Cairo

The city reached its height under the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, whose long reign ended in 1341: by then Cairo held close to half a million people, more than any city west of China. The Black Death broke that prosperity. Ibn Battuta, passing through again in 1348, heard of thousands dying in a single day, and the plague returned more than fifty times before 1517. Yet it was in these grim years that Sultan Hasan raised his madrasa-mosque below the Citadel, the largest monument of the Mamluk age.

The Ottomans, who had beaten the Mamluk army in Syria in 1516, took Egypt the next year and ruled it from Constantinople as a province, with Cairo as its capital. No longer on the spice route, the city's merchants found a new staple in Yemeni coffee, which they carried with Indian cloth to Anatolia, North Africa, and the Balkans, and Cairo stayed the second city of the empire. In the same centuries al-Azhar rose above every other school of the Islamic world, its fame carried home by the pilgrims who passed through on the road to Mecca.