Shajarat al-Durr
"Rage and sorrow are seated in my heart... so firmly that I scarce dare to stay alive. It seems that God wishes to support the Turks to our loss... anyone who wishes to fight the Turks is mad, for Jesus Christ does not fight them any more. They have conquered. They will conquer."
– Unnamed Templar Knight from the 7th Crusade
Shajarat al-Durr was an impoverished 13th-century farm girl from Turkic Armenia whose was kidnapped by the rampaging Mongolian Horde, stripped of her family and her identity, sold off into slavery, and was so inconsequential for the first couple decades of her life that we don't actually know this woman's real name, her age, or where she came from – we simply call her "Shajarat al-Durr", meaning "Tree of Pearls," because that's the nickname they gave her in the harem where she was enslaved.
She would go on to become Queen of Egypt, order the execution of two rightful Sultans, rule the Nile single-handedly with an iron fist and unquestioned authority, crush a European Crusade, defend Cairo from a massive military invasion, take the King of France as a hostage, stamp her name on Egyptian money, overthrow a Dynasty, lay the framework for a military and political institution that would destroy the Mongol Hordes once and for all, and become so beloved amongst the Egyptian people that the site where she died is now home to a mosque that bears her name.
Here is the tale of Shajarat al-Durr – the peasant slave who led a revolution and crushed all who opposed her with a steel-toed boot of justice up the urethra.
As I mentioned in the intro, Shajarat al-Durr's past is dark and mysterious – as is the case with all good badasses. Historians generally believe her to be a Kipchak Turk from somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Armenia, captured by the Mongols and sold off to Egypt as slaves. This was a really common practice – during this period of history, the Mongols sold off women for the Sultan's harem and men to serve as his personal bodyguard, a tough-as-nails fighting force of slave-soldiers known as the Mamlukes. Shajarat al-Durr and her countrymen headed to Egypt, doomed to a life of slavery, but constantly dreaming of a time when they could overthrow their yolk and seize true power and freedom for themselves.
Shajarat first appears in history in 1249, where she is described as a particularly beautiful, intelligent, and cunning member of the Sultan's harem. The Sultan, Salih Ayyub, was apparently so enamored with her that he took her along with him on all of his military campaigns, and her name comes up as having assisted the Sultan in the planning and execution of the war going on in Syria around this time. Which, to be sure, was really not common at all. He was so impressed by her beauty, cunning, and huge balls that he married her in 1250, freeing her from her slavery and making her Queen of Egypt.
Ok, great, that was probably a pretty awesome upgrade, but that same year the Egyptian Sultan also got some really shitty news – it came in a letter, signed by King Louis the Ninth of France, who had just won a huge-ass war of conquests to reclaim some upstart provinces in France and also happened to be super rich because he'd just expelled all the Jews from France and stolen all their money and land and jewels. And now this presumably-pleasant man was sailing full-steam towards Cairo at the head of a badass armada of Crusader knights eager to cleave and slash their way through Egypt in a sea of blood so hardcore it would give the Book of Exodus a boner. The letter read:
I have already warned you many times, but you have paid no heed. Henceforth my decision is made: I will assault your territory, and even were you to swear allegiance to the cross, my mind would not be changed. The armies that obey me cover mountains and plains, they are as numerous as the pebbles of the earth, and they march upon you grasping the swords of fate.
The Seventh Crusade was coming, and it was coming in hot.
An old medieval image of the French amphibious assault on Damiette in 1249 that I find absolutely hilarious. Hello, King Louis! Oh, also, yes, I know the caption says it’s the 8th Crusade, but there’s weird numbering shit going on with the Crusades, and nowadays we’ve settled on the 1249 Crusade being the Seventh Crusade because that’s what it says on Wikipedia.
The Crusader armies of Louis IX landed at the mouth of the Nile, captured the town of Damietta with a badass amphibious assault (no small feat in full plate armor), and within a few weeks there was a huge-ass horde of heavily-armed and armored religious zealots stampeding south towards Cairo singing "Our God Is an Awesome God" and sharpening their blades on the corpses of their enemies. Technically it was Sultan Salih Ayyub's business to handle this sort of shit, but, unfortunately for him, that dude was sick as balls from one of those gnarly old-timey diseases that couldn't be cured by injecting Lysol into your eyes with syringes you crafted from toilet paper origami, and it was pretty obvious to everyone who looked at him that this dude was going to croak any minute now. So, knowing that the Sultan was on his death bed (and also knowing that his son from his first marriage, Turan Shah, was a worthless, pretentious dick that was off galivanting in Nubia or some shit while everyone else in the kingdom was preparing to fight against a fucking Crusade), Shajarat had to make a call – she got together in secret with the top Mamluk military general and the Sultan's personal Vizier, and together they decided that together they'd run things while the Sultan was out of action and not tell anybody if he actually died. Shajarat then went in and asked the Sultan to sign a big stack of blank paper so she could use those signatures to issue orders to the army and the government in his name, which he did, and then she set the Mamlukes out to execute her plan for defending Cairo from this onslaught of Catholic fury. Meanwhile, she did also send for Turan Shah, knowing that by the time the kid showed up he'd probably be the rightful Sultan anyways.
She wasn't wrong. The Sultan died a few days later, leaving Shajarat and her advisors as the sole power in Egypt.
They took that power and shoved it up the ass of the Seventh Crusade.
King Louie in chains following his crushing defeat in the Seventh Crusade.
Louis IX laid siege to the city of Mansourah for over a month, leading in several attacks by badass mounted knights, but the people of Mansourah held the line every single time, sometimes even in brutal street-to-street fighting. The Crusaders were goaded into making mistakes, outstretched their forces, and were defeated, and then, as they were retreating back to the sea, a daring and ferocious Egyptian counter-attack caught the Crusaders strung-out across a large street and utterly annihilated them. Thousands of warriors were killed in the battle, and the King of France found himself the prisoner of the new Sultana of Egypt – Shajarat al-Durr.
The Seventh Crusade was a colossal disaster for Europe, and, over the course of the next few months, the Sultana negotiated terms of surrender with the Queen of France, Margaret of Provence. It's the only peace treaty I can think of from the Middle Ages that was negotiated entirely between two female rulers. Margaret eventually bought her husband back from Egypt for 400,000 livres – about 1.5x the yearly income of the country of France at the time. (He didn't learn his lesson, of course, led an Eighth Crusade in 1260, and died of dysentery outside the walls of Tripoli).
Oh, and also Turan Shah showed up, demanded to take his father's place as Sultan, and immediately ordered that Shajarat hand over the keys to the royal treasury, all of her crown jewels, and decreed that the Mamlukes would be "put in their place," returned to their positions of slavery, and stripped of all power in Egypt.
Shajarat, you'll remember, was a Turk – just like the Mamlukes – and neither her nor her army had any interest in returning to slavery. They had Turan strangled to death, ending the Ayubbid Dynasty in Egypt and installing Shajarat al-Durr as the first ruler of Egypt's new Mamluk Dynasty.
It’s good to be the Queen.
On May 2, 1250 – exactly 770 years ago next week – Shajarat al-Durr was placed on the Throne of Egypt, where she would rule single-handedly as Sultana. She had coins printed with her name on them, they mentioned her as Sultan in prayers at mosques across Egypt, and she exercised sole political power over one of the most powerful Muslim countries in the world – and she did it at a time when women across the world were treated primarily as property and not as human beings.
This lasted for a while, before, eventually, The Man had enough of it and Egypt got a letter from the Caliph of Islam – he wrote, "We’ve heard that you are governed by a woman now. If you’ve run out of men in Egypt, let us know so we can send you a man to rule over you."
The message here was clear – find a King, or become whatever you call it when you're excommunicated from Islam.
Shajarat understood. She married some fucking cuck simp with no power who was basically never heard from again, and, according to the scholars at the time, "she dominated him, and he had nothing to say".
Friday Prayers and the coinage of Egypt continued to list Shajarat al-Durr as the Sultana of Egypt, and she continued to issue royal decrees, dispense justice, command the military, and pass laws unilaterally.
Thirteenth-century Egyptian coinage bearing the name of Shajarat al-Durr. At least, that’s what I’m told, I haven’t been able to read Arabic for over a decade.
Ok, so, that all went well for like another seven years, but eventually the husband got all annoyed about not having any power and told Shajarat that he wanted to take a second wife.
Shajarat, naturally, had that asshole drowned to death in his own bathtub.
Well, as badass as that is, however, Shajarat at this point had become a bit overconfident, and it soon became obvious to everyone in Cairo that she was behind the murder of the Sultan. And, while a lot of people loved her, it also is kind of really uncool to murder people, and the backlash against her assassinating the Sultan was a lot worse than she was expecting – the harem slaves, who were loyal to the Sultan, ambushed her and killed Shajarat al-Durr by throwing her from the tower of her own palace in 1257. The spot where she died is now the site of a mosque that bears her name.
The mausoleum of Shajarat al-Durr.
Shajarat al-Durr is an anomaly in history – a woman from an unknown, impoverished village who rose to power in a civilization that is not well-known for powerful women, and during a time when empowered women were more likely to be executed for witchcraft than appreciated for their intelligence. She defeated a Crusade, ransomed a King, ruled as a Sultan, and established a Dynasty that would rule Egypt from the time of her death up until the times of Napoleon.
Oh, and as an added moment of badass – remember how I said the Mongols burned her home to the ground and sold her into slavery? Well, three years after her death the Mamluk armies (led by fellow badass Baybars) would defeat the Mongol Hordes at the Battle of Ain Jalut and effectively crush their power in the Middle East forever.
As she appears on TV in Egypt these days.
Links:
Books:
Geoffrey. Chronicles of the Crusades. United Kingdom: n.p., 1848.
Jackson, M. Women Rulers Throughout the Ages. United Kingdom: ABC-CLIO, 1999.
Mernissi, Fatima. The Forgotten Queens of Islam. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.