mameluke's Usage Examples:

MAMELUKE (anglicized through the French, from the Arabic mamluk, a slave), the name given to a series of Egyptian sultans, originating (1250) in the usurpation of supreme power by the bodyguard of Turkish slaves first formed in Egypt under the successors of Saladin.

In the south he was threatened by the dangerous rivalry of Kait Bey, the Mameluke sultan of Egypt, who had extended his power northwards as far as Tarsus and Adana.

He next turned against the Mameluke rulers of Egypt, crushed them, and entering Cairo as conqueror (1517), obtained from the last of the Abbasid caliphs,' Motawakkil, the title of caliph (q.v.) ' After the fall of the caliphs of Bagdad (1258), descendants of the Abbasids took refuge in Cairo and enjoyed a purely titular authority under the protection of the Egyptian rulers.

Much favoured by the earlier viceroys of Mehemet Ali's house, and removed from the Mameluke troubles, Alexandria was the real capital of Egypt till Said Pasha died there in 1863 and Ismail came into power.

The building of Cairo in 969, and, above all, the discovery of the route to the East by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, nearly ruined its commerce; the canal, which supplied it with Nile water, became blocked; and although it remained a principal Egyptian port, at which most European visitors in the Mameluke and Ottoman periods landed, we hear little of it until about the beginning of the 19th century.

The revolution in Egypt in 1250 separated Damascus from Cairo more trenchantly than they had ever been separated since 1171: while a Mameluke ruled in Cairo, Malik-al-Nasir of Aleppo was elected as sultan by the emirs of Damascus.

I Turanshah, deposed 1250, and succeeded by the Mameluke Aibek.

They consented to ally themselves with the ruler of Damascus against the sultan of Egypt; but in the battle of Gaza they were deserted by their allies and heavily defeated by Bibars, the Egyptian general and future Mameluke sultan of Egypt.

Muir, The Mameluke or Stave Dynasty of Egypt (London, 1896); for the Turkish period, G.

On leaving Egypt he travelled by land to the Persian Gulf, disguised as a Mameluke, visiting Damascus, and entering the great mosque undetected.