than his rank allowed. In practice, powerful amirs could accumulate 150 to 1,000 mamluks.35 Although a large mamluk corps was prestigious, amirs with too many mamluks risked the sultan’s retaliation if they appeared to challenge his power.36
In addition to mamluks, middle-ranking military households might have thirty or forty domestic slaves, while prominent amirs had two or three hundred.37 The number of slave concubines varied. Tankiz, governor of Damascus in the early fourteenth century, had nine, the amir Qawṣūn had sixty, and the amir Bashtak had eighty.38 Taghrī Birdī, governor of Damascus and father of the chronicler Yūsuf ibn Taghrī Birdī, had eight slave mothers (ummuhāt awlād) as well as a group of concubines who had previously belonged to Sultan Barqūq.39 Contemporary estimates of the total slave population of a single military household are rare, but Sunqur, governor of Bahnasā, owned sixty slave concubines, thirty additional slave women, and fifty mamluks at the time of his death in 1335.40
Table 2. Number of Mamluks per Sultan
Sources: Ibn Taghrī Birdī, Al-Manhal al-ṣāfī, no. 717; al-Yunīnī, Dhayl mirāt, 3:250; Ibn Iyās, Bidāʾiʿ al-zuhūr, 1:1:361; Simeonis, Itinerarium, 72–73, 79; Frescobaldi, “Pilgrimage,” 47; Gucci, “Pilgrimage,” 100; Lannoy, OEuvres, 116; “Piloti, Traité,” 54; Adorno, Itinéraire, 188; Ghistele, Voyage, 31; Breydenbach, Sanctarum peregrinationum, fol. 85r; Fabri, Evagatorium, 18:25; Harff, Pilgrimage, 106–7, 124.
The largest Mamluk household was naturally that of the sultan. The sultan’s mamluk corps (al-mamālīk al-sulṭāniyya) consisted of three groups: mamluks purchased by the reigning sultan (al-mushtarawāt or al-julbān), mamluks inherited by the reigning sultan from previous sultans (al-qarāniṣa), and mamluks inherited or confiscated from amirs who had died or lost favor (al-sayfiyya).41 The citadel of Cairo had twelve barracks (ṭibāq) with a capacity of one thousand mamluks each.42 However, contemporary estimates of the size of the sultan’s mamluk corps varied widely, as shown in Table 2. The sultan’s mamluk corps were subject to high turnover: several sultans purged the qarāniṣa and the sayfiyya to consolidate their power. The most notable purges were those of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad in 1310 and al-Nāṣir Faraj in 1411–1412.43 Their effects on the slave trade remain to be investigated.
In addition, the sultan’s household might include anywhere from forty to twelve hundred women, enslaved and free, as well as six hundred eunuchs and an unknown number of domestics.44 A sultan’s chief wife might have her own retinue of up to one thousand slave women.45 Like other military households, the sultan’s household tended to be smaller in the fifteenth century, and fifteenth-century sultans were more likely to be monogamous.46
Figure 2. Median Age of Slaves Sold in Genoa. Black points are based on more data (at least ten sales per year) than gray points.
(ASG, CdSG, N.185,00624, N.185,00625; ASG, Not. Ant. 172, 236–39, 253, 258, 265, 273, 286–87, 292, 363, 366–67, 379–82, 396–405, 449, 685, 719, 768; ASG, Notai ignoti, b.xxiii; Balard, “Remarques”; Balard, La Romanie; Cibrario, Della schiavitù; Amia, Schiavitù; Delort, “Quelques précisions”; Epstein, Speaking; Ferretto, “Codice diplomatico”; Gioffrè, Il mercato; Heers, Gênes; Tardy, Sklavenhandel; Tria, “La schiavitù”; Verlinden, “Esclavage et ethnographie”; Williams, “Commercial Revolution.”)
A third approach to slave demography is to consider the balance of age, gender, and origin. The origins of the Mediterranean slave population are discussed in Chapters 2 and 5. Age was included in Italian slave sale contracts, but notaries habitually rounded slaves’ ages to the nearest multiple of two or five.47 The median age of slaves sold in Genoa and Venice was normally between fifteen and twenty-five years old, as shown in Figures 2 and 3. Girls in their early teens seem to have been the most desirable for domestic work. When Cataruccia Dolfin asked her cousin in Alexandria for a slave, she requested a girl twelve years or older because “you can better use them in this age as you want.”48 Guglielmo Querini also preferred slaves between twelve and fifteen years old for domestic service.49 Francesco Datini thought that a girl between six and ten would learn his ways more quickly and provide him with better service.50 Further analysis shows that the slave women for sale tended to be a few years older than men and that the average age of slaves from the Black Sea increased after 1460, when exporting them became more difficult.51
Mamluk sale contracts categorized slaves by maturity (nursing, weaned, adolescent, or adult) rather than numerical age. Newly imported mamluks were often described as children (ṣaghīr, pl. ṣugharā’) below the age of maturity (bulūgh). The only evidence for numerical age at the time of sale is anecdotal. Jaqmaq al-Arghūnshāwī arrived in Egypt with his mother at age three, Sanqar al-Zaynī was imported around age six, Sultan Khushqadam at age ten, Sultan Shaykh at age twelve, and Sultan Baybars at age fourteen.52 Taghrī Barmish al-Jalālī and the eunuch Fayrūz al-Nawrūzī al-Rūmī also arrived in Egypt in their teens. The oldest reported were Qawṣūn al-Nāṣirī, who came to Egypt and became a mamluk voluntarily at age eighteen, and Sultan Qāytbāy, who was imported in his early twenties.53 The chronicler al-Maqrīzī claimed that the willingness of fifteenth-century sultans to accept older mamluks was a sign of decadence, but this may have been an element of his anti-Circassian rhetoric.54 Fifteenth-century European travelers reported that mamluks in training were between seven and eighteen or between ten and twenty years old.55
Figure 3. Median Age of Slaves Sold in Venice. Black points are based on more data (at least ten sales per year) than gray points.
(ASVe, Canc. inf., Misc., b.134 bis; ASVe, Canc. inf., Not., b.17; b.19, N.7; b.20, N.8–10; b.23, N.1; b.58–61; b.80, N.7; b.95; b.132, N.9; b.174, N.9; b.211; b.222; b.230, N.1–2; ASVe, PdSM, Misti, b.180; Tamba, Bernardo de Rodulfis; Braunstein, “Être esclave”; Cibrario, Della schiavitù; Colli, Moretto Bon; Dennis, “Un fondo”; Krekic, “Contributo”; Lazari, “Del traffico”; Lombardo, Nicola de Boateriis; Verlinden, “Le recrutement des esclaves à Venise”; Zamboni, “Gli Ezzelini.”)
As for gender balance, it has been argued that the Black Sea slave trade was divided so that boys were sent to Egypt and girls to Italy.56 Girls were supposed to be beautiful and docile, more suitable than boys for domestic and sexual service.57 Boys were supposed to be tough because of their steppe upbringing, al-ready skilled at archery and horsemanship, and therefore suitable for military service. The presence of slave women from the Black Sea in Mamluk society has been minimized, except as a “necessary complement” to satisfy the sexual needs of mamluks.58 Yet the majority of Mamluk as well as Italian slaves were women.59 During the 1419 plague outbreak in Cairo, the ratio of male to female deaths was 1,065:669 among free people but 544:1,369 among slaves.60 In Genoa, the half-florin tax records showed male to female ratios of 25:104 in 1413 and 9:100 in 1447.61 The female majority in the Mamluk slave population may have been missed through lack of attention to civilian households. While Mamluk military households owned both men and women in large numbers, civilian households
