Mamluk
Early origins in Egypt

The practice of recruiting slaves as soldiers in the Muslim world and turning them into Mamluks began in Baghdad during the 9th century CE, and was started by the Abbasid caliph al-Muʿtaṣim.

From the 900s through the 1200s, medieval Egypt was controlled by dynastic foreign rulers, notably the Ikhshidids, Fatimids, and Ayyubids. Throughout these dynasties, thousands of Mamluk slave-soldiers and guards continued to be used and even took high offices. This increasing level of influence among the Mamluks worried the Ayyubids in particular. Eventually, a Mamluk rose to become Sultan of Egypt. The Mamluks in medieval Egypt were predominantly of White Turkic and Circassian origins, and most of them descended from enslaved Christians. After they were taken from their families, they became renegades. Because Egyptian Mamluks were enslaved Christians, Muslim rulers and clerics did not believe they were true believers of Islam despite the fact that they were deployed for fighting in wars on behalf of several Islamic kingdoms as slave-soldiers.

By 1200, Saladin 's brother al-ʿĀdil succeeded in securing control over the whole empire by defeating and killing or imprisoning his brothers and nephews in turn. With each victory, al-ʿĀdil incorporated the defeated Mamluk retinue into his own. This process was repeated at al-ʿĀdil's death in 1218, and at his son al-Kāmil 's death in 1238. The Ayyubids became increasingly surrounded by the Mamluks, who acted semi-autonomously as regional atabegs. The Mamluks increasingly became involved in the internal court politics of the kingdom itself as various factions used them as allies.
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