Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.3 (2011) 423 The Amir Yalbughā al-Khāṣṣakī, the Qalāwūnid Sultanate, and the Cultural Matrix of Mamlūk Society: A Reassessment of Mamlūk Politics in the 1360s Jo Van Steenbergen Ghent University Ever since the dawn of studies on the Syro-Egyptian Mamlūk sultanate (1260–1517), the senior military commander, or amir, Yalbughā al-Khāṣṣakī (d. 768/1366) has been recog- nized as a key player on the regime’s political scene. Unfortunately, this recognition has traditionally been a negative one, and the picture that prevails in modern historiography is that of “the truly devious emir Yalbugha al-Khassaki,” as one popular Mamlūk history recently put it. 1 Scrutiny of that historiography reveals, however, that such a judgment is inadequate, and that a reassessment of his role in Mamlūk history is therefore largely over- due. At the same time, the exercise conirms that the stereotype of Yalbughā as a transgres- sor of Mamlūk socio-political norms and values has been given precedence—almost in an “Orientalist” fashion—over what really remains of his historical identity, suggesting that such a reassessment should also address deeper, epistemological issues. Yalbughā’s represen- tation in the historiography of the Mamlūk sultanate really only relects, and problematizes, a much larger, dominant research paradigm of long-term Mamlūk decline from an idealized, late thirteenth-century high point, which persists in obfuscating the many dimensions of continuity and change in the sultanate’s long and varied history. 2 The present reassessment of Yalbughā will therefore focus on the following two issues: the micro-historical roles that Yalbughā played and the macro-historical frameworks in which he operated. It will begin with a detailed account, on the basis of all relevant extant source material, of the life and times of the military slave (mamlūk) Yalbughā al-Khāṣṣakī, who rose to prominence in the later 1350s and dominated the Mamlūk political arena in the 1360s until his murder in December 1366 (Rabīʿ II 768) brought his efective rule over the Mamlūk domains to a sudden end. 3 Furthermore, instead of approaching this from the Author’s note: Hijri dates are given only for biographical data or for speciic events that are of importance in the article’s historical timeline and can be traced in the sources. 1. See J. Waterson, The Knights of Islam: The Wars of the Mamluks (London: Greenhill Books, 2007), 229. 2. For an inspiring parallel perspective on Ottoman studies, see D. Quataert, “Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes Towards the Notion of ‘Decline’,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–9. 3. Details for this source material are mentioned below when relevant. This material mainly consists of the traditional narrative data that can be culled from the era’s many annalistic chronicles and biographical dictionaries; for an overview, see D. P. Little, “Historiography of the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk Epochs,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1, Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, ed. C. F. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 432–43. In this context, however, one caveat should be kept in mind: the reports on the events of the late 1350s and early 1360s in the main chronicles of Ibn Duqmāq (745–809/1349–1407) and Ibn al-Furāt (735–807/1334–1405)—which are likely to have informed most other accounts—have not survived, and can therefore only be reconstructed from later, ifteenth-century chronicles, complemented by “Syrian” contemporary chronicles with a more circumscribed interest in Mamlūk politics; see J. Van Steenbergen, Order Out of Chaos: Patronage, Conlict and Mamluk Socio-Political Culture, 1341–1382 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 8–14. For a detailed reconstruction of the historiographical interdepen- dency for these and related chronicles for the slightly later year 778/1376–7, see S. Massoud, The Chronicles and Annalistic Sources of the Early Mamluk Circassian Period (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 13–86. The representative charac- ter of the historical Yalbughā in these diverse source materials is dealt with at length in the irst section of this article.