Under Western Eyes: A History of Mamluk Studies (MSR IV, 2000)

The exotic and savage Mamluks, the despotic sultans, their vast and extravagant harems, the political murders, the sanguinary punishments, the mounted skirmishes in the shadow of the pyramids, the moonlight picnics in the City of the Dead, the carnival festivities at the time of the flooding of the Nile, the wild dervish mawlids . . . . Is there not something paradoxical in the fact that the Mamluks owe their survival in modern memory to men (mostly) who were and are for the most part quiet and solitary scholars, much more familiar with the book than the sword? I have not punched anyone since I was a schoolboy. Yet, when, as a research student, I looked for a thesis topic, I was hooked by Steven Runciman's description of the sultan Baybars I. According to the doyen of Crusading history, Baybars "had few of the qualities that won Saladin respect even from his foes. He was cruel, disloyal and treacherous, rough in his manners and harsh in his speech. . . . As a man he was evil, but as a ruler he was among the greatest of his time." (Peter Thorau, of course, has since offered a slightly more benign view.) Many of those who have studied the Mamluks have not done so out of liking for them. Edward Gibbon, who was a contemporary of the Mamluks (or neoMamluks, if you prefer), put the case against them in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78): "A more unjust and absurd constitution cannot be devised than that which condemns the natives of a country to perpetual servitude under the arbitrary dominion of strangers and slaves. Yet such has been the state of Egypt above five hundred years." Gibbon went on to contrast the "rapine and