The sultanate that ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517 CE — governed by mamluks, military slaves bought as boys, converted to Islam, and trained as elite cavalry, who seized power from the Ayyubid successors of Saladin and ruled as a self-perpetuating slave-soldier aristocracy in which authority passed among the trained military elite rather than by birth. The Mamluks halted the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut, destroyed the last Crusader states, hosted a shadow Abbasid caliph in Cairo, profited from and taxed the Red Sea and Egyptian route of the spice trade, and fell to the Ottomans under Selim I.
The men who ruled medieval Egypt had nearly all been bought as children. Slave traders carried boys from the steppe north of the Black Sea to markets in Cairo. There the state purchased them, raised them in barracks, converted them to Islam, and trained them in horsemanship and the sword. Freed at the end of their training, they became the most feared cavalry of their age. Then they did something no slave class was supposed to do. They took the throne for themselves. For more than two and a half centuries, Egypt and Syria were governed by former slaves, and a man could rise from the auction block to the sultan's palace.