Infantry

These were clearly not counted as part of the Mamluk army proper — the al-askar as-sultani or al-asakir as-sultaniya, as it was called — which is defined by Moslem sources as comprising only the above-mentioned elements, i. e., the mushtarawat, mustakhdamun, mamalik al-umara and al-halqa. Instead they seem to have been hired on an ad hoc basis as, when and where required, usually from amongst the Arab, Turcoman and al-Ashir (Druze)13 population of Egypt and Syria (Gilbert de Lannoy, for instance, mentions the ‘common foot-soldiers along the coast of Syria. . . armed with a bow and arrows, and a great many of them have swords’). Their principal roles were doubtless those of providing garrison troops and besieging fortresses, but occasionally they served in naval campaigns (as, for example, in the invasion of Cyprus) and alongside field-armies, since Mamluk military manuals often include detailed advice on how infantry should be used in battle (see page 77). However, their numbers appear not to have been great during this period, judging from Moslem sources usually comprising only a few thousand at the very most, even under exceptional circumstances (such as revolts by dissident amirs, who tended to field them in the largest numbers). But Western observers now, as in the Crusade period, nevertheless continued to claim that the Mamluks could field large numbers of admittedly poorly-equipped infantry, pricipally bow-armed.