As you’ve alluded to, the collapse of the Mamluk sultanate is a bit more complicated than how it is often talked about. Certainly its collapse was not a foregone conclusion and many factors lead to its sudden fall. First, let’s try to place the end of the Mamluks in their context before the war. And then we’ll discuss how and where the war went wrong for the Mamluks.

Context:

The sultanate had definitely begun to struggle economically by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Following the Ottoman-Mamluk War of 1485–1491, the Mamluk army mutinied, looted their own city of Damascus, and demanded additional pay once in Cairo.^1

The sultan, al-Ghawri, was unable to meet his soldiers demands and attempted to siphon funds from the elite of Cairo. It was then that the government entered a short period of tense relations with the army over their pay. Eventually the soldiers were paid a fraction of their original demand. While this issue seems to have been resolved, it is emblematic of the Mamluk's faltering treasury in their final decades.

This economic hardship was partly driven by plague, which ravaged along the Nile and spread rapidly in the close-quartered Mamluk soldiers (who made up the elite portion of the army) and by the expanding Portuguese influence in the Red Sea.

Cutting off the lucrative spice trade, the Portuguese periodically blockaded Mamluk ports and set fire to Muslim merchant ships entering the region. This period of conflict lasted from 1505 to the sultanates fall in 1517. The legendary Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque even planned to ally with the Ethiopians and the Safavids to retake Jerusalem before he died in 1515.^2

Crusading visions aside, the Mamluks nonetheless truly struggled to counter the Portuguese in part due to their natural lack of wood for ships and metal for cannons. These goods had to be imported from forested and metal-rich areas, such as Anatolia and Europe.^3

As an aside, the Ottoman Empire actually assisted the Mamluk navy on several occasions as part of their history of competitive gift-giving and one-upmanship. Supplying materials and knowledgeable admirals, Ottoman experience proved vital for the Mamluks in challenging the Portuguese bid for dominance of the Red Sea.^4

Nonetheless, this lack of material, such as wood and metal, meant that the Mamluks struggled to support a modern fleet. In the 1516-1517 Ottoman-Mamluk War, this meant that the Ottoman fleet went unchecked as it supported and supplied the Ottoman army along the Levantine and Egyptian coasts.

This lack of metal also meant that the Mamluks struggled to equip their armies with cannons and rifles. There is little to no account of such gunpowder weapons at the Battle of Marj Dabiq, the first battle of the Ottoman-Mamluk War of 1516-1517, on the Mamluk side.

However, it is unclear if the Mamluks were even interested in using such weapons in a significant way before this battle. They certainly had some cannons and some rifles before the battle, but chose to resort to their more traditional form of warfare that had worked for them for several centuries at this point.