The Shadow Caliphate at Cairo

In 659 AH (1261 CE) the Mamluk sultan Baybars installed a surviving member of the Abbasid family as caliph in Cairo, reviving the caliphate as a ceremonial office three years after the Mongols had destroyed Baghdad and killed the last Abbasid caliph there in 656 AH (1258). The Mamluks were a sultanate of former slave-soldiers who ruled Egypt and Syria and who had just won enormous prestige by turning back the seemingly invincible Mongols at the battle of Ayn Jalut in 658 AH (1260). With the historic caliphate destroyed and the Islamic world without its symbolic head, Baybars saw the value of having an Abbasid caliph at his own court: a refugee prince of the house was brought to Cairo, formally proclaimed caliph, and in turn issued a diploma investing Baybars with authority over the Muslim lands. The arrangement was a careful exchange of legitimacy. The caliph gave the Mamluk sultanate the sanction of the Prophet's house and the prestige of the historic office; the sultan gave the caliph a dignified but powerless place at his court, a robe, a title, ceremonial honour, but no army, no treasury, and no real authority. This Cairo shadow caliphate, an Abbasid name upholding a Mamluk reality, would be kept by the sultans for two and a half centuries, until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 922 AH (1517) ended it. The episode is recorded by the Egyptian historians al-Maqrizi and Ibn Taghribirdi and analysed by Ibn Khaldun. This scene depicts the nominal investiture inside a ceremonial throne hall of the Citadel of Cairo: the sultan's dais dominant, a man being robed as caliph in the restored Abbasid black, the diploma of mutual investiture exchanged, and the Mamluk court around, the moment a powerless caliphate was revived to crown a powerful sultanate, in the city that had become the new centre of the Sunni world.