ABSTRACT
Researchers of the Mamluk period are in full agreement regarding the career the Mamluks chose for their sons, awlad al-nas; they trained their children mainly for one of two careers of the elite: as clerks in the civil elite or as soldiers in the Mamluk army. This chapter will focus on the Mamluk sons who chose a military career. David Ayalon clearly links the service of the awlad al-nas to the halqa, the auxiliary corps of the Mamluk army. He thinks that the Mamluk sons’ chances of promotion were thin when compared to those of the purchased Mamluks. They were kept out of the latter’s units and restricted to the far inferior halqa. However, Ayalon notes, there were sons of amirs who attained amir rank in the army, but no higher than Amir of Forty. During the second period of rule of al-Nasir Hasan (755–62/1354–61), sons of Mamluks attained the rank of muqaddam alf, commander of a thousand, but this was out of the ordinary and unique to this particular sultan. During the Circassian period, the sons of Mamluks are totally identified with the halqa and their status declined with it. 1 Ulrich Haarmann also thinks that the awlad al-nas who entered the army usually served in the halqa. 2 But in contrast to Ayalon, Haarmann thinks that they succeeded in advancing through the ranks and attained senior posts in the army, but only on condition that they had an advocate behind them and the right friends at court. There was, of course, a correlation between the political status they attained and their part in the iqta‘ land allocation system. From the 1370s, the members of the Qalawunid house, the asyad, amassed vast economic power through the iqta‘at they took for themselves. Sultan Barquq, the first Circassian sultan (784–801/1382–99), restored the lands held by the asyad to the iqta‘ system with the establishment of the diwan al-mufrad, a bureau that dealt with payments to the Mamluks he purchased, as part of the introduction of a new division of the sultanate’s resources. 3 In A Turning Point in Mamluk History, I had noted the gradual but constant increase in the entry of sons of Mamluks into the army during the Turkish, Bahri, period, with military and economic status equal to that of the purchased Mamluks. 4 In this chapter, I shall attempt to show that the heightened status of the sons of the Mamluks during this period, particularly the sons of the amirs, was not sporadic but the consequence of a deliberate policy of the Qalawunid sultans, those who succeeded in maintaining effective rule, and the Mamluk factions that were fighting for the remnants of the Turkish hegemony in the Mamluk sultanate.
