Suchergebnisse

Eunuchs were a common feature of pre- and early modern societies that are now poorly understood. Here, Jane Hathaway offers an in-depth study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the harem of the Ottoman Empire. A wide range of primary sources are used to analyze the Chief Eunuch's origins in East Africa and his political, economic, and religious role from the inception of his office in the late sixteenth century through the dismantling of the palace harem in the early twentieth century. Hathaway highlights the origins of the institution and how the role of eunuchs developed in East Africa, as well as exploring the Chief Eunuch's connections to Egypt and Medina. By tracing the evolution of the office, we see how the Chief Eunuch's functions changed in response to transformations in Ottoman society, from the generalized crisis of the seventeenth century to the westernizing reforms of the nineteenth century

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Problems in Defining Mutiny -- 1 Desertion as Mutiny: Upcountry Georgians in the Army of -- Tennessee -- Mark A. Weitz -- 2 Mutineer Johnny? The Italian Partisan Movement as Mutiny -- Victoria C. Belco -- Part II. Mutiny and Empires -- 3 Ideology, Greed, and Social Discontent in Early Modem Europe: -- Mercenaries and Mutinies in the Rebellious Netherlands, -- 1568-1609 -- David J. B. Trim -- 4 Mutinies on Anglo-Jamaica, 1656-60 -- Carla Gardina Pestana -- Part III. Mutiny in British India -- 5 Vellore 1806: The Meanings of Mutiny -- Devadas Moodley -- 6 Military Culture and Military Protest: The Bengal Europeans and -- the "White Mutiny" of 1859 -- Peter Stanley -- 7 The Indian Army, Total War, and the Dog That Didn't Bark in -- the Night -- Raymond Callahan -- Part IV. Mutiny in Emerging Nation-States -- 8 The Politics of Seduction: Mutiny and Desertion in Early -- Nineteenth-Century C6rdoba, Argentina -- Seth Meisel -- 9 One Hundred Fathers to None: Success and Failure in Two -- Wuhan Mutinies, 1911 and 1967 -- Christopher A. Reed -- Part V. Naval Mutinies -- 10 Mutiny in the Destroyer Division of the Baltic Fleet, -- May-June 1918 -- Anatol Shmelev -- 11 Austro-Hungarian Naval Mutinies of World War I -- Lawrence Sondhaus -- Part VI. Mutiny Remembered, Recounted, Reinvented -- 12 The River Crossing: Breaking Points (Metaphorical and "Real") -- in Ottoman Mutiny -- Palmira Brummett -- 13 The Symbolism of Slave Mutiny: Black Abolitionist Responses -- to the Amistad and Creole Incidents -- Roy E. Finkenbine -- 14 With God on Our Side: Scripting Nasser's Free Officer Mutiny -- Joel Gordon -- Index -- Contributors

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.

For over 350 years, Egypt was the largest province of the Ottoman Empire, which had captured it from the Mamluk sultanate in 1517. It is well known that the Ottomans retained key Mamluk usages, above all in subprovincial administration, and that a number of the defeated Mamluks who were willing to cooperate with the new regime were allowed to join the Ottoman administration. In consequence, a number of practices of the Mamluk sultanate survived the Ottoman conquest. Critical administrative offices such as those of pilgrimage commander (amīr al-ḥajj), treasurer (daftardār), and deliverer of the annual tribute to Istanbul (khaznadār) were analogous to offices of the Mamluk sultanate, and the grandees whom the Ottomans installed in these offices were analogous to the Mamluk amirs of the sultanate. Above all, the practice of recruiting boys and young men from the Caucasus as military slaves, or mamluks, and training them as soldiers in households geared to that purpose appears not only to have survived but to have flourished in Ottoman Egypt. By the time of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, in fact, the province's military elite was dominated by Caucasian, and above all Georgian, mamluks. In the face of such apparent similarities with the Mamluk sultanate, it is tempting to define the military society of Ottoman Egypt as a continuation or revival of the sultanate.