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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 bearings 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 perish.
ed 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 pri-
soner, without their advice or appro-
bation.

Egypt was now in the hands of the
Mamlukes, to be disposed of accord-
ing to their pleasure; and, after seve-
ral ineffectual attempts on the part of
some of the chiefs to elevate a prince
of Ayoobite blood to the nominal so-
vereignty, they solved the difficulty
by electing one of their own number
to the throne; and thus commenced
the monarchy, or rather military re-
public 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 con-
stantly filled by monarchs who had been
originally purchased in the slave-mar-
ket, and who had risen, by valour or
intrigue, through the various grada-
tions 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 of 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 expul sion of these invaders by the Mamluke sultan Khotuz, Syria, left without a lawful sovereign, became re-united, by lapse, to Egypt,

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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.'

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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

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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 (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-khaznah 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 chamberlains, 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

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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.

inaugurated Sultan, under the title of Malek-al-Dhaher, (the conspicuous prince.) When the ceremony was at an end, the hour of prayer had arrived, and the Shaikh-al-Islam, issuing from the citadel, read the khotbah in the great mosque, in the name of the Sultan Al-Dhaher."

The successive steps by which an adventurer from the valleys of the Caucasus mounted from the slave bazaar to the throne, are detailed by another oriental writer in a biographical notice of Sultan Inal, the twelfth of the Bordjites, who attained sovereign power A. D. 1454. "In early youth he had been purchased as a slave by Sultan Barkok, whose son and successor, Sultan Faradj, made him superintendent of his stables; he then became a man-at-arms (Khaskhyat) under one of the emirs, and was in due time advanced to the rank of an emir commanding 100 men. He next attained the grade of emir of the Tabul Khani; and after successively holding the governments of Gaza and Roha, was constituted one of the com. manders of a thousand, or emirs of the highest class. He was shortly afterwards invested with the dignity of dowadar or secretary of state, which he exchanged for that of atabek or generalissimo; till he eventually seized the throne on the deposition of Malek al-Mansur Othman." Of the offices here enumerated, the highest civil rank was that of the dowadar, who held in the divan, as above men tioned, the place corresponding to that of the Ottoman grand-vizir; the atabek (sometimes called emir-al-kebir or grand-emir, or naib-al-sultanat, lieutenant of the kingdom) was the supreme military functionary; and the other great officers of state, ("from whom," says Pietro Martyr, "the Sultan is practically elected, as the

pope is from the college of cardinals,") were the master of the horse, the grand-chamberlain, the high-treasurer, the chiefs of the different classes of emirs, and the cadhi-al-codhat or chief of the law.

All these various ranks and gradations were distinguished from each other, with rigid accuracy, by their costume, and more especially by the form and volume of their turbans, which differed greatly from any of those worn in the present day. The common Mamlukes were clothed in white, and wore extremely heavy and closely folded turbans, of a woollen stuff mixed with goat's hair; those attached immediately to the household of the Sultan were distinguished by having their turbans particoloured, black at the top, and green below, while the head-dress of the Korsans, or stipendiary troops, and of the Mamlukes belonging to the emirs, was crimson. The turbans of the emirs of the second or third grade were of white linen, of ample dimensions, and folded in a conical form high above the head; but those adopted by the Sultan, and the twenty-four Beys or emirs of the Tabul. Khani, were so singular as to require a particular description. They consisted of from sixty to seventy ells of linen, part of which was wrapped round the head in numberless complicated plaits, while the remainder was so twisted as to project in front in the form of horns, the number of which, in the coiffure of personages of the highest rank, amounted to six :-in this case the two longest of these strange appendages, which were more than a cubit in extent, were placed "like the horns of a snail," as Pietro Martyr describes them, between the four others, which were only a span long. The reasons assigned for the use of this ponderous

* His total ignorance of letters, which is recorded by several historians, does not appear to have been considered by the Mamlukes as any disqualification for this post! A similarly liberal view of the subject was taken by the knights of St John, in whose original statutes it was expressly enacted, that the vice-chancellor should be able to read and write, since it might be necessary to confer the office of chancellor, in consideration of his merits and services, on some knight not versed in these abstruse accomplishments.

De Legatione Babilonicâ, lib. iii. Most of the above details of Mamluke costume are taken from the work of this able writer, who visited the court of Kansub-alGhauri, as envoy from Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, a few years before the fall of the monarchy. One of the grotesque turbans appears to be represented in the woodcut of Kansuh, in p. 531 of Knolles's Turkish History.

and inconvenient head-dress, according to the same author, were the comparative ease with which its habitual use enabled them to wear their battlehelmet, as well as the grave and dignified demeanour which its bulk and cumbrousness imposed on the wearer, who could scarcely move his head without due circumspection under this preposterous burden. The Sultan was distinguished from the emirs of the first class, only by the long ends of the shawl of his turban, which were drawn through the folds, and floated over his shoulders, inscribed with his style and titles embroidered in gold.

We have been somewhat diffuse in this preliminary sketch of the institutions and ceremonial of the Mamluke regime, as well from their singularity and the paucity of notices existing relative to them at this period, as from the remarkable difference which they present, both in spirit and form, from those of the Ottoman empire, which we are accustomed in Europe to regard as the immutable type of all Asiatic monarchies, and with which they were now on the point of being placed in collision. The danger which impended from the formidable and increasing strength of the Osmanlis, had been early perceived by the sagacity of the rulers of Egypt. Barkok, the first of the Circassian sultans, had been wont to declare, in allusion to the attack with which he was menaced by Timur, that he feared not that Kapchak cripple, but that it was from the side of the sons of Othman that the true peril would come. It was not, however, till 1485, nearly ninety years after the death of Barkok, that the first encounter of the two empires took place. Till the latter part of the reign of Mohammed II. friendly relations had been constantly maintained between the courts of Cairo and Constantinople; and in 1435, a treaty of alliance had even been projected between

Mourad II. and Bourshai, for the purpose of jointly attacking in Persia the Sultan Shah-Rokh, son of their common enemy Timur: but in the last years of the conqueror of Constantinople, the jealousy of the Sultan KaitBey was awakened by the encroachments of the Turks on the petty princes whose dominions intervened between the Syrian and Anatolian frontiers, and who mostly acknowledged the Egyptian monarch as lord paramount; and the dispute thus originated was exasperated, at the death of Mohammed, by the succour and protection afforded in Egypt to the refugee Ottoman prince Djem. Shalı, (the Zizim of European writers,) who, vanquished by his brother Bayezid II. in the struggle for the throne, had been welcomed with royal hospitality at Cairo, and supplied with the means of striking a second unsuccessful blow.t From this period, the two monarchies were placed in open oppo sition, and the boundary became the scene of frequent frays and skirmishes; till the detention at Aleppo of an Indian ambassador on his way to Constantinople, with the occupation by the Beys of Syria of several strongholds on the Turkish side of the Cilician defiles, at length drew from the Porte a formal declaration of war.

Of the minor dynasties whose possessions, as already mentioned, separated from each other the territories directly subject to the sovereigns of Cairo and Constantinople, the two principal were the Ramazan-Oghlu, the chiefs of the Turkman tribes which pastured their flocks in the plains at the foot of Mount Taurus, and were masters of the cities of Tarsus and Adana; and the princes of the family of Zulkadr, another Turkman race which had fixed itself to the north-east of the RamazanOghlu, in the country marked in modern maps as Aladulia, a name corrupted from that of Ala-ed-dowlah, the last of the line who possessed

"The chief and wealthiest of them used head-pieces; the rest a linen covering of the head, curiously foulded into many wreaths, wherewith they thought themselves safe ynough against any handy strokes; the common souldiers thrumd caps, but so thicke, as that no sword could pierce them."-KNOLLES.

†The subsequent adventures of this unfortunate prince have been narrated by various writers:-After his second defeat, he fled to Rhodes, and died at Rome in 1495, (after being transferred during thirteen years from one European sovereign to another, from poison administered to him by the infamous Pope Alexander Borgia.

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