Mamluks

The Mamluks were a slave-soldier military caste that rose from serving the Ayyubid sultans of Egypt to seizing the throne outright in 1250, founding the Mamluk Sultanate that ruled Egypt and Syria for over two and a half centuries. Purchased young, converted to Islam and trained intensively in mounted archery and swordsmanship, Mamluk cavalry inflicted the first major defeat on the Mongol army at Ain Jalut in 1260, halting the Mongol advance into Africa, and later expelled the last Crusader strongholds from the Levant. The Mamluk military system persisted in Egypt in weakened form even after the Ottoman conquest of 1517, until Muhammad Ali Pasha destroyed the remaining Mamluk beys in the 1811 Massacre of the Citadel.