Mamluk sultan of Egypt (1277–1279), the son of the great Baybars, whose weak rule and clashes with the senior emirs led to his deposition and the rise of Qalawun.
Baraka Khan was the Mamluk sultan of Egypt from 1277 to 1279, the son and heir of the great Baybars, who had done more than anyone to build the Mamluk Sultanate into the leading power of the Near East. Baybars had tried to make the sultanate hereditary in his own line, and on his death Baraka succeeded him.
But the young sultan could not command the loyalty of his father's formidable comrades. His attempts to favour his own men against the senior Mamluk emirs provoked a revolt, and in 1279 he was forced to abdicate. After the brief nominal reign of his young brother, the powerful emir Qalawun seized the throne, founding the Qalawunid dynasty that would rule for a century.
Baraka was born in 1260, the son of Baybars, the Mamluk sultan and general who had helped defeat the Mongols at Ain Jalut and had hammered the Crusader states with relentless campaigns. Baybars, unusually among the Mamluks, sought to found a dynasty, associating Baraka with him on the throne and grooming him to succeed. On Baybars's death in 1277, Baraka became sultan.
Baraka Khan is remembered as an amiable but weak and ill-judged young ruler, wholly overshadowed by the memory of his mighty father. The Mamluk system rested not on heredity but on the collective power and mutual loyalty of the great slave-soldier emirs, and Baraka lacked both the standing and the skill to master those hard men who had been his father's equals.
His fatal error was to try to build a power base of his own younger favourites at the expense of the senior emirs, whose resentment he thereby united against himself. He appears as a prince undone by the impossible position of a hereditary heir within a system that did not truly recognise heredity — pleasant enough, perhaps, but without the ruthless authority the Mamluk sultanate demanded, and swept aside the moment he lost the soldiers' confidence.
Baraka's short reign was consumed by his losing struggle with the great Mamluk emirs. His promotion of his own men and his mistrust of his father's veteran commanders alienated the powerful factions of the army, above all the emirs Qalawun and Baysari. In 1279 they rose against him, besieged him in the citadel of Cairo, and compelled him to abdicate.
The throne passed nominally to Baraka's seven-year-old brother, Solamish, but real power lay with Qalawun, who soon set the child aside and made himself sultan.
Baraka Khan was sent away to Kerak and then Damascus, where he died in 1280, only about twenty, a year after his fall. His deposition ended the attempt of Baybars to found a lasting dynasty in his own direct line.
Baraka Khan is remembered as the son whose failure ended Baybars's hopes of a hereditary sultanate and cleared the way for Qalawun. His fall confirmed the essential character of the early Mamluk state — a regime in which supreme power belonged to whichever great emir could command the loyalty of the slave-soldier army, not to the blood of a previous sultan. The Qalawunid line that replaced him would, ironically, achieve the dynastic continuity that Baybars had sought and Baraka had failed to hold.