DAVID AYALON, Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans: A Study of Power Relationships (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1999). Pp. 387. $38.00 cloth.

Abstract

David Ayalon died in June 1998 after a scholarly career of well over half a century, during which he molded the historiography of the Mamluk sultanate, to say nothing of Mamluk studies generally. Throughout his career, he remained an unabashedly old-school empiricist, poring over Arabic narrative sources to recover the elusive realities of the Mamluk sultanate and earlier Islamic polities. His output consisted principally of lengthy, unassailably scholarly articles, each a model of painstaking source criticism and meticulous argumentation. As a result of those articles, we know the structures of the Mamluk sultanate's armies; the true nature of the Mamluk sultanate's relationship to the Mongols; the uses of banishment in the Mamluk sultanate; the place of Circassians in the sultanate; and the overall history of the mamlu¯k, or military slave, institution, to list but a few of the many key topics on which his research shed light—more often than not, the first rays of light. Surprisingly, Ayalon produced only two books before his death: L'esclavage du mamelouk (Israel Oriental Society, 1951) and Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to Medieval Society (Frank Cass, 1978). Nevertheless, his English-language articles alone easily fill four Variorum reprints volumes, with many to spare.