マムルーク體制とワクフ--イクター制衰退期の軍人支配の構造

Abstract

With the implementation of the highly systematic and well organized Iqta system, which depended on the completion of the cadastral survey (1313-25), referred to as al-rawk al-Nasiri, in Mamluk ruled Egypt and Syria (1250-1517), the Mamluk state and political system were constructed on this foundation. In this manner, the regimes of foreign military rulers, which were based on the Iqta system, which had been developed in the Arab-Muslim world since the latter half of the tenth century, reached an apex in the highly systematized Mamluk regime. As the fundamental land system of the period, the Iqta system served as the axis of political, military and governmental systems and formed the system that was the core of the ruling structure in which the Mamluks, who comprised the ruling class, controlled rural areas through possession of the Iqta lands and thereby held a grip on the supply of food, public works, economic and religious activities of the cities through the redistribution of the wealth obtained from the rural areas, and this influence reached throughout the entire society. However, the rapid expansion of the amount of land designated as waqf (religious endowment) following the latter half of the fourteenth century had a great influence on the Mamluk regime. This was not limited to the fact that due to the transformation of the state's land (amlak bayt ai-mal) into the waqf, the amount of land that could be distributed for the Iqta's was decreased and the economic foundation of the Mamluks continued to shrink. The increasing importance of the waqf, which was fundamentally independent from state control, as a self-regulating system for the redistribution of wealth that linked the cities and rural areas is thought to be link to the problem of relativizing and reduction of the social role of the Iqta system. From this point of view, I employ narrative and archival sources in this study to consider the sudden expansion of the waqf, whose social role from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century in Egypt and Syria reached a stage that could not be ignored, the influence of the expansion of the waqf on the Mamluk regime, and amidst these factors, how the Mamluk military ruling class maintained the ruling structure, particularly in regard to the economic aspect. As a result, I make clear that they were involved at various levels in the waqf system as donators and beneficiaries, as administrators, and as leaseholders of waqf land, and thereby they were able to obtain wealth and social influence and were also able to maintain the Mamluk regime of ruling structure by incorporating the waqf system within it.