Your Life as Every Rank in the Mamluk Sultanate

You're fourteen, and a dealer in Sivas just knocked your price down because of a small white spot in your eye. Eighteen years later, Egypt and Syria answer to you. This is the real ladder of the Mamluk Sultanate. Boys bought at slave markets, trained on an island in the Nile, who beat the French crusaders at al-Mansurah, stopped the Mongols at Ain Jalut, and then took the throne for themselves. Every rank has a price. Some you pay with your freedom. Some you pay with someone else's life. From merchandise on a rope to sultan, and why the top of this system was the most dangerous seat in it. Subscribe and tell us in the comments which system you want to climb next. Sources: Ibn Abd al-Zahir's biography of Baybars, the chronicles of al-Maqrizi, Jean de Joinville's Life of Saint Louis, Peter Thorau's "The Lion of Egypt". #mamluks #baybars #history