Scholarship on women during the Mamluk period has been fruitful since Abd ar-Raziq’s monograph on the subject, yet a comprehensive discussion of royal women, such as that of Leslie Peirce’s Imperial Harem for the Ottoman case, has not yet been undertaken. This talk is a step in that direction, analyzing the public presence of Mamluk princesses. I argue that not only were they engaged in politics and society, but also that their primary sphere of influence was in spaces that could not quite be defined as completely public or private. This talk will problematize categories of gender, class, and space through the lens of the accounts of prominent chroniclers of this period, notably al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taghribirdi, and Ibn Iyas. Elite women had paradoxically both greater and fewer opportunities to engage in public life than their lower-class counterparts – while on one hand they were expected to keep stricter seclusion, on the other they could weld power through wealth, alliances, and influencing prominent political figures. Royal women’s presence in the “public” eye furthermore exemplifies the problems with categorizing public and private space in the premodern period. Though medieval scholars conceptualized of a difference between the private life of the home and the public life of the street, their writings indicate that many aspects of life, spaces, and events blurred the lines between them. Royal women were quite influential in the spaces deemed “semi-public”: making strategic alliances and engaging in diplomacy; influencing the Sultan’s decisions and, in the cases of minor sons, likely being a strong influence; using their wealth in calculated ways; making connections between households; and attending celebrations and state ceremonies that allowed them to network with women of other prominent households. The paper will also analyze how the public perception of elite women could be seen as a reflection of popular consensus about the Sultan and, thus, the stability of the Sultanate. At the same time, the most public excursion of royal women, their pilgrimage parades, was a way for the Sultanate, through its female members, to project images of grandeur and piety to its populace.