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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Posted at Nov 27/2006 02:20PM:
Joey: Originally, these were a bunch of slave-soldiers from the Caucasus that served the Ayyubid dynasty, which had been established by Salah-al-Din in Egypt after the fall of the Fatimids. But over time, the co-opted the Egyptian empire and ruled it themselves; this began in 1250 or so, beginning the Mamluk dynasty.
Because the Mamluks were comprised of foreign slave-soldiers and not natives of Egypt, their dynastic line could only be sustained by fresh "imports" of slaves. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries they did this through Italian merchants who held sway over the primary slaving grounds, the Black Sea and Caucasus regions. First trhough the Venetians who controled the temporary Latin Kingdom of Caonstantinople, but more importantly through the Genoese (after the return of Byzantine control of Constantinople). Because the Genoese provided the Mamluks with this service, they were granted trading rights with the Egyptian merchants (read: Karimi) who brought goods back from the East. This strange symbiotic relationship, as Abu-Lughod mentions, made trade flourish between Europe and the East using Cairo-Fustat as intermediary through the 13th and 14th centuries.
The Mamluk dynasty of Egypt began its reign with a repulse of the Seventh Crusade (Louis IX's lackluster invasion of Egypt). They also conquered much of Syria and the Levant by beating back the Mongols from that area, and furthermore eliminated the last of the Crusader states from Syria. The Mamluk dynasty would remain in Egypt until 1517, when the Ottoman turks conquered them. (Note that Abu-Lughod makes the observation that this was a scant decade after Vasco de Gama and his Portuguese Men-o-War sailed around Africa to disrupt and break the Egyptian monopoly on trade with the East, effectively destroying what was Egypt's last source of profitability at the time: the southern (and only viable) trade route to the east.