Mamluk: Encyclopedia II - Mamluk

The first Mamluks worked for Abbasid caliphs in 9th century Baghdad. The Abbasids recruited them from enslaved mainly Turkic non-Muslim families captured in areas including modern Turkey, Eastern Europe, the steppes around modern Volgograd and the Caucasus. Using non-Muslims as soldiers helped partially overcome Islamic prohibitions on Muslims fighting each other. The rulers also desired troops with no link to the established power structure. The local warriors were often more loyal to their tribal sheiks, their families or nobles other than the sultan or caliph. If some commander conspired against the ruler, it was often not possible to deal with him without causing unrest among the nobility. The slave-troops were strangers of the lowest possible status who could not conspire against the ruler and who could easily be punished if they caused trouble.

After being converted to Islam, they were trained as cavalry soldiers. While technically after training they were no longer slaves, they were still obliged to serve the Sultan. They were kept by the Sultan as an outsider force, under their direct command, to use in the event of local tribal frictions. Many Mamluks rose to high positions throughout the empire, including commanderships. Status remained non-hereditary at first and children were strictly prevented from following their fathers. The intensive and rigorous training given to each new recruit helped ensure a great deal of continuity in Mamluk practices.

The Mamluks who seized power in Egypt were the most famous. They were about 1250 mostly Turkic, along with some Georgians, Circassians, a few Russians and some Mongols from the regions ruled by the Juchi branch of the Mongol family sold into slavery for various reasons such as bankruptcy. The Turkic element then was dominant, and most of them were from the Russian Steppe, in the lands alloted by Genghis Khan to his son Juchi and Juchi's heirs. The Mamluks were often sold into slavery by impoverished steppe families.

The Egyptian Mamluks were friendly with the Juchi's sons, Berke Khan and Batu Khan, for a number of reasons. One of the main ones was that the empire of Berke and Batu was mostly Turkic. While the Mamluk meritocracy lived in luxury as a military caste of foreign-born slave soldiers whose own sons were in that era barred from membership, despite their luxurious living, they were the best trained soldiers in the world at the time, ruthless and very brave, backed up by the resources of Egypt.

The friendship between the Egyptian Mamluks and Berke Khan arose because they had common interests.

Juchi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan, was born about nine months after Genghis' wife Borte was taken prisoner and raped by a man named Chilger-Boko. Genghis later caught and executed Chilger-Boko, but this always created doubts about Juchi's real paternity, and while it was very bad manners amongst the Mongols to mention this in public, this always created a rift between Jenghiz and his three other "legitimate" sons Juchi. Juchi was always suspected of really being Chilger-Boko's bastard.

The three other sons (Mongke, Tolui, and Jagatai) got a better inheritance. Meanwhile, Juchi's sons Batu and Berke knew they came off second-best along with their father.

Juchi passed away before his father Genghis Khan did. When Genghis Khan died, Juchi's heir Batu (Khan Berke's brother) was given very few Mongol soldiers for his western lands, and had to carve out his own Khanate by recruiting Turks on the Russian steppe who Batu had conquered.

After Batu in turn passed away, Berke became Khan in what was later the Russian steppe. In Berke's force, Turks outnumbered the Mongol officers by more than a hundred to one. Batu had turned his inheritance of 4000 Mongol soldiers into a force of more than 500,000, most of whom were Turkic nomads. Thus the "Golden Horde" as Batu's empire was later called, became a mainly Turkic one. The Mamluks found that they had an ethnic kinship with the Golden Horde, and this, along with the Islamization of the Horde, made Mamluk Egypt and the Golden Horde natural allies. Thus, the Mamluks could count on diversion attacks by the Golden Horde to the north against Hulagu, who ran the Khanate of Persia.

Berke Khan was apalled by Hulagu Khan's destruction of Baghdad. Berke was more than willing to be at odds with his cousin Hulagu. The Mamluks were a meritocracy, and Jochi's heirs, who knew that they were seen by the other Mongols Khanates as having possibly illegitimate ancestry, felt themselves left out of the Mongol inheritance and were willing to ally themselves with others who had fought to get to power. The Mamluks took great pains to cultivate this diplomatic, political, and military alliance.

In later centuries mainly Georgians, and some Caucasian tribemen were the main Mamluk recruits as Muslims on the Russian steppe were not eligible for enslavement.