Page images
PDF
EPUB

A FOURTH CHAPTER OF TURKISH HISTORY.

THE WARS WITH THE MAMLUKES.

SCARCELY any period within the scope of recent history has attracted less attention from modern writers in general, than the two centuries and a half of the independent domination of the Mamlukes in Egypt and Syria. Notwithstanding the singular form of government under which these countries were then administered, and the historical importance of the events with which their annals abound, they have been uniformly neglected by the oriental students of Europe ;-and though the gallant contest which the Mamlukes maintained in the last days of their existence against the French invaders, and their extermination in 1811 by the treachery of the present ruler of Egypt, have made their name familiar to us since the commencement of the present century, their ancient glories still remain unchronicled and unknown in the literature of the West, with the exception of a few pages in the various histories of the crusades, and a short sketch in the great work of De Guignes. Yet the Grand Soldans of Babylon (as the Mamluke sovereigns were termed by contemporary writers and travellers) were the acknowledged heads of the Moslem world, while the power of the Ottomans was yet in its infancy; it was by the arms of these warriorprinces, whose throne was both gained and held more frequently by the right of the sword than by hereditary descent, that the Mogul hordes of Jenghiz and his descendants were checked and finally repelled in the career of devastation and bloodshed which had overspread almost the whole of Asia during the first half of the thirteenth century: and at the end of the same century, the last relics of the Christian sway in Palestine disappeared before their attacks, and the fall of Acre in 1291, closed with a final scene of slaughter the bloody drama of the Crusades. At the zenith of their power, the realm of the monarchs of Cairo extended from the mountains of Armenia and Koordistan, to Yemen and Abyssinia; the holy cities of Mekka and Medinah acknowledged them as their protectors and sove

VOL. XLIX. NO, CCCII.

reigns; and the senate of Venice courted by frequent embassies the potent alliance of the Sultan, whose armaments, issuing from the ports of the Red Sea, afforded zealous and powerful aid to the Moslem princes of Guzerat in their struggle against the encroachments of the Portuguese, the commercial rivals of the Adriatic republic. But this mighty fabric of empire rested, not on the arms and energies of the Arab population, nearly the whole of whose tribes were comprehended within its limits, but on the ferocious valour of a foreign militia, drawn from distant countries to maintain and defend the throne of a prince, who was equally with themselves an alien in blood and language from the people whom he governed : and when the Syro-Egyptian kingdom was incorporated by conquest with the dominions of the Osmanli sultans, the change was unfelt by the people at large, who merely exchanged the yoke of the Circassian Bey for that of the Turkish Sandjak or Pasha. But before we proceed to recount the incidents of the warfare, the event of which doubled the territory of the Ottoman empire, and united under the sceptre of the same sovereign, (though it failed in amalgamating,) the Turkish and Arab races of Western Asia, it will be necessary to give some previous details relative to the origin and organization of that remarkable body of men who so long held Egypt in thraldom, and whose discipline and manners are scarcely known except by the description of recent tourists, who viewed them long after the decay of their ancient predominance.

The word Mamluke literally implies one who is possessed by, or the property of, another; and the term (though popularly restricted in European parlance to the renowned corps whose rule in Egypt and Syria first gave celebrity to the appellation) appears, from a period soon after the first ages of Mohammedan history, employed to designate a military slave or armed household retainer. The Turkish guards of the caliphs of Bag

C

dad (whose authority the seditions of these mutinous prætorians, during the the reigns of Motawakel and his successors, mainly tended to subvert) were the first instance of a domestic force of this description; but the custom of raising Mamlukes to eminent dignities in the army and the state soon became prevalent throughout the East, particularly in dynasties of Tartar or Turkish origin. The sovereigns of these races, indeed, having themselves generally sprung from the Mamlukes of the antecedent dynasty, seem to have employed slaves of this description as their generals and ministers, in preference to free men of the conquered or even of the conquering nation. Originally selected for the appearance of valour or sagacity, and trained to arms under their master's eye, the Mamlukes of a despotic monarch were the most able and unscrupulous agents of his will; while, as they derived their existence and advancement from the sovereign alone, and were unconnected by ties either of birth or relationship with the country into which they had been transplanted, the power lodged in their hands was considered less likely to be turned against its donor, than if entrusted to nobles supported by alliances with each other, and presuming on their hereditary claims to distinction and authority.

But in the course of degeneracy and decay which seems inseparable from the history of the decline of an oriental reigning house, the Mamlukes of the falling race in whose hands the command of the provinces and the armies had been vested, often seized on the power which their feeble masters were unable longer to retain, and commenced a new empire, generally destined to be dissolved in a few gene rations by the same causes which had operated in the destruction of the preceding. Thus, at the close of the tenth century of our era, the warlike dynasty of the Ghaznevides in Eastern Persia occupied, almost as lawful heirs, the dominions which had fallen from the grasp of their own former lords, the princes of the exhausted and effete line of Saman: the Ghaznevides were in their turn supplanted by their vassals, the Turkish chiefs of the race of Seljook; and the sway of the mighty Seljookians themselves, after a long career of conquest and glory, was

overthrown by the arms of the Shah of Kharasm, whose ancestor in the fourth generation had been a Mamluke in the household of Malek Shah, the third sultan of the Seljooks; while Ak-Sankar Bourski, another Mamluke of the same prince, laid in the provinces west of the Euphrates the foundation of a kingdom, which his grandson, the famous sultan Noored-deen, extended over Egypt and nearly the whole of Syria, but which at the death of Noor-ed-deen fell almost wholly, according to the apparently inevitable law of Asiatic suc cession, into the power of his mighty lieutenant, the illustrious Salah-eddeen (Saladin.)

Under the successors of Salah-eddeen, the Ayoobite princes who divided and disputed the vast inheritance which he bequeathed to them, the Mamluke system received a degree of developement and organization far exceeding the extent to which it had hitherto been carried, and the numbers of this domestic soldiery were augmented beyond all former precedent. But the famous corps of the Baharite or maritime Mamlukes, (so called from their having been originally charged with the defence of the coast,) owe their origin to Malek-alSalah, or Nodjm-ed-deen, a grandnephew of Salah-ed-deen, who became Sultan of Egypt A.D. 1240. In a war which he had waged in early life against his relative the sovereign of Damascus, the failure of Nodjm-eddeen had been occasioned by the desertion of his troops, who went over in a body to the standard of his rival; his Mamlukes alone remained loyal; and this unshaken fidelity was deeply remembered by their grateful master. On his subsequent accession to the throne of Cairo, he erected a fortification on the Isle of Roudha, in the Nile, the custody of which was entrusted solely to his faithful slaves; and abandoning the citadel of the city, which had been the usual abode of the sovereign, he there took up his residence in the midst of his Mamlukes, from whose ranks all military offices were exclusively filled up, while their numbers were continually recruited by the purchase of many thousand slaves to be trained to arms, principally Kharasmians and Tartars of Kapchak, with whom the victories of the Moguls had inundated the slave

markets of Western-Asia. The flower of Nodjm-ed-deen's force was composed of these hardy natives of the north, whose discipline and equipments far surpassed those generally attained by the loose squadrons of an Asiatic army; each division was constantly attached to the person of its comman der, to whose household the individual Mamlukes were considered to belong, and under whose eye they were schooled in martial exercises and military evolutions; while a select corps, the number of which is differently stated at from 500 (Joinville) to 1000 (Makrizi), were more peculiarly on duty about the person of the Sultan, under the title of halca, or lifeguards: these wore the badges or armorial bearingst of the monarch, embroidered in gold, on their appointments and banners, and had charge of the tabul-khani,‡ or martial music, an indispensable appendage to Oriental royalty. The organization of this formidable alien gendarmerie, and the privileges with which they were invested, excited the suspicion and discontent of the native subjects of the sultan, and the historian Abul- Mahasen has preserved a warning addressed to him by a poet, that "in increasing the number of these Tartars, he would multiply the misfortunes of himself and his race, so that the divine protection could alone save them from ruin;" a prediction which, if not delivered after the event, was amply fulfilled in the succeeding gen

eration, by the death of Tooran Shah, the son of Nodjm-ed-deen, who perished in 1250 by the swords of the Mamluke hordes, who were irritated at his having concluded a treaty with Louis IX. of France, then his prisoner, without their advice or approbation.

Egypt was now in the hands of the Mamlukes, to be disposed of according to their pleasure; and, after several ineffectual attempts on the part of some of the chiefs to elevate a prince of Ayoobite blood to the nominal sovereignty, they solved the difficulty by electing one of their own number to the throne; and thus commenced the monarchy, or rather military republic of the Mamlukes, one of the most anomalous phenomena which the page of history presents. "A more unjust and absurd constitution," says Gibbon," 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 500 years." And during the period which intervened between the death of Tooran Shah and the Turkish conquest, the throne of Egypt and Syria § was almost constantly filled by monarchs who had been originally purchased in the slave-market, and who had risen, by valour or intrigue, through the various gradations of rank till within reach of the supreme dignity. A faint form of hereditary succession was indeed pre

It is frequent in the Mamluke annals to find different chiefs bearing the name of the officer in whose household they had served their noviciate, and who was, consequently, regarded as their original patron, appended to their own title as a distinctive patronymic; thus several of the Circassian sultans are surnamed Al-Dhaheri, from having been the slaves of Sultan Al Dhaher Barkok.

De Guignes. Joinville describes the cognisance of Fakhr-ed-deen, the Mamluke general killed at the battle of Mansooriyah, whom he calls "Scecedine, son o Seic." "This Scecedine was the most prized chieftain of all Paynimrie, and had received knighthood from the Emperor Ferris (Frederic II.):—his banner was in three bands or compartments; in one the arms of the emperor who had knighted him; in the second, those of the soudan of Halape (Aleppo); in the third, those of the soudan of Babylon." Most of the variations and devices of European heraldry were probably borrowed from the Moslem antagonists of the crusaders, or from the Moors in Spain.

De Guignes, speaking of the Tabul-Khani, says, "les emirs sonnèrent des trompettes;" but the trumpet is not an Oriental instrument. Joinville correctly describes it as consisting of "nacaires" or kettle-drums.

§ Syria continued to be ruled by another branch of the Ayoobites, directly descended from Salah-ed-deen, for several years after the death of Tooran Shah; but this dynasty was overthrown by the Moguls under Hulaku-Khan; and on the expulsion of these invaders by the Mamluke sultan Khotuz, Syria, left without a lawful sovereign, became re-united, by lapse, to Egypt,

served; but if the son of a deceased sultan was proclaimed in the room of his father, he was, in most instances, only suffered to bear, for a few months, the pageant title of royalty, till the boldest or most ambitious of the emirs dismissed him to imprisonment or obscurity, to make way for his own assumption of the sceptre ;a change which was generally further facilitated by the minority of the heir; for the Mamlukes, from their first establishment in Egypt to their extinction, uniformly disdained, with a strange infatuation, to ally them-. selves with the women of the country, and delayed to form a harem till, from their advance in wealth and dignity, they could afford to import female slaves from their native Circassia. Thus the sons, born in the old age of the father, rarely attained sufficient maturity or experience, before his death, to maintain the stormy inheritance which he endeavoured to bequeath to them and with the exception of Kalaoon, (thence called the Father of Kings,) whose descendants occupied the throne, with some interruptions, for ninety years, the most powerful of the Sultans failed to transmit their authority beyond a single generation. In the words of Volney, "the sword, the bowstring, or poison, public murder, or private assassination, were the fate of a series of tyrants, fortyseven of whom are enumerated in the space of two hundred and sixty-seven years."

De Guignes and other writers have divided the history of the Mamluke kingdom into two dynasties, those of the Baharites or Tartars, and the Bordjites or Circassians; but this distinction is in fact merely nominal, as the same form of government and elective principle of succession continued throughout. The change in the composition of the Mamluke body, to which these appellations refer, was effected by Barkok, who pos

sessed himself of the sovereignty in 1380, by dethroning the last of the race of Kalaoon, and in order to strengthen himself in his newly-acquired power, discontinued the importation* of the Turkish or Tartar slaves, from whom the force had been recruited since its first formation by Nodjm-ed-deen,† and supplied their place with his own Circassian and Georgian countrymen, who continued to fill its ranks till the destruction of the corps. This first Circassian ruler of Egypt was one of the most potent and politic princes of his age and his state is described by the Arabic historians (Abul- Mahasen, Soyûti, &c.) as having far surpassed that of any of his predecessors: 5000 Circassian Mamlukes, besides those maintained by each of the emirs, were attached to the household of the Sultan himself: the expenses of their pay and maintenance amounted to 400,000 silver dirhems (about £10,500) monthly, besides 13,000 ardebbs of corn for the provender of their horses. When the Sultan held his public audiences, on Mondays and Thursdays, to receive complaints and redress grievances, "the Cadhis of the four orthodox sects of Islam took their seats on his right, next to them the naziral-hhaznah or high treasurer, and then the mohtesib or prefect of police: on the left of the Sultan sat the dowadarhebir or principal secretary of state, followed by the atabek or commanderin-chief of the army: and the circle was completed by the katibs or registrars of the council:-if one of the vizirs of the pen were present, he was placed between the Sultan and the dowadar; but if he were a vizir of the sword, he remained standing at a fixed distance from the other officers of state. Two ranks of equerries, officers of the wardrobe, pages, &c. stood behind the Sultan on the right and left. At the distance of about fifteen cubits on each side were seated

A treaty was concluded between Bibars, the third Baharite Sultan, and the Greek Emperor, Michael Palæologus, for the passage of Egyptian ships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to the slave markets of Kaffa.-(Pachymer, lib. iii.) Among the gifts sent to Constantinople on this occasion, is particularly mentioned a giraffe or camelopard.

† Volney erroneously describes the original Mamlukes of Nodjm-ed-deen as "Circassians, Mingrelians, and Abazans:" all the Sultans who preceded Barkok wer Tartars, with the exception, perhaps, of Hasam-ed-deen Ladjin, whom some author state to have been a renegade Saxon knight.-(Art de vergier les dates.)

the emirs who commanded a hundred men or upwards-and these formed the council; the emirs of inferior grade remained standing behind the emirs of the council; and without the circle formed by the Sultan and the emirs, stood the hadjibs or chamber lains, to hand in memorials, and introduce petitioners. The memorials were read by the katibs to the Sultan, who communicated with the cadhis on those which came within their province, and with the treasurer and the dowadar on such as concerned military affairs." The publicity of this divan, the details of which are given by Soyûti from an author named IbnFadlallah, contrast curiously with the inaccessible state customarily maintained by the Ottoman Sultans; and the numbers, and comparatively subaltern rank, of the military chiefs who were admitted to share in the debates of the council, prove that the acquiescence of the Mamluke body was considered in some degree necessary, in form as well as fact, for the measures of government.

The constitution, indeed, of this singular militia bore a much nearer resemblance, in many of its essential points, to those of the religious orders of knighthood, who were so often the antagonists of the Mamlukes in the battle fields of Palestine, than to any other association occurring in the history of Islam. As in the brotherhoods of the Hospital and the Temple, the vacancies in their ranks were filled, not by the descendants of the former members of the order, but by perpetual infusions from the primitive source: the repugnance of the haughty Circassians to mingle their Caucasian blood with that of the Egyptians whom they held in abject bondage, was equivalent in effect to the statute of celibacy which bound the knights of the white and the red cross, and kept them equally isolated from the natives of the land of which they were the sovereigns their education in the

:

households of the emirs or beys, and their promotion through various grades till they were emancipated and entrusted with separate commands, present a strong analogy, allowing for the difference of manners and religion, with the discipline which the junior knights were obliged to go through in the convents under the eyes of the priors and senior commanders, before they were allowed to assume the direction of a detached post or commandery; and the Sultan himself, elected by the voice of the soldiery, and controlled in the exercise of his authority by the jealousy of the great officers who had formerly been his equals, was less the direct and absolute sovereign of the country, than the grand-master, or responsible head, of the governing body. For even when the new monarch was the son of the preceding Sultan, the form of nomination and approval by the troops was still adhered to: and if no previous claim to the throne existed on the part of the aspirant, the ceremony of public suffrage was still more unequivocal, as the programme of one of these diets of election, quoted by Carlyle from an anonymous Arabic writer, sufficiently shows:

"On the day of assembly, (Friday,) the Mamlukes, the emirs, the cadhis, and the other magnates of the realm, having assembled completely armed at the gate of the citadel called Salsalet, the question was put to the soldiery whom they chose for their Sultan? and they responded with acclamations, Kansuh! Then the caliph,* the four cadhis, and other dignitaries, came forward and announced the election :-the citadel resounded with the clangour of kettle-drums and the shouts of the Mamlukes; and Azbek the chief of the emirs, after investing the new monarch with a khalat or robe of cloth of gold, raised over his head the canopy of state, which was surmounted with the figure of a bird:and thus was Kansuh elected and

:

A branch of the Abbassides, after the destruction of Bagdad by the Moguls, had taken refuge in Egypt, where they assumed the title of caliph, and were recognised as the spiritual heads of Islam; but they possessed no temporal power or prerogative.

The use of a canopy was one of the most exclusive privileges of royalty. We find from Ferishta that the founders of the various petty dynasties which divided the Dekkan, never considered themselves entitled to the august appellation of Shah, till they had been invested with the canopy by a prince of some reigning house of established royalty.

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »