Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages

This new paperback is a Revised Edition with new preface.

When scholars of Middle Eastern and Islamic history consider Mecca or its region, the Hijaz, they tend to focus on either the first century of Islam, when the city and region became briefly the centre of an incipient empire, or the twentieth, when the city was the centre of the Arab Revolt. More than a thousand years of history in between are relatively unknown.

The pre-modern imperial cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo quickly superseded Mecca as centres of politics and long-distance trade, leaving Islam’s premier holy city with its singular role as the destination of the great pilgrimage.

Of course, the religious significance of Mecca attracted the attention of neighbouring rulers, such as the Mamluk sultans of Cairo, who claimed sovereignty over the city to enhance their reputations as paramount Muslim rulers in the later medieval period.

Using sources composed by late medieval Meccan scholars alongside the more well-known Mamluk material, this study presents the history of late medieval Mecca and the Sharifs who ruled the city by examining their relations with local and global forces: their alliances with local groups in the Hijaz, their relations with the imperial centre of Mamluk Cairo, and their reliance on the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean.