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The Road to the Citadel as a Chain of Opportunity: Mamluks’ Careers between Contingency and Institutionalization

In the weeks following the demise of the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy in Dhū l-Ḥijja 841/June 1438, although he was immediately—indeed automatically— succeeded by his son, al-ʿAzīz Yūsuf, there ensued a struggle for the sultanate.1 The protagonists here were the amirs Jaqmaq and Qurqumās. Of these two, it was the former who emerged victorious as the next sultan, alẒāhir Jaqmaq. His opponent, Qurqumās, paid dearly for his failed attempt, and was executed in December of the same year. It therefore appears that in spite of being succeeded by his son, Barsbāy’s death sparked off a struggle for the sultanate, and opened up the road to the citadel for a number of Mamluk contestants, all equally eager and seemingly equally eligible to force their way into the citadel and to become the next sultan. While the short-lived sultanate of the fourteen-year-old al-ʿAzīz Yūsuf is interesting enough in its own right, my focus here will not be the issue of underage rule and its common conceptualization as a mere stopgap in a faltering political system. In fact, neither this nor any other similar struggle in fifteenthcentury Mamluk history will be dealt with in much detail here. The reason why I refer to this episode nonetheless is that it provides the historical backdrop for the question raised in this chapter. My central question here is informed first and foremost by bringing together two seemingly disparate quotations: one in relation to the episode above, taken from Ibn Taghrībirdī’s chronicle, al-Nujūm al-Zāhira fī Mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira (“Stars that Shine among the Kings of Egypt and Cairo”); the other is taken from one of the famous speeches or orationes of the Roman author and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, the De Lege Agraria contra Rullum (“On the Agrarian Law Proposed by Rullus”). Agreed, it