5 November 2025
Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen
Michael Martoccio: Let me introduce our speaker tonight. Our speaker is Chris Herde. Chris is a PhD candidate. I am on his committee. So I will be judging everything that you’re doing. It will be on the final. Here at UW, I should say. He’s here at UW. His research is on the competition and recreation cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. Today he’s talking about the history of polo. (applause)
Chris Herde: Thank you all. Thank you, Professor Martoccio for the introduction. And to, thank you also Professor Martoccio and Professor Hall for inviting me, and the War in Society and Culture Program for hosting me. And also, special thanks to Tom for all of the logistical things putting this together.
As Professor Martoccio said, my name is Chris Herde. And I am going to be talking today about the role of sport, and especially polo, in the politics of the medieval Mamluk Sultanate. And I’m going to be examining this largely through the lens of the relationship between sports and war. Between violence and games.
I am hardly the first person to point out that this connection exists. I think the most famous quote or speaker who has had an opinion on this is George Orwell, who wrote in 1945, quote, “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
However, George Orwell also did not originate this idea. I’m in fact teaching an entire class on this—shameless plug—if you are or have undergrads, History 223 next semester. This connection has been discussed implicitly or explicitly for millennia. The classical Greeks and Romans were debating this question 2,000 years ago. Norse sagas present the prowess in games and prowess in warfare as equivalent and transferable skills. The Victorians believe that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The Mesoamerican ball game and the Flower Wars that were conducted by the Aztecs not only blur the line between the two, but they feed back and forth into one another. Knights of the Hundred Years War regularly took breaks from the real fights that they were conducting to have play fights with one another when they were bored or had time off. And finally, chess and the Olympic games were integrated rather seamlessly into the competition, the very serious 00:03:00 and real competitions of the Cold War.
So, there’s always been this association between sports and war that has been acknowledged but not necessarily understood or quantified. Certainly not in any conclusive way. A cursory Google search when I was putting this together on the relationship between the two turned up multiple forums of people emphatically insisting that there was absolutely no connection between them, and it was in fact insulting to both sports and war and the people who participate in them to compare the two. And yet, people keep asking this question. We keep asking this question.
Anyway, so I’m going to be first looking at this combination of the relationship between sports and war, both the way that we think about it now, and the way that it would have been thought about in the Middle Ages, specifically in the Middle East. Then talking a little bit about who are the Mamluks that we’re talking about here. What are they actually doing with their sports. And then moving on to finally the political implications and political uses of those sports.
So, theories about this relationship fall into one of two strands, which would actually be largely comprehensible to a medieval Islamic scholar. The first theory is that sports, especially violent sports, are indicative of some internal aggressive human instinct. And by participating in these faux aggressive activities, pseudo aggressive activities, they are reinforcing a person’s capacity for violence. This is the whole playing fields of Eton thing. It comes with the belief that sports developed out of military training and regardless of what people do to try to change the trappings, to change the externalities of sport, it retains that inherently martial core that it cannot get away from.
In medieval Islamic thought, this type of play would be called jidd, or serious. And it is, in fact, the only form of play that is permissible. According to this canonical hadith, which is number 3,578 in this particular collection, the messenger of Allah, the prophet, said, “Play is only permitted in three things: a man training with his horse, playing with his wife, and shooting with his bow and arrow.”
And the commentators whose treatises over the centuries make up the elaboration of what Islamic law, shariah, is and means 00:06:00 are universal in concluding that the reason why these forms of play are permissible is because they are part of the preparation for and participation in jihad, in holy war in defense of the community and its expansion.
This is the principle that defines the medieval Islamic debates around chess, for example. The medieval Muslims spilled a mid-sized lake worth of ink on the subject of chess. And much of it was concerned with whether or not chess was permissible as an activity. Whether it was jidd. And the argument went that if you accept that chess provides some sort of strategic training, then by analogy it should be permitted according to this hadith. Because while it is not training with a horse or shooting a bow, it is serving the same function. And the people who disagree with that attack one or both of those propositions.
So this is theory one. The other theory is that sport serves as a regulated safety valve for aggression. And in fact make the people who participate in, especially violent sports less likely to go out and commit violence, real violence, in the real world. The International Olympic Committee are very big fans of this particular theory. And this type of play, of sport as a replacement for warfare, fits nicely under the characterization of lahw, which means useless entertainment, frivolous distraction, diversion. Frequently appears in an idiomatic form “lahw wa la’ib”, diversion and games.
And this form of play, which theoretically encapsulates everything that’s not listed in the above, is not sinful per se unless it is distracting or diverting your attention from things that are religiously compulsory. Like for example, attending to prayer times or participating in jihad in defense of the community.
So, a thing to note is these concepts, both the two theories and the Islamic, Arabic terms that they map onto, are closely tied in with systems of morality. Right? For the pious medieval Muslim, jidd is what makes play permissible. Whereas in many modern Western societies, lahw 00:09:00 is mobilized to make violent sports justifiable.
And in both cases, the questions that this raises are inherently political ones. Questions like under what conditions do we as a society approve or disapprove of violence? Under what conditions do we approve or disapprove of leisure? To what degree does one morally counterbalance the other, if they even do? And, really at the root of these questions, is what kind of society do we live in? What kind of society do we want to live in? And how do we get from the former to the latter?
Everybody has lots of ideas, but nobody seems to be able to pin down an exact answer. Nobody really seems to know. And I would argue that is sort of the point. I’m going to be claiming today that sport is made compelling and therefore worth studying specifically because it lies unresolved at the intersection of all of these questions. This is particularly useful for looking at the Mamluks. And it’s also particularly visible because the inherent instability of sport as a concept, especially polo, as alternately and simultaneously war and game, lahw and jidd, real and just for fun, is the very reason why it can be used as an effective tool for legitimizing and stabilizing the Mamluks’ famously volatile regime.
So, before we get into that, what even is a Mamluk?
The Mamluks are an enslaved, foreign- born, non-hereditary, military aristocracy that ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. Now, if you think about any of those words in combination for more than a couple of seconds, none of them should go together in any sort of logical manner. So I’m going to break these down really quick.
First off, enslaved. The word “Mamluk” in Arabic literally means “owned.” It refers to them, but also it can be used to refer to, this house is owned by me. That house would be mamluk. And the Mamluk system was created, really has its roots in the ninth century Abbasid Caliphate and the civil wars that were dividing society at the time. They were intended to form a professional core to the military, and sort of a Pretorian Guard. This is not unique to Islamic society. These sorts of soldiers exist in a large number of, especially pre-modern societies, and even modern ones. So, the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, the pope is surrounded by the Swiss Guard. 00:12:00 And in the present day, the Wagner military, private military company, is serving this role for a large number of authoritarian governments around the world. Or at least they were until their leader got assassinated. Unclear. (laughter)
But the significant difference, the unique thing about the Mamluk system, is that rather than using mercenaries as all of these others do, Mamluks are enslaved. They are purchased from specialized slave traders as children, usually ideally around the age of ten to twelve, and they are trained in the household of their owner for probably eight to ten years. So they are manumitted, they are released from slavery, around the age of twenty. But they stay within the household and frequently are promoted to very high positions of military and administrative authority within that household.
So this is a, not necessarily a cheap way to get a professional military. But it is one effective way to make sure that somebody actually spends all of their time engaging in professional military training. If they just literally have no legal choice in whether they do it or not.
And the closest corollary is, if anybody is familiar with the Ottoman Empire, the Janissary Corps emerges from the same basic philosophy.
So, second, foreign-born. The vast majority of Mamluks are taken from the Turkish steppes in central Asia. And specifically the Black Sea region. This is for a couple of reasons. Number one, the regional instability of the Black Sea region and the type of warfare that the nomadic tribes there understood was mainly based around raiding and this tribal organization. And so therefore, if you have raided one of your neighbors, being able to take some of their people and sell them to the empires yourself is number one, an additional way to make money on the endeavor. And number two, weakens the potential response—the potential and the inevitable response that that tribe, that that kin group is going to inflict upon you, because you have removed more of them who could theoretically fight against you.
More importantly, though, these tribes are reasonably close by and have not generally converted to Islam yet. This is very important because under the provisions of Islamic law, you are not allowed to enslave other Muslims. However, if you 00:15:00 enslave someone and then convert them to Islam afterwards, you have done both them and society a service. And as a reward for your good deed, you get to continue profiting from their labor as long as you would like. Christianity is developing the same workaround at around the same time.
So this means that the Mamluks are non-hereditary. Because Mamluks are converted as part of their training and taught the basics of Islam. Their children are automatically and legally considered to be Muslims, which means they can’t be enslaved. So they cannot go through the system. This isn’t strictly, for the majority of the existence of this system, this isn’t really a problem. Because very few parents actually want their children to be enslaved in military boot camp for eight to ten years. If the Mamluks do rise to a position of authority, they generally set their kids on much more comfortable and much faster paths to wealth and status, like trying to make them companions in a princely court, or educating them as religious scholars. There are better ways to get rich and powerful. Nobody actually really wants to go through this system.
So this isn’t a problem until they become the rulers of Egypt and Syria. Through a long series of improbable mistakes and dramatic assassinations that I cut for time, the Mamluks of Egypt end up taking the throne away from the Ayyubid descendants of Saladin. And unlike other similar coups which happened throughout history, they do not leave a token descendent of their former master’s dynasty on the throne as sort of a puppet. But rather they confer the sultanate in name and in fact on one of their own.
However, at the same time, they keep this non-hereditary Mamluk system intact while reserving all of the executive and military functions of the state for themselves and their class. Generally speaking, the Mamluk class is replenishing itself not through their own children, but through further people who are taken from the Black Sea region and imported as slaves.
This inevitably and immediately raises issues of legitimacy. The Mamluk sultans definitionally are not related to the prophet and have no famous ancestors. Many of them, it is not clear if they even knew who their family was or remember who their family was. They 00:18:00 can’t claim ethnic solidarity with the Egyptian and Syrian Arabs over whom they are ruling. And since they had no say in their relatively late life conversion to Islam, and limited intellectual education on the subject, they don’t really have the religious bonafides to justify their rule, either. Additionally, some of them never really learned to read, write or speak Arabic, the native language, at all, and conduct their business in Turkish. And the few of them who do know Arabic, very few of those know it well enough to engage in the philosophical debates that govern Islam and dominate questions of Islamic law and rulership at this time.
And, because this Mamluk system of importing the next generation from the Black Sea remains intact and retains its monopoly on the sultanate and the other major functions of government, none of this gets resolved over time. The civilian and military elite don’t have very high opinions of each other throughout the entirety of this time period.
Also, on an individual level, this means that very little besides the immediate context separates a Mamluk sultan from his highest officers. Every emir had a theoretically equal claim to the sultanate, and could conceive of himself not only as a possible, but a likely successor to his current boss. This leads to intense feelings of paranoia at the highest levels of power. Sultans know that any other officer could conceivably seize power at any time, and be received more or less as legitimately as they were.
Meanwhile, everyone else knows that the sultan can and will dispossess and imprison or kill anyone they distrust with absolute impunity. There are essentially no legal limits on what the sultan is allowed to do with the lands or the military resources of the sultanate. The only meaningful protection to be found from the whims of the sultan, or at least the only reliable protection, is usually found in allies. Networks of other powerful people who will either intercede on your behalf, or, in extreme cases, threaten to or actually rise up against the sultan for what he did to you.
So this is partially how you get 48 sultans in 250 years. Forty-eight unique sultans. Many of them get deposed and come back two or even three times.
And it’s actually a bit more dire than those numbers suggest. 00:21:00 Because if you take out the four longest reigning sultans, who are something of outliers— Al-Nasir Muhammad, Qaitbay, Baybars and Barsbay, those four collectively ruled for over 100 years. Which means if you take out those outliers, then the remaining 150 years are split between 44 different individual holders of the title, for an average reign of about 3.4 years. Many only rule for a few months. And very few people die of natural causes while still holding this job.
And yet despite all of that, the sultanate does last for 250 years. And not only does it survive, it was the dominant political, military and commercial power in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean throughout much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So, how did they pull that off?
For the purposes of this discussion, their primary claim to, the Mamluks’ primary claim to legitimacy is their status as Mujahidin, or participants in jihad, in holy war. Scholars at the time will often throw around the appellation, the title, “the fortress of Islam” to refer to the Turks as a race or an ethnic group.
So the Mamluks rule less by a threat of violence against their own people than through promises of violence against the Muslim world’s two greatest encroaching threats: the European crusaders, and the Mongols. And to their credit, the Mamluks do follow through on this, especially early on. The Mamluks hand the Mongols their first significant defeat at Ain Jalut in 1260. And they confirm that Syria will be the western, or at least the southwestern border of Mongol expansion at the second battle of Homs in 1281. On the European front, they are responsible—or at least, they claim that they are responsible—for defeating Louis IX’s seventh crusade at Mansura in 1291.
And all of these things go over great with the home audience. This leads, in fact, to many of the smaller Ayyubid princes in Syria handing over their holdings to the Mamluks with only a little bit of extortion required. However, anyone who has studied military dictatorships in really any period of history knows that this brings with it its own series of problems. Legitimacy through force lasts only as long as the military is both present and perceived to be effective. 00:24:00 If the army is defeated or just leaves on an extended campaign, the regime becomes incredibly vulnerable.
Furthermore, since the regime is the army, the majority of the people who are making the decisions about whether or not to go to war are in fact the people who are also going to be doing it, making them a little bit gun shy. On an individual level, any sultan who goes on campaign in his own right, leading the army himself, risks finding somebody else’s butt in the chair when he gets back. And at the same time, if the sultan appoints another officer to lead the army, he is functionally handing the keys to the kingdom over to a potential rival. And as we remember from above, everyone is a potential rival.
So, this is why all those big victories were fought in the thirteenth century against specifically invading opponents. Once the Mamluks neutralize the main external threats to their power, they have very little incentive to seek new foreign conflicts. But they are ruling for another 200 years after this. And you can’t really rest on those laurels forever, right? Especially when you’re importing new generations from the Black Sea. The ability to maintain the connection to those great victories of the past gets very tenuous. In order for martial skill and this status as Mujahidin to serve as a legitimizing force for the sultanate, it needs to be demonstrated and actively pursued.
So, this is how we finally circle back to sports and especially polo. I imagine that some of you, as many of the people I talk to do, heard me say polo and immediately thought of posh Brits taking a tea break midfield while wearing silly hats and knee-high boots. Because that is the modern idea of what polo is. But polo is a much older game than the Brits would have you believe. And also, I would argue, significantly more interesting.
Polo originates in Central Asia. We’re not entirely sure when. But it spread very quickly to China, India and the Middle East, all of whom took it up to varying degrees. At its core, polo is a game with two teams of mounted players using sticks to control the ball and try to send it through some kind of a goal.
The Mamluks are playing in the tradition that comes out of pre-Islamic Iran, really. The primary sources for my specific research on this subject, furusiyya manuals, which detail military training, 00:27:00 veterinary and care for horses, and also the performance of polo, were already being composed and compiled in the House of Wisdom in ninth-century Baghdad. And the game appears frequently and is highlighted in the epic poetry and also Mirrors for Princes’ literature of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish traditions.
And the Mamluks were massive fans of this game. Their chronicles are littered with incidental references to it. Numerous entries will either begin with, “While the sultan was playing polo, so and so came and found him,” or news arrived of this event. Or they will end with, “And then the sultan went and played polo with his emirs and it was a memorable day.” They always include that last bit as well.
The start of the summer polo season was one of the defining events of the Mamluk calendar that was marked with an official letter that had to be sent to the sultan at the second city, Damascus, declaring the season open. As well as with ceremonial processions and a change in the ceremonial clothing of the court. I believe it marks the change from winter to summer clothes.
During these months, the expectation was that the sultan would spend Tuesday and Saturday in the Maydan or on the polo field playing the game. These are just a handful of references that cite those days specifically from an epic poem, a commentary on the Torah, and a biographical encyclopedia respectively.
And polo was still an important aspect of rule right up to the end of the sultanate. The chronicler Ibn Iyas claims that the last real Mamluk sultan, al-Qansuh Ghawri, always rode out on the first day of the season and took to the field and played in at least the first game. Despite the fact that he was a seventy-plus-year-old man who was half blind from an eye infection. Nevertheless, it was essential that he be able to honestly say, “I played polo this year.”
Why, though? Why is it so important that the sultan plays? And why this game? I imagine you’re already starting to draw some connections. So let’s start with the most straightforward one, and certainly the one that they write about and publish about the most. The primary reason polo players give to explain their play is its utility in preparing them for warfare. Even before the Mamluks take over, the twelfth century sultan Nur al-Din stated this explicitly when he was questioned by a scholar of his court as to why he was wasting time playing polo instead of 00:30:00 going and fighting the crusaders.
Nur al-Din responded, saying, “If we leave the horses in their stables, they become lethargic, unable to sustain themselves in pursuit. Nor do they know how to turn with speed in the charge and retreat,” or karr and farr, which is one of the dominant tactics of the Middle Eastern horse archer at the time. “So we ride them and train them through this game. And thereby their lethargy dissipates and they become accustomed to the speed of turning and obedience to the rider in war. This, by God, is what drives me to play ball.”
Essentially, polo is not a separate activity from warfare, and certainly not a distraction from warfare. It is an essential component. They are the same activity. One leads into the other.
This sentiment also appears in basically every treatise on polo, usually quoting the tenth century furusiyya master Ibn Akhi Hizam. And it usually appears as the first line in some form of this first line from his treatise. “Know that striking with the polo stick is among the greatest and most essential opportunities, useful for all who seek mastery of the arts of furusiyya, or horsemanship. Especially the use of the sword and spear and of shooting. It is training for war and exercise for the horses.”
Thus, polo serves as an excellent solution to that legitimacy problem. The scholarly elite generally accept that polo is jidd. And the chronicles report that sultans staged or even played polo matches in front of domestic audiences and foreign ambassadors from the Byzantines, from the Mongols, and later from the Ottomans. And while there’s no way to know exactly how those audiences interpreted the game, the Mamluks’ management of these relationships seems to have been quite successful. They faced little opposition from their civilian population. And most of the uprisings or unrest that did occur were focused on economic woes and usually directed against civilian administrators. Additionally, for most of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the Mamluks managed to avoid conflict with any of their major neighbors.
Hold on, wait a second. Polo is jidd, right? It’s permissible. It’s serious because it’s part of jihad. It’s preparation for fighting. And so because that’s the case, you can fulfill your obligation to fight in the path of God and defend your people by playing polo, which is great, because then that means you don’t actually have to go and fight your neighbors? Which means polo is replacing warfare. Which means it’s lahw. Huh. 00:33:00
So, I could leave the story there and put a nice tidy conclusion on everything. Polo’s connection to violence really serves as an excuse to avoid having to partake in real violence. It’s a replacement. It’s lahw. Theory two confirmed. Case closed.
But, that isn’t the only way that polo appears in the Mamluk sources. And external conflicts are not the only type of violence in the Mamluk world. Let’s talk about internal politics. You remember that big long list of 48 sultans, where I said that most of them were either assassinated or deposed, because every high amir was a potential and even likely successor to the sultanate? Yeah. The Mamluks were at peace with their neighbors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But that does not mean that those centuries were peaceful.
In Arabic, this type of internal conflict, especially internal conflict between and among the rulers, is termed fitna, which can mean civil war, division, internal strife. And it is generally ranked among the worst possible evils that a society could suffer. To the point that chroniclers who are contemporary to the events that they are describing do not even use the word to describe the internal conflicts contemporary to their day. Because fitna represents a complete and utter loss of control and authority on the part of the rulers.
And in this context, in the context of this highly competitive and paranoid environment, and this ever-looming fear of fitna, polo appears to be problematically jidd. It’s dangerously close to real conflict. And careful steps had to be taken to make sure that the competition on the field didn’t spill over or ignite real conflict among the political elite.
An excellent example of this appears in the anonymous and unpublished treatise that is my current focus. In The Book of Knowledge of Striking with a Polo Stick, the author recommends, “If they want to divide the teams by mutual agreement, rather than by lottery, then one captain should name himself Muhammed and the other one Ali. Or one should name himself Hassan and the other one Hussein. Or Sa’d and Sa’id, Nasirr and Mansur, Najah and Najaah, or something else along those lines.”
Then they both step forward and say, “Which of the players is most agreeable to you, Sa’d and Said?” So what we’re dealing with here is the picking of teams before a sporting event. And anyone who has ever played elementary school recess dodgeball knows that picking teams is among the most politically and emotionally fraught processes that humanity has ever devised. 00:36:00 And now add to that the fact that one of the people doing the picking may very well be your autocratic and paranoid ruler. You can envision the situation, right? You don’t get picked first, right? Why didn’t you get picked first? Is it because the sultan thinks you’re incompetent? Or is it because he’s mad at you? Everybody else who are all your rivals saw—your rivals and your allies—saw that you weren’t picked first. Does that mean, are they going to think you’re out of favor? If they do, then that means that you’re not going to be a worthwhile ally to cultivate. As is idiomatically said, your intercession will not be accepted. And if that happens, then your faction is going to shrink. And if your faction starts shrinking, then everyone else is going to rush for the exits before your sinking ship brings them down with you, or they’re going to get out before they get caught in the blast radius of the sultan’s displeasure when he realizes that you no longer have the allies to justify the wealth that you have accumulated up to this point. In that scenario, with those fears, it becomes not only possible to consider, but even logical to believe that one of your only options is to assassinate the sultan before he can throw you in prison and execute you because you are so politically irrelevant that no one will even bother raising their voice to defend you anymore. Because you were picked second in a game of polo.
And add to that the fact that this is a competition, right? Half of the players necessarily must be on the opposite team from the sultan. There are numerous literary anecdotes where companions opt to sit the game out, rather than stand on the other side of the field from their lord.
And even if you do get paired against him, if you play too well you risk embarrassing him and drawing his ire that way. But if you play too poorly, then you’re going to look incompetent. You aren’t going to get invited back. And we’ve started this whole spiral again.
And these fears are especially dire when the sultan is on the field. But crucially, the sultan’s presence isn’t required. Because your defense against the sultan, your position in the society is based on your network of allies. Your patrons, your clients. And appearing like you are weak, like you are out of favor with the other powerful players, like you are isolated, is a really good way to kick off this cycle again. Because your peers and your rivals are the only defense that you have. The only way that you can maintain your station is by staying at an equilibrium with your peers, your rivals, your allies. 00:39:00
So, all of this becomes, in this context, too serious, too real, right? And therefore the game requires an explicit statement of unreality. The first thing to note about this nicknaming ritual is that it means that captains are neither selecting their teammates nor competing under their own names. Right? This is no longer the competition between the sultan and your political patron, right? This is no longer about who the sultan likes best. This is about Hassan and Hussein. This is about Sa’d and Sa’id. This isn’t real. This isn’t about today, right now, us.
The second is the names themselves. The last three pairs are just linguistic inversions. They’re more or less equivalent terms. So, for example, Nasir means “the victorious” and Mansur means “the one who’s granted victory by God.” Other than sounding slightly different, there’s no meaningful distinction between these terms. They are equivalent and just useful for differentiating player A from player B without giving somebody the prominence of being player A and somebody else the prominence of being player B.
However, the first two sets of names do reference historical figures. Muhammed is the prophet. Ali is his son-in-law and his fourth successor. And Hassan and Hussein are both the sons of Ali.
And so, first thing, it’s notable that they didn’t pick names the way modern sports teams pick mascots. This isn’t referencing historically conflicting figures. We don’t pick Ali and Mu’awiya. We don’t pick Muslims versus Mongols. And we don’t even pick conflicting animals. We’re not even picking cats and dogs here. Rather, the names that are selected here are all as politically aligned as they possibly can be while still representing identifiable individuals. Ali is Mohammed’s son-in-law. Hassan and Hussein are brothers. This isn’t just we’re not fighting for real. It’s we are part of the same family.
Thus, this naming ritual, which is essentially role playing, allows the participants to establish a Huizingian magic circle around the game, symbolically separating the contest that they’re about to undertake from the competition that dominates their lives all the other days of the year. In order to avoid this game provoking fitna, it has to be lahw. We have to make sure that it is lahw And everybody understands that it’s not jidd, it’s not serious, it’s not real; it’s just for fun. 00:42:00
Thus, in addition to providing marital legitimacy, polo becomes a mechanism for both building and demonstrating consensus among the Mamluk political elite. Regular public games of polo signaled to the outer world that the major political actors were all in good health, and also all on good terms with one other.
Chroniclers describe sultans riding out to meet newly arrived Mongol defectors and playing a pick up game of polo with them. Or even insisting that a recently-imprisoned amir join them for a game of polo upon his release. Because how could anyone think that there’s real tension between us when we waste so much time together? (laughter)
So hopefully by now I’ve established that there is no single, unified, true essence of polo for the Mamluks. They aren’t pretending that this is jidd when it’s really lahw. Nor are they consciously disguising political maneuvering under the guise of just playing a game. Or, one could say, they are. They’re doing both of those things simultaneously. But there is no, polo is not intrinsically one or the other. It is either or both when we need it to be. And this is exactly what makes polo a productive site for political activity.
Turning briefly back to this naming ritual, I would like to note that while the historical figures of the first two sets are aligned, they are not equal. Ali is great. He’s the pinnacle of manliness. The Mamluks love Ali. But he’s not The Prophet, capital T, capital P. And Hassan and Hussein are brothers. But Hassan is the older brother. This allows for this ritual that is meant to obscure identity and status to still acknowledge identity and status, right? You can accept the false identity for the sultan without disrespecting him. “No, no. No, no, sir. You take Mohammed. I’ll be Ali.”
This also allows for symbolic gestures, such as offering a social equal the higher status title. Right? “No, no. No, no. You be Hassan. I’ll be Hussein.”
I do in fact have some records of emirs making gestures of this sort. Our old friend Ibn Iyas reports two separate episodes in the 1480s where emirs used the polo field to effect reconciliation of serious external conflicts. I won’t go into the details, but in both cases, a politically powerful figure, a sultan or a high court official, drops his mallet on the ground in the course of play. And immediately, somebody who is on the outs with that person or needs something from them, jumps out of the saddle, grabs the polo mallet and hands it back to him.
This is significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is super dangerous. 00:45:00 There are a lot of horses, they are moving very fast. And despite the fact that this supposed to be training you to stop quickly, it is not that easy to stop a horse quickly. And they are very big. The modern rules of polo, in fact, disallow players from dismounting during play for any reason.
Second, it’s not your job to do that. Right? If you look, you see this little fellow down here who’s holding multiple polo sticks? His job is to stand on the sidelines and rearm any players who drop their stick. And note that he is not a player. He is not on horseback. And also the fact that he doesn’t have a beard implies that he is younger. Probably mid-teens. This is a servant, or somebody in a servant role. I would love to be able to prove that he was referred to with the title “Jukandar,” but unfortunately I don’t have enough evidence to make that argument right now. But it is worth noting that he is separated from the players in the center and the spectators at the top of the image.
And even more than an amir taking on the role of a young servant, this act requires one emir to dismount in public in front of another Mamluk. This is a massive deal. The Mamluks are absolutely obsessed with their status as horsemen. Can go into it in the Q&A if you’d like. But dismounting in public is an absolute abandonment of your respect and authority as a member of this class. And so this act, which is performed in the context of an ongoing feud which one cannot outright win, should be profoundly destructive. It should trigger that cycle, right, of you look weak so everybody abandons you. And because people are abandoning you, more people abandon you. And then you end up in political irrelevance.
But that doesn’t happen. What happens in both cases is the mallet dropper immediately, within the next day, resolves the feud in a public manner and showers the dismounter with gifts. And this is possible because it’s just a game. Because they’re just doing it as part of this fun camaraderie thing that they do together. It doesn’t mean anything serious. But the fact that it doesn’t mean anything serious means that they can, that somebody can request an end to a feud, request reconciliation, without losing face. Everyone looks honorable. Everybody looks generous. Consensus is restored.
This is what Peter Donnelly calls the Janus face of sport. Sport is a flexible concept and contains maybe too much of the human experience, honestly. It’s everything from an impromptu playground game 00:48:00 conducted by children to professional athletes destroying their bodies to get a competitive edge. It can be used to bring people together across ideological lines. And it can be used to entrench those divisions even further. Sport can be mobilized to encourage or to replace real violence, and even to redefine what real violence is and how people feel about it. And it can do all of these things only because it has the capacity to do all of the others.
Thank you for your time. I welcome any questions and feedback, as this is likely forming the basis of at least one chapter of my dissertation. Also, another shameless plug for my class. (applause)
48:48
[End Recording.]
Christopher Herde is a PhD candidate in UW Madison’s History Department researching cultures of play and competition around the medieval Mediterranean. His dissertation explores the role of equestrian sports in the construction of relationships and hierarchies among the Mamluk elite. He previously completed master’s degrees in History and Medieval Studies from the Universities of Louisville and York respectively. In addition to the social and political importance of play in the Middle Ages, Chris is fascinated by the design and potential of modern games to engage, inform and shape our understanding of the medieval past. He will be combining both interests in the Spring of 2026 to help students explore the complex and evolving relationship between play and violence in the Middle Ages.