ABSTRACT
Maqrīzī, who states that from Saladin’s time onwards all Egyptian cultivated land had been assigned in the form of iqṭāʽs to the sultan, his ajnād and his amīrs, does not specify the method by which the individual shares were allotted, at that time, to the respective beneficiaries. 1 Nor is any mention made of this point by other historians of the Ayyūbid period, probably due to a lack of information about the Ṣalāḥī rawk ordered by Saladin in 572/1176. It is also possible that the Ayyūbid sultans prevented the officials of the dīwān al-jaysh (armý office) from divulging this secret. The gist of the available information is that, when Sultan Lājīn came to power in the year 696/1296, he found that of the 24 qīrāṭs (qīrāṭ simply means 1/24) constituting the cultivated land of Egypt, four were in the hands of the sultan including the royal mamlūks, ten in the hands of the amīrs, and the last ten in the hands of the ajnād al-ḥalqa, i.e., the non-mamlūk cavalry. 2 This proportion was changed as a result of the Ḥusāmī rawk in 697/1298, and the Nāṣirī rawk in 715/1315.
