David Ayalon died in June 1998 after a scholarly career of well over half a century, duringwhich he molded the historiography of the Mamluk sultanate, to say nothing of Mamluk studiesgenerally. Throughout his career, he remained an unabashedly old-school empiricist, poring overArabic narrative sources to recover the elusive realities of the Mamluk sultanate and earlierIslamic polities. His output consisted principally of lengthy, unassailably scholarly articles, each amodel of painstaking source criticism and meticulous argumentation. As a result of those articles,we know the structures of the Mamluk sultanate's armies; the true nature of the Mamluksultanate's relationship to the Mongols; the uses of banishment in the Mamluk sultanate; theplace of Circassians in the sultanate; and the overall history of the mamlu¯k, ormilitary slave, institution, to list but a few of the many key topics on which his research shedlight—more often than not, the first rays of light. Surprisingly, Ayalon produced only twobooks before his death: L'esclavage du mamelouk (Israel Oriental Society,1951) and Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to MedievalSociety (Frank Cass, 1978). Nevertheless, his English-language articles alone easily fill fourVariorum reprints volumes, with many to spare.