Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn Musallam

During the Mamluk period, various influential families appeared among the Kārimīs. For example, Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn Musallam made huge profits by traveling to India, Ethiopia, Yemen, and al-Takrūr for slaves (ʿabd), becoming the most influential merchant of his age. It is said that when he died in Cairo in 776/1374, he left a fortune to his sons of 200,000 dinars each.

The Kārimīs were generally known as “the merchants of spices and perfumes.” These spices (bahār or tābil) included pepper, clove, nutmeg, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, saffron, and others, from South and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the perfumes (ʿiṭr) consisted of camphor, sandalwood, ambergris, musk, frankincense, myrrh, and so on, mainly from Arabia, South and Southeast Asia. Yajima, based on the Nūr al-Maʿārif compiled in thirteenth- century Yemen, explains that, when trading with India, the Kārimī merchants offered copper, tin, ironware, grinding stones, maḥlab, cumin, musk, mastic trees, dates and the alcohol produced from them, ivory, silk, gold, silver, cotton, flax, leather, kuḥl, sulfur, indigo, and more. While in Egypt, they offered pepper, lac, turmeric, clove, nutmeg, ginger, myrobalan, indigo, myrrh, rice, wheat, and so on.

In addition to the above items, we can confirm that the Kārimī merchants also traded timber (khashab), horses (khayl), sugar (sukkar), pottery (fakhkhār), and slaves (raqīq). As mentioned above, Egyptian sugar and wheat were valuable exports for Italian merchants arriving in Alexandria during the Mamluk period. Nūr al-Maʿārif also states that various kinds of sugar, such as refined sugar (sukkar mukarrar) and white sugar (sukkar abyaḍ), were imported from Egypt to Yemen during the thirteenth century. According to Ashtor, “the Kārimīs were active in several branches of trade and industry. They traded in wheat, precious stones and jewels, cloth, and slaves, and they invested great sums of money in the sugar industry.”