Once a person starts to study the 250-some years of the Mamluk Era in Egypt and Syria (12501517), one characteristic of that period stands out immediately the very unusual polarization of its society. A predominantly Arabic population was dominated by a purely Turkish-born elite of manu-mitted military slaves who sought to regenerate themselves continuously through a self-imposed fiat. The only person who could become a Mamluk was a Turk who had been born free outside the Islamic territories as a non-Muslim, then enslaved, brought to Egypt as a slave, converted to Islam, freed, and finally, trained as a warrior. Only those who met these prerequisites were members of the ruling stratum with all the concomitant political, military, and economic advantages. On this historically unique model of a society, Stephan Conermann has published a series of seminal articles. In this edited volume the reader gets an excellent introduction to some of the central issues of the ongoing research on the Mamluk history and society.

Auteur
Prof. Dr. Stephan Conermann lehrt Islamwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn und ist seit 2010 Sprecher der Kollegforschergruppe 1262 »Geschichte und Gesellschaft der Mamlukenzeit«.