alternatehistory.com

One frequent complaint heard about the Crusader States is that they never had enough native troops to defend their borders, and thus were always one decisive Muslim victory away from being destroyed. That decisive defeat came, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem was virtually destroyed, clinging only to a few coastal cities.

In Egypt a short time after the Crusaders were being pushed into the sea, armies of slave-soldiers were being mustered by the various heirs of the Ayyubid dynasty. The slave-soldiers were preferable to locally raised troops because they were loyal only to their master, not to local tribes or communities, meaning that in the case of civil war they could be relied on. These slave-soldiers, known as Mamluks, would eventually overthrow their masters and make themselves Sultans of Egypt. So what-if the Crusader States came up with the same idea? The people who became Mamluks came primarily from north of the Black Sea, and were shipped south to Egypt. The Italians could very easily get into the slaving business, since i believe that the Genoese already controlled one or several Crimean ports.

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