Chapter VII: The Dome Builders (1)

1. THE MAMLUKS OF THE RIVER

SALADIN had raised Cairo once more to the rank of an imperial capital. By his fortifications he had strengthened it against attack, and by his theological foundations he had united it to the great comity of Muslim culture. He had no doubt added seriously to the responsibilities of future rulers of Egypt, who found themselves engaged in controversy, diplomacy, or war with the minor rulers of Syrian cities, members of Saladin’s kindred, as well as with the Franks of the coast of Palestine, who had not yet abandoned the dream of “_Gerusalemme liberata_,” and were now fully aware that the road to the Holy City, circuitous as it might seem, lay through Egypt. It is no part of the story of Cairo to relate the campaigns waged by Saladin’s brilliant brother, el-‘Ádil Seyf-ed-din—“the noble Saphadin” of the _Talisman_, the friend of King Richard, who actually gave the accolade of Christian knighthood to one of Saphadin’s sons, as Humphrey of Toron had given it before to Saladin himself. Succeeding, after a brief interval, to his brother’s empire in 1200, el-‘Ádil soon showed that the loss of the hero was not irreparable. He had loyally served Saladin as his right hand for a quarter of a century, and for another quarter of a century he held together the empire which his nephews and cousins were doing their best to shatter into fragments. He prudently kept on terms with the Franks by the cession of a couple of ports in Palestine, and such hostilities as took place in spite of his concessions did not lower his prestige. He is described by one who knew him as a man of immense experience and information and much foresight, physically robust and high-spirited, and capable of eating a whole lamb at a meal. A contemporary Arabic poet dwells on his extraordinary alertness and personal control of every part of his wide dominions—

A Monarch, whose majestic air

Fills all the range of sight, whose care

Fills all the regions everywhere;

Who such a ward doth keep

That, save where he doth set his lance

In rest to check the foe’s advance,

His eye with bright and piercing glance

Knows neither rest nor sleep.

Even his vigilance, however, could not avert that periodical calamity of mediæval Egypt an insufficient inundation of the Nile, and its usual concomitants plague, pestilence, and famine. This happened in 1201 and was repeated in 1202, and the results were exceptionally disastrous. We have the appalling narrative of an eye-witness of undoubted veracity and professional experience for this time of horror:—

“The Baghdád physician, ‘Abd-el-Latíf, who lived at Cairo for ten years (1194-1204), attending the professors’ lectures at the Azhar mosque, records the terrible experiences of the famine. The distress was so desperate that the inhabitants emigrated in crowds, whole quarters and villages were deserted, and those who remained abandoned themselves to atrocious practices. People habitually ate human flesh, even parents killed and cooked their own children, and a wife was found eating her dead husband raw. Men waylaid women in the streets to seize their infants. The very graves were ransacked for food. This went on from end to end of Egypt. The roads were deathtraps, assassination and robbery reigned unchecked, and women were outraged by the multitude of reprobates whom anarchy and despair had set loose. Free girls were sold at five shillings apiece, and many women came and implored to be bought as slaves to escape starvation. An ox sold for 70 dinárs and corn was over ten shillings the bushel. The corpses lay unburied in the streets and houses, and a virulent pestilence spread over the delta. In the country and on the caravan routes flocks of vultures, hyenas, and jackals mapped the march of death. Men dropped down at the plough, stricken with the plague. In one day at Alexandria an imám said the funeral prayers over 700 persons, and in a single month a property passed to forty heirs in rapid succession. The depreciation of property was disastrous. Owing to the decrease of population, house-rent in Cairo fell to one-seventh of its former price, and the carvings and furniture of palaces were broken up to feed the oven-fires. Violent earthquakes, which were also felt throughout Syria and as far north as Armenia, shook down countless houses, devastated whole cities, and increased the general misery.”

The invasion of John de Brienne, who captured Damietta, kept Egypt in a tremor of anxiety for three years (1218-21); but el-‘Adil, who died at the beginning of the trouble, left a singularly able successor in his son el-Kámil; the Crusaders departed in ignominy; and when some years later the emperor Frederick II. himself “took the cross” and came to Palestine, the prudent sultan not only let the emperor crown himself in Jerusalem without striking a blow, but actually concluded (1229) a general defensive alliance with Frederick against even the Franks of Syria. The Holy City was surrendered to the Christians with the road to it, but the Muslims retained the sacred enclosure of the Mosque of ‘Omar, which was all they cared for. The treaty was the most singular ever concluded between a Christian and a Muslim power; but it must be remembered that the Pope had called Frederick “a follower of Mohammad,” and the emperor’s correspondence with the Arab philosopher Ibn-Sab‘in and the metaphysical debates he held with Kámil’s ambassadors point to “emancipated views” that in the case of less eminent people commonly conducted them to the stake. Frederick was much admired by Muslim writers, and for his part Kámil had shown himself broad-minded. He had entertained the emperor’s envoy, bishop Bernard, at Cairo, released the poor prisoners taken in the “Children’s Crusade,” and loyally stood by his treaty. It is not surprising that good Muslims regarded him in much the same light as the bishop of Rome held the emperor. They were wrong, however, for Kámil was a thorough Muslim, and had only treated with the “infidel” in the cause of peace. His college, the Dar-el-Hadíth or Kamilíya, some relics of which still stand in Beyn-el-Kasreyn, bears evidence to his zeal for orthodox Islám, whilst his father’s intellectual powers shone in the son when he took part in the meetings of the learned at his palace on Thursday evenings. To him Cairo owed the completion of the Citadel, where he took up his residence, and Egypt was improved in cultivation by his assiduous superintendence and enlargement of the canals and dikes.

The new régime of the Ayyúbids or successors of Saladin had introduced something besides an imperial sway and a revival of orthodox learning: it had brought with it a feudal system that dominated Egypt, for better or for worse, for six hundred years, and vitally affected the social conditions, arts, literature, and material aspect of Cairo. The _Mamlúk_ period may be said to begin with Saladin. It is true of course that there had been mamlúks, _i.e._ white slaves, long before, and many of them had attained to power. Ibn-Tulún, or at least his father, was a mamlúk, and many of the later governors belonged to the same class of emancipated slaves whether Turks or Greeks, from Turkistan or from Asia Minor. Under the Fátimid caliphs slaves had risen to the highest rank. Gawhar, the founder of Cairo, was a Greek or a Slav—it is not certain which—and we have seen how the Armenian slave Bedr became practically master of Egypt. Slavery in the East is no disgrace; on the contrary the relationship ranks far above mere hired service. The slave is regarded almost as a son, and we find an amusing instance of this feeling in the undoubted slur that attached to a famous emír (Kusún) in the fourteenth century, because he had the misfortune _not_ to be a slave, like the rest of his world. The Fátimid armies were full of such mamlúks, and they acquired rank and lands. But the system had not reached the completeness that we see under Saladin’s successors. The great champion of Islám was brought up in the mamlúk system, as organized by the Seljúks and their followers, whose power rested upon a military basis formed by hired or purchased troops, paid by grants of fiefs, lands, castles, towns, or even whole provinces, held on strict condition of military service. The higher feudatories sublet parts of their fiefs to minor vassals, who had to furnish a certain number of men to their lord, just as he had to bring his contingent to aid the sultan in his wars. This system was adopted in all the provinces governed by officers of the Seljúk empire. Nur-ed-din, who sprang from the Seljúk officers, carried it out in Syria; Saladin, trained under Nur-ed-din, brought it to Egypt, where the land and villages were parcelled out among the generals of his armies, who lived on them during the winter, and joined their overlord at the head of their retainers each year as soon as the campaigning season opened.

We find this feudal system in force in Egypt from the arrival of Saladin and his Turkish troops down to the accession of Mohammad ‘Aly in the nineteenth century. It took a dominant place in Cairo when el-‘Adil’s grandson, es-Sálih, established a picked battalion of mamlúks in the new palace and barracks which he built on the island of Roda, opposite Misr. From their quarters on the river (_el-bahr_) they were known as the Bahry or Nilotic Mamlúks. Their splendid valour at the battle of Mansúra, when under the leading of Beybars they drove back the finest chivalry in Europe, decided the fate of the disastrous Crusade of Louis IX. Thenceforward they ruled Egypt for a century and a half, and in spite of much lawlessness, tyranny, intrigue, and slaughter, the reign of the Bahry Mamlúks is among the glorious pages in the history of Cairo. Their triumph at Mansúra was not the less remarkable because they were then under the sovereignty of a woman. Queens are rare in Mohammedan history, for the blessed Prophet had a prejudice against them; but among the three or four Muslim women that have held the sceptre, queen Sheger-ed-durr—“Spray of Pearls” is the translation of her charming name—holds the first place. She was only a slave, and her lord and husband, es-Sálih, grandson of el-‘Adil, died in the midst of the campaign with the Crusaders; but she at once took command, kept the sultan’s death secret till his son could be fetched from the other end of the empire, controlled the government, organized the defence, gave instructions to the generals and governors at her levees, and with wonderful courage and wisdom held the state together. When the heir arrived (1250) she surrendered her regency, but on the assassination of the brutal young man by the exasperated mamlúks within two months, “Spray of Pearl” resumed her authority, and honourably observed the treaty of ransom with St Louis, who probably owed his life to the high- minded queen.

She possessed great qualities, and she had the title, such as it was, that was conveyed by her having borne a son to the late Ayyúbid sultan. The baby was dead, but she still based her claim to rule upon her motherhood, and her signature and her coins[67] bore a string of feminine titles ending with “Mother of the victorious King Khalíl,” though the little “king” had never been conscious of his royalty.

She was not long left to rule alone. The idea of queenship was too repugnant to Muslim prejudices, and the caliph of Baghdád interfered with all the authority of a pope. “If they had no man among them,” he wrote to the emírs of Cairo, “he would send them one.” So the commander- in-chief, Aybek, was chosen to marry the queen, and a joint-king, a child of Saladin’s kindred, was appointed to keep up the figment of the departed dynasty. But “Spray of Pearls” still ruled, in fact though not in name. She kept her hold on the exchequer, and evidently treated her new husband with scant respect. Like a true woman however, she could be jealous; she made him divorce another wife, and when Aybek ventured to propose a fresh marriage with a princess of Mosil the queen gave way to a regrettable act of resentment; having lured him by fair words to the Citadel—the facts unhappily cannot be softened—she had him murdered in the bath (1257). Her punishment was speedy and terrible. In three days all was over. The mamlúks shut her up in the Red Tower, where she vindictively pounded her jewels in a mortar that they might adorn no other woman, and then she was dragged before the wife whom she had made Aybek divorce, and there and then beaten to death with the women’s clogs. For days her body lay in the Citadel ditch for the curs to worry, till some good Samaritan buried it. Her tomb may still be seen beside the chapel of Sitta Nefísa, and a pious hand of these latter days has shrouded it with a cloth on which the Arabic name of “Spray of Pearls” is worked in gold.

The rule of the Bahry Mamlúks now began, without further pretence of joint-kingship with one of Saladin’s house, though not without opposition and intrigue from members of the family in Syria, nor without hostility from the Arabs of Egypt, who got up a national movement and were put down with great severity. The bare list of the twenty-three sultans of the Bahry dynasty—all Turks, and most from Kipchak—who succeeded Aybek and ruled from 1257 to 1382 is misleading unless one takes the conditions of their rule into account. Of the twenty-three, only four reigned for any considerable period, and the four reigns of Beybars, Kalaún, en-Násir, and Hasan, account for more than half the sum of all the twenty-three reigns. A sultan was nothing more than the chief mamlúk, elected by his comrades, _primus inter pares_ indeed, but with a distinct understanding that they were his peers. For example, when Lagín was elected sultan by a conspiracy of the emírs, they marched at his stirrup and did him fealty, but they made him swear, and then swear again, that he would remain one of themselves, act only by their counsel, and never favour his own mamlúks to the detriment of the rest: and when he broke his oath by making a favourite, they murdered him. It was only a very strong man who could hold the dangerous position for long, as Beybars did, partly by the prestige of his brilliant campaigns in Syria; and after the strong man’s death, which as likely as not happened by design, his son would be set on the throne as a stop-gap whilst the rival emírs tried their strength, arranged their combinations, and bought off competitors. Then the strongest of them, or the most diplomatic, would remove the warming-pan and ascend the throne, to hold it as long as he could; after which the same process would be renewed.

We must at least give the mamlúks their due as a splendid soldiery. Four times they had to meet the most formidable of all possible invasions, the repeated advance of the Mongol hordes led by Ginghiz Kaan’s successors, and four times they rolled them back. Kutuz was the first to bear the brunt. Hulagu’s Mongol envoys came to Cairo with insulting demands of submission: Kutuz cut off their heads and hung them up at the Zuweyla Gate; then marched into Syria, routed the Mongols in a glorious victory at Goliath’s Well in 1260, and rid the land of them. Beybars swam the Euphrates at the head of his troops and defeated the Mongols at Bira in 1273; then turning west he slew seven thousand of the enemy at Abu-lusteyn and seated himself on the Seljúk throne, which they had usurped, at Cæsarea of Cappadocia. Kalaún stemmed another invasion in 1281. Mustering every man he could enrol, mamlúks of the guard, Turkmáns, desert Bedawis, Arabs from the Euphrates and the Higáz, backed by the steady veterans of the old principality of Hamáh which still owned a prince of Saladin’s blood, the sultan won a decisive battle at Emesa, and freed Syria once more from the locust-cloud of devouring Mongols. Again they returned in the time of his son en-Násir, and this time the Egyptian army sustained a terrible reverse at the battle of the Treasurer’s Ghyll near Emesa in 1299. Damascus was lost, and the Mongol envoys appeared at Cairo to treat for the respectful submission of the sultan. But the mamlúks had not lost heart; the armourers of Cairo were busy, recruits were pouring in, and remounts were in such demand that the price of a horse rose at a bound from £12 to £40. Syria was in a panic, after an orgy of Mongol license; but the great emírs, Beybars Gashnekír and the other mamlúk chiefs, rode proudly on to victory. Once more the opposing armies met, in the plain of Marg-es-Suffar, in 1303, and for the fourth time, and the last, the Mongols were driven out of Syria. “Násir returned to Cairo in a wave of glory. Messengers had announced the news, and the emírs vied with one another in setting up costly pavilions, or grand stands, richly decorated and furnished, along the route of his procession. Workmen were forbidden to do anything but set up these triumphal erections. Rooms along the route were let at from £2 to £4 for the day. Silken carpets were laid in the street; and the proud sultan rode between the brilliant façades and admired the nobles’ pavilions, while troops of Mongol prisoners in chains, each with a fellow Mongol’s head hanging from his neck, completed the triumph. So noisy were the rejoicings and so deafening the tumult of drums and music throughout Egypt, that nothing short of an earthquake sobered the people.”

Nor was it the Mongols alone who felt the edge of the mamlúks’ steel. Beybars the Great—a blue-eyed Turk from Kipchak afflicted by a cataract which caused him to fetch but £20 in the slave market—despite his humble beginnings, had the courage and the zeal of a second Saladin. He waged the Holy War for ten years in Palestine, where the Franks were disposed to league with the Mongols. He seized and razed Cæsarea and Arsúf in 1265, and dragged their defenders in cruel ignominy to Cairo, where they were paraded with reversed banners and broken crosses. Jerusalem had been recovered from the Christians twenty years before, but the embers of Crusading zeal still smouldered feebly on the coast and at a few inland fortresses. Beybars resolved to extinguish the last flicker. Jaffa fell in 1268, Belfort surrendered, and Antioch, the Christian capital of northern Syria, was stormed and burnt to the ground; three years later the great fortress of the Hospitallers, Crac des Chevaliers, lowered its flag, and the Teutonic knights lost Montfort.[68] Even Cyprus, whence the Franks got their supplies, was invaded by the mamlúk fleet. The mountain fastnesses of the dreaded Assassins were seized and disarmed, and the Wehmgericht sank into impotence. Before Beybars died his commands were obeyed from the Pyramus and the Euphrates to the south of Arabia and the fourth cataract of the Nile. The Holy Cities of Mekka, Medina, and Jerusalem were his; he held the ports of Sawákin and ‘Aydháb on the Red Sea; the Arabs of the desert were his servants, the chiefs of Barbary paid him tribute; the great Khan of the Golden Horde on the Volga was his sworn ally and sent him his daughter in marriage—Mongol though he was, Baraka Khan was the inveterate foe of the Mongols of Persia who had overrun Syria;—embassies were exchanged with the Eastern Emperor, who permitted a mosque to be restored at Constantinople, while Beybars supplied him with a patriarch; diplomatic and commercial relations were established with Manfred of Sicily, James of Aragon, Alfonso of Seville, Charles of Anjou. To crown his glory he revived the old ‘Abbásid caliphate, extinguished at Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258; brought a meek representative of the sacred line to Cairo and housed him in great state in the Citadel, as the supreme legitimate pontiff of Islám, and humbly received at the caliph’s hands the purple robe and black turban and golden chain and anklets which betokened a sovereign recognized by the spiritual power. Henceforward there was ever a caliph at Cairo—however _fainéant_—till the Ottoman conquest and the assumption of the caliphate by the Sultans of Turkey in 1538.[69]

A great soldier and a consummate if perfidious diplomatist, Beybars was also an able and laborious administrator. Under him the land was quietly if not quite godly governed, and his energy was unbounded. He seemed to be in several places at once, so rapid and secret were his journeys, and it was a favourite device of his to lie hidden in the Citadel for days together, watching his deputies, when he was believed to be in Syria all the time. “The greater part of his reign was spent in campaigns outside Egypt, but he generally passed the winter months at Cairo, whilst his troops rested and rains or snow hindered marching, and he devoted these intervals to improving the country and the capital. It was not only in founding and restoring mosques and colleges, or rebuilding the Hall of Justice at the foot of the Citadel, that he showed his public interest. He enlarged the irrigation canals and dug new ones, made roads and bridges, fortified Alexandria and repaired the pharos, and protected the mouths of the Nile from the risk of foreign invasion. He revived the Egyptian fleet, built forty war galleys, and maintained 12,000 regular troops—not reckoning, one must assume, the Arab and Egyptian militia or occasional levies. His heavy war expenses entailed heavy taxation; and though with a view to popularity he began his reign by remitting the oppressive taxes imposed by Kutuz to the amount of 600,000 dinárs a year, he found himself compelled to increase the fiscal burdens as his campaigns developed. Yet we read more often of old taxes repealed than of fresh duties imposed, and his treasury was filled less by the imposts of Egypt than by the contributions from the conquered cities and districts of Syria, the tribute of vassal states and tribes, and the valuable custom-dues of the ports.

“His government was enlightened, just and strict. He met the severe famine of 1264 by measures at once wise and generous, by regulating the sale of corn, and by undertaking, and compelling his officers and emírs to undertake, the support of the destitute for three months. He allowed no wine (though the tax on it used to produce 6000 dinárs a year), beer, or hashish in his dominions; he attempted to eradicate contagious diseases by scientific isolation; he was strict with the morals of his subjects, shut up taverns and brothels, and banished the European women of the town; though, personally, he was addicted to the Tatar kumiz, and was suspected of oriental depravity. He was no sybarite, whatever his vices; no man was more full of energy and power of work. If his days were often given to hunting or polo, lance-play or marksmanship, his nights were devoted to business. A courier who arrived at daybreak received the answering dispatches by the third hour, with invariable punctuality.” Sometimes over fifty dispatches were dictated, signed and sealed late in the night, after a fatiguing march. There was a mail twice a week carried by relays of horses, besides a well-organized pigeon-post.

It was no wonder that such a man was adored by the people, who thought him the ideal of a gallant and generous soldier-king, and who still listen with delight to the romance in which the story-teller of the cafés of Cairo clothes the great deeds of the ever popular Záhir Beybars. Even the devout admired a king who endowed religious foundations and held an even balance between the four contending schools of orthodox divines, from each of which he nominated a separate kády. Only the emírs and officers dreaded one who, if he was true as steel to a good servant, never forgave a bad one, and whose restless suspicion watched their every move. It was inevitable that some day one of the many grudges should be paid off, and after seventeen years of a resplendent reign Beybars died in 1277 by a cup of poison which he had apparently made ready for another.

Beybars was the true founder of the mamlúk power and the organizer of the mamlúk system. Since the day when he led the charge of the Bahry guard against Louis of France at the battle of Mansúra, he had sedulously watched over the army, stimulated recruiting from fresh blood, and encouraged good service by liberal distribution of fiefs. His was the foreign policy maintained in Egypt for many years, and his court formed the pattern for succeeding kings. A very magnificent and ceremonious court it was, where the sultan sat surrounded by the great officers of state and of the household,—Viceroy, Commander-in-chief, Major domo, Captain of the Guard, Armour-bearer, Master of the Horse, Cup-bearer, Taster, Master of the Wardrobe, Grand Huntsman, Polo-bearer, Slipper-holder, Lord of the Seat; the Master of the Halberds with his Gentlemen at Arms; the Adjutant-General with his thirty Lords of the Drums, each followed by forty troopers and a band of ceremony of ten drums, four trumpets, and two hautbois; the eunuch guards, equerries and chamberlains, secretaries and court physicians, judges and divines. All these functionaries had their allowances, fiefs, or appanages; a lord of the drums, for instance, would draw an income of about £16,000 a year; and the expenses of the royal household may be judged by the estimate that 20,000 lbs. of food were daily prepared in the larder, and that the daily cost in meat and vegetables in the time of en-Násir was from £800 to £1200.

The great officers of the court and of the army were of course the most powerful men next to the sultan, and each deemed himself a fit successor to the throne. On their loyalty, and especially on that of the bodyguard, a brigade of several thousand picked men who held in fief a large part of Egypt, rested the safety and power of the sultan, who stood more or less at their mercy. Each of the great lords, were he an officer of the guard, or a court official, or merely a private nobleman, was a mamlúk sultan in miniature. He, too, had his guard of slaves, who waited at his door to escort him in his rides abroad, were ready at his behest to attack the public baths and carry off the women, defended him when a rival lord besieged his palace, and followed him valiantly as he led the charge of his division on the field of battle. These great lords, with their retainers, were a constant menace to the reigning sultan. A coalition would be formed among a certain number of disaffected nobles, with the support of some of the officers of the household or of the guard, and their retainers would mass in the approaches to the royal presence, while a trusted cupbearer or other officer, whose duties permitted him access to the king’s person, would strike the fatal blow or administer the insidious cup; and the conspirators would forthwith elect one of their number to succeed to the vacant throne. This was not effected without a struggle; the royal guard was not always to be bribed or overcome, and there were generally other nobles whose interests attached them to the reigning sovereign rather than to any possible successor, except themselves, and who would be sure to oppose the plot. Then there would be a street fight; the terrified people would close their shops, run to their houses, and shut the great gates which isolated the various quarters and markets of the city; and the rival factions of mamlúks would ride through the streets that remained open, pillaging the houses of their adversaries, carrying off women and children, holding pitched battles in the road, or discharging arrows and spears from the windows upon the enemy in the street below. These things were of constant occurrence, and the life of the merchant classes of Cairo must have been exciting. We read how the great bazar, called the Khan-el-Khalíly, was sometimes shut up for a week while these contests were going on in the streets without, and the rich merchants of Cairo huddled trembling behind the stout gates.

There were fine doings of this kind when Ketbugha deposed the child-king Násir, for a time. The Ashrafis—or mamlúks of the late sultan, el-Ashraf Khalíl—raised a revolt and besieged the Citadel. Then Ketbugha’s troops rode out to quell the tumult and slashed through the ranks; the rebels were blinded, maimed, drowned, beheaded, nailed to the gate of Zuweyla; and so a new reign began (1294). A plague followed, when seven hundred corpses were carried out of one gate of Cairo in a single day. A fresh conspiracy was formed, Ketbugha fled, and the viceroy Lagín was elected sultan in his place. The streets which had lately been shambles were now _en fête_ with decorations, for the new sultan was a generous man and promised to remit taxes; bread was cheap and Lagín was popular.

The idea of hereditary succession was wholly foreign to the mamlúk system; yet it presented the only correction to these scenes of violent supercession, and after a time some sort of hereditary title seems to have been established. Kalaún had been succeeded by his son Khalíl, and then by a younger son en-Násir Mohammad in 1293, and though the last, as a mere child, was temporarily deposed, he came back in 1298 after the murder of his brother-in-law Lagín. After another trial of usurpation by Beybars Gashnekír (the Taster) in 1308, Násir was restored and began a third reign which lasted thirty-one years (1310-1341), and after his death his incapable descendants sat on the throne, with little or no real authority, till the close of the dynasty. Thus from 1279 to 1382 Egypt was ruled, except for six or seven years, by members of one family, the House of Kalaún. The founder of this family, whose history refutes the theory that these foreigners were unprolific in Egypt, was himself a notable figure, a brave general, a prudent statesman, and a great encourager of commerce. His passports to traders were in force as far as India and China, and he did all he could to develop the commerce of Egypt. Like most of the mamlúk sultans he was a notable builder. It is extraordinary how these men of war, in the midst of alarums and intrigues, took a delight in architecture. The brilliant queen, first of the mamlúks, built (1250) the tomb-mosque over her husband Sálih, which still stands on part of the site of the old palace of the Fátimids in Beyn-el-Kasreyn. Beybars founded a college in 1262 on another part of the palace called the “Hall of the Tent,” and also a great mosque outside the Bab-el-Futúh in 1267-9, both of which still exist, though the college is a ruin, and the mosque was used, _infandum!_ as a bake- house for the French troops a century ago, and recently as a slaughter- house for the British army of occupation. Kalaún, stirred by a dangerous illness, vowed to build a hospital, and his Maristán is still to be seen in the Nahhasín, though no longer used for its original purpose: it was a madhouse less than a hundred years ago. It stands beside his mosque and tomb, the latter notable for its exquisite plaster tracery and red granite pillars, and for the oddly decorated stone minaret and fine inscription. Ibn-Tulún and Saladin had built hospitals, and Kalaún carried on the good tradition of these pious benefactors. Cubicles for patients were ranged round two courts, and at the sides of another quadrangle were wards, lecture rooms, library, baths, dispensary, and every necessary appliance of those days of surgical science. There was even music to cheer the sufferers; while readers of the Korán afforded the consolations of the faith. Rich and poor were treated alike, without fees, and sixty orphans were supported and educated in the neighbouring school. People still visit the tomb where the good sultan and his son en-Násir lie buried, to touch their clothes in sure belief that they will be cured of sundry diseases and disabilities.

The long reign of en-Násir was a golden age of mamlúk architecture. However much this sultan may have profited by the sense of tranquillity which hereditary title inspired, he owed his long tenure of the precarious throne partly to his personal qualities. “This self- possessed, iron-willed man—absolutely despotic, ruling alone—physically insignificant, small of stature, lame of a foot, and with a cataract in the eye—with his plain dress and strict morals, his keen intellect and unwearied energy, his enlightened tastes and interests, his shrewd diplomacy degenerating into fruitless deceit, his unsleeping suspicion and cruel vengefulness, his superb court, his magnificent buildings—is one of the most remarkable characters of the Middle Ages. His reign was certainly the climax of Egyptian culture and civilization.” He carried on the traditions of Beybars and Kalaún; maintained the alliance with the Golden Horde and married a princess from the Volga, the lady Tulbíya, whose tomb may still be seen, with that of another of his wives, in the eastern cemetery; he preserved the normal boundaries of the empire, from the Pyramus and Euphrates to Sawákin and Aswán, and arranged, if not alliances, diplomatic connexions with the emperor of Constantinople and the king of Bulgaria, as well as the rulers of Abyssinia and Arabia. He married eleven daughters to the highest nobles, and each wedding cost him half a million. Násir was not only a statesman; he was a farmer, trainer, and sportsman, who would pay £4000 for a horse, kept a systematic stud-book, knew all his horses’ pedigrees, prices, and ages, and broke in three thousand fillies every year with Bedawy grooms, for the races in which he and his emírs took the keenest possible interest. He kept thirty thousand sheep, and imported the finest breeds from abroad, and like most of the sultans he was devoted to falconry. Ibn-Batúta, who saw him in 1326, describes Násir as a king “of noble character and great virtues,” beneficent to pilgrims and assiduous in his duty of sitting in appeal twice a week to hear causes and complaints in person. Under his rule Egypt thrived; vexatious taxes were repealed, a new survey of the land was made, millers and bakers who tried to raise prices in bad years were scourged, and when his son-in-law, the great emír Kusún was reported to him for extortion, the sultan smote him with the flat of his sword and flogged his factor. Prices were kept down by his vigilance, wine-bibing and immorality were severely punished, and if Násir recouped himself by sweeping confiscations among the nobles, and cut down the “tall poppies” remorselessly, the people gained by the new method, and prospered exceedingly.

Even to the Copts Násir was indulgent, though the Christians were never so well used under mamlúk rule as they had been under the Fátimids and in the time of el-Kámil. At the time of Saladin’s invasion there had been a great destruction of churches, due rather to the burning of Misr and the turmoil of war than to any fanaticism of the conquerors. Saladin himself was no friend to Christians; he was too rigid a Muslim to be tolerant; but he did not persecute them. The flight or expulsion of the Armenian patriarch and his followers was more probably the result of the close association of the Armenians with the Fátimid government than of religious bigotry. But the Holy War in Palestine, though waged against the Latin branch of the church catholic, reacted unfavourably upon the Copts, and Saladin’s brother el-‘Adil was stern and tyrannical towards his Christian subjects. His son el-Kámil often interceded for them successfully, and when he came to the throne of Egypt himself, he displayed a spirit of toleration rare indeed in that age. He received St Francis of Assisi courteously, when the good friar came to teach him the truth as he perceived it, and the Christians of Egypt unanimously regarded Kámil as the kindest ruler they had ever known. His son es- Sálih seems to have followed in his steps during his short reign, for he wrote to Innocent IV to express his regret that he could not converse with the Dominicans by reason of his ignorance of Latin.

The Crusade of Louis IX naturally upset these amicable relations, and it is not surprising that the Muslims wreaked their vengeance upon many churches in Egypt. Nor was the temper of the succeeding mamlúk sultans, excited by repeated victories over the remnant of the Franks in Syria, conducive to a good understanding with their Christian subjects. The new colleges founded by Saladin and his successors were working a change in Cairo, and a fanatical spirit was encouraged by the teachers of these divinity schools, whose influence grew stronger as time went on. In 1280 all the Coptic scribes employed at the war-office were dismissed and their places supplied by Muslims. In 1301 the old humiliating sumptuary rules prescribing distinctive dresses and the like were revived. In 1321 occurred a series of outbreaks which brought terrible persecution on the Christians. The disturbance began when en-Násir’s workmen, digging a lake called Nasir’s Pool, near the Lion’s Bridge (west of the Lúk and close to the mosque of Taybars) undermined the church of ez-Zuhry, which en-Násir had commanded to be respected. Without the knowledge of the government the people rushed to the church one Friday after prayers and utterly demolished it. Thence they went to the church of St Mina in the Hamra and sacked it, and did the like to the “Church of the Maidens” by the seven watermills, dragging out the nuns, and pillaging and burning everything. The sultan was indignant when the smoke of the burning churches told the tale of disaster, and sent troops at once to coerce the mob. Meanwhile news arrived of the destruction of two other churches in the quarters of Zuweyla and of the Greeks, and it was found that the mob was attacking the Mo‘allaka in the fortress of Babylon. Here the sultan’s troops happily arrived in time to protect the church. There was evidently a popular excitement difficult to quell. Wild fakírs got up in the mosques and shouted “Down with the infidels’ churches! To the foundations! To the foundations!” The same thing was going on all over Egypt; at Alexandria, at Damascus, at Kus, churches were burning.

A month later mysterious fires began to break out at Cairo. One after the other great conflagrations burst forth, and a strong wind carried the flames far and wide. People went up the minarets and cried to God, thinking that the whole city would be burnt down, and there was groaning and weeping over the loss of homes and possessions. Every effort was made to extinguish the fires. All the water-carriers were impressed, and twenty-four emírs of the highest rank worked at the head of the lines of men carrying water from the baths and cisterns, and demolishing acres of fine houses to clear a space round the burning buildings. The street from the Deylem quarter to the Gate of Zuweyla ran with water like a river. No sooner was one fire extinguished than another began. Almost every day witnessed a fresh conflagration.

It was noticed that these fires were apparently aimed at mosques, and that they were the work of incendiaries was evident from clothes soaked in oil and pitch and naphtha that were discovered. A Christian was caught at the mosque of ez-Záhir with packets of naphtha and pitch, which he was lighting in the mosque. Put to the torture he confessed that the conflagrations were the organized work of Christians. Two monks, under torture, admitted that they had set the fires afoot to avenge the destruction of the churches. The Coptic patriarch was called in, and, with tears, denounced the incendiaries as wild enthusiasts who were paying off the foolish church-destroyers in their own coin. He was sent back to his house in honour. The populace however were in no mood to see a patriarch respected, and would gladly have torn him in pieces, but for the sultan’s guard. As it was they burned four monks from the Melekite “Convent of the Mule” (el-Kuseyr) in the Mukattam hills. Two Christians caught in the act of arson were by the sultan’s orders burnt alive in a pit in the presence of an exulting multitude, and an innocent Coptic secretary, passing by, only escaped being thrown to the flames by hasty apostasy. The mob was becoming dangerous, and the sultan, who, though much alarmed, had done his utmost to calm the people, took strong measures. Troops were sent through the whole of Cairo with orders to charge the crowds and spare none. The news had preceded them, and they found the bazars closed and the streets deserted. Not a man was to be seen between the Citadel and the Gate of Succour. Some two hundred were arrested near the Nile, and brought before the sultan, who ordered them to be executed or to lose their hands. In vain they pleaded innocence; even the emírs interceded for them; en-Násir was resolved to make an example of somebody. Gallows were set up all the way from the Gate of Zuweyla to the Rumeyla, and there the unlucky Muslims were hung by their hands in order to teach other people not to raise an uproar.

The result of this excitement was the revival of the old regulations as to dress which Násir had endeavoured to drop since 1301. Any Christian found riding a horse or wearing a white turban might be killed at sight. The Copts were compelled to wear blue turbans, to carry a bell round their necks at the baths, and to ride only the ass, and that with the face to the tail. The emírs were not allowed to employ Christian servants, nor were the Copts any more to hold posts in the government offices. They hardly dared to show themselves abroad, and a great many became Muslims. This was probably the worst persecution since the days of el-Hákim, three centuries before, but it must be admitted that there was grave provocation on both sides, and that the outrages sprang from popular fury, not from the fanaticism of the rulers. Similar persecution, though scarcely on so large a scale, went on throughout the mamlúk period, and the Copts, who had perhaps waxed over-fat and kicked during the tolerant epoch of the later Fátimids, paid dearly for their past favour. They were gradually reduced to the state of suffering insignificance from which they are only now being to some extent raised.

Whilst churches were being thus destroyed mosques were rising with amazing prodigality. There never was such a harvest for the builder and the architect as in the reign of en-Násir. The sultan set the example himself. He was a man of fine taste and high culture, the patron of scholars, and the intimate friend of the learned historian Abu-l-Fida, whom he restored to the princedom of Hamáh, which had been held by his family since the days of his ancestor, Saladin’s brother. It was an age of brilliant artistic production, and the immense sums spent by the sultan and his emírs on building and decorative works show that the wealth of the country was vast, and was nobly expended. Some of Násir’s own furniture has been preserved—there are two exquisite inlaid-silver tables of his in the Arab Museum at Cairo—and his two chief buildings, the college in Beyn-el-Kasreyn (1304), next to the Maristán, with its Gothic gateway brought from ‘Akka by his brother Khalíl, and the old mosque (1318) in the Citadel, are worthy memorials of his taste, though unhappily they show but few traces of their original splendour. The great dome which once surmounted the Citadel mosque has fallen in, and most of the marble mosaics which adorned the kibla have vanished, as well as the iron grille which enclosed the sultan’s place of prayer (_maksúra_). There is still a range of clerestory windows all round the mosque, but the tracery and stained glass is almost all gone; yet the ten great granite columns, and the marble mosaics on the south wall, and other relics, show what the mosque must once have been. Its most remarkable feature is the coating of the minarets with green tiles, which may probably be ascribed to the Tatar influence of Násir’s wife, who belonged to the royal family of the Golden Horde. That the Citadel mosque is not wholly destroyed is due to the care of Colonel C. M. Watson, C.M.G., who rescued it from the degradation of an army storehouse, and removed the wooden partitions which had been set up when the beautiful building was converted into a prison. There was once a “Hall of Columns” belonging to Násir’s “Striped Palace” of black and white stone in the Citadel (which cost, it is said, twenty millions, but the figure is incredible), which still stood three quarters of a century ago; the fortress was largely rearranged and added to in his reign, and the aqueduct which brought the Nile water to the citadel, though commonly ascribed to Saladin and probably a reconstruction of some Ayyúbid conduit, was Násir’s work (1311), afterwards restored in stone by el-Ghúry. He also built a mosque beside the shrine of Seyyida Nefísa, the Kubbat-en-Nasr near the Red Hill, and other chapels.

Where the sultan led, the court followed. The emírs of that day were never content till they had built a mosque, a college, or a tomb-chapel, to celebrate their piety and lay up riches where they stood most in need of a balance. The Moorish traveller, Ibn-Batúta, who was at Cairo in 1326, was impressed by the zealous emulation of the emírs in founding mosques and monasteries for recluses, such as the Khankah or convent of Beybars Gashnekír, still standing, and he gives a curious account of the monastic rules.[70] One cannot count the colleges (medresas), he says, and he is lost in admiration of the great hospital of Kalaún, with its excellent apparatus and drugs, and its revenue amounting, he was told, to 1000 dinárs a day. More than forty mosques and colleges were erected between 1320 and 1360—more than a fourth of the total number recorded from the Arab conquest to the time of Makrízy—and many of them still survive to bear witness to the munificence of the great nobles of the time. Such are the mosques (_gami‘_) of the emír Hoseyn (founded A.H. 719, A.D. 1319), Almás, the chamberlain (730), Kusún (730), Beshták (736), Altunbugha el-Maridány, the cupbearer (740), Aslam, the armour- bearer (746), Aksunkur (747), Arghún el-Isma‘íly (748), Mangak, the proconsul (750), Sheykhú (750); the colleges (_medresa_) of Almelik, the polo-master (719), Sengar el-Gáwaly (723), Ahmad, the master of the ceremonies (Mihmandár, 725), Akbugha, the major domo (734), Sarghitmish, captain of the guard (757); the monasteries (_Khankáh_) of Kusún (736), el-Gáwaly (723), Sheykhú (756); besides the mosque of “the Lady Miska” (a slave of Násir’s named Hadak, 740), the college of Násir’s daughter, the Lady Tatar el-Higazíya (761), and the great mosque of his son Sultan Hasan facing the Citadel (757-60).

To describe these mosques of the Násiry epoch in detail would demand a whole volume. Some of them indeed are sadly ruined and present but fragments of their original building. Some, like Aksunkur’s and el- Isma‘íly’s were restored, the one with much taste by Ibrahím Agha in 1652; the other, with none, fifty years ago by one of the Khedivial family. But even in what remains of the original work of the twenty-one mosques enumerated above there is so much variety in plan, in treatment of the parts, and in decoration, that no verbal description can take the place of ocular study on the spot. Almost every one of these buildings deserves separate and attentive examination. Three features, however, may here be signalized as characteristic. The old mosques had no external decoration; their enclosing walls were plain, and only in the late Fátimid mosque el-Akmar do we find the beginning of a façade. The mamlúk mosques, copying no doubt the buildings of the Crusaders in Palestine, generally present fine façades, with sunk panels, portals in recess, and decorative cornice and crownwork. The next characteristic is the development of the minaret, which becomes more graceful, is built of well-faced stone, and shows delicate articulations and gradations of tapering from the square to the polygon and cylinder, with skilful use of “stalactite” or pendentive treatment of angles and transitions and supports for the balconies. The third is the construction of large domes. Hitherto small cupolas over the mihráb or above the entrance were the utmost achievements of the earlier architects. The feature of a great dome was introduced by Saladin’s successors, for example in the dome of the tomb-mosque of esh-Sháfi‘y in the Karáfa, and probably in other edifices, but too little remains of the Ayyúbid period to permit of very exact definition.

The mamlúks were dome-builders _par excellence_. A large proportion of their mosques and colleges were also the founders’ tombs; the tomb- chapel adjoined the main building, and the dome, as we have said, is pre-eminently a sepulchral canopy. From the mamlúk period begins that adornment of the city with those beautiful bulbs which still form its dominant architectural note. From the plain dome with a small cupola on top comes the fluted dome, and next the dome covered with ornament, chevrons, arabesques, or geometrical _entrelacs_, all chiselled in the stone. The most elaborate ornament belongs to the work of the Circassian sultans of the fifteenth century, but already in the fourteenth the dome had taken its place among the leading features of Saracenic architecture.

As an example of the fourteenth century style we cannot do better than take the great mosque of Sultan Hasan, which includes most of the characteristics of the Násiry epoch, and displays them on the grandest scale. Sultan Hasan,—who sat on the throne from 1347 to 1351, was deposed by the emírs, and then restored from 1354 to 1361,—was far from an interesting or estimable character, and his mosque was his one good deed. It was built between 1356 and 1359 (A.H. 757-760) and is said to have cost him 1000 dinárs a day, but one distrusts the round figures of Eastern chroniclers. The sultan was so charmed with his masterpiece that he cut off the architect’s hand in the vague idea that its loss would cripple his genius and prevent his repeating his success. The mosque is of the usual form of medresa, a cross formed of a central court and four deep transepts or porticoes, and the founder’s tomb may be compared to a lady-chapel behind the chancel or eastern portico. The outside does not of course reveal the cruciform character of the interior, since the angles are filled with numerous rooms and offices.[71] The prevailing impression from without is one of great height, compared with other mosques. The walls are 113 feet high and built of fine cut stone from the pyramids, and have the peculiarity, rare in Saracen architecture, of springing from a socle. Windows—two with horseshoe arches, the rest simple grilles—slightly relieve the monotony of the broad expanse of wall; but the most beautiful feature is the splendid cornice built up of six tiers of stalactites each overlapping the one below, which crowns the whole wall. There are some graceful pilasters or engaged columns at the angles, and a magnificent portal set in an arched niche, 66 feet high, vaulted in a half sphere which is worked up to by twelve tiers of pendentives. Bold arabesque medallions and borders, geometrical panels, and corner columns with stalactite capitals, enrich this stately gate.