ABSTRACT
AI-Maqrizi was born in 1364 during the Mamluk rule of Egypt, at the time when the region was about to switch from the rule of twenty-five Turkish sultans {1250-1382)3 to one of twenty Circassian sultans (1382-1517). AI-Maqrizi
started his detailed account of the causes of the 1406 depression (ghummah) beginning with this latter period. Corruption was then rampant within the entire structure of power.4 During that time, half of the population of Egypt was wiped out by mass starvation, and shortly thereafter he had lost his daughter, his only child, in the plague that followed it; he felt that it was his civic duty to inform the public of its real man-made causes. Al-Maqdzi did not live to see the end of Circassian rule. He died in 1442.
