A newly discovered anonymous manuscript preserved in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, Turkey, sheds light on the previously almost completely unknown early life and career of the pen-ultimate Mamluk Sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-1516). This source (written in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) bears the title al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya fī l-nawādir al-Ghawriyya (The Jewel Necklaces on al-Ghawrī’s Anecdotes). Importantly, it includes a comprehensive discussion of the Sultan’s birth and childhood in Circassia, his transport to Egypt, his education as a mamlūk, and his early military career. Based on information which comes, as the text claims, from the Sultan himself, the source presents the Sultan’s early days as a series of preordained events of cosmic significance which find their logical culmination in al-Ghawrī’s ascension to the sultanate. In presenting the results of a close reading of this manuscript, the paper will: (1) provide a first analysis of the contents of al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya in view of this text’s importance as a new source on late Mamluk history; (2) study the literary specifics of the work in comparison with related texts from the Mamluk period; and (3) tackle the question whether and to what extent al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya can be used as a historical source on the early life of Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī. The paper concludes that the parts of the text that deal with the Sultan’s biography are best viewed as a previously unknown example of the genre of Mamluk “literary offerings” as described in earlier studies on Mamluk courtly literature. Thus, a literary analysis of the work has to pay due attention to issues such as authorial intention, communicative functions and the performative aims which stand behind the composition of the text. Moreover, the paper shows that, if the above-mentioned aspects of a close (con-)textual analysis are properly taken into account, al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya can be used to arrive at a new and far more complete picture of Sultan al-Ghawrī’s early life and career than hitherto deemed possible.