The Mamluk Sultanate

In the middle of the thirteenth century the slave-soldiers of Egypt did the unthinkable: they overthrew their masters and made themselves kings. The mamluks were military slaves — boys bought on the steppe, converted, and drilled into the finest heavy cavalry in the world — and in 1250, with a crusade led by Louis IX foundering in the Nile Delta and the last of Saladin's dynasty dead, they seized power outright. The improbable hinge of the coup was a woman: Shajar al-Durr, a former slave-concubine who became the only female sovereign in the history of Islamic Egypt, ruled as sultana, and married the first Mamluk sultan, Aybak — then had him killed, and was beaten to death in turn.

Out of that violent birth came the man who defined the age. Baibars — a blue-eyed Kipchak sold cheap for a flaw in his eye — rose by two murders to the sultanate and then did what no one else had managed: he stopped both of the century's superpowers. He had already helped shatter Louis IX's crusade; alongside the sultan Qutuz he broke the Mongols of Hulagu at Ain Jalut in 1260, killing their general Kitbuqa and ending the myth of Mongol invincibility. His successors finished the work: Qalawun founded a dynasty that lasted a century, and his son al-Ashraf Khalil stormed Acre in 1291, driving the Crusaders into the sea for good. The slave-kings had saved Islam and outlasted everyone who came for it.