The word Mamluk means ‘owned’ and the Mamluks were not native to Egypt but were always slave soldiers, mainly Qipchak Turks from Central Asia. The Mamluks had first appeared in the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century.
The use of Mamluks as a major component of Muslim armies became a distinct feature of Islamic civilization as early as the 9th century CE. The practice was begun in Baghdad by the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842), and it soon spread throughout the Muslim world. Mamluk regiments constituted the backbone of the late Ayyubids military. Each sultan and high-ranking Amir had his private corps, and the sultan as-Salih Ayyub (1240-1249) had especially relied on this means to maintaining power. In 1249, the Bahri mamluks defeated the crusaders at the battle of al-Mansurah and captured Louis IX, effectively ending the crusade.
As the Mongols and Crusaders tried to work out an alliance against their common enemy, the Ayyubids, they were overthrown by their own Turkish slave soldiers called Mamluks. The Mamluk dynasty was established in Egypt in mid-thirteenth century after abolishing the Ayyubid dynasty in 1250. The regime they set up came to be known as the Mamluk sultanate.
The Mamluk sultans established their rules both in Egypt and Syria, Cairo being their capital. Then they achieved the re-conquest of the last of the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, and defeated the Mongols at the critical battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260.
The Mamluk sultan Zahir Baybars (1260-77) installed an Abbasid amir as caliph at Cairo, who survived the Mongol massacre in Baghdad in 1258. For more than two centuries, right up to the1480s, the external threat to the Mamluks varied in intensity but not in quality.
Early history of Mamluks
