and cautioned that beating or threats might be necessary to make them work.
Eunuchs had a special role as guardians of Mamluk household honor.107 They served in the dual households of the elite, both in the harem where the women and children lived and in the barracks (ṭabaqa) where the young mamluks were trained.108 In both contexts, they helped integrate other slaves into the household. The zimāmdār (head of the harem) and his staff supervised the female slaves, both domestics and concubines. The muqaddam al-mamālīk (supervisor of mamluks) and his staff brought up the young mamluks. One of the more famous eunuchs was Sandal al-Manjakī, who served Sultan Barqūq as treasurer and then head of the Sandaliyya barracks.109 Sandal’s mamluk charges revered him for his generosity, piety, abstemiousness, and holiness (baraka), despite the temptations of his powerful position. Because castration was not permitted by Islamic law, it usually occurred before slaves were imported to the Mamluk kingdom.110 Greeks (rūmī), Indians (hindī), West Africans (takrūrī), and Ethiopians (ḥabashī) were preferred.111 Eunuchs from the Black Sea were less common, but a Russian and a Kipchak eunuch were also mentioned.112
To the extent that slaves were used for heavy physical labor in the late medieval Mediterranean, they tended to be male. Slave oarsmen, though today strongly associated with galley warfare, were not common until the sixteenth century.113 Slaves occasionally farmed or built fortifications in Genoa, but this was more common on the islands (Majorca, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus) than on the mainland.114 A few Mamluk slaves mined salt and copper in the Sahara.115 When the fifteenth-century German traveler Bernhard von Breydenbach saw people making bricks on the banks of the Nile, he called them slaves, though they may have been free laborers whom he imagined as slaves in the tradition of Exodus.116
Slaves also worked in craft production and in trade. Italian and Mamluk merchants were known to travel with male slaves and authorized them to act as business agents.117 Islamic law enabled masters to confer a special status, maʿdhūn, on slaves so that they could legally conduct business. Artisans were assisted by both male and female slaves.118 In Cairo, a community of Christian slaves worked as masons and carpenters.119 Several Venetian guilds (the gold beaters and the makers of velvet and samite) banned slaves from learning trade secrets in case they were later sold outside the guild, but Genoese guilds allowed slaves to learn trade secrets as long as they did not compete with their former masters after manumission.120 Apothecaries were not permitted to let their slave assistants run the shop or dispense arsenic for fear of poisoning.121
Slaves as Soldiers
The best-documented Mamluk slaves were boys in military training.122 These were the mamluks after whom the Mamluk state was named. New mamluks were housed in special barracks (ṭabaqa) under the supervision of eunuchs. A jurist (faqīh) visited each day to teach them reading, writing, the Quran, ritual prayer, and the rudiments of Islamic law. Military instructors trained them in horsemanship, archery, and the use of various weapons. The end of training was marked by a graduation or passing-out ceremony (kharj).123 During this ceremony, the sultan would inspect his mamluks and issue each one a suit of formal clothing, a horse, and a sword. Each mamluk also received a document of manumission (ʿitāqa). From this moment, he was legally free but enmeshed in a complex system of patronage and factional politics.
The intensity of mamluk training forged bonds of loyalty among boys in the same cohort (khushdāsh) and between the boys and their master (ustādh). The goal of the mamluk system was for these relationships to replace the ties of biological kinship lost through enslavement.124 A son might assassinate his father to gain his inheritance, and a civilian bureaucrat might betray a ruler to benefit his own family, but a slave had no kin and therefore no conflicted loyalties. After manumission, masters became patrons, and fellow mamluks became factional allies. A newly graduated and manumitted mamluk would be enrolled as a soldier (jund) in his former master’s corps and given a salary or a fief (iqṭa’) to live on.125 His subsequent ability to rise through the ranks would depend on the patronage of his former master and the support of his faction as well as his own skill and ambition.126
Mamluks of the sultan could expect faster advancement than mamluks of the amirs. More was written about those who attained high ranks like commander (amīr), governor (nā’ib), or general (atabak), but most mamluks remained in obscurity at the rank of soldier (jund). They lived in the city where they were stationed, received a salary and rations from the state, and supplemented their income by working or extorting money from civilians.127 Of the five thousand mamluks associated with Sultan al-Muʿayyad Shaykh, only sixty (1.2 percent) were prominent enough to be named in a biographical dictionary.128 The most successful Muʿayyadī mamluk, Khushqadam, rose over the course of forty years to become sultan himself. During the same period, his fellow Muʿayyadī mamluk Jānibak Shaykh was not promoted at all. When Khushqadam became sultan, he raised Jānibak Shaykh to the lowest rank of amirs in honor of their metaphorical brotherhood (khushdāshiyya). Yet Jānibak Shaykh was unemployed again at the time of his death six or seven years afterward. His biographer described him as “one of the neglected, lost ones.”129
Mamluks were unique among late medieval Mediterranean slaves in that their manumission was virtually guaranteed and their masters allowed them real opportunities for power and wealth. Their enslavement early in life has been compared to education at a strict boarding school: harsh, but with the prospect of a bright future.130 Yet, although their careers after manumission have led some to dismiss the legal reality of their slave status, the time that young mamluks spent enslaved was the basis of their class identity. No one could hold a high military post in the Mamluk state without undergoing enslavement and manumission.131 Although there were free soldiers in the Mamluk army (ḥalqa), they were never promoted beyond a certain level. Civilian bureaucrats held important administrative offices, but their career paths were distinct from those for mamluks. If free people wished to join the Mamluk ruling class, they had to become slaves first. One who did so was the amir Qawṣūn.132 He had come from the Golden Horde to Cairo as a merchant selling leather goods, but Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad saw him in the citadel and persuaded him to sell himself into slavery. The sultan sent 8,000 dirhams to Qawṣūn’s brother, and Qawṣūn went to the barracks and began training.
The enslavement of mamluks shaped their youth and had consequences for the rest of their lives.133 As slaves, mamluks were not allowed to move freely. They stayed in the citadel barracks and needed permission from their eunuch guardians to go down into the city. They possessed no money, privileges, or military equipment of their own; everything was supplied by their master and could be taken away by him. They themselves could be sold, given away, or confiscated at any time. They also could not marry without their master’s permission.
The legal effects of slavery did not end with manumission. The jurist al-Suyūṭī, for example, said that an amir could never designate his property as a charitable endowment (waqf) like many elite civilians did because of his status as a former slave: “we say that [the waqf] reverts to the treasury because its endowers are slaves of the treasury and the permanence of their manumission is subject to consideration.”134 The shaykh Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām refused to swear loyalty to Sultan Baybars until a witness could be found to testify that Baybars had been legally purchased and manumitted.135 Any question about the legitimacy of a mamluk’s sale or manumission had to be rectified at once lest it undermine his authority, as in the case of the general Asandamur explained in Chapter 1.136
According to Mamluk racial stereotypes, only Turks (in the generic sense of nomadic, Turkic-speaking people from cold northern climates) were suitable for military training because of their vigorous physical strength and
