This summer’s major exhibition at the Louvre, called simply Mamelukes, opened on 30 April and runs until 28 July, after which it will transfer to the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the UAE, its co-organiser, for a further run from 17 September until 25 January next year.
It is a rare opportunity to find out more about this regime of slave soldiers – mameluke means “owned” in Arabic – that ruled Egypt and much of the wider Middle East including Syria from 1250 to 1517 CE. No one visiting Paris over the next few months will want to miss this remarkable exhibition, designed and curated to the usual high standards of the Louvre and drawing on collections of Mameluke material in France and other countries in Europe.
While the Mamelukes were an originally non-Egyptian and non-Arab military caste who spoke varieties of Turkish among themselves and kept themselves aloof from Egypt’s native population, they were of course all Muslims, almost always by conversion, and it is to them that we owe both many of the architectural splendours of what is now Islamic Cairo as well as perhaps the continuity of Arab and Islamic culture.
Purchased while still children in the slave markets of what is now southern Russia and the Caucasus and originating from the mostly Turkic regions of Central and Southwest Asia, they were brought to Cairo and trained as soldiers, joining the elaborate arrangement of houses, each with its own emir or prince, that made up the Mameluke military system.
No Mameluke could inherit a position in one of these houses or even in general Mameluke status. All were trained from their childhood or teenage years to become soldiers, and some, starting from the humble condition of child slaves sold in the Caucasus, eventually became emirs or even sultans. The Mameluke Sultan al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars, for example, started out in life as a child slave sold in what is now Turkey but eventually became first a leading emir in the Mameluke regime before becoming sultan in 1260.
During their lifetimes and in preparation for their deaths the Mameluke emirs and even more so the sultans spent freely on mosques and mausoleums as well as schools and hospitals. Their palaces and private houses have now mostly disappeared – the Mameluke palaces were cleared from the Cairo Citadel by Mohamed Ali in the early 19th century to make way for the Mohamed Ali Mosque – but their religious buildings and schools and hospital complexes have often very much survived, with some of them being among the best-known examples of Islamic architecture in Cairo.
Who can forget the spectacular Sultan Hassan Mosque below the Citadel, for example, its towering walls and elaborate dome and minarets functioning as an immediately recognisable architectural icon of Islamic Cairo? This building, built between 1356 and 1363 CE on the orders of the Mameluke Sultan Al-Nasir Hassan, has served as an inspiration to generations of architects.
Who can forget, either, the mosque-mausoleum-madrassa-hospital complexes built by the Mameluke sultans along Al-Muizz li-Din Allah Street in Islamic Cairo, where the Qalawan Complex built by the Mameluke Sultan Al-Mansur Qalawan in 1284-1285 and the Barquq Complex built by the Mameluke Sultan Al-Zaher Barquq in 1384-1386 make up one of the most important ensembles of traditional Islamic buildings in the world?
However, it is not only much of Cairo’s magnificent Islamic architecture that present generations owe to the Mameluke sultans, since their rule, coming at a time when the Muslim world was at least at first threatened by invasions on multiple fronts, helped not only to preserve and consolidate the Egyptian state but also to do much the same thing throughout the eastern Mediterranean region.
When Egypt’s Ayyubid Sultan Salah al-Din Ibn Ayyub (Saladin) died at the end of the 12th century, Egypt and the region were being threatened both by the European Crusaders, who had been invading the Levant and setting up Crusader Kingdoms in what are now Syria and Palestine, and, more importantly, by the Mongols, who, following campaigns orchestrated by their legendary leader Genghis Khan, had invaded the territories of the Abbasid Caliphate based in Baghdad in what is now Iraq.
In 1258, the Mongol general Hulegu took Baghdad after a lengthy siege, killing the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mustasim and putting much of the population to the sword. Two years later, the Mongol forces appeared in Syria, directly threatening not only historic centres of Islamic culture, among them Damascus, but also, should they not be defeated, Egypt itself.
The Mameluke emir, later Sultan, al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars had already distinguished himself in the battles of the Seventh Crusade when French King Louis IX invaded Egypt in 1250. Louis IX, dubbed Saint Louis, was taken captive, the last Ayyubid Sultan, Turanshah, was killed, and for a time his mother, Shagarat al-Durr, was named Egypt’s Sultan.
This situation was not to last, and in 1260, Baybars, now Sultan, defeated the invading Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Syria in a victory usually seen as definitively halting the Mongol advance across the region and guaranteeing its security for centuries to come.
Mameluke legacy: Visitors to the Louvre’s Mamelukes exhibition are taken on a tour of some 250 years of Egypt’s history, from the accession of Baybars and the defeat of the Mongols in 1260 to the Mamelukes’ own defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1517 when the country became part of the Ottoman Empire.
On the way, they have the opportunity to learn more about not only Egypt’s military history under Mameluke rule, but also and perhaps more importantly its cultural and economic life and the contributions the Mameluke sultans made to the building and consolidation of the Egyptian state. Egyptian direct rule extended northwards into Syria and indirect rule westwards and eastwards into what are now Libya and Saudi Arabia.
Presented in the Louvre’s main temporary exhibition spaces in the Hall Napoléon of the Museum, the exhibition starts with a section on what it calls the “legend of the Mamelukes,” chiefly the French legend in this case, since it was Mameluke horseman, nominally still under Ottoman rule but in fact more or less independent, who fought invading French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte during the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798.
A splendid painting of the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, lost by the Mamelukes but earning the admiration of Bonaparte’s forces, appears in this first section together with some of the elaborate harnesses used by the Mameluke horsemen. There is a manuscript copy of the “Romance of Baybars” (Sirat al-Zahir Baybars), a popular account based on his 13th-century rule, along with a copy of a treatise on the genealogy of Egypt’s Mameluke rulers tracing them back to the Prophet Mohamed and apparently written for a Mameluke emir in 1733.
This part of the exhibition, illustrated by atmospheric projections of Mameluke architecture and objects such as mosque lamps, metalwork, and architectural elements produced in Egypt and Syria during Mameluke rule, introduces visitors to the sources of the regime’s prosperity – chiefly trade along the commercial routes that joined Asia and Africa to Europe and the Mediterranean world and passed through Egypt.
Until at least 1453, the exhibition says, when the Ottomans finally took the city of Constantinople ending the rump Byzantine Empire and uniting Anatolia under their rule, the Mamelukes had few military competitors. Their control of the trade routes converging on the eastern Mediterranean and stretching northwards to major European centres such as Venice also tended to guarantee the continuing prosperity of their regime.
However, the Ottomans emerged as important competitors, and the European discovery of the ocean routes leading from Europe to the Far East round the Cape of Good Hope, and, just as importantly, their discovery of the Americas, tended to marginalise the Mediterranean world, which entered a period of economic decline. The Mamelukes were defeated by forces led by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I at the Battle of Marj Dabiq in Syria in 1516, with the last Mameluke Sultan, Qansuh al-Ghuri, dying on the battlefield.
The exhibition introduces this history in its opening sections, while at the same time trying to make sense of various features of the Mameluke regime. Could the Mamelukes really have been slave soldiers, some visitors can be imagined asking, presumably more familiar with very different slave-based regimes such as those of ancient Greece or Rome. While the exhibition does not go into this subject in detail, it does remark that the Egyptian Mamelukes, “contemporary with the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, were the authors of a singular chapter in world history.”
Further sections of the exhibition aim to unpick Egyptian society during the Mameluke period followed by what it sees as cultures in dialogue. While the Mamelukes themselves formed a military caste entrance into which was strictly controlled, they ruled over a highly urbanised and economically advanced society that was also multilingual and religiously mixed. While there is little mention of Egypt’s Muslim minority and Jewish communities in the records of the period, the exhibition says, there is ample reference to the country’s Christians as well as evidence of a thriving religious and secular culture.
This is illustrated by some of the well-known works of literature and history produced under Mameluke rule, including the famous Kalila wa Dimna, an Arabic version of an earlier Persian work, and the histories of Ibn Khaldoun (Kitab al-Ibar), written and first circulated in Cairo. There are sumptuously written copies of the Qur’an in the exhibition, commissioned by Mameluke emirs for the mosques and madrassas they endowed, as well as scientific instruments, instruments for astronomy and navigation, works on magic, and, presumably much closer to home, books on furusiyya, the Mameluke art of horsemanship, and books on history including Ibn Taghribirdi’s history of Egypt in a copy dating from 1471.
Women are “a blind spot in our knowledge” of the Mameluke period, since barring a few names of elite women mentioned in the biographies of Mameluke emirs they are almost entirely absent from the historical record. It is known, however, that women in Egypt during the Mameluke period could carry out their own professions, implying some level of education, and even have successful business careers.
The last two sections of the exhibition on trade and other links between Mameluke Egypt and the rest of the Mediterranean and larger world and on Mameluke art contain objects that are famous in their own right quite apart from the role they play in illustrating different themes.
The anonymous painting of a Venetian delegation being received by the Mameluke governor of Damascus in 1511, now in the Louvre, is a famous testimony to dialogue and cooperation between the north and south of the Mediterranean during the mediaeval period and later in Western history. The equally famous “Baptistère of St Louis,” in fact an exquisitely crafted Mameluke period metal basin used for the baptism of members of the French royal family, is also on show.
Mamelukes right and wrong: Visitors leaving the Louvre exhibition, their minds full of the exquisite objects on display and much taken with the Mameluke role as builders, warriors, protectors of Islam, and patrons of Islamic arts and crafts, may tend to downplay possible drawbacks of Mameluke rule.
The Mameluke emirs and sultans did not encourage social mobility – theirs was a closed caste to native Egyptians – and their characteristic value system, built on the martial virtues, lavish expenditure, and display, while it had an appealing aristocratic swagger was probably not conducive to the more sober virtues of methodical organisation and careful planning. It may have come as little surprise to contemporaries when the Mameluke armies were defeated by the Ottomans in 1517, possibly in part because Mameluke horsemanship, so impressive on the parade ground, was by this stage not enough to defeat a modern army in the field.
More generally, some visitors may wonder about the overall viability of the Mameluke system considered as a form of social organisation. There were precedents for the military caste system run by slaves that the Mameluke regime represented, not least in late Abbasid Baghdad, where the official power structure was effectively marginalised by Turkic mercenaries from the 9th century onwards, rendering the Caliph a prisoner of what was perhaps something like an all-powerful Praetorian Guard.
Something similar may have happened in the Ottoman Empire, where the Sultan became increasingly a prisoner of his own Janissary soldiers, also originally recruited from Christian boys, at least until the Sultan Mahmud II decided to disband them and begin a programme of reform in the early 19th century.
By the same token, Mohammed Ali, Egypt’s early 19th-century ruler and himself preeminently a military man, decided that there was no room for Mamelukes in the modern Egypt he wanted to create, perhaps particularly because their habit of martial feuding and their clan-based hierarchies seemed to fit ill with the centralised bureaucracy and policy planning required of a modern state.
In a famous episode in Egypt’s modern history, Mohamed Ali invited the country’s surviving Mamelukes, perhaps a little ragged after their defeat by Napoleon and then the British intervention in the country to expel the French and restore Ottoman rule, to a ceremony in the Cairo Citadel in 1811. The invitation was a trap, since as they left they were massacred on Mohamed Ali’s orders in a foundational act of violence that ushered Egypt out of the mediaeval and into the modern age.
Mamlouks, 1250-1517, Musée du Louvre, Paris, until 28 July.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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