Crime in Mamluk Historiography: A Fraud Case Depicted by Ibn Taghribirdi (MSR X.2, 2006)

Fraud and crimes related to corrupt fiscal practices figured prominently among references to criminal activity as chroniclers of the Mamluk period reported such episodes. A crime, as distinct from other categories of violence, may be defined as an act deemed by its recorder(s) as worthy of investigation, apprehension, prosecution, and retribution. Of roughly 1,100 cases discerned in a group of prominent Mamluk-era histories, fraud-related crimes constituted some fifteen percent (167 incidents). Included in this broad category were cases involving manipulation of waqf properties, fiscal extortion, generalized corruption (the largest group with 60 incidents), embezzlement, false witness, forgery, and fraud itself (defined as a crime linked specifically to mendacity). The range of actions the chroniclers described, and the diversity of their contexts, were truly multifarious. While the majority of incidents touched upon the laundering or other misappropriation of fiscal assets (but not larceny or theft, which constituted a separate category), fraud-related crimes included sale of defective goods, faking weights and measures, forcing purchases of otherwise unsalable goods, hoarding and price fixing, racketeering through connivance with gangs, falsification of accounts, spreading of rumors deliberately to stimulate civic unrest, and a host of elaborate con schemes. I am still in the process of collating these crimes among their various types, since few incidents fit neatly into one category and most can be considered in several. I have also discovered that generalizations about classification of criminal acts offer few insights unless they are closely tied to discrete incidents as illustrations. I therefore have selected one well-documented case of fraud for discussion, as an example of the kind of activity that attracted the notice of historians active during the Mamluk period. It emerged as perhaps the most interesting scheme by a con artist that I have encountered.