Shajar al-Durr

Shajar al-Durr — 'Tree of Pearls' — rose from slavery to become the only woman to rule Egypt as sultan in the Islamic era, the hinge between the Ayyubid and Mamluk regimes. Of Turkic, possibly Kipchak, origin, she was purchased for the household of as-Salih Ayyub, shared his captivity at Kerak in 1239, bore him a son named Khalil who died in infancy, and was freed and married by the sultan, becoming his most trusted political partner.

Her capacity revealed itself in the crisis of 1249. When as-Salih died at Mansura on 22 November with the crusade of Louis IX of France advancing through the Delta, Shajar al-Durr, with the commander Fakhr al-Din and the chief eunuch, concealed the death, had documents issued over the dead sultan's forged signature, and kept the army intact until the heir Turanshah could arrive from the Jazira. The deception held through the battle of Mansura and contributed materially to the crusade's destruction.

Turanshah's ingratitude toward his father's establishment ended with his murder by the Bahri mamluks in May 1250, and the regiments turned to the widow who had steered the war. Shajar al-Durr was proclaimed sultana of Egypt, with coins struck in her name and her name pronounced in the Friday sermon — styled, in deference to convention, mother of Khalil and wife of as-Salih. The reign lasted about three months. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad refused recognition of a woman's sultanate, and the Syrian Ayyubids rejected Cairo's new order outright. She resolved the impasse by abdicating in favor of the Mamluk commander Izz al-Din Aybak, whom she married, transferring legitimacy to the new regime while retaining much of its substance: she continued to manage state papers and finances through the seven years of Aybak's sultanate.

The partnership ended in mutual destruction. In April 1257, learning that Aybak intended a marriage alliance with a Zangid princess of Mosul, she had him murdered in his bath. The mamluks of Aybak's faction seized her within days; she was beaten to death, by the famous account with wooden clogs by the slave women of Aybak's first wife, and her body cast from the Cairo citadel. She was buried in the tomb-madrasa she had built for herself, which still stands in Cairo.