¶ Baybars, Mongols, and Military Slavery's Rise
The last defeated survivors of the Mongol army They tore out of the hills as fast as their small, hardy horses could carry them. They were bloody, the overlapping leather scales of their armor torn. Their quivers nearly empty. They loosed a last few arrows over their shoulders at their pursuers, hoping to discourage them. But the Turks had bows of their own, and more than a few arrows among them. A volley, loosed at full gallop, reined down among the fleeing enemies. Only one arrow found a home.
The hardened steel tip punched straight through a leather scale and into the spine of a fleeing horseman. He dropped instantly and died moments later on the plain of Ainjaloo in Syria, bringing to an end the career of a Mongol who had ridden the length and breadth of Eurasia over decades of service.
¶ Kipchak Roots and Forced Enslavement
Of service to the Khans. Two years earlier, he had ridden through the streets of Baghdad, his blade drenched in the blood of its citizens. Twenty years before that, the Mongol had been a thousand miles north on the shores of the Black Sea. The army had killed countless Turks there. Kipchak.
Be precise, but they captured many more to sell into slavery. The Mongol didn't remember any of them. They were a smattering of faces among the many thousands he had helped traffic in campaigns that had taken him from the Danube basin to the Caspian Sea and, at last, Syria.
But if he had remembered that day, twenty years prior, he might have recognized the face of the man who loosed the arrow that killed him. The face was lined and notched by blades. A thick dark beard hung from the chin. But it was still recognizable as the face of a kipchak.
Boy from the Black Sea. He would have been one of many being led away from a circle of burning yurts, his father dead somewhere behind him, his mother and sisters tied with him into a long coffin destined for the market. The intervening years had not been kind to that face.
Flattened the nose and reshaped the cheekbones and left strips of scar tissue around the eye sockets. It was the face of a former slave turned professional soldier, a Mamluk. He hadn't been a Kipchak for a long time, but he never forgot the Mongols. Neither had the man whose shouting voice called the pursuers to a halt.
His name was Bybars, and like the Mamluk who just loosed the final arrow, he too had traveled a long, hard road from the Kipchak steppe to enslavement to military command. This was his victory. The thousands of dead Mongols in the hills behind them were his work. And, Bybars promised himself, he would climb higher still. I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives.
One of the major points of our inaugural season, which I've been hammering at throughout, is the diversity of experiences that defined the lives of enslaved people. Two people living at the same time, working in the same place at the same task, might have been taken on entirely different paths to get there. For some, life was as bad as it's ever been for a human being. A daily deluge of brutally grueling tasks that ended only in death.
For others, slavery was a temporary state of affairs, and their quality of life was no worse, and perhaps even better than that of an average free person in a given society. Regardless, the defining feature of every enslaved person's life was not how well they ate or what kind of jobs they were assigned, but their subjection to a master. Yet even with that diversity in mind, it can be hard to wrap our heads around the concept of military slavery.
For more than a millennium, powerful individuals in states throughout the Islamic world, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, relied on the slave labor of millions of people who were trafficked from specific regions to fill army ranks, lead troops, and fill key government posts.
Military slavery was an institution unique to the Islamic world. There were many instances of enslaved people fighting, either through coercion or on a voluntary basis, from ancient Athens to the nineteenth century wars of independence in Latin America. But military professionals who were stolen as youths, trained as soldiers, converted to the religion of their enslavers, and given real power and responsibility in adulthood can be found only in the Islamic world.
You might have heard of Janisseries, elite soldiers of the Ottoman sultans, who were the backbone of the conquering armies that spread an empire from the gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf. All were slaves, the Sultan's property to do with as he pleased. Similar institutions existed in the Abbasid Caliphate, the Delhi Sultanate, among the Seljuks, and in countless other places.
Military slavery emerged time and again as a tried, tested, and viable strategy for Islamic rulers to build powerful armies and further the spread of empire, and it appeared almost nowhere else in the world. The most famous example of military slavery is that of the Mamluks of Egypt. Not only did military slaves form a potent fighting force that defeated crusaders, Mongols, and a variety of other opponents for the better part of 300 years,
They also ruled Egypt itself, with ex-slaves and their descendants making up the political and military elite until 1517. One of the first men to ascend from military slave to Sultan is the subject of today's episode, Bybars. At the start of this series, I promised that past lives wouldn't be about Capital G great men.
At first glance, Bybars would appear to be just that, a prototypical great man whose actions altered the course of history. This is a man who stopped the Mongol invasion of West Asia in twelve sixty. And built the structures that supported centuries of Mamluk rule in Egypt. Those are not the aspects of Baibar's life that we'll focus on here. This episode is about Bybars and the years he spent as a military slate.
how that time and experience shaped him into the man who eventually became Sultan? And most of all, what the well documented facts of his life can tell us about the thousands of Mamluks who didn't rise to the highest levels of power in the Islamic world. A couple of notes about sources here before we get started. There's only one strong English biography of Bibarts, The Lion of Egypt by Peter Thoreau. It's good, but now over 30 years old, and it's a bit dangerous.
Otherwise, I've relied on relevant chapters from the Cambridge World History of Slavery and Hannah Barker's outstanding book on the Black Sea slave trade, That Most Precious Merchandise. Let's start by getting our bearings in Bybar's world. Vybars was born sometime in the 1220s, somewhere in the grasslands of the Pontic Caspian steppe north of the Black.
By birth he was a Kipchak or Cuman, a Turkic speaking group that had controlled much of this region between Ukraine and Kazakhstan in varying configurations for the past few centuries. The years of Bibar's youth were turbulent times. A new power was rising in the eastern reaches of the steppe. The Mongols, led by Genghis or Chingis Khan, had exploded out of obscurity in the years before Baibar's birth and remade the map of Eurasia.
Empires fell, millions died, and when the dust settled, a series of new powers controlled the steppe and practically all lands adjacent to it. There had never been an empire larger than the one Genghis Khan and his successors built, and while it lasted only a few decades as a unified entity, it transformed the world into something entirely new. That world of conquest, mass death, forced migrations of entire ethnic groups, and war on an enormous scale was the one that shaped Baibar's early years.
The Mongols' reputation for brutality was well earned. Decades of warring and empire building killed millions and enslaved millions more. For most of the societies in contact with the Mongol war machines, slavery wasn't new. The regions in which they were most active, such as Central Asia and the Black Sea, were already suppliers of enslaved people to the Islamic world and the Christian Mediterranean.
But the Mongol Wars of Conquest made those numbers skyrocket, pouring millions of people into the slave trading networks that tied the distant corners of the medieval world together. Bybars was one of them. There were slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia and in all the lands the conquering Arab armies brought under their sway following the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
As Islamic societies developed everywhere from Iran to Iberia, slavery remained, adding a new layer to inherited structures built by the late Roman Empire and the Sasanids of Persia. Islamic theological and legal thought saw no meaningful conflict between the inherent freedom of all human beings at birth and their absolute, divinely sanctioned commodification and enslavement.
In this, Muslim scholars thought in much the same terms as their Christian predecessors and neighbors, including an emphasis on treating the enslaved with compassion. Freeing slaves, as among Christians, was considered to be a pious act that reflected well on the slave owner. None of this, however, meant that it was any better to be a slave in the Islamic world than it was anywhere else.
For all of its brutality, exploitation, and dehumanization, such as we've seen elsewhere and in other periods, the owning and abuse of human beings and their labor was a banal and unremarkable fact of life. A woman who was abducted from her home near the Black Sea, trafficked hundreds of miles, and sold in the slave markets of Baghdad or Cairo wouldn't have thought she was experiencing a particularly pious form of slavery.
By the tenth century, active trade routes transported captives from Christian Europe, Armenia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean to Muslim entreposs for sale to Bayern. As in the Roman world, slaves served a baffling number of functions. Women were broadly preferred for domestic roles, concubinage, and as companions.
The gendered nature of the slave trade in the Islamic world is notable, and the assumption that enslaved women would be sexually available to their male owners is explicit and universal. Eunuchs, men who were subjected to castration, were increasingly common after the early period and remained so for centuries, probably following Eastern Roman practice.
Eunuchs often played extremely important roles in administration and governance. None of this was particularly unusual. The most unique feature of slavery in the Islamic world was its role in manning the powerful armies of major Muslim states. Military slavery appeared early in the Islamic world. Slaves fought alongside the Prophet and his companions and continued to do so during the centuries of conquest.
By the eight twenties, however, the Abbasid caliphs residing in Baghdad had transformed their use of enslaved soldiers into a full-blown institution. The Abbasids imported male use, mostly of Turkic ethnic descent, from the steppe to the north. trained them, converted them to Islam, and made them the ultra loyal core of a professional standing army. That worked for a while, but within a few decades those former slaves found themselves at the very heart of the Abbasid Caliphate.
For the first time, but not the last, military slaves became the real operators of a vast and powerful state. This process repeated itself over and over again, with military slaves breaking away from larger states and forming their own kingdoms and dynasties over the course of years. Now we have a basic grasp of the world Baibars inhabited. One that was ripping apart at the seams as the Mongols rolled westward through Eurasia, killing millions and displacing millions more.
As we've seen time and again, slavery thrived where misery and violence laid waste. One way or the other, war at such scale produced bodies, living and dead. The living, bybars among them, were more valuable. They were an asset, a source of funding for the next war. As they had for centuries, some of those forced into slavery during these conflicts made their way south into the slave markets of the great cities of the Islamic world.
Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and a dozen others, all trafficking thousands of captives every year. Among them were the boys who would be purchased and selected for a life of military slavery. Little did the conquering Mongols of this age realize that their actions now would lead directly to their defeat in 20 years, as they created the very group of military slaves who would one day. to destroy their forces in Syria.
¶ From Captivity to Mamluk Warrior
Considering the extraordinary position to which he rose, we know surprisingly little of Bibar's early life. His precise birth year is unknown, with dates given between 1220 and 1229. Several sources discuss his youth, but the one we might expect to tell us the most, the official biography written by the head of his chancery, says only that Bybars was a Turk by birth.
Even this information, while limited, is pretty revealing. The biographer, Muhi al-Din ibn Abd al-Zahir, tells us explicitly that he had personal access to bybars, with the implication that the book's biographical details came directly from the Sultan.
He could have provided a detailed genealogy and stirring tales of Baibar's Kipchak ancestors, or talked about how the teenager was marked for greatness from birth, or even invented a distant connection to some prestigious Muslim dynasty to support Baibar's current position as ruler. But all of this is conspicuously miserable. Other accounts of Baibar's life include some of these details, but Ibn Abdel Zahir doesn't.
What authors choose to leave out of their book is often as revealing as what they include, and here we can see clearly that Bybars himself didn't want to dwell over much on his background, or the specific circumstances of his enslavement. The Turk label was important because Turks had been the military protectors of the Islamic world for centuries. Everything else was at best irrelevant and at most actively harmful to the carefully crafted public image of a ruler who had once. Enslaved.
Other sources tell us more. The scholar and administrator Yz al-Din ibn Shadad, a contemporary of Ibn Abdel Zahir, who also wrote a biography of Baibars, questioned a high ranking Mamluk Emir who had been enslaved with Baibars.
According to this text, Baibars was born in twelve twenty seven, the year of Genghis Khan's death in the Kipchak steppe of what is now southern Russia. He lived there until his teenage years, when fear of another Mongol invasion drove his Kipchak tribe to flee their home and seek refuge. They had good reason to be afraid.
The Mongols had decided long ago that the Kipchaks, one of the most powerful ethnic and political groups on the steppe, had to be eliminated or incorporated entirely, a belief that would have powerful ramifications for Baibars and his compatriots later in life.
Precisely where Baibars and his tribe went isn't clear. Is Al Din Ibn Shadad's text says that they crossed the water to reach their destination, but whether that meant they crossed the Sea of Azov to Crimea or the Black Sea to Bulgaria or Anatolia is unknown. Crimea is the most likely answer because we know Kipchaks fled there in large numbers in the late twelve thirties.
Whether it was invading Mongols who descended into the region and destroyed what remained of the Kipchaks or their hosts' own treachery, we hear both, Bybars was ultimately seized and enslaved along with thousands of others. Some later, less reliable sources tell us that Bybars witnessed the death of his parents firsthand.
From this, the most violent turn in Baibar's life, we can track his movements in more detail. We know he was taken across the Black Sea to Anatolia, probably by ship, where he was sold for the first time in the city of Seva. The process was every bit as degrading in the Islamic world as it was in the Roman Empire.
Buyers poked and prodded at the human merchandise, stripped them of their clothing, checked their teeth, questioned them about their skills, and haggled over their value. Bybar's value was a mere eight hundred diarrhums. For many enslaved people, this point of sale represented the end of one journey and the beginning of a new life of slavery.
But Baibar's first buyer in Sivas, a goldsmith, soon returned him to the cellar. The fourteen year old boy had a physical flaw, a small white spot in one of his blue eyes. So Bybars was soon on the move again. Sivas was more of a clearinghouse than a final destination where wholesalers purchased recently enslaved people, mainly from the Black Sea, for transport to major markets further afield. Constantinople, Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus, chief among them.
Bybars was forced overland to Hama in Syria, which was under the rule of an Ayyubid prince, the dynasty brought to power by the famous Saladin in Syria, Egypt, and the Levant 50 years earlier. If you've seen Kingdom of Heaven, Saladin is the main Muslim ruler in that movie. The second slave dealer must have seen something in by bars, because in Hama, the 14-year-old was shown to the Ayyubid prince of the city, Al-Malik al-Mansur Muhammad.
Military slaves were in great demand, and Bybars fit the bill. He was a tall, dark-skinned, blue-eyed Kipchak boy from the steppe, presumably already possessed of all the skills a promising warrior might need. Al-Mansur strongly considered buying it, but the prince's forceful mother, we're told, didn't like the look of the white spot in the boy's eye and counseled against buying it. Bybar's chance at becoming a Mamluke, lowercase M in this case.
seemed to have disappeared, and with it a shot at a far better life than any common slave might aspire to. But luckily for Bybars, there was a temporarily disgraced Amir, or high official of the Ayyubid prince, who was in desperate need of military slaves for his personal household. This man, Allah al-Din Aidakin al-Salihi al-Bun Dakhtar, bought bybars and another Kipchak youth and set about training them as soldiers.
The training was rigorous. Our sources for what this process looked like for newly acquired Mamluks are all later, from the 14th and 15th centuries, but we believe they reflect long-standing practices. Bybars was already familiar with riding and mounted archery, having learned those skills in his earliest youth, but this additional training included the full range of skills required of a professional soldier.
Vaulting onto horseback in layers of armor, hitting a stationary target with an arrow while riding at speed, handling a lance, using a sword both on foot and in the saddle, and doing it all in complex formations of dozens or hundreds of other Mamlukes was all required learning. Bybar's education went beyond the martial, however, and also included a variety of other skills.
Conversion to Islam was required, as was learning to speak and read Arabic, studying the Quran, and memorizing the required prayers. He probably gained a basic understanding of the law as well. Because he was owned by an emir, a high official, rather than the ruler himself, Baibar's education in these matters was probably less formal than it later became under the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, but every component was still essential.
The Emir, who bought and trained by Bars, Al-Bundukhtar, consistently got himself into trouble with his Ayyubid masters. One such transgression had Al-Bunduktar marrying another Emir's concubine without permission, and this was the final straw. His Ayyubid lord Al-Malik al-Salih removed him from command and confiscated his property, Mamluks included.
This was a major step up for Baibars, because Al-Malik al-Sali was the ruler of Egypt and Syria, overlord of the most powerful state in the Muslim Middle East, and the head of his own personal army. Al-Malik al-Sali wasn't particularly secure on his throne, and he desperately needed more soldiers to buttress his position. As such, trained Mamluks like Bybars were in high demand.
At some point in the years between his purchase and his confiscation, Bybars was freed. All Mamluks were, at some point in their training, Unlike most of the enslaved people we've met, however, for whom the prize of freedom was the ultimate goal, Manu Mission barely altered a Mamluk's life. They were totally loyal to their masters while enslaved, and remained so afterward, at least in theory. This was by design.
Byers deliberately severed the ties that connected prisoners to their ethnic groups, as Circassians, Turkomans, Kipchaks, or Tatars, taking away their names, their religions, and their families. Only the raw material, a vigorous youth from a hard land, was worthwhile to the kings, caliphs, and emirs who bought them. This system of isolation and dependency ensured even freed slaves remained close to their former masters.
What little we know of what Mamluks thought about Manumission doesn't seem to indicate it being a major marker in their lives. Roman freedmen never forgot where their manumission documents were located, and took the voice of God to free Saint Patrick. But Mamluks like Bybars, while assumed to have been freed, might never have been formally manumitted at all.
By that point in their careers, and military slavery was a career, what mattered was the fact that they were Mamluks, with respected positions and access to opportunities that far exceeded those of the free Muslim inhabitants among whom they lived. For some scholars, particularly older ones, the high status of military slaves and the lack of emphasis placed on the shift from slavery to freedom means that they don't really count as slaves at all. But that's just not the case.
What defined them was subjection to their masters, the expectation of complete loyalty, and an inability to choose. Even after being freed, military slaves weren't going anywhere. The process of natal alienation, so central to all forms of slavery, had already been completed. The choice didn't belong to them. And that, more than anything else, is why we have to consider them alongside other enslaved people. For his part, Bybars certainly made the most of these opportunities.
¶ Mansura Victory and Slavery's True Cost
Shortly after joining Al Malik al Sali's Royal Mamluks in Egypt, the Bari Regiment, Baibars was promoted to a command rank. Amid the backbiting and vicious politicking of this insecure ruler's court and army, Bybars would soon have the opportunity to prove himself worthy of an even larger role.
On June 4, 1249, a Crusader fleet, led by France's warrior king and Saint Louis IX, anchored off the coast of Egypt. The cream of Christendom's military power had arrived to wage what's generally known as the Seventh Crusade. more than ten thousand infantry, thousands of knights drawn from France's finest nobles, and the full force of the Templar and Hospitaler military order.
This crusader army under Louis's leadership quickly seized the crucial port city of Damietta, but then sat back and waited for months while reinforcements from Europe arrived. This wait was a serious mistake, because it gave the opposing forces, led by a dying Al-Malik al-Sali and his highly competent Mamluks, plenty of time to prepare. Months later, the crusaders attacked the Egyptian forces encamped outside the city of Mansura and put them to flight.
Sensing the stroke that might end the war, or at least win him everlasting glory, the Crusaders' commander, Robert of Artois, Louis IX's brother, pursued the enemy into the tight streets of Monsoura itself, waiting for them in silence. were thousands of Muslim soldiers, Baibars and the lethal core of the Sultan's Mamluks among them.
A French nobleman, Jean Desjuanville, was posted outside Mansur during Robert's attack. After recognizing the trap for what it was, he wrote, the crusaders attempted to retreat. Quote, when our men tried to return, the Turks in Mansur Great beams and blocks of wood down on them as they passed through the streets, which were very narrow. Another source tells us that the defenders dropped the city's gate, trapping the crusaders inside. We can picture the scene from Bybar's perspective.
Not as a commander, which later sources claimed he was, a dubious claim, as Bybars would have been in his early twenties at the time, but as an officer with Mamluks under him. Imagine bybars standing on a rooftop overlooking hundreds of dusty, bloodied crusaders packed into the streets below.
Shouting orders to his soldiers who flung down wooden beams, stones, and roof tiles onto the attackers. Once the crusaders were far enough inside the city, the Sultan's professional slave soldiers, Bybars among them, swarmed in, emerging from alleys and courtyards, isolating groups.
groups of mounted Templar knights or French men at arms and cutting them down as they stood and fought or tried to flee. In the narrow streets of that relatively small city, the combatants fought amid growing piles of bodies. Ears ringing as the shouts and screams of men and horses echoed off towering walls, blood sloshing around their feet.
Whatever fighting Bybars had seen before, it couldn't compare to this tableau of mass death concentrated in the narrowest possible space, with barely enough room to thrust a spear or swing a sword. Could Bybars have imagined, on the day of his capture less than a decade earlier, that he and his compatriots, many of them Kipchaks like him, would be cutting down the brother of the King of France and the Grand Master of the Templars a thousand miles from home?
Could any of them have envisioned the long journey that lay before them, the erasure and replacement of their original identity, the years of training, or the potential opportunities ahead of them? It's doubtless. Nevertheless, it was a journey that thousands upon thousands of boys would make over the next two centuries.
Some of those boys, young teenagers subjected to full blown military discipline and a rigorous, violent military life, would have died in training. More of them died in battle from disease or during one of the many internesine feuds that regularly broke out among military slaves.
Over time, some individuals reached incredibly high ranks. Within a decade of this victory at Mansura, Baibars would come to rule Egypt and Syria, beginning a new career as one of the most powerful, ruthless warrior kings of the Middle Ages. His successors controlled Egypt for more than two hundred and fifty years, until another army composed largely of military slaves, the Janissaries of the Ottoman Sultan, brought them to heel.
Far Moore boys, however, became common Mamluk troopers or were assigned menial tasks behind the front lines. This is the point. The undeniable success of a few within an extractive, abusive, and lethal system like military slavery does not mean that system was somehow good. It just means those few were lucky. Obviously, the system that produced Mamluke's like by bars was extraordinarily effective.
These were skilled, dedicated soldiers who were among the finest warriors to ride onto a medieval battlefield. which is why military slavery was a constant in this region for hundreds of years. To be a Mamluk was not the worst possible fate for an enslaved person around the Black Sea in the later Middle Ages, but make no mistake, even these relatively privileged, highly valued, and usually manumitted people were still slaves.
The systems that produced the Mamluk dynasty of Egypt and gave some a route to power and influence were nonetheless violent, exploitative, cruel, and highly profitable. In that, its similarities with every other form of slavery we've examined couldn't be clearer.
Next time on past lives, we'll follow a much different path from the Black Sea. In the early 15th century, a woman who would eventually be known as Madalena was abducted, transported to Venice, and sold to Cosimo de Medici, the of the notorious Florentine dynasty.
Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our Patreon, linked in the description. It's only$7 a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, QA's with me, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick or on Blue Sky at Patrick Wyman. Past Lives is a 100% independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So thank you.
Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman, the producer is Morgan Jaffe, the music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould, and the story editor is Rachel Cambori. Until next time.