosques, colleges and domes that still stand among the most beautiful buildings of the medieval world.

Told through the chronicles of the men who lived under their rule, al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taghribirdi and Ibn Iyas, The Mamluks follows these soldier-kings from the slave market to the throne, and from the throne to the gate where the last of them died.

It is the story of the most extraordinary ruling class in history: men who began their lives as property and ended them as kings.

Part of the series Hidden Histories of the Islamic World.

Asmahan Mostafa Tawfik Khalil is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the Faculty of Arts at Beni Suef University, Egypt. She taught for ten years at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, and her research centers on Ottoman archival documents on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf and on the history of Muslim peoples. This book was built and prepared on the original contemporary sources.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798166933652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204