Waste, Excess, and Obsession in the Mamluk Harem

Royal women, in spite of the restrictions of seclusion, engaged with the urban space of the Mamluk Sultanate at its capital in Cairo in a variety of ways. Modern scholarship has focused primarily on their pilgrimage processions and building projects, the most "visible" manifestations of their influence on Mamluk society and governance. Less studied has been how medieval Islamic scholars constructed their narratives about royal women. What kind of categories and assumptions were in use? What choices did they make in depicting these women? How were accounts of royal women similar or different across different texts, and what can that tell us about Mamluk chronicle-writing more broadly? Using descriptions of royal women written by three prominent Mamluk chroniclers—al-Maqrīzī, Ibn Iyās, and Ibn Taghrībirdī—I emphasize the differences in chronicles in terms of the value judgments that the authors made about royal women and events in their lives and what they chose to emphasize and neglect in weaving together an account of Mamluk reigns. In doing so, I argue that motifs of waste, excess, and obsession are frequently used: waste of precious resources by sultans or the members of their harem, excessive displays of wealth, and sultans' distracting obsession with wives and mothers. Through these themes this article explores broader issues of how chroniclers depict royal women and the variation in such narratives.