Central issues of the ongoing research on the Mamluk history and society

Once a person starts to study the 250-some years of the Mamluk Era in Egypt and Syria (12501517), one characteristic of that period stands out immediately the very unusual polarization of its society. A predominantly Arabic population was dominated by a purely Turkish-born elite of manu-mitted military slaves who sought to regenerate themselves continuously through a self-imposed fiat. The only person who could become a Mamluk was a Turk who had been born free outside the Islamic territories as a non-Muslim, then enslaved, brought to Egypt as a slave, converted to Islam, freed, and finally, trained as a warrior. Only those who met these prerequisites were members of the ruling stratum with all the concomitant political, military, and economic advantages. On this historically unique model of a society, Stephan Conermann has published a series of seminal articles. In this edited volume the reader gets an excellent introduction to some of the central issues of the ongoing research on the Mamluk history and society.

Autorentext
Stephan Conermann, PhD, is the Speaker of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn. His research interests include slaveries, narrative strategies in historiographic texts, transition periods, reconciliation processes, global history, and rule and power. His work is focused on the Mamluk and Delhi Sultanates, the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, and the Crossroads Area Transottomanica.