© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341300 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013) 189-217 brill.com/jesh he Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State: Household Politics and the Case of the Qalāwūnid bayt (1279-1382) Jo Van Steenbergen Abstract his article focuses on the conceptualisation of Mamluk socio-political organisation in late thirteenth and early to mid-fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. Breaking free of the heu- ristic constraints imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the political elite as deined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery—the so-called Mamluk system—it demonstrates that apparent dynastic attitudes were no mere façade for that system but rather powerful representations of the Mamluk version of a long-standing regional tradition of socio-political organisation: the military patronage state. It is argued here that this tradition, with its focus on military leadership, patronage ties, household bonds, and unstable devolved authorities, coalesced between 1279 and 1382 in Qalāwūnid leadership over and monopolisation of Syro-Egyptian societies. Keywords Mamluk politics, military patronage state, households, elite integration, social identity, Qalāwūnids his article ofers new insights into the longue durée of the late medie- val Islamic sultanate that once dominated the area between the eastern * Jo Van Steenbergen, research professor, Ghent University, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, B-9000 Ghent (Belgium): jo.vansteenbergen@ugent.be. My thanks are due to Reuven Amitai, Jan Dumolyn, Albrecht Fuess, Angus Stewart, Warren Schultz, and Patrick Wing for their valu- able feedback on earlier versions of this article, and to colleagues and students of the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (Ghent University) and of the Political Culture in hree Spheres: Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin World network, for inspiring “medieval” debates and discussions. his article has also beneited a lot from research undertaken in the ERC-Starting Grant project ‘he Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate. Political Tradi- tions and State Formation in 15th-century Egypt and Syria’ (Ghent University, 2009-14).