Patrick Wing

MP3 is a complex relational database in Filemaker Pro (developed since 2009 in collaboration with ClickWorks) that re-organises the available (narrative!) source material’s information on individuals/actors and their 'political' actions and interactions (‘who gets what, when and how in late medieval Syro-Egypt’) in such a way that it becomes easily accessible, searchable and researchable, first and foremost from the perspective of the reconstruction of social and political practices and their temporal  and social dynamics.
MP3 is an ongoing 'open' relational database that operates as the basic research tool ('laboratory') for those members of the UGent Mamluk team that use prosopographical, sociographical and discourse-oriented methodologies; it is hosted on an external server (Clickworks-server), and can be worked with by any team member from any working station with internet access.
A simplified selection of prosopographical and institutional data for the period 784-872 AH/1382-1468 CE from MP3 is made available in a basic searchable format (names in transcription or in Arabic) on this website. It has to be noted, however, that this remains work in progress, and therefore cannot claim to be more than indicative of the available material.

This is the first of two connected articles that aim to offer a new perspective on the history of late medi- eval Egypt and Syria, on 15th-century political history of the so-called Mamluk Sultanate in particular. Informed by a comparative look at a selection of wider relevant scholarship, we propose to reconsider 15th-century Syro-Egyptian political action within the particular framework of a complex process of state formation. This perspective, defined as ‘Mamlukization’, may help to better account for change, and for contemporary laments that “things aren’t what they used to be.” In “Part I — Old problems and new trends”, we begin by examining the state of the field of 15th-century Mamluk political history, before laying out the new perspective of ‘Mamlukization’ in Part II. Part I explains how Mamluk scholarship has only recently managed to overcome a traditional tendency to view the sultanate’s political history as a long process of divergence from an idealized system based on military slavery, raising new difficulties. We conclude that there remains a need to replace this decline paradigm with a more useful conceptual framework. If something profound indeed was taking place in the 15th century, something that is not usefully considered “decline,” then what was it?