Who Were the Mamluks?
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
"Marine Corps history states that a sword of this type was presented to Marine First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon by the Ottoman Empire viceroy, Prince Hamet, on December 8, 1805, during the First Barbary War, in Libya, as a gesture of respect and praise for the Marines' actions at the Battle of Derna (1805)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mameluke_sword#United_States_M...
Prince Hamet was the heir to the Tripolitan throne before being usurped by his brother and moving to Egypt to live in exile. The U.S. Marines were sent ashore to assist Prince Hamet in retaking Tripoli from his brother (who had been raiding U.S. ships in the Mediterranean). After the first Combined Joint operation in U.S. Marine history resulted in a complete victory at Derne, Prince Hamet gifted Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon with a Mameluke sword - a scimitar he had presumably obtained in Egypt.
Subsequent to his devastating loss at Derne, of course, the Tripolitan usurper Bashaw Yusef agreed to release the members of the U.S.S. Philadelphia and cease his attacks on Americans on the condition that the Marines withdraw from Derne. So it was that the U.S. political class started its long tradition of abandoning its allies and agreements across the Islamic world...
Today, the Marines honor O'Bannon (one of the barracks at The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia is named after him) and wear a replica of the Mameluke sword in some configurations of our Dress Blue uniform.
Great book, totally fascinating reading, with the hottest geopolitical issues of today traced back through thousands of years of history.
What about the "other" Roman empire, the Byzantines? They seemed to have filled the vacuum even better.
How so? Constantinople was the richest, most recognized city on the European continent from the fall of Rome to the Fourth Crusade -- over half a millenium. At it's zenith it ruled almost as much territory as the Roman Empire. There's a reason the Islamic caliphs coveted it so much.
Remember that there was a lot of distrust between the Latin and Greek worlds after the Great Schism. The whole reason we're calling them Byzantines instead of Romans (or even Greek/Eastern Romans) is because Renaissance scholars wanted to emphasize Latin Romans over (the still existing) Greek Romans.
But yeah, totally a European perspective. Aside from the Romans, "Europe" barely comes into play in history, until Spain reached America and started bringing back enormous piles of gold.
Basically, they only lasted meaningfully for a few centuries, between the fall of the western empire and the rise of the Islamic empire. If you count the transition from the original Islamic conquest to the Ottoman empire as a single continuous system (as you're doing with the western Roman empire and the Byzantine empire), then the Islamic empire lasted for north of 13 centuries, finally dying only in the 20th century, the end of WWI.
You've completely glossed over the Renaissance of the empire around 1000 AD (550 years after the West fell) under John Tzimiskes, Basil II, etc. You can blame this on the decline of Abbasid power if you want, but even if the caliphate _technically_ held territory in Syria/Lebanon, there was no question as to military superiority. The Byzantines raided with impunity and got tribute from the local emirs.
Constantinople lost 90% of its population after the plague of Justinian, and a recurring series of outbreaks over the next centuries, plus a loss of manpower after the desperate end of the Sassanian wars under Heraclius (which Heraclius technically won, but both empires were so diminished that they were easy prey for the new caliphate). It rebounded. Never to its maximum, but it was back near 750000 under the Macedonians.
So, the empire was ok until 660, lost territory, rebounded in the 10th century, and was arguably at its best organizationally and culturally until the real decline started during Manzikert.
It lasted 1000 years. Please read something other than Gibbon, or at least listen to The History of Byzantium (which follows on where The History of Rome left off). History is not a static field, and the Byzantines are rapidly becoming rehabilitated as more documents come up.
The rebound of the Byzantines is a good point, but they never really reclaimed their former glory. Still, point taken.
edit: Actually, going further with this, the modern "European-ness" of classical Roman and Greek culture is largely a retcon of actual history. The culture of western Europe had very little to do with the culture of ancient Greece, relative to, say, Egypt or Syria.
I don't think it's fair to say that Roman culture being European is a "retcon". Sure, for the Greeks, but the Romans were the forebears of virtually all European institutions, and any argument that the society Europe consciously modeled itself upon was somehow not European falls apart.
But Greek culture... yeah, that's a retcon.
Roman culture, though, was heavily focused on superstition and virtue, rather than logic, and is not in any way a retread of Greek culture.
The spurts of Greek (and later Persian and Egyptian) fashion in Rome existed precisely because they found it exotic. Otherwise Roman and Greek myths link at several levels purely and simply because they shared the same root. Romans didn't really "snatch" Gods from Greece, they were already theirs. And they "enriched" their existing archetypes with new attributes from outside as the Empire grew to pacify the subjugated peoples.
The Goths in Rome explicitly modeled their state after Rome, to the point where they considered the Western half to have survived. The organization of early Frankish kingdoms is a direct result of Roman estates, as experienced administrators were all... Roman. Rinse and repeat. It's not so much that it "informed" their institutions as that dux->duke, because they were the same position, and Diocletian's dioceses obviously survived as organizational units, along with Diocletian's organization of the empire (of which feudalism is a direct result).
During the Renaissance, ideas of liberty and democracy aped the Romans, but none of this was a cargo cult, as the ideas spread in the Renaissance drew directly from Roman historical sources (including arguments for why they did/did not work) rather than any cargo cult mythology.
I mean if you count the Ottomans, Abbassids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Umayyads, and Rashiduns as one single entity, sure. By that measure you'd also have to consider the Romans and Byzantines (and maybe even the HRE) to be a single contiguous entity as well.
I'm not sure how a state which can trace a direct lineage of law and rulers back to Romulus is "carrying the torch".
Then again, despite being an engineer by trade, I'm a historian specializing in Late Roman Antiquity (specifically, the Eastern Empire from Leo the Isaurian to Alexios I, so I'm probably a little pedantic about it.
This is totally different for the islamic empires. The invovled massive chamges of the leading elites, internal organisation, sometimed completly know peoples.
Saying the Ottomans were continues with the older empires is ridiculus assertion.
>Less than a century after Islam started, they were laying siege to Constantinople.
Pick one.
Don't conflate manifest destiny/religious destiny and culture. The caliphate(s) eventually gave up on sieging Constantinople after the utter failure of 717. But before that, they were essentially a collection of tribes which rapidly expanded, and whose opponents fell so quickly they felt they were destined to bring Islam to the entire world, with Constantinople as a prophecied conquest.
This is less than 100 years after the Rashidun caliphate sprang into existence, and the Islamic Golden Age lasted for centuries after that.
Beyond which, you should not assume that they were not peaceful just because they conquered their neighbors. The laws of the caliphate(s) were extraordinarily generous to believers of other religions, and the caliphate was internally peaceful, enforced charity, successful as a gateway for trade between the East and West, and, yes, actively preserved/translated the writings of previous civilizations until ~1100
That's the definition of not being peaceful.
>The laws of the caliphate(s) were extraordinarily generous to believers of other religions
As in, they were second-class citizens who were tolerated because they paid extra taxes?
>Pretty sure this isn't 4chan.
Yea, but I haven't been there or responded to anything with "implying implications" for years, so forgive me this indulgence.
Remember that the Arabs (prior to the caliphate) were used as proxy troops/mercenaries by the Persians/Romans for centuries under the guise of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids. This has repercussions.
You can make the argument that the jizya made them second-class citizens who were tolerated, but you cannot make the argument that they were not tolerated, which stands in stark contrast to the various persecutions of other religious groups under Julian the Apostate, assorted Byzantines who decided that Arianism/whatever was heretical, Zoroastrianism's (well, the Sassanid rulers' interpretation of it) treatment of nonbelievers, etc. I'm not arguing that sharia is a modern, progressive system of law. In the context of 650 AD, though, it definitely was.
> Yea, but I haven't been there or responded to anything with "implying implications" for years, so forgive me this indulgence.
My comment is more that:
> foo bar quuz baaz
> foo
Pick one
Is underservedly dimissive and really doesn't serve to advance the conversation. I do it also (mostly on Reddit, I guess), but the statement you were replying to wasn't obviously fallacious. There's a lot of nuance which you can't hammer away with
>implying
If you asked me if Rome was peaceful, I would tell you no. But no one is claiming that Rome is peaceful. Once again, there is nothing peaceful about conquering your neighbors, especially ones that didn't attack you first.
> Remember that the Arabs (prior to the caliphate) were used as proxy troops/mercenaries by the Persians/Romans for centuries under the guise of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids. This has repercussions.
Next you will argue that Russia had the right to attack UkraIne because Kievan Rus attacked the people that lived in the areas that are now Russia centuries ago.
> I'm not arguing that sharia is a modern, progressive system of law. In the context of 650 AD, though, it definitely was.
I don't know enough detail to comment on it either way. "I'm not arguing that sharia is a modern, progressive system of law." - we are on the same page then. With that, comes the idea that any comments on "peaceful" and "rightfully counter-attacking" would only, possibly apply in the context of the time.
Edit: I know it's against the rules, but I just want to note that I am not the one downvoting you, appreciate a good argument once in a while.
Well, some would claim that Rome was peaceful, in the same way that historians may later claim that the US was peaceful. To be honest, it's virtually impossible to stay peaceful when it's kill or be killed. The Romans always had justifications for their wars (often contrived, but still), but I take the converse position.
> Next you will argue that Russia had the right to attack UkraIne because Kievan Rus attacked the people that lived in the areas that are now Russia centuries ago.
I think you're interpreting this backwards. I'm saying that the Arabs were well-aware of the rapacious appetite for war their immediate neighbors had after watching the Persians duke it out with the Romans (and Byzantines) for centuries, with firsthand experience of serving in their militaries and watching their (Arab) leaders become enriched. It's not that the Arabs themselves didn't war on the peninsula, but...
Imagine that you're someone who's watched repeated proxy wars from foreign powers, and maybe even taken part in them. For this example, let's use the American colonists. You've watched the French and British recruit your friends and neighbors, either by coercion or bribery, to fight and die for someone else. Now, they've worn each other out, and you have a chance to remove their influence once and for all to put a better society in place. To do this, you need to wipe them off the map (the Americans did this regionally, but Canada was so underpopulated and the rest of the Empire so far away that it's effectively equivalent).
Is this just? Is this peaceful, in the end? To some, yes. To the Arabs, probably.
Yes, there were religious motivations, but it's exactly the same kind of "manifest destiny" that spread the American dominion coast-to-coast. Is it externally peaceful? No. Is the end result (internally) more peaceful? Yes.
(discussions about the relative peace of First Nations elsewhere, since we really can't say what the balance of force was like before European intervention due to lack of documentation, but the loss of territory to the Americans and introduction of horses/gunpowder definitely provided conflict).
> I don't know enough detail to comment on it either way. "I'm not arguing that sharia is a modern, progressive system of law." - we are on the same page then. With that, comes the idea that any comments on "peaceful" and "rightfully counter-attacking" would only, possibly apply in the context of the time.
That's the point, really. History must be evaluated in historical context. It's easy for us to look back now and say "of course the caliphate was warlike" or "of course the Romans were warlike", but that's hindsight. To a denizen of southern Gaul living in 200AD, you'd have a hard time arguing that it was anything but peaceful, and that Rome imposing her dominion on a bunch of barbarians was the best thing that ever happened.
> Edit: I know it's against the rules, but I just want to note that I am not the one downvoting you, appreciate a good argument once in a while.
> implying I care about internet karma points
But really, I don't. I come here to the internet for discussion
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
And "second class citizens who were tolerated because they paid extra taxes" was a definite step up from the Romans (and before them, the Persians, and after them, the Crusaders).
By the sword. They would ask a city to surrender and convert to Islam, or they would take it by force and either kill or enslave it's citizens. Doesn't sound very peaceful to me.
> the caliphate was internally peaceful, enforced charity, successful as a gateway for trade between the East and West
And they were also the most prolific slave traders in all of history. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to say that the caliphates were any more or less peaceful than any other world empires.
This differs from the common behavior of powers at the time in what way?
But it's also incredibly misleading. That's what they did to the Crusader States, centuries later, but the collapse of Byzantine/Persian power, and the absence of any strong power blocs in North Africa (after the exarchate of Carthage was established and the Vandals broken) makes this a null argument. Cities traded hands all the time. Without a field army nearby, or, if the field army was decimated, the city essentially had no choice but to surrender.
Additionally, the umma under the Rashiduns and Ummayads often lived outside the city. The caliphate was happy to simply collect taxes, and have Arab troops live among Arabs (as an external garrison).
> And they were also the most prolific slave traders in all of history. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to say that the caliphates were any more or less peaceful than any other world empires.
This is incredibly speculative. The Romans are estimated to have had anywhere from 5-8m slaves throughout the Empire, for 400 years. We really have no idea what the scale of slavery was like in most of antiquity, or even late antiquity.
You're conveniently forgetting that chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas was wholly different from slavery in the "Old World", also.
I wasn't the one to assert that the caliphate was "more" or "less" peaceful than any other world empire, and I would not. I asserted that it's was peaceful.
If you're going to pick once that is the "most" peaceful based on duration and territory held, I'd go for China, but it's the kind of "who is the best baseball player ever" argument that goes nowhere.
I once saw a comparison of the battles fought against Islam in the Crusades, and the battles fought by Islam in expanding. Islam fought maybe ten times more battles to expand than the Crusades fought against Islam. (And much of the Islamic expansion was against civilizations that were already christian - all of north Africa, for example.)
Bill Warner, PhD: Jihad vs Crusades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_To-cV94Bo
Donatism had its roots in the long-established Christian community of the Roman Africa province
Also known as an empire.
>Islam fought maybe ten times more battles to expand than the Crusades fought against Islam.
What a strange comparison. Without seeing the details, it seems to be comparing the battles sanctioned by the Pope during a few centuries against any expansion battle by any Islamic state over a period greater than a millennium. If it is the video linked, that seems like an accurate description. It doesn't even show the Christian expansion into Spain.
That still doesn't make them devoted to peace, though.
To compare it to a baseline of something universally regarded as "not peaceful". Assuming you agree that the crusades weren't peaceful then you can't really claim that islamic expansion was peaceful can you?
> Without seeing the details, it seems to be comparing the battles sanctioned by the Pope during a few centuries against any expansion battle by any Islamic state over a period greater than a millennium.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I assume they're referring to the early islamic expansion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests), it's comparing the centuries of the crusade to just ~150 years.
Though I agree that the Crusades were not peaceful, I disagree that they are universally regarded as such. Many people view them as some righteous expulsion of the terrible Muslims, which is why this comparison is an issue.
>I don't know if this is true or not, but I assume they're referring to the early islamic expansion
Still assuming that the video linked elsewhere is the document, as it matches the description, this is not the case. It may be some other source, but given the difficulty in making anything resembling a fair comparison between the expansions of an empire and pilgrimage invasions, I would guess that source is also pushing a narrative. Why else would you compare all expansion by the Muslims in the 7th century against only a small subset of wars in the 11th?
It's entirely possible that you and the poster are unaware of how loaded that argument is, but it's still used to say Islam is necessarily violent and must be removed.
Many people would consider it righteous, but no-one can seriously claim it was peaceful. The allied side of WW2 was/is considered righteous but no one claims it was peaceful.
> It's entirely possible that you and the poster are unaware of how loaded that argument is, but it's still used to say Islam is necessarily violent and must be removed.
It seems more like you're making all sorts of mental contortions to take the polar opposite position, that they were "devoted to peace". At this point you're arguing against a strawman without even having the decency to tell us what the strawman is.
If you don't like the crusades comparison would you prefer the nazi Germany conquests in WW2? Would you say they were "devoted to peace"?
People often consider a state committing a righteous act peaceful. People say the US was forcibly dragged into both world wars and describe the goal of "spreading peace."
>It seems more like you're making all sorts of mental contortions to take the polar opposite position, that they were "devoted to peace". At this point you're arguing against a strawman without even having the decency to tell us what the strawman is.
I've never stated that the religion is devoted to peace. I called the behavior normal for an empire and then described how I saw the comparison with the Crusades strange and misleading. The "strawman" I'm arguing against is a vague recollection of what seems to be anti-Islamic propaganda that was in the first post I responded to. Speculating that I'm mistaken about the time period used in the comparison doesn't make it less strange or misleading.
>If you don't like the crusades comparison would you prefer the nazi Germany conquests in WW2? Would you say they were "devoted to peace"?
Their wars alone are enough to show they weren't devoted to peace. Comparing it to some other thing is only useful to show how it's better or worse than some other thing. What other reason is there to say "Islam fought maybe ten times more battles to expand than the Crusades fought against Islam. (And much of the Islamic expansion was against civilizations that were already christian - all of north Africa, for example.)"
I take big issue with calling them "devoted to peace". The same as I'd take issue with calling Mongols, Romans, or Alexander's Greeks/Macedonians being called "devoted to peace". They very obviously were not. For selfish reasons, they provoked a staggering level of warfare, on a totally different scale as the typical kingdoms that existed throughout the world.
Don't mistake classical Islam for contemporary Islam. Different beasts.
Hard to play historical what-ifs, but let me try. By the end of the 13th Century, almost all Crusader holdings had been taken over by the Sultan of Egypt Baibars. He used his consolidated power to defeat the Mongol horde at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, the first time a Mongol army had been defeated.
It's possible that if there had been no Islamic power at the time, either the Golden Horde or the Ilkhanate would have eventually swept the Eastern Roman Empire away. Or maybe not. Who knows?
Even otherwise, you realise that the body blow to the ERE wasn't struck any Muslim army. Constantinople was captured and looted by Crusaders in 1204, apparently on the Fourth Crusade. Though the Greeks recovered Constantinople a few decades later, it was a shadow of it's past self, left with the city, north Western Anatolia and parts of the Balkans. The Ottomans ended the empire in 1453.
This is a really bizarre interpretation, considering that the 'writing of ancient Greece' was only endangered due the destruction of the eastern Roman Empire (and the Persian Empire) by the Muslim conquests. The era of the conquests was extremely chaotic and a major setback for civilization in the region. The historical record practically falls apart because of this. Prior to the conquests, the eastern Roman Empire and its long heritage of learning and culture was trucking along quite happily, even if there were periodic border conflicts with the Persians.
Even during the conquests and their ever-shrinking territory, the Romans maintained their technological superiority over the surrounding civilizations. The final conquest of Constantinople, and the consequent fleeing of the learned with their texts westward, was a key factor in helping along the European Renaissance.
It's always been a bit strange to me how the history of the Roman Empire is pretty much ignored after the fall of the western empire. The East remained one of the greatest, wealthiest, and most educated powers in the world for centuries.
The period surrounding the Muslim conquests is almost as disruptive in the historical record as the Bronze Age collapse. A lot of writing either gets lost or destroyed during that period. Sources dry up after ominous allusions to doom and gloom. The Latin sack was bad for Constantinople, but isn't nearly that bad.
The emperors were also very aware that the loss of nearly all their holdings was the beginning of the end, and that they were essentially caretakers, only able to delay the end. It's very sobering reading what they wrote.
We did lose most of it. This isn't to diminish the preservation by the Islamic world of so much of what did survive.
(I was under the impression that the true center of civilization was China.)
That's a bit like saying, "The US never grew much beyond its current borders, so it wasn't expansionist."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/29/silk-roads-pet...
It's doesn't look like you may expect.
As Hans Rosling points out, Sweden in the 19th century was worse off than most of Africa today - birth rate above 5, 90% illiteracy, 20% of the population actually fled to the US to escape famine. And a century and a half later... they're Sweden, the most civilized country in the world.
It's just a matter of time before this catches up to the Middle East. There's no reason they can't be as wealthy and stable as Europe, it's just going to take a few generations. After all, the Levant was once the center of civilization - more than once.
Think about the mass human history involved in that: each Mamluk was either bought from a desperate family or (more likely) captured in raids in which many of his friends and relatives were no doubt slaughtered; he was carried thousands of miles from anywhere he knew or recognised; then he was 'freed,' with no choice but to fight on behalf of those who'd bought him. No doubt many of them were subject to torture and abuse.
It's very similar to the Janissaries, who were taken from Christian villages in the Balkans and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), made to convert and then trained to serve as soldiers for the Ottomans.
The mind boggles at the centuries of boys taken from their families at forced to fight on behalf of their kidnappers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_of_May_1808
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamelukes_of_the_Imperial_Guar...
Sure, it got a lot of things wrong and it took liberty with a lot of historical facts, but it also gave me a basis for, and appreciation of history.
I knew about the Mamluks because they were an elite unit in the game, and I happened to one day just Google their name and read the wiki page.
> And they kept their garrisons distinct, not mixing with the populace in the territories. The contemporary Arab historian Abu Shama noted after the Mamluk victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 that, ‘the people of the steppe had been destroyed by the people of the steppe’.
They kept their south Russian steppe blood well into their empire.
They somehow often colonize Australia.
Also, yep. I was surprised to see them in Indonesia!
It seems as though all educational games are created with a primary goal of "education" and a secondary goal of "fun game". The result is always an unfun game. What if the ordering were reversed? Create a fun game, then try to tack on some educational elements after the fact.
Perhaps some games like this already exist. I'm sure you could make a claim that Minecraft is a fun game that also teaches resource management and spatial awareness.
So basically the same story as Mamluks rebelling against their Arab leaders.