“Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.”