This project concerns the history of late medieval Egypt and Syria, of the Cairo sultanate (1250-1517 CE) in particular. It aims to continue the study of the sultanate's (political) elites, of their textual (and especially historiographical) production, and of the discourses of sovereignty and power that circulated among these elites and in their texts, and that connected them to other elites and to other textual and discursive traditions across the wider region of Islamic West-Asia. This project builds on current scholarship in which the rich complexity and diversity of these elites, texts and discourses are not only fully acknowledged but also identified as requiring much more reflexive and careful study, beyond traditional assumptions of the history of the sultanate. To this purpose, this project develops and uses prosopographical as well as distant and close reading tools and methodologies to study the period's main sources (chronicles and biographies).