The Madrasa of Emir Azbak al-Yusufi

I just find this madrasa gorgeous. Every time I round the corner, even though I know it’s about to appear, it wows me. It’s a sudden display of drama and color on a quiet residential back street. It kills me that it’s never open, so I’ve never seen inside.

It was built in 1495 by Emir Azbak al-Yusufi, his contribution to the ornate and glorious burst of monumental construction under Qaytbay, the last great Mamluk sultan. Though a senior military figure in his own right, Azbak was a sort of junior partner to a more powerful Azbak — Azbak min Tutukh, who was Qaytbay’s top military commander (or “atabek”) for a startlingly long 30 years and who is better known today as the founder of the Cairo district of Azbakiyya.

The two Azbaks shared a similar trajectory. They climbed the Mamluk hierarchy parallel to each other. Each married a relative of their original master, Sultan Jaqmaq (one his daughter, the other his niece.) They went on Hajj together. They fought alongside each other in military campaigns. And both died in their 80s on the very same day, May 5, 1499.

Among the campaigns in which they both served was the first Mamluk-Ottoman war, from 1484-1490.

The Mamluks and the Ottomans had been on a slow burn of rivalry for quite a while. For two centuries, the Mamluk Sultanate had been the greatest power in the Islamic world, the heir of the caliphate and the center of a blossoming of arts and religious scholarship. But now the upstart Ottomans were rapidly expanding and capturing territory from Muslims and Christians alike.

Ottoman victories challenged the Mamluk’s reputation as the defenders of Islam, which — if it did still shine — did so only because of the patina of age. Generations had passed since the Mamluks defeated the Mongols and Crusaders in the 1200s. Since then, the Mamluks had been happy to sit within their domains of Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz, never bothering to expand.

For a while, the Mamluks and Ottomans kept their tensions contained. They built up busy commercial ties. Their rivalry they hid behind lively, if fraught, diplomacy. To the Ottomans, the Mamluks were a gang of slaves unfit to claim leadership of Islam. To the Mamluks, the Ottoman were barbarians who were barely Muslims. But they maintained a steady exchange of envoys and extravagant gifts — gold, silver, slaves, furs and the occasional elephant, giraffe and leopard — along with communications elaborately calibrated to deliver just the right level of contempt beneath the etiquette and declarations of respect.

My favorite gift/insult is described by Cihan Yuksel Muslu in his recent book “The Ottomans and the Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the Islamic World.” Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, sent a gift of money directly to the Mamluk governors of the Hijaz to repair the neglected, dilapidated wells along the pilgrimage routes. With that one gesture, he both bypassed the Mamluk Sultan in Cairo like he was nuthin’ and highlighted the Mamluks’ failures as Custodians of the Two Holy Places.

On the ground, the two sides jostled for control over the small Turkoman states along their frontier in southern and eastern Anatolia. This turned into the first actual direct confrontation between them in 1484 when the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sent troops to support a Turkoman leader who had switched loyalties from Cairo to Istanbul. Together, their forces entered Mamluk territory.

For the next six years, the two sides fought in for control in the plains of Cilicia, near the corner of the Mediterranean where the coasts of Anatolia and Syria meet.

Sultan Qaytbay assembled the largest Mamluk armies in a century to send in expedition after expedition from Cairo. Most campaigns included Azbak al-Yusufi (our madrasa builder) and were led by the Atabek Azbak (the other Azbak). The two sides traded bits of territory several times. The Mamluks did deal several humiliating defeats to the Ottomans, after getting a bit of luck from a storm that sank the Ottoman naval fleet. In one battle, the Mamluks captured the top Ottoman commander, Bayezid’s son-in-law. After another, they paraded around Cairo with the heads of 200 Ottoman soldiers skewered on their spears.

But neither side was able to gain a decisive upper hand. Eventually, the two sides reached a peace deal that left the frontier where it had always been, It would end fighting between them for nearly 30 years. When war did resume between them, it would end disastrously for the Mamluks, as the Ottomans captured Cairo in 1517, bringing down the Mamluk Sultanate and reducing Egypt to an Ottoman province.

But that was well in the future. Returning home after the peace, Azbak al-Yusufi built this mosque-madrasa, near his own mansion.

And it’s a beauty, bulging out with three open facades to reign over this street. It brims with decoration. The showy red-and-white banding glows from beneath the coating of dust. Plaited tracery zips around windows and arabesque panels, then up, up, up and over the portal’s spandrels, marked with Azbak’s cup blazonry. The circular medallions with the name “Al-Sultan Al-Malik Al-Ashraf Abu al-Nasr Qaytbay” advertise Azbak’s loyalty to his ruler. Red, black and white tendrils twist across the lintel of the window of the sabeel, where people would have come to receive water. Over the entry portal, the retaining arch greets visitors with a flourish of joggled voussoirs that virtually cries out: “Jazz hands!”

The lintels and tracery surrounding the Sabil’s window

Medallion with the name of Sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Qaytbay

It’s not so easy to read in that one, but it’s a bit clearer in this panel below, elsewhere on the facade, with his kunya: “Abu al-Nasr Qaytbay”

The madrasa’s main entrance portal

The top of the portal with Azbak’s cup emblem on each side.

Inside the madrasa are the tombs of Azbak, his wife Banakh and her son, Farag, who died during an outbreak of fever around Cairo a decade before the mosque was built. Farag “was a handsome young man, his beard not yet sprouted, and the people were very sorrowful,” say the annals. He was the son of Banakh’s first husband, Emir Tanam, a much-hated governor of Damascus who died when the boy was three, so Azbak raised him alongside his own daughters with Banakh. Azbak is said to have been devastated when Banakh passed away only a few months before the mosque was finished.

The building campaign under Sultan Qaytbay’s long rule, from 1468 to 1496, was the greatest seen in Cairo since the early 1300s and boosted Mamluk prestige in the face of the Ottomans. At the same time, Qaytbay restored discipline and stability to the declining Mamluk armies.

Unfortunately, competing with the Ottomans was an enormous drain on the treasury. Though the Mamluks held their own in battle, the wars contributed to the exhaustion of the resource-poor Sultanate. Qaytbay tried to squeeze more and more money out of a system that was producing less and less.

Repeatedly, he gathered all his emirs and the top judges to demand they agree to new ways to raise funds. At one session, he complained he had spent 7 million gold dinars on campaigns and declared he had had enough. “Pick yourselves a new sultan!” he shouted, throwing off his robe and marching out of court.

Naturally, they begged him to come back. He did, on condition that they back him in his new tax, taking a full year’s income on everything from properties, agricultural lands and religious endowments to shops, bathhouses and mills. The horrified judges convinced him to reduce the levy and do it in two stages, the first seizing two months’ income, the second taking five months’.

“The people cannot tolerate more than that,” they pleaded.

The tax agents fanned out, “harsh and rough, sparing no one, listening to no pleas of despair. A man might step out of his door and find agents waiting for him, turning his day dark,” writes the main historian of the time, ibn Iyas. In the district of Husseiniyya outside Cairo’s northern gates, the agents descended on a penniless woman living in an abandoned lot and forced her to give up her one source of comfort: the lone jujube tree that gave her shade. They chopped it down and sold off the wood.

It was the poets, always close to the ground in this era, who captured the public’s outcry. As verses quoted by Ibn Iyas put it: “I was taxed two months on my place, and I’m drowning in an ocean of fines! / By the Lord of the sun, moon and all creation, I can’t bear two months, how will I ever bear five?”