Imperial Strategy and Political Exigency: The Red Sea Spice Trade and the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

A salient issue in Mamluk history of the fifteenth century A.D./ninth century A.H. is the relationship of economic conditions to the formulation of the Sultanate's policies. In a landmark study, England to Egypt, 1350-1500, Robert Lopez, Harry Miskimin, and Abraham Udovitch explained why economic development across Eurasia came to a dead stop in the fourteenth century, leading to stagnant economic conditions that continued through the fifteenth century.1 This characterization in general remains valid. Indeed, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria faced especially severe difficulties. The Black Death, which had swept across the Eurasian landmass in the middle of the previous century, recurred in Egypt over a period of a century and a half and led to a sustained population loss of between one-quarter and one-third.2 By the turn of the fifteenth century, civil conflict in Egypt which resulted in the political ascendancy of the Circassian sultans and Timur's invasion of Syria compounded the economic difficulties the Sultanate continued to face. Udovitch, whose contribution to this study dealt with Egypt, concluded that Mamluk policy during this period of readjustment and recovery was directed fundamentally at responding to economic exigencies.3 If imperial activity is taken as a sign of a state's vitality, however, the reign of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422-38/825-41) stands out as an interlude of concerted initiative in a time of depleted resources. Although Barsbay was not able to reinvigorate the Sultanate's economy, he consolidated the new political order of the Circassians, established by his predecessors, and, to the extent that he was able to expand Cairo's imperial power to Cyprus and the Hijaz, he overcame the limitation of reduced agricultural and industrial wealth. These apparently contradictory tendencies of imperial ambition and economic stagnation require that we adopt a more nuanced view of Barsbay's rule, in order to refine the broadly drawn contour map provided by Udovitch and his coauthors.4 Although the agricultural sector had been hit hard by demographic decline caused by the plague, the trade in spices, and pepper in particular, constituted a vital part of the Mamluk economy. In terms of the transit trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world, Richard Mortel has found evidence in sources from Mecca of an increase in the commerce that