For a long time historians have disputed that the so called Mamluks who as foreign former slave soldiers ruled over large parts of the Middle East during the late middle period had any interest in Arabo-Islamic scholarship at all. In the last years there has been a growing awareness of the fact that a significant share of the foreign slave soldiers who ruled Egypt and Syria in late medieval times occupied themselves with intellectual matters both during their initial training and their adult lives as members of the military elite. Moreover, several cases have been documented in which military slaves embarked on veritable intellectual careers in various fields of knowledge. However, key aspects of the phenomenon of Mamluk involvement in scholarship such as the chronological development of the interests of member of the Mamluk military and the motivations behind their intellectual activities are still largely unknown. Based on the analysis of a large corpus of biographies of Mamluk soldiers and officers, the paper sheds light on the development of learned interests within the Mamluk military elite across time. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that there was indeed a structural need for highly educated members of the military elite in the Mamluk system of rule.