The Madrasa of Sultan Hassan

The Madrasa of Sultan Hassan is not just a masterpiece of Islamic architecture. It’s a weapon of war.

From the time it was built in the early 1360s, the madrasa has been locked in conflict with its enemy, the Citadel, just across the roundabout. They’re like two great warships drawn up side by side, ready to let loose and start pounding each other with full batteries.

And many times during the Mamluk era, they did just that, literally.

This roundabout was often a battleground. Cannonballs, stones, volleys of arrows and pots of fire were flung back and forth from atop the madrasa’s roof and the Citadel’s walls. Across what are now street curbs and grassy median dividers, soldiers charged out of the Citadel gates and from the alleys around the madrasa and smashed into each other. Where taxis and pickup trucks now flow around and around, armored horsemen barreled through like tanks, their lances flaming.

The rivalry between the two monuments was built in from the start.

Hassan was sultan since the age of 11, but throughout his reign he was under the domination of the emirs of his late father, the great Mamluk Sultan al-Nasir Mohammed bin Qalawoun. When Hassan tried to exert his own authority, they deposed him and locked him up in his harem in the Citadel, replacing him with one of his half-brothers. Within a few years, they tired of his replacement, so they carted him off to prison in the Citadel and hauled Hassan back out to install once more on the throne.

In his 20s, Sultan Hassan began to shed their control and avenge the humiliations he suffered at their hands. One senior emir was stabbed to death in the middle of court; another, Hassan imprisoned and executed; and yet another, Hassan ordered his eyes gouged out. To create a corps of loyalists, Hassan elevated his own Mamluks to positions of power and promoted the sons of emirs, the “awlad al-nas,” who were normally excluded from authority.

To demonstrate his power, he began work on his madrasa in 1357. He demolished the palaces of two of his father’s emirs and told his engineers and architects that, in their place, he wanted the highest mosque in the world.

The scope of the project drained the treasury. During construction, one of the four planned minarets toppled, crushing a school for orphans below and killing nearly everyone inside, so Hassan scaled back to two minarets.

But after three years of work, he got the magnificence he had wanted. His madrasa competed in height with the Arch of Ktesiphon, the 35-meter high iwan built by the Sassanians on the Tigris River that was synonymous with monumentality. The madrasa’s mausoleum, meant for Hassan, is the biggest in Egypt; its towering portal entrance is the tallest in Egypt.

It wasn’t just a show of grandeur. Putting this distinctly fortress-like hulk directly in front of the Citadel was Sultan Hassan’s proclamation of defiance, a symbolic challenge directed at the center of the emirs’ authority. The madrasa represented the power of a new generation, centered on Hassan and opposed to the old Citadel establishment, writes Howayda al-Harithi, an architecture professor at the American University of Beirut.

It didn’t save Sultan Hassan, unfortunately. The marble and other finishing touches were still being put on the madrasa when Hassan, then around 26, was murdered in March 1361.

His policy of cultivating a loyalist circle failed. One of his own Mamluks, Yalbugha al-Umari, whom he had elevated to the top ranks of emirs, turned against his master and revolted. Hassan tried to flee but was captured, and Yalbugha had him tortured to death. It’s said Hassan was buried either under a floor in Yalbugha’s stables or in a trash heap outside of Cairo.

Either way, he’s not buried in his own richly decorated mausoleum.

It didn’t take long for everyone to realize that, intentionally or not, Hassan had left a giant, ready-made siege engine parked permanently on the doorstep of whoever ruled as sultan. With its towering height, the madrasa’s roof and minarets made the perfect platform for archers, catapults and cannons to bombard the Citadel.

This helped transform the constant infighting among the Mamluks. Up to that point, pitched battles at the Citadel had been rare. Emirs rising against the sultan usually resorted to court intrigues or assassinations. If it did come to a clash of soldiers, it usually happened outside the city in the deserts at the foot of the Muqattam Plateau.

But after the Sultan Hassan was built, major battles and sieges at the Citadel became a regular thing. Going through the histories of the time, I count at least 16 of them over a span of about 150 years.

The change probably comes from a confluence of trends. For one thing, the nature of Mamluks’ factions evolved during the 1400s in a way that helped amass large forces for rebellions.

At the same time, cannon technology was improving. Cannons first appear in Mamluk chronicles in the mid-1300s, joining older catapult-style siege engines like trebuchets and mangonels. Referred to in Arabic as madfa’a or makhala (plural, madafi’ and makahil), the artillery pieces of various sizes could fire naphtha (a sort of Greek fire), stones, giant arrows, or metal cannonballs.

Chroniclers of the time record the fearsome names of famed cannons: There was the Furious! (al-Ghadban), the Lunatic! (al-Majnouna) and most terrifying of all... the Pussycat and Her Kittens (al-Qutayta wa Awladha), so named because it could fire four projectiles at once.

And the Madrasa of Sultan Hassan made besieging the Citadel more logistically possible.

The madrasa was used as a bombardment platform in 11 of those 16 battles for the Citadel. In all but a few cases, it was decisive for victory.

Its first recorded use in battle was in 1380 by Barqouq, who would eventually become one of the most important Mamluk sultans but who at this point was a senior emir struggling with his rivals.

After getting word that a rival emir, Baraka, was plotting to assassinate him, Barqouq got the jump on him. He took over the Sultan Hassan, deployed archers on its roof and rained arrows down on Baraka’s palace next door. Baraka was captured and paraded through the city in chains on his way to prison.

Baraka was a popular figure, and since everyone wrote poetry about everything in the Mamluk era, a poet mourned his downfall with a verse punning on his name:

“What a sordid state, what an ominous deed / What an ugly conflict when Baraka (“blessings”) is wiped away.”

In later conflicts, the Sultan Hassan was turned directly against the Citadel. The battles tended to follow a particular pattern.

First, let’s explain the battlefield. The present-day roundabout between the Sultan Hassan and the Citadel was then known as Midan al-Rumaila or al-Ramla (the al-Rifai Mosque next to the madrasa did not yet exist). The Citadel gate facing the roundabout was called Bab el-Silsila. (The current gate there, Bab el-Azab was built later by the Ottomans.)

Whoever held the madrasa would set up madafi’ and makahil and archers on the roof and fire down on the Citadel Stables, located just behind Bab el-Silsila on the lowest level of the fortress. It was in the Stables that the Citadel’s defenders usually set up their command headquarters, from which the sultan and his top emirs directed the battle. The defenders would have their own arrays of cannons on Bab el-Silsila and elsewhere on the walls. The two sides’ forces, including Mamluk cavalrymen, foot soldiers, Bedouin horsemen and street thugs organized into mobs, would also clash in Midan al-Rumaila and neighboring Qara Midan Square to the south, often spilling over into nearby streets.

A map showing the relevant parts of the battlefield (based on the map from the 1809 Description de l’Egypte.)

Cannons of the time weren’t powerful enough to actually break through the Citadel walls. Instead, bombardment from the Sultan Hassan was intended to wreak casualties inside the Citadel, set fire to command tents and intimidate the defenders, hoping to break the often-fragile coalitions of emirs backing the sultan and cause them to abandon him.

Several sultans tried to prevent the Sultan Hassan from being used against them. They tore down staircases leading up to the roof and sealed up entrances. It never worked. Besiegers always found ways to break in and get up to the roof. Sultan Janbalat ordered the entire madrasa destroyed. His men hacked away at it for three days, barely putting a dent in it. In the end, his Grand Chamberlain convinced him to halt the demolition, warning that the people would be upset by its destruction “because nothing like it had ever been built in the world.”

One of the fiercest battles at the Citadel came in a revolt against Sultan Uthman in March 1453, only a few weeks after the 18-year-old succeeded his late father Jaqmaq on the throne.

Uthman’s loyalists in the Citadel overwhelmingly outnumbered the rebels. As a result, Uthman was overconfident and failed to secure the Sultan Hassan first.

It was his biggest mistake, the chroniclers of the time say.

On the first day of fighting, a Monday, the rebels dug through one of the Sultan Hassan’s walls and took it over. They installed cannons on the roof and bombarded the Stables. For days, the two sides showered each other with arrows and cannon fire while hand-to-hand fighting raged below. Sitting at home nearly a mile and a half away inside the walled city of al-Qahira, the prominent religious scholar Burhaneddin al-Biqai wrote that the cannons sounded like “rolling thunder” and that he felt the earth shake beneath him.

The leader of the revolt, Emir Inal, directed the battle from his headquarters in the Qousoun Palace next to the Sultan Hassan. He was the picture of calm, writes the historian ibn Taghribirdi, who was there with him. “I looked on his face, unable to tell if he was happy or upset, so firm and rational he remained in all situations,” he wrote. As fighting dragged on for days, Inal reassured his panicking allies, “Citadels fall only with patience, deliberateness and steadfastness.”

After a week of bloodshed came the climactic battle. The Citadel’s defenders sent a surge of fighters out of Bab el-Silsila and drove off an assault by Inal’s men. At the southern side of Midan al-Rumaila, the two sides battled for control of the Sabil al-Mu’meni, a building strategically positioned near the Citadel. Inal’s forces advanced into the midan from multiple directions, moving under the cover of mobile wooden sheds to protect them from the rain of arrows and stones.

Amid the mayhem, according to al-Biqai’s account, a mighty horseman burst into the square, he and his horse so completely carapaced in armor that only his eyes and the horse’s tail were visible. He charged through the midan, holding a lance coated in burning naphtha. (*) Arrows fired from the Citadel bounced off him “like hail bouncing off a mountain.” With a touch of his lance, he set fire to the Sabil al-Mu’meni’s roof.

As the fire spread, wind blew the smoke into the Citadel walls, forcing its defenders back. Inal’s engineers rushed to dismantle part of the wall, and his fighters stormed in.

“The screams and cries were constant, and the earth shook, groaning. The shock broke the spirit of the Citadel’s defenders,” al-Biqai writes. After days of standing firm, Uthman’s forces fell into disarray.

Inal marched into the Citadel and took the throne as sultan. Uthman fled into his harem to hide with his mother and servants, and there he was arrested. Days later, he was paraded in chains on a horse out of the Citadel to the Nile, where he was put on a boat heading to Alexandria Prison.

* The burning lance story may sound too over the top to be true, and perhaps it is. But a Mamluk war manual written around that time, “al-Makhzoun Jami’ al-Funoun,” does have an illustration of horseman carrying a flaming lance, along with a description of how to keep the horse and rider from burning. So apparently it was a thing.

The longest battle at the Citadel came 50 years later in the summer of 1497, when Emir Aqbirdi the Grand Chancellor lay a siege that lasted an entire month, trying to oust Sultan Mohammed, the son of the great Sultan Qaytbay.

Aqbirdi held every advantage. Almost all the top emirs backed his revolt while Sultan Mohammed, holed up in the Citadel, had only a few minor emirs by his side. Aqbirdi also held the trump card, the Sultan Hassan.

Problem was, he didn’t have cannons to fire from it.

Only after the battle began did he call in al-Muallem Dominico, an Italian cannon maker, who set to work forging artillery. The Citadel, meanwhile, had no shortage of cannons, including its big gun, the “Lunatic,” positioned on Bab el-Silsila. With a mighty boom, one of the Lunatic’s volleys blasted through a window of the madrasa, killing three fighters and terrorizing everyone inside.

According to the Mamluk historian ibn Iyas, the fighting went on incessantly every day. Bedouin auxiliaries used by both sides slaughtered each other, carrying off the severed heads of the vanquished. Over the course of the month, 1,000 of them would be killed, ibn Iyas reports.

Inside the Sultan Hassan, el-Muallem Dominico was working excruciatingly slowly, and every day the Citadel’s fire wreaked more casualties in Aqbirdi’s camp. One by one, his allies abandoned the battle, and eventually Aqbirdi was left practically alone with only his own personal Mamluk soldiers fighting alongside him.

On the 31st night of the siege, a large force burst out of the Citadel and attacked the Sultan Hassan. They burned down its door, stormed in and killed or drove off everyone inside. Aqbirdi’s side collapsed; he and his last allies fled Cairo and sought refuge in Syria.

The Madrasa of Sultan Hassan itself then became a casualty of battle.

First, the sultan’s soldiers looted it, rolling up its carpets and carting them off with the chandeliers. Then came the mob. People ran rampant through the madrasa, pulling brass from its windows, hacking marble off its walls, running off with anything of value. After three straight days of looting, the madrasa was left a gutted shell. El-Muallem Dominico, the Italian cannon maker, was caught by the sultan’s Mamluks and beheaded — “punished for no crime,” ibn Iyas shrugs.

The wrecked madrasa was unusable for nearly a year. Eventually, a senior emir named Toumanbay paid to repair it, and Friday prayers in the mosque resumed. Of course, not long after, Toumanbay’s arquebusiers and cannons were blasting from the Sultan Hassan’s roof into the Citadel. He swiftly ousted the sultan of the moment, Janbalat, and took the throne for himself.

View of the midan and the Citadel from the foot of the Sultan Hassan

After the Ottomans took over Egypt in 1517, battles around the Sultan Hassan became less common and smaller in scale.

Evilya Celebi, the Ottoman travel writer, visited the madrasa in the late 1600s and, marveling at its grandiosity, called it a greater fortress than the Citadel itself. He wrote admiringly how cannonballs fired by the Ottomans’ most powerful artillery piece, the 8-meter-long “balyemez”-type cannon, bounced harmlessly off the madrasa’s walls during a recent suppression of rebellious soldiers.

By the 1700s, there was less reason to besiege the Citadel. The Ottoman governors continued to be based there, but the physical center of power shifted to the mansions of the Mamluk beys who really ran things. They attacked each other’s houses regularly in their fights for domination, but they rarely needed the Sultan Hassan as a battle platform.

The construction of the al-Rifai Mosque next door in the 1800s completed the taming of the Sultan Hassan, architecturally speaking. Instead of a lone rebel challenging the Citadel, the madrasa was now part of a pair, sitting contentedly in a new urban plaza.

Still, the scars, dents and pockmarks from years of warfare remain visible on its walls.

Speaking of Evliya Celebi... the great traveler always valued a good, juicy story over a true one, and he relates a legend about the Madrasa of Sultan Hassan that seems fit for us to close on. It illustrates an important point that, with my focus on armies smashing together, I’ve neglected — the place of pride and affection that the madrasa holds in Egyptians’ hearts.

The story is yet another variation of the many tales of what happened to the head of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, after he was killed by the Umayyads at Karbala in 680. In Celebi’s recounting, the killers brought Hussein’s head to Egypt. Here, where the Sultan Hassan now stands, they desecrated the head by playing football with it.

As they kicked it back and forth, God punished them by giving them a disease that caused excruciating swelling in their legs. Then God opened up a small pond around the head to hide it. There it lay until it was taken and put in what is now the Hussein Shrine at Khan el-Khalili.

Centuries later, Sultan Hassan built his madrasa and put a fountain on the exact spot where the pond had been located. When he was killed, so Celebi’s story goes, Hassan was butchered inside his madrasa at the edge of his fountain, “and the blood of Hassan flowed like the blood of Imam Hussein into the pool.”

Ever since, people doing ablutions at the fountain have remembered Sultan Hassan and Imam Hussein together by reciting the Fatiha for their souls, Celebi writes.

Hassan, of course, was the name of Imam Hussein’s brother, both of them the revered sons of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali.

Presumably, Celebi didn’t make up this story out of whole cloth. It must have been a popular legend that he heard from Egyptians. It’s yet another sign of how popular the Prophet’s family has always been in Egypt, where shrines to descendants of Muhammad and Ali and Hussein are all over the place. With this story, Egyptians found a way to link that love to their beloved, gigantesque mosque.