Mamlūks, Ottoman period - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
General Material Designation
[Article]
First Statement of Responsibility
Hathaway, Jane
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Leiden
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Brill
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
(2,604 words)
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
From the eleventh/seventeenth through the early thirteenth/nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire made heavy use of mamlūk s , or elite slaves converted to Islam and trained for military and administrative service, from the Caucasus. In doing so, the Ottomans were not so much reviving the institutions of the Mamlūk sultanate as exploiting an alternative pool of military and administrative manpower to the devşirme (devşīrme) , the distinctive Ottoman system of enslaving boys from the empire's rural Balkan and Anatolian Christian populations, converting them to Islam, and training them for