Blog #5 Zayni Barakat

I found the book, "Zayni Barakat" to be a very interesting read. A fictional account of the Mamluk Empire, I chose to focus on the fact that had Zayni Barakat been appointed a part of the Ottoman government once the Mamluk Empire had fallen, he would have excelled at this opportunity. Reading Zayni Barakat was a very interesting change for a History class because I had never studied a time period using a fictional book as a source. I found it to be a welcome change of pace and in the end after writing our class paper, I found that it helped to enhance my understanding of how people in this time period lived. It also helped me to understand what sorts of problems governments had to face in these particular regions. My favorite part of the book included the five excerpts from the Venetian Traveller Visconti Gianti. This person, according to the book, visted the Mamluk empire while Barakat was in different positions on five separate occasions. I am very eager to get further into the class because during our colloquium one person mentioned that the book was a parity of the way the Egyptian government was being ran on a separate occasion.