The Mamluk Period

The Mamluk Period, 1250 to 1517, was the era of Mamluk rule over Egypt, the Levant and the Hejaz, an unusual state governed by a military caste of formerly enslaved soldiers, many of Turkic and Circassian origin, who seized power from the Ayyubid dynasty and elected their own sultans from within their ranks rather than through hereditary succession. The Mamluks won lasting fame by decisively halting the Mongol advance into the Middle East at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, the first major defeat of a Mongol army, and by finally expelling the last Crusader states from the Levant by 1291, while Cairo under Mamluk rule flourished as a center of Islamic scholarship, trade and monumental architecture. Weakened by plague, economic decline and outdated military technology, the Mamluk Sultanate fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1517, after which Egypt became an Ottoman province, though Mamluk military elites retained significant local power for centuries afterward.