In 1250 the Ayyubids were driven out by their own army of Turkish slaves, known as Mamluks; in 1260 the kingdoms of Aleppo and Damascus were swept aside by the invading Mongols. The Mamluks established a military regime, devising ceremonies and developing an imperial architecture devoted to the exultation of the sultanate. Admired as mighty conquerors with military qualities and revered for their inherently religious power, the sultans were also feared as the lords of cosmic force based on archaic Turkic beliefs. Formidable on the battlefield, the Mamluks wrest the Holy land from the Crusaders and even defeated the Mongol hordes. On the spiritual plane they made the great show of being mainstays of(true)Islam and apponents of the Shias, elevating Sunnism to the status of the state religion, rigidly enforced with preachers, ulama(theological scholars) and Sufis appointed and paid for by the government. Enthusiastic and prolific patrons of religious building, they erected mosques, madrasahs and khanaqah beside mausoleums in their honour. Many had grandiose and elaborate domes and opulent minarets erected to perpetuate their fame. The strict and measured aesthetic of the Fatimids was engulfed by an exuberant hotchpotch of architecture elements, structural clarity being downed out by a haphazard plethora of decorative inlay, making Cairo in to the most extravagant cityscape of the time.