The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture.

• Author: Bloom, Jonathan M.

This book is a reworking of the author's doctoral dissertation, which won the Malcolm Kerr dissertation award from the Middle East Studies Association in 1991. It reconstructs the history of the Cairo citadel from its founding under the Ayyubids in the twelfth century to the end of the reign of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad (r. 1294-1330 with interruptions). Using a wide range of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, the author excavates through the accreted constructions and reports of succeeding centuries to reveal the process by which the mountain-top citadel acquired its unusual spatial arrangement. Initially conceived as a vital link between the city's northern and southern defensive walls, the citadel came to have two walled enclosures containing barracks, mosques, reception rooms, and palaces which overlooked the maydan, or exercise ground, and the city itself. The meticulous and exhaustive scholarship shows that the author has read and examined everything and forgotten nothing. Specialists in Mamluk history will now be able to localize activities mentioned in their sources, and architectural historians will profit from learned and exhaustive disquisitions on architecture and architectural vocabulary during the early Mamluk period.

This impressive book comprehends several scholarly disciplines. A devoted reader will find not only the author's re-interpretations of early Mamluk political history, but also his summaries of archaeological discoveries in the Cairo citadel as well as his interpretations of the development of Mamluk architecture. The author's passionate imagination of his subject occasionally produces such glowing phrases as "the green meadow of the maydan" (p. 227), an image that will stop any reader who has recently visited Cairo dead in his tracks. More often, however, an accumulation of detail tends to overshadow the bigger picture suggested by the subtitle of the book. A reader with an interest, say, in architectural history, may find much of the political history frankly tedious, while a reader with an interest in Mamluk history will find the archaeology rough going. It is never quite clear where the author's loyalties lie and what he wants his book to be. For example, any reader who perseveres to chapter five, "The Citadel under Qalawun and al-Ashraf Khalil," hardly needs several pages of introduction (pp. 132-35) to the Mamluk system of government. Given this reviewer's own interests and expertise, it...