Crossing the line: Mamluk response to Qaramanid threat in the fifteenth century according to MS ar. 4440 (BnF, Paris) 1 Malika Dekkiche University of Antwerp Malika.Dekkiche@uantwerpen.be Abstract The present article investigates the complex dynamics of the relationship between the Mamluk sultans and Qaramanid rulers in the second half of the fifteenth century. Based on the revealing of an unpublished corpus of letters (MS ar. 4440, BnF, Paris), which preserved copies of the corres- pondence exchanged between sultan Īnāl and Ibrāhīm II after the Qaramanids’ Rebellion in 860–862/1456–58 and their capture of the Mamluk fortresses in Tarsus and Gülek. After briefly sketching the history of their contact and alliances, I then concentrate on the Qaramanid Rebellion itself, presenting the new data provided by the corpus and ana- lysing the stakes and extent of the Qaramanids’ threat to Mamluk policy in the Anatolian context. Keywords: Mamluks, Qaramanids, Diplomatic correspondence, Peace agreement, Borders, Buffer-state The history of relations between the Mamluk sultanate and Turkmen beylik of the Qaramanids still remains an unexplored terrain. Through the efforts of Turkish scholars who first investigated the history of the Qaramanids, more is known about the history of the beylik itself, but this knowledge came within the trend of a nationalist history of Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924. 2 Additional material related to the Qaramanid beylik is also included within studies on early Ottoman history that focus on the 1 The first version of this article was completed within the context of the ERC project “The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate. Political Traditions and State Formation in 15th-century Egypt and Syria”, headed by Jo Van Steenbergen (Ghent University, 2009–14, ERC StG 240865 MMS). 2 The practice of nationalist history in modern Turkey is discussed in S.N. Yıldız, “Karamanoğlu Mehmed Bey: medieval Anatolian warlord or Kemalist language reformer? History, language politics and celebration of the language festival in Karaman, Turkey, 1961–2008”, in J. Nielsen (ed.), Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Leiden and Boston, 2012), 147–70. As for the rich Turkish literature (primary and secondary sources) on the Qaramanids, see bibliography in S.N. Yıldız, “Reconceptualizing the Seljuk–Cilician frontier: Armenians, Latins, and the Turks in conflict and alliance during the early thirteenth century”, in Fl. Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2005), 91–120. Bulletin of SOAS, 80, 2 (2017), 253–281. © SOAS, University of London, 2017. doi:10.1017/S0041977X17000453 First published online 17 April 2017 use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X17000453 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Antwerp, on 31 Aug 2017 at 08:04:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of