Slavery and Manumission in Mamluk Egypt and Syria

The Mamluk Sultanate ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517; historians commonly divide its rule into the Bahri period (1250–1382) and Burji period (1382–1517). Mamluk comes from an Arabic word for an owned person, but the ruling military class was only one part of slavery in these lands. Enslaved people also served in households, workshops and other settings. Ownership shaped their work, family ties and legal standing, while their opportunities differed sharply by role and by the power of the household that held them.

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Buying and selling people

Military demand helped connect Mamluk cities to long-distance routes. Historian Jan Hinrich Hagedorn traces Turkish and Circassian recruits from Anatolia, the peninsula that includes much of modern Turkey, and the Black Sea region through ports toward Alexandria and Cairo, or through Anatolia overland to Aleppo and Damascus. Routes from the south brought enslaved people, including Ethiopians, into Egypt and Syria. Sultan Qalawun (r. 1279–1290) urged merchants to import people for the army and households.

In Cairo’s urban market, a seller commissioned a broker to find a buyer. Brokers kept notebooks recording a seller’s name and occupation; foreign sellers also needed a local guarantor whose name was entered. These details let the market inspector trace a transaction and punish abuses, including attempts to sell a free person or someone taken from another owner. Market rules also directed buyers to inspect people for illness and bodily defects. The inspection exposed enslaved people to humiliating scrutiny as they were treated as saleable property.

Military households and training

Purchased military recruits lived in barracks before manumission, the legal release from ownership, and received military instruction alongside a nonmilitary curriculum. Manuals describe training in wrestling, bow shooting, horsemanship, sword and lance use, and coordinated maneuvers. Historian Kristof D’hulster tentatively identifies the early Arabic scribbles in the fifteenth-century Ayasofya MS 1448 as the work of Tamurbāy, a junior recruit. The manuscript also preserves Qayt Sharīfī’s Turkic class notes, giving a specific glimpse of language learning within a barracks setting.

After a recruit was freed, he could enter his patron’s military service. The household that trained them for service could continue to employ them after release, extending the relationship beyond formal ownership.

Household labor, concubinage and power

Enslaved household workers performed a wide range of tasks, from routine service to skilled work. Female slavery could also involve concubinage. Mamluk legal doctrine treated an enslaved woman as sexually available to her male owner, a relationship structured by coercion and the owner’s greater power. Hagedorn finds that most enslaved women in the records were used primarily for labor, though labor and sexual exploitation could overlap. Historian Yossef Rapoport describes fewer concubines in military households in the fifteenth century than in the first half of the fourteenth. He suggests recurrent plague outbreaks reduced the supply of enslaved women, citing plague deaths and changes in household records.

Rapoport’s account of Bulbul, whom he identifies as the enslaved companion of the fifteenth-century Damascene scholar Yūsuf Ibn al-Mibrad, describes her spinning for income and leaving her profits to the poor. Her story shows how women’s production could support both their own spending and charitable giving.

A series of thirteenth-century sale and gift deeds from Upper Egypt follows Khulayfa, a girl born into slavery. At eleven, she was sold to a local druggist’s family for 200 dirhams, the silver currency unit recorded in the deed. Over the next five years, family members sold and gifted shares in her ownership. Her mother, Zubayda, had also been enslaved, but a later deed describes Zubayda as manumitted and still socially attached to the family while Khulayfa remained enslaved. When the husband tried to sell Khulayfa to his brother, his wife revoked an earlier gift of her half-share to their son; that revocation invalidated the husband’s sale. The documents show a woman using her property rights to block a transfer, while the girl at the center of the dispute remained owned.

Concubinage could create a distinct legal status when an enslaved woman bore her owner’s child. Known as umm walad, or “mother of a child,” this status protected her from sale and, under the legal rule, freed her when the owner died. A fifteenth-century notarial manual gives a model court petition in which a woman’s owner denies that she gave birth; she answers that four midwives can testify, then asks the judge to recognize her status and require support, clothing and housing. The example describes a legal form, not a surviving record of that particular hearing. This legal position differed from that of a free wife negotiating a marriage contract, whose marriage rested on a contract rather than ownership.

Paths to freedom and life afterward

An owner could grant release immediately, orally or in writing. A kitāba contract set installments that an enslaved person paid toward release; tadbīr was a promise that freedom would take effect when the owner died. The result could still depend on inheritance law. In one fourteenth-century Jerusalem case, a young owner attempted to free three enslaved people near his death, but a court ruled the release invalid: he lacked legal capacity and had already assigned the portion of his estate he could give away to a hospital. The court ordered the three people sold for the heirs.

A freedwoman’s estate inventory from Jerusalem lists unprocessed and prepared fibers, textile materials, coloring brushes and other tools. Hagedorn identifies her work as combing and spinning flax, cotton and wool, which she likely continued after manumission.