The bravest and richest generals and court officials surrounded themselves with bands of warrior slaves, and reached a power almost equal to the reigning sultan, who was, in fact, only _primus inter pares_, and on his death--usually by assassination--they fought for his title. All were alike slaves by origin, but this term implied no degradation. Any slave with courage and address had the chance of becoming a freedman, rising to influence, and climbing into his master's seat. Every man was every other man's equal--if he could prove it; but the process of proving it often turned Cairo into a shambles. The Mamluks were physically superb, a race of born soldiers, dashing horsemen, skilled leaders, brilliant alike in battle and in all manly sports. They were at the same time the most luxurious of men, heavy drinkers, debauched sensualists, magnificent in their profusion, in their splendid prodigality in works of art and luxury, and in the munificence with which they filled their capital with noble monuments of the most exquisite Saracenic architecture. Most of the beautiful mosques of Cairo were built by these truculent soldiers, all foreigners, chiefly Turks, a caste apart, with no thought for the native Egyptians whose lands they received as fiefs from the sultan; with no mercy when ambition called for secret assassination or wholesale massacre; yet fastidious in dress, equipment, and manners, given to superb pageants, laborious in business, and fond of music and poetry. Their orthodoxy is attested not only by their innumerable religious foundations and endowments, but by their importing into Cairo a line of Abbasid caliphs--_fainéants_ indeed, but in a manner representative of the great caliphs of Baghdad, extinguished by the Mongols in 1258--and in maintaining them till the Ottoman sultan usurped their very nominal authority as Commanders of the Faithful. The greatest of all the Mamluks was Beybars (1260-1277). He it was who had charged St. Louis's knights at Mansura in 1249, and afterwards helped to rout the Mongol hordes at the critical battle of Goliath's Spring in 1260; and he was the real founder of the Mamluk empire, and organised and consolidated his wide dominions so skilfully and firmly that all the follies and jealousies and crimes of his successors could not destroy the fabric. He made his army perfect in discipline, built a navy, made canals, roads, and bridges, annexed Nubia, organised a regular postal service, built fortifications, mosques, colleges, halls of justice, and managed everything, from the fourth cataract of the Nile and the Holy Cities of Arabia to the Pyramus and the Euphrates, by his immense capacity for work and amazing rapidity of movements.