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

INTRODUCTION 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)