Shajar al-Durr: the slave who became a sultan

On 2 May 1250, a new name was read aloud in the Friday prayers at al-Azhar mosque in Cairo. This was not a gesture of honour or courtesy: in the Sunni Muslim world of Ayyubid Cairo, to have your name spoken in the khutbah, the formal sermon delivered at the most important mosque in Egypt, was the highest available expression of sovereignty. It confirmed uncontested status as Sultan of the Ayyubid Sultanate. It meant that the armies fought in your name, and that no authority on earth stood above you in Egypt.

The name sung out that Friday, and stamped on fat gold dinars being minted as the khatib chanted, belonged to a woman. A decade earlier, she had been a slave. Now, she was the first Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. Her name was Shajar al-Durr, which loosely translates as Tree of Pearls.

It is a name not given to her by her parents, but by her masters. Shajar al-Durr was kidnapped when she was a young girl and trafficked to the Levant, where she was sold. We do not know what she was called before that. We do not know where she was born, though it was likely somewhere on the Turkic steppe or in the Armenian highlands. The historical record begins, for Shajar al-Durr, at the moment she became useful to powerful men.

What we do know is this: she was given as a concubine to the heir of the Egyptian Sultan, named al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, in the late 1230s. At some point after that, something changed between them, and she became more than just another slave in his eyes. She became his most trusted companion. When – following his father’s death – he was imprisoned in the desert fortress of Kerak in Jordan, while trying to claim his inheritance, she stayed by his side. When he was released and was victorious in reclaiming the Sultanate in Cairo, she shared in his triumph. In 1240, she bore him a son, Khalil. The child died in infancy, but the pregnancy had already elevated her position, and, to the consternation of many, Salih chose to marry her. She had borne his son, and he trusted her completely. That trust, extended across a decade of marriage, would soon be vindicated beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In 1248, Louis IX of France (later to be hailed St Louis) launched the Seventh Crusade with Egypt as his first target. As the wealthiest and most powerful Muslim state in the region, the heart of Ayyubid power, securing Egypt could be the gateway to the recapture of Jerusalem. Louis landed at Damietta in June 1249 and – to the Salih and Shajar al-Durr’s horror – took the city in a single day. He wrote to the sultan that the number of his troops ‘[filled] the mountains and the plains, their numbers being as those of the pebbles on the shore, and they [would] descend upon [him] with the swords of fate’. The crisis facing Egypt was grave: the crusaders were indeed fierce and numerous, and Salih was seriously ill with tuberculosis and ulcers. He was transported to the field in a litter and commanded his troops from his sickbed. All the while, the crusaders advanced.

With Shajar al-Durr beside him, he slipped away on 22 November 1249. His son and heir, Turanshah, was weeks of travel away in Anatolia. At the very moment when the army most needed its leader, the Ayyubid sultanate was without a sultan, and on the brink of collapse. Shajar al-Durr leapt to action.

Conferring with Fakhr al-Din, the emir leading the army, and the chief eunuch, she decided that Salih’s death should be completely concealed. Meals continued to be ordered to the tent, the doctor still visited. Together the trio ate the sultan’s meals, and forged his signature on written orders, dispatching ‘his’ commands to the army and court.

The contemporary chroniclers Ibn Wasil and Sibt ibn al-Jawzi record with surprising agreement that Shajar al-Durr held the defence of Egypt together. It is a remarkable thing to find in medieval Arab chronicles: an unambiguous, united account of a woman as the decisive actor in a military and political emergency.

Their deception held long enough. Fakhr al-Din was killed in battle, but Turanshah arrived and assumed rule in February 1250, in time to lead the army that surrounded and trapped Louis in the Nile Delta, his supply lines cut, his men dying of disease and dysentery. The King of France was captured in April.

Turanshah’s reign lasted only three months however. The same month as the French king was captured, he was assassinated by the Mamluk military commanders. These were soldiers esteemed by his father, but whom he had sidelined and threatened. They were outraged at being passed over and insulted by Turanshah, especially when they had defeated the crusade and protected the sultanate for him. Following his death, his murderers had a power vacuum to fill. With Fakhr al-Din also dead, there was no obvious male choice for the next sultan at hand, and the crisis was still ongoing – although the king was captured, the crusaders still held Damietta.

Against the odds, the mamluks turned to Shajar al-Durr. She was Salih’s widow, and had proven herself repeatedly to be the ablest political mind at court. On top of this, she was one of them: a mamluk, a former slave, elevated by ability and proximity to power. On 2 May 1250, they proclaimed her sultan.

She was – unwittingly – the first sultan of a new dynasty. Although she was chosen for her links to the Ayyubid dynasty, Shajar al-Durr’s reign marked the end of Ayyubid Egypt. She was a mamluk, and mamluks would follow after her.

Her reign saw two major achievements.

The first, extraordinarily, was the ransoming of the king of France, and the ending of the Seventh Crusade. Shajar al-Durr negotiated the king’s ransom with his wife, Margaret of Provence. In exchange for Louis’ release, the French crown would pay 400,000 livres, and return Damietta. Margaret of Provence cuts as impressive a figure as Shajar al-Durr in this instance: not only had she accompanied her husband on his ill-advised crusade, and negotiated his release; she also, in the midst of all this, gave birth to a healthy son, Jean Tristan, at Damietta. Louis was released on 6 May and departed Egypt soon after. Egypt was safe. The defence that made all of this possible had been held together, in its most precarious weeks, by Shajar al-Durr.

The second achievement was the construction of her late husband’s mausoleum, and overseeing his burial, a crucial act that his own son had overlooked.

This was her first major architectural project, and she positioned it at the heart of political and commercial life in Cairo. This placement was very intentional, as was its striking design. As D.F. Ruggles has noted in her seminal text detailing Shajar al-Durr’s architectural patronage, it projected outward into the street: unavoidable, arresting, a daily reminder that she was the widow of a sultan, the keeper of his memory, the legitimate custodian of his legacy.

For all her efficiency as sultan, Shajar al-Durr’s reign did not last. Her position as a ruling female was awkward, as she could not lead the army herself, and other rulers in the region would not accept or respect her, both on the grounds of her sex and former slave status. The Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad reportedly sent a letter to Cairo which threatened that if Egypt lacked men capable of ruling, he would send one. A female sultan was ideologically unacceptable, and the wider Muslim world would not recognise her. After 80 days, Shajar al-Durr ceded the sultanate. She did not, however, cede power.

She swiftly married the new man chosen to replace her, Izz al-Din Aybak, a mamluk military commander elevated to be the male figurehead the world demanded. Shajar al-Durr insisted he divorce his existing wife, the mother of his children, as a condition of their marriage, and forbade him to take another while she lived. For the next six years, Aybak held the title of sultan, but Shajar al-Durr held the power. Shajar al-Durr had simply relocated her power from the visible register – coins, prayers, formal titles – to the invisible one.

Six years later, Aybak broke their agreement. He began negotiating a second marriage – to the daughter of the ruler of Mosul. This political alliance would have given him an independent power base, a legitimacy that no longer depended on her. When Shajar al-Durr discovered this she was furious. Ibn Wasil records: ‘She was filled with jealousy about this and took it very hard; she was very much a Turk with a strong personality and overbearing audacity. She decided to kill him and put another ruler in his place.’ She was as good as her word. Aybak was assassinated in 1257. But she had overplayed her hand.

Aybak’s son succeeded him, and Aybak’s first wife – the woman she had demanded he divorce as the price of their marriage – took her revenge. Her son imprisoned Shajar al-Durr, and while his slaves had promised to do her no harm, Aybak’s first wife had made no such promise. She ambushed Shajar al-Durr bathing in the hammam, and beat her to death with wooden bathing clogs. She then had her body thrown from the citadel, where it lay, broken and unclaimed, for several days, before it was retrieved and buried in the mausoleum she had built for herself, outside the city walls.

This building was simpler than that Shajar al-Durr had built for Salih, and positioned outside the city limits. Within the white structure, with the modest square base and pointed dome, is a mihrab, a prayer niche, designed in an extraordinary manner. Playing across the apse is a mosaic in the damascene style, of green and gold and white tesserae. It depicts a tree of pearls.

Figurative imagery is forbidden in Islamic religious architecture. Yet here, in the most sacred corner of her own tomb, in the place where the faithful direct their prayers, Shajar al-Durr worked in a clear visual reference to herself, to her own name, presented as a living, growing, fruiting thing: rich, prosperous, eternal.

Shajar al-Durr was the first Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. She held together a defence that saved her country. She governed for years as the power behind the throne. The historical record has not been kind to her: she appears in most accounts as a footnote between dynasties, or as a cautionary tale about female ambition due to her catastrophic fall from power. But the tree of pearls in the mihrab remains. It is testament to a woman who began her life with no name, a slave, who grew to become the most powerful woman in the Islamic Mediterranean, founder of the new slave sultanate, and the captor of the French monarch. Her legacy deserves more attention.