ABSTRACT
Bey, and Kansuh el-Ghuri, ampunt to 125 years, leaving but nine years for the other fourteen sultans.
It is with these nine sultans that history has chiefly to do : the rest were ciphers, but the nine were all 1 emarkable men, as indeed their success in winning and keeping their power for eight, sixteen, or even twentysix years implies. It needed no ordinary abilities to hold even a partial authority over rival emirs and seditious mamluks for any length of time. Their abilities, however, were seldom those of the warrior-king. They often fought their way to the throne over the corpses of rivals, but once there they seldom led their armies in the field, and Farag was perhaps the only Circassian sultan who was conspicuously a general. Several of them-as Barkuk, Sheykh, G'akmak, Kait-Bey, besides the shortreigned Tatar and Timurbugha-were much attached to literature and the society of the learned ; they were strict, sometimes even austere, Muslims, and many ot their pious foundations, mosques, colleges, hospitals, and schools, still bear eloquent witness to their aesthetic refinement. Perhaps the costly elaboration of such exquisite architectural gems as the mosques of Barkuk and Kait-Bey were intended to atone for the many acts of barbarity and oppression of which the Circassian sultans were commonly guilty. Barkuk caused his rival, Mintash, to be 11 put to the question " in order to make him reveal his hidden treasure : the wretched emir's limbs were broken one after the other, he was tried by fire, tortured with infernal ingenuity, but all in vain ; at last he was put out of his agony, and his head was displayed on a lance through the towns of Syria and exposed at the gate of Zawila at Cairo. Other conspirators were nailed to camel saddles and paraded through the streets till they died. For such deeds Barkuk's lovely medresa and noble mausoleum were all too small an atonement. His savage cruelty was emulated by his successors.
