Who exactly were 'Mamluks', and how could they become kings if they were slaves?

I find that the concept of Islamic slave soldiery is often found confusing by people- especially by people from the Western world.

This is very understandable. In the Western world, when someone mentions slavery, what people think of is chattel slavery- where slaves are treated as, and bought and sold as, property, and are usually used for unpleasant labour under harsh conditions. Thus, when someone talks of the Mamluks, the Janissaries, the Ghilman, people stop and think ‘Wait. How do slaves wield influence and power? How do you trust them with arms? How the heck do you make elite troops out of enslaved men?’

And well… it’s a combination of reasons, but when you dig down to it, it is a wickedly clever element to have in an environment of the power politics of the old world.

A Mamluk in traditional full armor, with lance, shield, sword and pistol.

Now, imagine that you’re a hypothetical Islamic monarch. Like most of the monarchs in the world, your power isn’t absolute- the lands you rule over is a semi-feudal patchwork, with many Emirs, Beys, and tributary Kings paying homage to your mighty throne.

But of course, you are the superior among all of those, and their loyalties are fickle and ever-changing. As the mighty Sultan you are, you cannot be expected to merely rely on having their fragile support for your power base, can you? No. You need a support base that must be strong, and must be loyal. You need soldiers loyal directly to you, and not to the emirs that recruit them, administrators that obey your commands and your will without any ties to established power structures that might need nepotism.

Throughout history, rulers in such positions inevitably turned to outsiders. Importing foreign experts to your court is an age old monarchical tradition: one that creates a mutually supporting power base. You as the monarch will favour your foreign servants, because they form your power base- and they will remain loyal, because their interests are inevitably tied to your well-being. As foreigners, they will have no local support and indeed will be resented by established power structures: if you go down so will they, and thus it’s in their best interest to ensure you do remain strong.

The prelude to the Mamluk system would be the Ghilman: a new class of soldiery introduced to the Islamic world by the future Abbasid Caliph Al-Mu’tasim, but back then he was not yet Caliph nor held that regnal name. Al-Mu’tasim took the general idea of imported foreign courtiers to a new level- he began buying Turkish (mostly, with some Caucasians and Iranians in the mix) slaves from slave markets, and began to train them as a household force of salaried elite troops. This was also joined by foreign retainers, volunteers and freemen.

This served as a mutually beneficial arrangement for all involved. The slaves got a life far more prosperous and with prospects of advancement than they had before Al-Mu’tasim bought them, the freemen had prestige and chance for advancement and triumph, and Al-Mu’tasim had a small but fiercely disciplined, fiercely loyal army that knew very well their continued good fortunes depended on him.

Whether Ghilman were originally slave soldiers, fully freedmen, or existed as something in between (more on that later) is unknown: but whatever it was, his small but elite force of personal troops won Al-Mu’tasim his throne. The effectiveness of relying on professional armies recruited, as slaves or free-men, from warlike foreigners were demonstrated, and Ghilman spread through the Islamic world like flame.

And now we come to the Mamluks.

The Mamluks emerged as a full standardization of the initial, haphazard organizations of early ghilman corps. The initial drive came, depending on who you ask, either from the Abbasid regent Al-Muwaffaq, or the Fatimids in Egypt. The recruits would be young male slaves, mostly from warlike populaces: Turks (especially Cumans and Kipchaks) and Georgians were especially favoured, but Armenians, Copts, and though rarely even Sudanese could be found. Those boys and young men would then be raised as dedicated soldiers, usually in secluded barracks and training grounds with relatively little interaction with the world outside, with rigorous discipline. Once his training was complete, a Mamluk would then occupy a strange spot in between being free or enslaved- they weren’t free men, but they were not ordinary slaves either, and their prestige, salaries and influence made the organization’s members envied by many freemen.

The result was a disciplined, well trained force, loyal to their owner/patron for both prospects of advancement and protection from the existing local power structures that disliked them as foreigners and coveted their position, and loyal to their fellow Mamluks by their renowned esprit de corps.

Though Mamluks and most Ghilman were technically slaves, subject to the will of their monarch, in practice they lived lives like nobility, and held the prestige and power to match. This meant that in practice, they were closer to trusted and valued subordinates than actual slaves, and the mutually supporting base between foreigner technically-slave-soldiers and their patron became a thing that held up many an Islamic regime.

In theory, the system seems infallible. While technically slaves, nobody actually considered those men actual, traditional slaves. The slave-soldiers would exist outside existing power structures, and be loyal to their lord they derived power from, and serve with discipline and loyalty- in return, their lord would safeguard their privileges, their prestigious position, and reward them with advancement: many a slave soldier would eventually grow to serve as emirs or viziers.

There is only one problem.

The key problem with creating such a corps of foreigner soldiers is that, when you keep this organization around for long enough, there’s a considerable risk that what you end up doing will be creating another established power player, a player that now has all that formidable military and administrative power and prestige that they used to keep your dynasty on the throne. A player that commands the greatest military force in your realm, and which is fiercely loyal to itself owing to that esprit de corps.

And thus, as time went on, in a lot of places, Mamluks and Ghilman and other slave soldiers first became king-makers, and then Kings themselves. In Egypt, Emir Aybak, a Kipchak Mamluk, took power in 1250 by Mamluk backing and married the widow of the Egyptian Sultan who’d died fighting the Crusaders, establishing a Mamluk ruler ship over Egypt that lasted until 1517, when the Ottoman Empire came south, with the Sultan’s Janissaries at the vanguard- yet another class of Islamic slave soldiery.