The Mamluks governed based on competence, in a time when governance was always based on inheritance. They didn’t come up with a framework for peaceful transfers of power or group selection of the leader. Instead, they functioned like a monarchy that’s constantly at risk of internal coup. Every Mamluk Sultan wanted to leave power to his kids if he could, but “if” was the big question. Let’s look at some of the stories.
Baybars oversaw the rising dominance of the Mamluk regime between 1260 and 1277; he is thought to have had ten children, including three sons. At his death, his son Barakah took control, so that at first it looked like the Mamluks might have started a new monarchist dynasty. Barakah understood how to use power; he started weeding out powerful Mamluk Emirs who might shoulder him aside as his father had done to Qutuz. After about a year, the Emir who was also Barakah’s father in law put a stop to it, forcing him to abdicate in favor of his seven-year-old brother. Barakah withdrew to Kerak, Jordan, where the Mamluks had captured a Crusader castle, and later died there.
No child can rule a Mamluk kingdom, so the real ruler was Qalawun, the father in law. By 1279, the child was expelled to Constantinople and Qalawun simply became the Sultan. The Emir of Damascus thought this was very wrong, since his concept of government was still royal inheritance, but by the time the Mongols came around for the Second Battle of Homs, he was glad to accept a strong Mamluk Sultan’s help. Qalawun successfully negotiated with the remaining Latins of the Holy Land to pay tribute and accept restrictions on fortifying cities like Tyre and Beirut.
Qalawun had at least two sons, too. Like Baybars, he preferred to establish a family dynasty, and he had an idea to weaken the other Emirs around him. He started promoting Circassians, another ethnic minority from around Georgia, to power among the Mamluks. This disrupted the old-boy networks that his fellow Kipchaks had built up. It worked: his son Khalil inherited after him. Khalil was the conqueror of Acre in 1291.
Khalil continued to promote Circassians, probably rewarding those who were loyal to his family, until he was assassinated by other Kipchak Mamluks. And then the Circassians supported his brother an-Nasir Mohammed, so the family kept power. Qalawun’s family strategy not only worked, it also brought a wave of Circassians into Egypt, so that eventually they would become the rulers in their turn (and into modern times). Even before they took power, they became known as the Burji Mamluks, fighting the mainstream Bahris.
An-Nasir Mohammed’s nemesis was an Oirat Mongolian named Kitbogha, who had been captured as an adult fighter in the Second Battle of Homs. Although the Mamluks abandoned their ethnicity in theory, it seems like in practice they formed ethnic mafias. A whole group of Oirats (roughly equivalent to today’s Tuvans?) were in a conspiracy to cast down Qalawun’s legacy and put their own guy into power, and they succeeded twice—and failed twice.
Kitbogha had his own nemesis: his Vizier, probably a Kipchak Turk loyal to Qalawun’s family. The Burji faction drove Kitbogha out of Cairo, but he returned with the support of Mongolian and Kurdish Mamluks and besieged the Vizier in the Citadel. Qalawun’s Mongolian widow, mother to nine-year-old Sultan an-Nasir, sided with Kitbogha by locking the rival Emir out of the Citadel. A third Emir named Lajin (whose ethnicity is uncertain: his hair was blond) persuaded Kitbogha to depose and exile the child, after all, so they set up as Sultan and Vice-Sultan in 1294.
Lajin was a dangerous guy: not only had he been the assassin of Khalil, he then deposed Kitbogha in 1296. Not to worry: soon Lajin was also assassinated by another Mongolian Mamluk. Now what? One of the Mamluk Emirs had to rule, but there was no clear leader. They finally decided to reinstate the King: they brought back 14-year-old Nasir Mohammed from exile at Kerak Castle and agreed to two viziers: an Oirat Mongol and a Circassian.
Sultan Nasir Mohammed led the Mamluk army against Ghazan’s third Mongolian invasion in 1299, just in time to lose the battle. He won the peace, though, when Ghazan inevitably withdrew. In 1303, Ghazan and the Mongols tried one more time, but the young Sultan led an army to surprise them into defeat just south of Damascus. But unknown to everyone else, the Sultan was getting sick of power struggles with domineering Viziers. The Circassian Burji Mamluks had started a protection racket in Cairo, too, and nobody could call them to heel. In 1309, Sultan Nasir announced he was going on Hajj and just didn’t come back. Instead, he went “home” to Kerak, the Crusader castle in Jordan where he had been exiled as a child.
The Circassian Vizier, Baibars al-Jashnakir, ruled as Sultan for nearly a year. It was dreadful; the Mongols and Latins were still threatening war, while the new “Sultan” was greeted with riots in Cairo. So a delegation sent to Kerak, begging an-Nasir (now 24) to come back. He did, and his first act was to execute Baibars al-Jashnakir. Then he started on the rest, and boy he knew where the bodies were buried, as they say. He got rid of the Oirats, stopped the Circassian Mafia racket, and shut down a prison where the Mamluk Emirs had been disappearing their enemies.
This time, Nasir Mohammed ruled until his death in 1341. He oversaw the redigging of a canal in Alexandria and received envoys from the Pope and the King of France (who simply wanted Jerusalem back, please?). When he died, he left eight sons who all became Sultans in their turn, followed by four grandsons. Sounds good, right? But wait, why eight of his sons? If the family dynasty was really settled in now, like a real monarchy, what happened? Ah…
So in truth, although Nasir groomed and trained his oldest son to be the best Sultan ever, the Mamluk Emirs around him were still too much for them. It was only a peaceful power transition on the surface, and really another strongman was in control and used Nasir’s sons as puppets. Qusun was another easterner of some kind, who had come west with a Mongolian army, perhaps as a merchant or suttler. He was powerful enough by 1341 to have Nasir’s son, the new Sultan, arrested and executed. He installed the infant Ashraf Küçük (which means “little”) as Sultan, but dang if Little Ashraf didn’t need a strong Regent, you know?
It was a stormy year, and by the end, Qusun had been executed. The next living son of Nasir, who like his brothers had been trained in strict desert warfare at his father’s “home” of Kerak Castle, came to power. He only wanted to go back to Kerak, so the Emirs installed another brother. That one lasted a few years, then another (we’re up to 5 now) who was a terrible partier and made it only one year. Time for number six, who turned out to be an obsessive pigeon racer and gambler. Number 7 was a child but stayed alive long enough to have 11 children and rule as Sultan, twice (interrupted by #8).
The Mamluks were groping toward a system of oligarchy in which they’d privately elect an executive from among the dynastic potentials. They swapped out sons (and grandsons) as different factions seized power. Earlier, the Mamluks had actually taken a stab at peaceful power transitions by exiling former child Sultans, not killing them. During this period, usually the losing Sultan lost his life, but the last of Nasir’s sons was not executed during at least one coup, so that he was still there to return to power.
This last son of Nasir took steps to trim the powers of Mamluk Emirs, as his father had done. His weapon of choice was clever: he began promoting the descendants of Mamluks who had never been made into Mamluks themselves. The core “Mamluk” experience was to be enslaved then freed (or to free self via coup), but these descendants, the Awlad al-Nas, had not undergone this process, but had just lived as a sort of Cairo aristocracy. They now became Sultan an-Nasir Hasan’s civil servants, governing cities and heading up departments.
Naturally, by 1361, the still-young Sultan was assassinated by one of the Mamluks whose power he was trimming back. This murderer, Yalbugha (whose ethnic background is unclear), became the new strongman who chose which grandson of Nasir Mohammed to install at the moment. And so it went on, until the Mamluk Vizier Barquq ended the farce and just started a new Mamluk era, making himself the first Circassian Burji Mamluk Sultan.