Historiography of the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk epochs

Abstract

As is evident from other chapters of this volume it would be artificial and misleading to try to separate the history of Islamic Egypt from that of its neighbors, especially Syria and Palestine. After all, the geopolitical situation of Egypt throughout the Middle Ages dictated both the necessity to defend its right flank from encroachments by rival powers in Syria and, to a lesser extent, Mesopotamia, and to secure its commercial interests in the Mediterranean through control of the ports of the Levant. These geopolitical factors were not of course peculiar to the Islamic period and are recurring themes of both ancient and modern times. That being the case, it is not surprising that it is also impractical to confine the historiography of the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk periods to writing about Egypt alone or to those composed by Egyptian authors. Although historians resident in Egypt became more and more prominent in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and an Egyptian group of writers flourished in Cairo during the fifteenth century, for the whole of the Ayyūbid period, Syrian and Mesopotamian authors dominated what was recorded about Egypt. Since, moreover, the Egyptian Ayyūbid sultans, including Salāh al–Dīn, were involved with building and maintaining an empire with its capital in Cairo but including Syria, Palestine, and other territories, there is no history focusing on Ayyūbid Egypt per se, so that it must be studied as a part of Ayyūbid history in general.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.