Historical institutionalists have long been concerned with the conditions under which political institutions provoke their own processes of internal change. This paper explores institutional stability through an examination of changing landholding patterns in Egypt during the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517 CE). Although the mamluk state nominally controlled all agricultural land, I find that regime management of land resources declined in the century preceding the regime's fall. Using data from cadastral land surveys of Egypt from two temporal periods, 1376 and 1480 CE, I demonstrate that land shifted from temporary and revocable land grants offered in exchange for service to the state, to Islamic religious endowments and hybridized land types, representing a transformation away from state authority over agricultural resources to more privatized forms of property control. The mamluk regime made use of a number of coordinated protocols meant to protect the core common pool resource (i.e., state agricultural land); over time, however, predation on collective state resources by individual mamluks, state actors themselves, was a negative externality associated with the foundational principle of the impermissibility of transferring mamluk status to one's sons. As mamluk elites sought to engage in intergenerational transfer of wealth to their progeny, the result was a "chipping away" at the state fiscal base with negative long-term implications for the stability of the mamluk regime. My characterization of mamluk political institutions provides an empirical illustration for a self-undermining institutional equilibrium with implications for understanding how Muslim world political institutions differed from those in other world regions, particularly Western Europe.