The Ghulman and Their Impact on the Army of the First Bahri Mamluk Sultanate (648–678 AH / 1250–1279 CE): A Critical Analytical Study in the Light of Primary Sources

Abstract

Background And Context:  It was also one of the foremost formations in medieval Islamic history in the sense that it existed in the context of both the Mongol killing of the Abbasid Caliphate,  and the older Crusader presence on the Levantine coast.  Its military power rested in the institution of the ghulman system, that is, a means of turning slaves of steppe descent into professional warriors with a clear Islamic identity and a strong institutional loyalty.

Research problem and methodology:  Existing scholarship on the term ‘ghulman suffers from a constant methodological hermeneutical flaw: the conflation of distinct semantic registers for the Arabic term ghulam (linguistic, literary-poetic, jurisprudential, military-administrative) that produce anachronistic or ideologically inflected understandings. This paper addresses this hermeneutical flaw through a critical analytical-historical methodology founded upon source induction, isnd-informed reliability assessment and systematic comparison of conflicting accounts within the corpus.

Sources: The thesis focuses on eye-witness and near-contemporaneous sources from Ibn Abd al-hir (d.692AH), personal secretary to Sultan Baybars,  in addition to Ab Shma (d. 665AH), Baybars al-Manr (d. 725AH), al-Nuwayr (d. 733AH), al-Dhahab (d. 748AH), al-Maqrz (d. 845AH), and Ibn Taghr Bird (d. 874AH).  The sources are tested for their recency, access to an institution, and given marked biases.

Results: The study develops six main results. 1. The word ghulam is shown to have at least six semantic registers which cannot be lumped together without methodologically error-prone category errors. 2. The Mamluk formation system contained seven archaeologically identifable phases which combined religious education with specialized military training a supra-institutional system detectable in multiple independent compilations of sources. 3. Evidence is found to argue that the redoubling of Ayn Jlt (657 AH / 1260 CE),  perceived as having checked the western Mongolian scourge, was largely achieved by systematically-trained Mamluk ghulman. 4. The manumission-promotion system established institutional rewards which produced ends and means that seemed to have established the uniquely high rates of effectiveness and loyalty found within the Mamluk military relative to the alternatives available. 5. The primary military and administrative sources appear to have no historic basis for the popular modern narrative regarding the social character of the Mamluk institution, though they are compatible with individual variation. 6. The modern Orientalist and contemporary scholarly Arab works on this topic are fundamentally erroneous from an extrinsic empirical perspective.

Impact: This article supplies a recorded critical method for the sémantique analysis of important historiographical lexemes and an empiricallybased reiterated seven-stage system of formation and lays out a thorough criticism of paradigms for analyzing Mamluk military history thus filling a perceived lacuna in Historical Mamluk studies.