Social Infrastructures, Military Entrepreneurship, and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in Fifteenth-Century Cairo

Abstract

This paper engages with the organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate in the long ninth/fifteenth century, focusing particularly on the case of the court position of ‘the Chief Head of the [sultan’s] Guards’ (raʾs nawbat al-nuwab). It explores narrative source reports to identify the sultanate’s sixty ‘Chief Heads’ and to reconsider what they did in this capacity. Through the analytical categories of the court, social infrastructures and military entrepreneurialism, this paper furthers understandings of how these military leaders were all constitutive participants in the era’s complex processes of resource accumulation, violence-wielding, courtly reconfiguration, and state formation.