CHAPTER 3
In June 1798, British ships appeared without warning off the coast of Egypt. A landing party rowed ashore to be received by the governor and notables of what was then the modest port town of Alexandria. The British warned of an impending French invasion and offered their assistance. The governor was indignant: “This is the sultan’s land. Neither the French nor anyone else has access to it. So leave us alone!”1 The very suggestion that an inferior nation like France posed a threat to Ottoman domains, or that Ottoman subjects might turn to another inferior nation like Britain for assistance, clearly offended the notables of Alexandria. The British rowed back to their tall ships and withdrew. No one gave the matter any further thought—for the moment.
The people of Alexandria awoke on the morning of July 1 to find their harbor filled with men-o’-war and their shores invaded. Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived at the head of a massive invasion force, the first European army to set foot in the Middle East since the Crusades. Outnumbered and outgunned, Alexandria surrendered in a matter of hours. The French secured their position and set off for Cairo.
Mamluk horsemen engaged the French army at the southern outskirts of Cairo. In what seemed like a replay of the 1516 Mamluk battle against the Ottomans at Marj Dabiq, the gallant Mamluks drew their swords and charged the French invaders. They never even got within striking distance. The French moved in tight formations, with row upon row of infantrymen maintaining a rolling thunder of rifle fire that decimated the Mamluk cavalry. “The air darkened with gunpowder, smoke and dust from the wind,” a contemporary Egyptian chronicler recorded. “The uninterrupted shooting was ear-deafening. To the people it appeared as if the earth were shaking and the sky were falling in.”2 According to Egyptian eyewitnesses, the fighting was over within three-quarters of an hour. Panic swept the streets as the army of Napoleon occupied the defenseless city of Cairo.
Over the next three years, the people of Egypt came face to face with the customs and manners of the French, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon had intended to establish a permanent presence in Egypt, which meant winning her people over to the benefits of French rule. This was more than a military matter. Accompanying the French infantry was a smaller army of sixty-seven savants, or learned men, who came with the dual mission of studying Egypt and impressing the Egyptians with the superiority of French civilization. With a liberal sprinkling of the ideas of the French Revolution, the occupation of Egypt was the original French “civilizing mission.”
A crucial eyewitness to the occupation was ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1824), an intellectual and theologian with access to the highest echelons of both French and Egyptian society. Al-Jabarti wrote extensively on the French occupation, detailing the Egyptian encounter with the French, their revolutionary ideas, and their astonishing technology.
The gulf separating French Revolutionary thought from Egyptian Muslim values was unbridgeable. Enlightenment values that the French held to be universal were deeply offensive to many Egyptians, both as Ottoman subjects and observant Muslims. This gulf in worldview was apparent from Napoleon’s very first proclamation to the people of Egypt, when he asserted “that all men are equal before God; that wisdom, talents, and virtues alone make them different from one another.”
Far from striking a chord of liberation, Napoleon’s pronouncement provoked deep dismay. Al-Jabarti wrote a line-by-line refutation of the proclamation that rejected most of the “universal” values Napoleon vaunted. He dismissed Napoleon’s claim that all men were equal as “a lie and stupidity” and concluded: “You see that they are materialists, who deny all God’s attributes. The creed they follow is to make human reason supreme and what people will approve in accordance with their whims.”3 Al-Jabarti’s statements reflected the beliefs of Egypt’s Muslim majority, who rejected the exercise of human reason over revealed religion.
If the French failed to win the Egyptians over to the ideas of the Enlightenment, they were nevertheless confident that French technology would impress the natives. Napoleon’s savants brought quite a bag of tricks to Egypt. In November 1798, the French organized the launch of a Montgolfier hot-air balloon. They posted notices around Cairo inviting the townspeople to witness the marvel of flight. Al-Jabarti had heard the French make incredible claims about their airship, “that people would sit in it travelling to distant countries to gather information and to send messages,” and went to see the demonstration for himself.
Looking at the limp balloon on its platform, decorated in the red, white, and blue of the French tricolor, al-Jabarti had his doubts. The Frenchmen lit the Montgolfier’s wick, filling the balloon with warm air until it took flight. The crowd gasped in amazement, and the French took evident pleasure in their reaction. All seemed to be going well until the balloon lost its wick. Without a source of hot air, the Montgolfier collapsed and fell to the ground. The crash of the balloon restored the Cairo audience’s contempt for French technology. Al-Jabarti wrote dismissively, “It became apparent that it was like the kites which servants construct for holidays and weddings.”4 The natives were not impressed.
The French failed to appreciate just how proud the Egyptians were and how humiliating they found the experience of alien occupation. Napoleon’s proclamations seem to cry out for gratitude from the Egyptians, but few Egyptian Muslims would concede their approval of the French or their institutions—at least not to their faces. The chemistry demonstration by Monsieur Bertholet (1748–1822), was a case in point.
Al-Jabarti, who was a regular at the French Institute in Cairo, was once again in attendance. He wrote openly about his amazement at the feats of chemistry and physics he witnessed. “One of the strangest things I have seen in [the Institute] was the following,” he wrote. “One of the assistants took a bottle filled with a distilled liquid and poured a little of it into a cup. Then he poured something from another bottle. The two liquids boiled and coloured smoke rose from them until it ceased and the contents of the cup dried and became a yellow stone. He turned it out on the shelf. It was a dry stone which we took in our hand and examined.” This transformation of liquids to solids was followed by demonstrations of the flammable properties of gasses and the volatility of pure sodium, which, when struck “gently with a hammer,” made “a terrifying noise like the sound of a carbine.” Al-Jabarti resented the savants’ amusement when he and his Egyptian compatriots were startled by the bang.
The pièce de resistance was a demonstration of the properties of electricity using Leyden jars, first developed as electrostatic generators in 1746. “If one held its connections . . . and with his other hand touched the end of the revolving glass . . . his body would shake and his frame tremble. The bones of his shoulder would rattle and his forearms immediately tremble. Anyone who touched the person in contact, or any of his clothes, or anything connected to him, experienced the same thing—even if it were a thousand or more people.”
No doubt the Egyptians present at the demonstration were very impressed by what they had seen. However, they did their best not to show their amazement. One of Napoleon’s aides who witnessed the chemistry demonstration later wrote how “all of the miracles of the transformation of fluids, electrical commotions and experiments in galvanism caused them no surprise at all.” When the demonstration was over, he claimed one of the Muslim intellectuals asked a question through an interpreter. “This is all well and good, but can they make it so that I would be in Morocco and here at the same time?” Bertholet replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah, well,” said the shaykh, “he isn’t such a good sorcerer after all.”5 Al-Jabarti, reflecting on the demonstration in the privacy of his own study, begged to differ: “They had strange things in [the Institute], devices and apparatus achieving results which minds like ours cannot comprehend.”6
Napoleon’s real reasons for invading Egypt in 1798 were geostrategic, not cultural. France’s main rival in the second half of the eighteenth century was Great Britain. The two European maritime powers struggled for ascendancy in a number of theaters, including the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. British and French commercial companies had fought a bitter campaign for supremacy in India that was only resolved in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), when the British defeated the French and secured their hegemony over the subcontinent. France was never reconciled to its losses in India.
With the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, Britain and France resumed their hostilities. Napoleon, looking for ways to hurt British interests, turned back to India. By capturing Egypt, he hoped to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean and to close the strategic land-sea route to India that ran from the Mediterranean through Egypt to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean beyond. The British were aware that Napoleon was assembling a major expedition force in Toulon and suspected a move against Egypt. Admiral Horatio Nelson was put in command of a powerful squadron to intercept the French fleet. They actually beat the French to Egypt, where they had their brief and discouraging encounter with the governor of Alexandria. Nelson withdrew his ships to search for Napoleon elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The French succeeded in eluding the Royal Navy, and Napoleon’s army made a quick conquest of Egypt. However, Nelson’s squadron caught up with the French fleet one month later and succeeded in sinking or capturing all but two of the French warships in the Battle of the Nile, on August 1. Napoleon’s flagship, l’Orient, was set ablaze in the battle and exploded in a spectacular fireball that lit the night sky. The French lost more than 1,700 men in the Battle of the Nile.
The British victory over the French fleet condemned the Napoleonic expedition to failure. The 20,000-man French army was now trapped in Egypt with no line of communication to France. The defeat dealt a terrible blow to the morale of French troops in Egypt. Their sense of isolation was compounded when Napoleon abandoned his army without warning to return to France in August 1799, where he seized power in November of that year.
Following Napoleon’s flight, the French army in Egypt was left without a mission. Napoleon’s successor entered into negotiations with the Ottomans for a full French evacuation from Egypt. The French and Ottomans struck agreement as early as January 1800, but their plans were scuttled by the British, who had no wish to see a large and experienced French army rejoin Napoleon’s legions to fight the British on other fronts. In 1801 the British Parliament authorized a military expedition to secure a French surrender in Egypt. The expedition reached Alexandria in March 1801 and combined forces with the Ottomans in a pincer movement on Cairo. The French surrendered Cairo in June and Alexandria in August 1801. They then boarded British and Ottoman ships to be transported home to France, bringing the whole sorry episode to a close.
The French occupation of Egypt lasted just three years. It was a fascinating moment in human terms, where Egyptians and Frenchmen found points to admire and to condemn in each other. Both sides emerged wounded from the encounter. The French who withdrew from Cairo in the summer of 1801, driven out by an Anglo-Ottoman force, were no longer the self-confident agents of a new revolutionary order. Rather, their ranks were thinned by war and disease and their morale was low after years without relief in Egypt. Many Frenchmen had converted to Islam and taken Egyptian wives—hardly a sign of condescension toward the people under their occupation. But the Egyptians too had had their confidence shaken by the experience of occupation. Their sense of superiority had been upset by their confrontation with the French, their ideas, and their technology.
The departing French left a power vacuum in Egypt. Their three-year occupation had broken the Mamluks’ power base in Cairo and Lower Egypt. The Ottomans wanted to prevent the reestablishment of the Mamluk households at all costs—in the absence of the French, they had never faced a better opportunity to reassert their authority over the rebellious province of Egypt. The British feared Napoleon would attempt the reconquest of Egypt and were determined to leave a strong deterrent behind. They had more confidence in the Mamluks than in the Ottomans defending Egypt from future French attack, and so they worked to rehabilitate the most powerful Mamluks. They pressured the Ottomans to pardon key Mamluk beys, who began to reestablish their households and rebuild their influence. The Ottomans complied with British wishes against their better judgment.
No sooner had the British expeditionary force departed in 1803 than the Ottomans reverted to their own solutions for Egypt. The Sublime Porte ordered the governor in Cairo to exterminate the Mamluk beys and seize their wealth for the treasury.7 The Mamluks, however, had regained enough of their former strength to withstand Ottoman attacks. What followed was a bitter power struggle between the Ottomans and the Mamluks that prolonged the misery of the war-weary civilians of Cairo. One Ottoman commander emerged from the chaos to master the conflict with the Mamluks and to build public support for his bid to rule over Egypt. In fact, he would soon become one of the most influential figures in Egypt’s modern history. His name was Muhammad ’Ali.
An ethnic Albanian born in the Macedonian town of Kavala, Muhammad ‘Ali (1770–1849) rose to command a powerful and unruly 6,000-man Albanian contingent of the Ottoman army in Egypt. Between 1803 and 1805, through an ever-shifting set of alliances, Muhammad ’Ali enhanced his personal power at the expense of the Ottoman governor, the commanders of the other Ottoman regiments, and the leading Mamluk beys. He openly courted the support of the notables of Cairo, who had grown increasingly restive after five years of political and economic instability, first under the French and now under the Ottomans. By 1805 the commander of the Albanian detachment had emerged as a king-maker in Cairo. But Muhammad’Ali aspired to be king himself.
Muhammad ‘Ali’s activities had not escaped the attention of the Ottoman authorities. The commander of the Albanians was seen as a troublemaker, but he had talent and ambition that could be put to the empire’s advantage. The situation in Arabia remained critical. The Wahhabis had attacked Ottoman territory in Iraq in 1802 and took control of the holy city of Mecca in 1803. The Islamic reformers now imposed conditions on the Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from Cairo and Damascus and threatened to prohibit them entry to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina altogether (as they would do after 1806). This was an intolerable situation for the sultan, who claimed by imperial title to be the guardian of Islam’s holiest cities. When the notables of Cairo first petitioned Istanbul to appoint Muhammad ’Ali as governor of Egypt in 1805, the Porte decided to name him governor of the Arabian province of the Hijaz instead, and to entrust him with the dangerous mission of crushing the Wahhabi movement.
As governor-designate of the Hijaz, Muhammad ‘Ali was promoted to the rank of pasha, which made him eligible to serve as governor in any Ottoman province. Muhammad ’Ali accepted the appointment to the Hijaz for the title alone. He showed no interest in moving to the Red Sea province to take up his new post. Instead, he conspired with his allies among the civilian notables of Cairo to put pressure on the Ottomans to appoint him governor of Egypt. The notables had confidence that Muhammad ‘Ali and his Albanian soldiers could impose order on Cairo. They also suffered from the illusion that Muhammad ’Ali would be beholden to them for their support and would allow the notables to exercise control over the governor they’d appointed. They hoped in this way to lessen the government’s tax burden on the merchants and artisans of Cairo and to regenerate the economic vitality of the province to their benefit. But Muhammad ’Ali had other plans.
In May 1805 the townspeople of Cairo rose in protest against Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor. The common people of Cairo had reached a breaking point after years of instability, violence, overtaxation, and injustice. They closed their shops in protest and demanded the Ottomans appoint a governor of their choosing. Al-Jabarti, who lived through these troubled times, describes large demonstrations led by beturbaned shaykhs in the mosques of Cairo where young men chanted slogans against their tyrannical pasha and Ottoman injustice. The mob made its way to Muhammad ’Ali’s house.
“And whom do you want to be governor?” asked Muhammad ’Ali.
“We will accept only you,” the people replied. “You will be governor over us according to our conditions, for we know you as a just and good man.”
Muhammad ’Ali modestly declined the offer. The mob insisted. In a show of reluctance, the crafty Albanian allowed himself to be persuaded. The leading notables then brought him a fur pelisse and a ceremonial gown in an improvised ceremony of investiture. It was an unprecedented event: the people of Cairo had imposed their own choice of governor on the Ottoman Empire.
The incumbent governor, Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, was not impressed. “I was appointed by the sultan and I will not be removed at the command of the peasants,” he retorted. “I will leave the Citadel only on the orders of the imperial government.”8 The civilians of Cairo laid siege to the deposed governor in the Citadel for over a month, until orders came from Istanbul confirming the people’s choice of governor, on June 18, 1805. Muhammad ’Ali was now master of Egypt.
It was one thing to be named governor of Egypt—scores of men had held the title since the Ottomans had conquered the territory in 1517—and quite another to actually govern Egypt. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha established his mastery over the province like no one before or after him. He succeeded in monopolizing the wealth of Egypt and used the revenues to establish a powerful army and a bureaucratic state. He used his army to expand the territory under his command, making Egypt the center of an empire in its own right. But unlike ’Ali Bey al-Kabir, who as a Mamluk had dreamed of rebuilding the Mamluk Empire, Muhammad ’Ali was an Ottoman, and he sought to dominate the Ottoman Empire.
Muhammad ‘Ali also was an innovator who put Egypt on a path of reform, drawing on European ideas and technology in ways that the Ottomans themselves would later imitate. He created the first peasant mass army in the Middle East. He undertook one of the earliest industrialization programs outside Europe, applying the technology of the Industrial Revolution to produce weapons and textiles for his army. He dispatched education missions to European capitals and created a translation bureau to publish European books and technical manuals in Arabic editions. He enjoyed direct relations with the great powers of Europe, who treated him more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy of the Ottoman sultan. By the end of his reign, Muhammad ’Ali had succeeded in establishing his family’s hereditary rule over Egypt and the Sudan. His dynasty would rule Egypt until the 1952 revolution brought down the monarchy.
Though they had shifted Muhammad ’Ali’s appointment from the Hijaz to Cairo, the Sublime Porte still expected him to lead a campaign against the Wahhabis to restore Ottoman authority in Arabia. The new governor found many excuses to ignore Istanbul’s commands. He had come to power through disorder and knew that he too would fall unless he brought the Cairo public and the Ottoman soldiers to heel.
Muhammad ‘Ali’s Albanian soldiers gave him an independent power base to help him achieve mastery in Cairo by force. The fragmented Mamluk households were his first target, and he pursued them to Upper Egypt. Such campaigns soon proved expensive, however, and the pasha realized that soldiers were not enough to control Egypt. He needed money too. Agriculture was the province’s primary source of revenues. Yet, one-fifth of Egypt’s agricultural land had been endowed to support Islamic institutions, and the other four-fifths were leased out in tax farms held by the Mamluk households and other large landholders that brought little benefit to the treasury in Cairo. To control the revenues of Egypt, Muhammad ’Ali would have to control its land.
By putting the land of Egypt under a system of direct taxation, Muhammad ‘Ali gained the necessary resources to impose his control over Egypt. In the process, he undermined the financial bases of his Mamluk opponents and his supporters among the notables of Cairo alike. The religious scholars were divested of their autonomous revenues, and the landed elites found themselves dependent on the governor they had hoped to control. In all, it took six years for Muhammad ’Ali to consolidate his position in Egypt before he finally accepted the sultan’s commission to conduct a campaign against the Wahhabis in Arabia.
In March 1811, Muhammad ‘Ali sent his son Tussun Pasha to lead the military operation against the Wahhabis. This was to be Muhammad ’Ali’s first venture beyond the frontiers of Egypt. Before sending a large part of his army abroad, he wanted to ensure peace and stability in Egypt. He organized a ceremony of investiture for Tussun and invited all of the leading figures of Cairo to attend—including the most powerful Mamluk beys. The beys saw the invitation as a conciliatory gesture following several years of hostilities with Muhammad ’Ali’s government. Clearly, they reasoned, the governor would find it easier to rule with Mamluk support than to continue fighting against them. Nearly all of the beys accepted the invitation and arrived in Cairo’s Citadel dressed in their finery to take part in the ceremony. If any of the beys had misgivings, the fact that nearly all of the leading Mamluks were in attendance must have given them some sense of security. Besides, what sort of man would violate the laws of hospitality by committing treachery against his guests?
After the ceremony of investiture, the Mamluks paraded in a formal procession through the Citadel. As they made their way through one of its gated passageways, the gates suddenly closed. Before the confused beys realized what was happening, soldiers appeared on the walls overhead and opened fire. After years of fighting, the soldiers had come to hate the Mamluks and went about their work with relish, leaping down from the walls to finish off the beys. “The soldiers went berserk butchering the amirs and looting their clothing,” al-Jabarti recorded. “Showing their hatred, they spared no one.” They killed Mamluks and the supernumeraries the beys had dressed up to accompany their procession—most of whom were common citizens of Cairo. “These people were shouting and calling for help. One would say, ‘I’m not a soldier or a Mamluk.’ Another would say ‘I’m not one of them.’ The soldiers, however, did not heed these screams and pleas.”9
Muhammad ‘Ali’s troops then went on a rampage through the city. They dragged out anyone suspected of being a Mamluk and took them back to the Citadel, where they were beheaded. In his report to Istanbul, Muhammad ’Ali claimed that twenty-four beys and forty of their men had been killed, and he dispatched their heads and ears to support the claim.10 Al-Jabarti’s account suggests the violence was far more extensive.
The massacre in the Citadel was the final blow to the Mamluks of Cairo. They had survived Selim the Grim’s conquest and Napoleon’s invasion, but after nearly six centuries in Cairo they were practically exterminated by Muhammad ‘Ali. The few surviving Mamluk beys stayed in Upper Egypt, knowing that Cairo’s governor would stop at nothing to secure his power, and that they lacked the means to challenge him. Confident that he no longer faced any domestic challenge to his rule, Muhammad ’Ali could now send his army to Arabia to earn the gratitude of the Ottoman sultan.
The Wahhabi campaign proved a tremendous drain on the resources of Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt. The battlefield was far from home, communication and supply lines were long and vulnerable, and Tussun Pasha was forced to fight in a harsh environment on the enemy’s terrain. In 1812, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the countryside, the Wahhabis drew the Egyptian force into a narrow pass and dealt the 8,000-man army a serious defeat. Many of the demoralized Albanian commanders quit the battlefield and returned to Cairo, leaving Tussun short-handed. Muhammad ’Ali sent reinforcements to Jidda, and over the next year Tussun managed to secure Mecca and Medina. Muhammad ’Ali accompanied the pilgrimage caravan in 1813 and dispatched the keys of the holy city to the sultan in Istanbul as a token of the restoration of his sovereignty over the birthplace of Islam. These victories had come at a high price: the Egyptian force had lost 8,000 men and the Egyptian treasury had spent the enormous sum of 170,000 purses (approximately $6.7 million in 1820 U.S. dollars).11 Nor had the Wahhabis been fully defeated. They had merely withdrawn before the Egyptian army’s advance and were bound to return.
Fighting continued between Tussun’s Egyptian army and the Wahhabi force, commanded by Abdullah ibn Saud, until the two sides struck a truce in 1815. Tussun returned home to Cairo, where he contracted plague and died within days of his return. When word of Tussun’s death filtered back to Arabia, Abdullah ibn Saud broke his truce and attacked Egyptian positions. Muhammad ‘Ali appointed his eldest son, Ibrahim, as commander in chief of Egyptian forces. It was the beginning of a brilliant military career, for Ibrahim Pasha emerged as Muhammad ’Ali’s generalissimo.
Ibrahim Pasha took up his command in Arabia early in 1817 and pursued a relentless campaign against the Wahhabis. He secured Egyptian control over the Red Sea province of the Hijaz before driving the Wahhabis back into the central Arabian region of the Najd. Even though the Najd lay outside Ottoman territory, Ibrahim Pasha was determined to eliminate the Wahhabi threat once and for all, and he drove his adversaries back to their capital of Dir’iyya. For six months the two sides fought a terrible war of attrition. The Wahhabis, trapped within the walls of their city, were slowly starved of food and water by the Egyptian siege. Egyptian forces suffered heavy losses to disease and exposure in the lethal summer heat of Central Arabia. In the end the Egyptians prevailed, and in September 1818 the Wahhabis surrendered, knowing they faced total destruction.
On Muhammad ‘Ali’s orders, the Egyptian forces destroyed the town of Dir’iyya and sent all of the leaders of the Wahhabi movement to Cairo as prisoners. Muhammad’Ali knew he had earned Sultan Mahmud II’s favor by suppressing a movement that had brought the very legitimacy of the Ottoman sultanate into question for over sixteen years. Moreover, he had succeeded where no other Ottoman governor or commander could, in prosecuting a successful campaign in Central Arabia. From Cairo, Abdullah ibn Saud and the leaders of the Wahhabi state were sent on to Istanbul to face the sultan’s justice.
Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) turned the execution of the Wahhabi leaders into a state occasion. He summoned the top government officials, the ambassadors of foreign states, and the leading notables of his empire to the Topkapi Palace to witness the ceremony. The three condemned men—the military commander, Abdullah ibn Saud, the chief minister, and the spiritual leader of the Wahhabi movement—were brought in heavy chains and publicly tried for their crimes against religion and state. The sultan concluded the hearings by sentencing all three to death. Abdullah ibn Saud was beheaded before the main gate of the Aya Sofia Mosque, the chief minister was executed before the main entrance to the palace, and the spiritual leader was beheaded in one of the main markets of the city. Their bodies were left on display, heads tucked under arms, for three days before their corpses were cast into the sea.12
With the expulsion of French forces from Egypt and the defeat of the Wahhabi movement, Sultan Mahmud II might be excused for believing the Ottoman Empire had withstood the most serious challenges to its position in the Arab world. Yet the governor in Egypt who delivered victory in Arabia would himself prove a far graver threat to Mahmud II. For while the Wahhabis attacked the fringes of his state—very important fringes on spiritual grounds, but fringes nonetheless—Muhammad’Ali would pose a challenge to the very center of the Ottoman Empire and the ruling dynasty itself.
In recognition of Ibrahim’s services to the Ottoman state in defeating the Wahhabis, Sultan Mahmud II promoted Muhammad ‘Ali’s son to the rank of pasha and named him governor of the Hijaz. In this way, the Red Sea province of the Hijaz became the first addition to Muhammad ’Ali’s empire. Henceforth, the Egyptian treasury would benefit from the customs revenues of the port of Jidda, which, given its importance in the Red Sea trade and as a gateway for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, were considerable.
Muhammad ‘Ali substantially consolidated Egypt’s grip over the Red Sea in 1820 when his forces invaded Sudan. He had hoped to find mythical gold mines in Sudan to enrich his treasury while he sought a new source of slave soldiers for his army in the upper reaches of the Nile. The Sudan campaign was marred by great brutality. When Muhammad ’Ali’s son Ismail was killed by the ruler of Shindi, a region on the Nile to the north of Khartoum, the Egyptian expeditionary force retaliated by killing 30,000 of the local inhabitants. The gold never materialized, and the Sudanese quite literally preferred to die rather than serve in Muhammad ‘Ali’s army. Thousands of men who had been captured for military service became despondent when taken from their homes, fell ill, and perished in the long marches to training camps in Egypt: of 20,000 Sudanese enslaved between 1820 and 1824, just 3,000 survived to 1824.13 The only real gains to Egypt of the Sudan campaign (1820–1822) were commercial and territorial. By adding Sudan to Egypt’s empire, Muhammad ’Ali doubled the land mass under his control and dominated the trade of the Red Sea. Egypt’s hegemony over Sudan would endure 136 years, until Sudan regained its independence in 1956.
Muhammad ‘Ali faced a severe constraint in the shortage of new recruits for the Egyptian army. His original Albanian forces had been decimated by wars in Arabia and the Sudan, and by age as well. By the time of the Sudan campaign, the surviving Albanians in Muhammad ’Ali’s army had been in Egypt twenty years. The Ottomans had placed an embargo on the export of military slaves from the Caucasus to Egypt in 1810, both to prevent a Mamluk revival and to contain the ambitions of Muhammad ‘Ali himself. Nor were the Ottomans willing to send any of the empire’s soldiers to serve Muhammad ’Ali when they were needed on the European fronts. With no external source of new soldiers, the governor of Egypt was forced back on his own population.
The idea of a national army—a conscript force that drew its ranks from the workers and peasants of the country—was still novel in the Ottoman world. Soldiers were seen as a martial caste taken from slave ranks. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the famous Ottoman infantry known as the Janissaries did modify their recruitment procedures as the devshirme (“boy levy”) fell out of practice. Soldiers took wives and enrolled their sons in the Janissaries’ ranks. But the notion of a military caste distinct from the rest of the population persisted. Peasants were dismissed as too passive and dull for military service.
As the Ottomans began to lose wars to European armies in the eighteenth century, the sultans came to doubt the effectiveness of their own infantry. They invited retired Prussian and French officers to Istanbul to introduce modern European methods of warfare, such as square formation, bayonet charges, and the use of mobile artillery. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Sultan Selim III (r. 1780–1807) created a new Ottoman army recruited from Anatolian peasant stock dressed in European-style breeches and drilled by Western officers. He called this new force the Nizam-i Cedid, or “New Order” army (its soldiers were known as Nizami troops).
Sultan Selim deployed a 4,000-man Nizami regiment to Egypt in 1801, where Muhammad ‘Ali would have seen the discipline of the corps firsthand. As one Ottoman contemporary recorded, the Nizami troops in Egypt “bravely combated the infidels and defeated them incessantly; and the flight of a single individual of that corps was never seen nor heard of.”14 However, the Nizami forces were a more immediate threat to the powerful Janissary corps than to any European army. If the Nizamis were the “new order,” the Janissaries were by implication the “old order,” and they weren’t going to accept redundancy while they still had the power to protect their own interests. In 1807 the Janissaries mutinied, overthrew Selim III, and disbanded the Nizami army. Though this first experiment in an Ottoman national army came to an inauspicious end, it still provided Muhammad ’Ali with a viable model to replicate in Egypt.
The Napoleonic army gave Muhammad ‘Ali a second model to consider. The French levée en masse was a citizen’s mass army that, when led by able commanders, had proven capable of conquering continents. However, Muhammad ’Ali viewed the people of Egypt as subjects rather than citizens, and he never tried to stir his troops with rousing ideological slogans as did French revolutionary commanders. He decided to draw on French military experts to train his recruit army, but otherwise he modeled the Egyptian Nizam-i Cedid on the Ottoman example. In 1822 he commissioned a veteran of the Napoleonic wars named Colonel Sèves—a French convert to Islam known in Egypt as Sulayman Agha—to organize and train a Nizami army drawn entirely from Egyptian peasant recruits. Within a year he had raised a force of 30,000 men. By the mid-1830s, that number would reach 130,000.
The Egyptian Nizami army was not an overnight success. Egyptian peasants feared for their farms and the welfare of their families; their close attachment to their homes and villages made military service a real ordeal. Peasants avoided conscription by fleeing their villages when military recruitment teams approached. Others deliberately maimed themselves by chopping off fingers or striking out an eye to gain exemption on grounds of disability. Whole regions rose in revolt against the draft, and in Upper Egypt an estimated 30,000 villagers rebelled in 1824. Once pressed into military service, many peasants deserted. It was only through heavy punishment that Muhammad ’Ali’s government was able to force the peasants of Egypt to serve in the army. The astonishing thing is how successful this reluctant army proved on the battlefield. It was first put to the test in Greece.
In 1821 the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire erupted in a nationalist uprising. The revolt was initiated by members of a secret society known as the Filiki Etairia, or the “Society of Friends,” established in 1814 with the goal of Greek statehood and independence. The Greeks of the Ottoman Empire were a distinct community held together by their language, their Orthodox Christian faith, and a shared history spanning the classical period to the Hellenic Byzantine Empire. As the first overtly nationalist uprising in the Ottoman Empire, the Greek War posed a danger of much greater magnitude than the eighteenth-century revolts by local leaders. In previous revolts, movements had been driven only by the ambitions of individual leaders. The novelty of nationalism was that it was an ideology capable of inspiring a whole population to rise up against their Ottoman rulers.
The revolt broke out in the southern Peloponnesian Peninsula in March 1821 and quickly spread to central Greece, Macedonia, the Aegean islands, and Crete. The Ottomans found themselves fighting pitched battles on several fronts simultaneously, and they turned to Muhammad ’Ali for assistance. In 1824 his son Ibrahim Pasha set off for the Peloponnesian Peninsula at the head of an Egyptian army of 17,000 newly trained infantry, 700 cavalry, and four artillery batteries. As all of his soldiers were native-born peasants, it is the first time we can speak of a genuinely Egyptianarmy.
The Egyptians achieved complete success in the Greek War, and the new Nizami army proved its mettle. Following his conquests in Crete and the Peloponnese, Ibrahim Pasha was awarded the governorships of those provinces, expanding Muhammad ‘Ali’s empire from the Red Sea to the Aegean. Ironically, the better his forces fared on the battlefield against the Greeks, the more concerned the sultan and his government grew. The Egyptians were subduing insurgencies that had withstood the Ottomans and expanding the territory under Cairo’s control. If Muhammad ’Ali were to rise in rebellion, it was not clear that the Ottomans would be able to withstand his troops.
Egyptian victory and Greek suffering provoked concern in European capitals as well. The Greek War captured the imaginations of educated elites in Britain and France. As the cities of the classical world became modern battlefields, European Philhellenic societies clamored for their governments to intervene to protect the Christian Greeks from the Muslim Turks and Egyptians. The poet Lord Byron drew international attention to the Greek cause when he sailed to Messolonghi in 1823 to support the independence movement. His death in April 1824—of a fever, not at the hands of Ottoman soldiers—elevated him to the status of a martyr for the cause of Greek independence. Public calls for European intervention redoubled in the aftermath of Byron’s death.
The British and French governments were susceptible to public pressure but were more concerned with larger geostrategic considerations. France had developed a privileged relationship with Muhammad ’Ali’s Egypt. In turn, the governor of Egypt made use of French military advisors for his army, drew on French engineers for his industrial needs and public works, and sent his students to France for advanced training. The French were keen to preserve their special relationship with Egypt as a means to extend their influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The expansion of Egyptian power to Greece, however, posed a dilemma for the government in Paris. It would not serve France’s interests to see Egypt grow stronger than France itself in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The situation was more clear-cut for the British government. London watched Paris extend its influence in Egypt with mounting concern. Since Napoleon’s invasion, the British had sought to prevent France from dominating Egypt and the land-sea route to India. Britain had also been scarred by the continental wars of the Napoleonic era and worried that attempts by strong European powers to secure positions in Ottoman territory could reignite conflict between the European powers. The British government thus sought to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire to preserve the peace in Europe. It was clear that the Ottomans could not retain Greece on their own, and the British did not wish to see Egypt extend its power into the Balkans at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, British interests would best be served by assisting the Greeks to achieve greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and securing a withdrawal of both Ottoman and Egyptian troops from the disputed territories.
Muhammad ‘Ali had nothing left to gain from his campaign in Greece. The war proved a tremendous drain on his treasury. His new Nizami army was overextended across Greece. The Ottomans were treating him with growing suspicion and clearly doing their best to deplete his army and his treasury. By the summer of 1827 the European powers had made clear their opposition to Egypt’s position in Greece and had assembled a combined Anglo-French fleet to force an Ottoman and Egyptian withdrawal. The last thing the governor of Egypt wanted was to engage the European powers on the battlefield. As Muhammad ’Ali wrote to his political agent in Istanbul in October 1827, “We have to realize that we cannot stand up against the Europeans, and the only possible outcome [if we do so] will be sinking the entire fleet and causing the death of up to 30 or 40 thousand men.” Though he was proud of his army and navy, Muhammad ’Ali knew they were no match for the British or the French. “Although we are men of war,” he wrote, “yet we are still in the A-B-Cs of that art, whereas the Europeans are way ahead of us and have put their theories [about war] into practice.”15
Though he had a clear vision of possible disaster, Muhammad ’Ali committed his navy to the cause and dispatched his fleet to Greece. The Ottomans were unwilling to concede independence to Greece, and the sultan decided to call the European powers’ bluff and ignore their joint fleet. It was a fatal mistake. The allied fleet trapped the Egyptian ships in Navarino Bay and sank virtually all the seventy-eight Ottoman and Egyptian ships in a four-hour engagement on October 20, 1827. Over 3,000 Egyptian and Ottoman men were killed in the battle, along with nearly 200 men in the attacking allied fleet.
Muhammad ‘Ali was furious at his losses and held Sultan Mahmud II responsible for the loss of his navy. Moreover, the Egyptians found themselves in the same position Napoleon had been in after the Battle of the Nile: thousands of soldiers were trapped, with no ships to provision or repatriate them. Muhammad ’Ali negotiated directly with the British to conclude a truce and repatriate his son Ibrahim Pasha and the Egyptian army from Greece without consulting the sultan. Mahmud II was outraged by his governor’s insubordination, but Muhammad ‘Ali no longer sought the sultan’s favor. His days of loyal service were through. Henceforth, Muhammad’Ali would pursue his own objectives at the sultan’s expense.
Navarino was also a turning point in the Greek war of independence. Assisted by a French expeditionary force, Greek fighters drove Ottoman troops out of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and central Greece in the course of the year 1828. That December the governments of Britain, France, and Russia met and agreed to the creation of an independent Kingdom of Greece, then imposed their solution on the Ottoman Empire. After three more years of negotiations, the Kingdom of Greece was finally established in the London Conference of May 1832.
In the aftermath of the Greek debacle, Muhammad ‘Ali trained his sights on Syria. He had aspired to rule over Syria since 1811, when he first agreed to lead the campaign against the Wahhabis. He petitioned the Porte for Syria both in 1811 and again after the defeat of the Wahhabis in 1818. The Ottomans rebuffed him both times, not wanting their governor in Egypt to become too powerful to serve the Porte’s purposes. When Istanbul sought Egypt’s assistance in Greece, the Porte held out the prospect of conferring Syria on Muhammad ’Ali. The Egyptian governor called this debt due after the loss of his fleet in Navarino, but to no avail: the Porte believed Muhammad ‘Ali had been sufficiently weakened by his losses that it was no longer necessary to earn his goodwill.
Muhammad ‘Ali recognized that the Porte had no intention of ever conceding Syria to him. He also knew the Ottomans had no force to prevent him from taking the territory for himself. No sooner had Ibrahim Pasha and his soldiers been repatriated to Egypt than Muhammad ’Ali set about building a new fleet and reequipping his army to invade Syria. He approached both the British and the French to gain their support for his ambitions. France showed some interest in entering into an agreement with the Egyptians, but Britain continued to oppose all threats to the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Undeterred, Muhammad ’Ali continued his preparations, and in November 1831 Ibrahim Pasha set off at the head of an invasion force to conquer Syria.
The Egyptian army was now at war with the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim Pasha led his 30,000 men in the rapid conquest of Palestine. By the end of November his army had reached the northern stronghold of Acre. As reports of Egyptian movements reached Istanbul, the sultan sent a special envoy to persuade Muhammad ’Ali to call off his attack. When this had no effect, the Porte then called on its governors in Damascus and Aleppo to raise an army to repel the Egyptian invaders. They enjoyed a six-month window of opportunity while the Egyptian army laid siege to the near-impregnable fortress of Acre.
While the Ottomans prepared to repel the Egyptian invasion, some of the local leaders in Palestine and Lebanon chose to lend their support to Ibrahim Pasha to preserve their positions in the face of the new Egyptian threat. Amir Bashir II, the ruler of Mount Lebanon, entered into alliance with Ibrahim Pasha when the Egyptian army reached Acre. One of the members of Amir Bashir’s ruling Shihabi family sent his trusted advisor, Mikhayil Mishaqa, to observe the Egyptian siege of Acre and report back to the rulers of Mount Lebanon.
Mishaqa spent nearly three weeks in Acre, following Egyptian operations first-hand. When he arrived, Mishaqa witnessed a fierce battle between the Egyptian navy and the Ottoman defenders in Acre. Muhammad ’Ali had committed twenty-two warships to the siege, and they fired more than 70,000 rounds into the citadel of Acre. The defenders put up a stiff fight and managed to disable many of the ships in heated exchanges. “Acre,” Mishaqa wrote, “could not even be seen for the smoke of gunpowder” in shelling that lasted from morning to sunset. According to Mishaqa’s sources, the Egyptians fielded eight regiments of foot soldiers (18,000 men), eight cavalry regiments (4,000 men), and 2,000 Bedouin irregulars against “three thousand brave and experienced soldiers” defending Acre. Given the strength of Acre’s sea walls and the earthworks protecting its land walls, Mishaqa warned his employers to expect a long siege.
For six months the Egyptians pummeled the fortress of Acre. By May 1832, the impregnable walls of the castle had been sufficiently reduced for Ibrahim Pasha to assemble his infantry to storm the citadel. He gave a rousing speech, reminding his veterans of their victories in Arabia and Greece. Retreat was not an option for the Egyptian army. To reinforce the point that there would be no turning back, Ibrahim Pasha warned that “cannons would be brought up behind them to blast any soldier who returned without having taken the walls.” With these menacing words of encouragement, Ibrahim Pasha led his men in a charge on the shattered walls of Acre. They easily overran the ramparts and forced the surrender of the surviving defenders, reduced by months of fighting to just 350 men.16
With Acre now secured, Ibrahim Pasha set off for Damascus. The city’s Ottoman governor mobilized 10,000 civilians in defense. Ibrahim Pasha knew that untrained civilians would not fight a professional army and ordered his troops to fire over their heads to frighten away the defenders. Sure enough, the sound of gunfire was enough to dispel the Damascenes. The governor retreated from the city to join Ottoman forces further north, and the Egyptians entered Damascus unopposed. Ibrahim Pasha ordered his soldiers to respect the townspeople and their property, and he declared a general amnesty for all the people of Damascus. As he intended to rule over the people of Syria, he had no wish to alienate them.
Ibrahim Pasha appointed a ruling council for Damascus and continued his relentless march to conquer Syria. The Egyptian commander took some of the notables of Damascus with him to ensure the townspeople would not revolt in his absence. Mikhayil Mishaqa once again followed the Egyptian campaign, gathering intelligence for the rulers of Mount Lebanon. As the Egyptians marched out of Damascus, he took a tally of their numbers: “eleven thousand foot soldiers, two thousand regular cavalry, three thousand [Bedouin] cavalry”—16,000 men in all, supported by forty-three cannons, and 3,000 transport camels for supplies and materiel. They marched to the town of Homs in central Syria, where they were joined by a further detachment of 6,000 Egyptian troops.
On July 8, the Egyptians engaged the Ottomans in their first major battle for control of Syria near the town of Homs. “It was a stirring sight,” Mishaqa wrote. “When the regular Egyptian troops reached the battlefield, they were met by the more numerous regular Turkish troops. One hour before sunset the battle raged between the two sides with continuous fire of guns and cannon.” From his hilltop, Mishaqa could not make out which way the battle would go. “It was a frightful hour, during which the very gates of hell were opened. At sundown the noise of guns was quieted, leaving only the pounding of cannon until an hour and a half after sunset, when total silence reigned.” Only then did he learn that the Egyptians had secured total victory in the Battle of Homs. The fleeing Ottoman commanders had abandoned their camp in their haste. “Food was left burning over the fire, and medicine chests, rolls of dressing and shrouds [for the dead], a great number of furs and mantles for awards and much materiel were all left behind.17
The restless Ibrahim Pasha did not linger in Homs. One day after his victory, he drove his army northward to Aleppo to complete his conquest of Syria. Like Damascus, Aleppo surrendered without resisting the Egyptian army, and Ibrahim Pasha left behind a new administration to govern the city on Egypt’s behalf. The Ottoman governor had withdrawn to join a large Ottoman army that included the surviving units from the Battle of Homs. On July 29 the Ottomans engaged the Egyptian army in the village of Belen, near the port of Alexandretta (now in modern Turkey, but at the time part of the province of Aleppo). Though outnumbered, the Egyptian forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Ottomans before accepting their surrender. Ibrahim Pasha then marched his forces to the port of Adana, where Egyptian ships could resupply his exhausted army. Ibrahim Pasha sent dispatches to Cairo detailing Egypt’s victories and awaited further orders from his father.
Muhammad ’Ali moved from warfare to negotiations, trying to secure his gains in Syria either by the sultan’s edict or through European intervention. The Ottomans, for their part, were unwilling to concede any gains to their renegade governor in Egypt. Rather than recognize his position in Syria, the Ottoman grand vizier (or prime minister) Mehmed Reshid Pasha began to mobilize a massive army of over 80,000 men to drive the Egyptians from the Turkish coast and out of Syria altogether. After rebuilding his army and his stores, Ibrahim Pasha set off into Central Anatolia in October 1832 to face down the Ottoman threat. He occupied the city of Konya that month, where he prepared for battle.
The Egyptian army would now have to fight in the most inhospitable environment imaginable. Used to the desert heat of summer and the temperate winters along the Nile, the Egyptian troops found themselves in the driving snow and subfreezing temperatures of winter on the Anatolian plateau. Yet even in such conditions, the unwilling conscripts proved the more disciplined army, and though outnumbered, they secured a total victory over Ottoman troops in the Battle of Konya (December 21, 1832). The Egyptians even managed to take the grand vizier prisoner, which strengthened their bargaining position enormously.
Upon receiving news of his army’s defeat and the capture of his grand vizier, the sultan capitulated and agreed to most of Muhammad ‘Ali’s territorial demands. He had no military options following the defeat of his army at Konya, and he now faced an Egyptian army billeted in the western Anatolian town of Kütahya, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the imperial capital, Istanbul. In order to secure a complete withdrawal of Egyptian forces from Anatolia, Mahmud II reestablished Muhammad’Ali as governor of Egypt (he had been stripped of the title and declared a renegade following his invasion) and conferred the provinces of Hijaz, Crete, Acre, Damascus, Tripoli, and Aleppo on Muhammad ‘Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, with the right to collect taxes from the port city of Adana. These gains were confirmed in the May 1833 Peace of Kütahya, brokered by Russia and France.
Following the Peace of Kütahya, Ibrahim Pasha withdrew his troops to Syria and Egypt. Muhammad ’Ali had not achieved the independence to which he had aspired. The Ottomans had bound him firmly to their empire’s rule. But he had secured most of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire for his family’s rule, creating an Egyptian empire that rivaled the Ottomans for the rest of the 1830s.
Egyptian rule proved very unpopular in Syria. A new tax laid a heavy burden on all layers of society, from the poorest worker to the richest merchant, and local leaders were alienated when they were stripped of their traditional powers. “When the Egyptians began to alter the customs of the clans and institute more taxation of the inhabitants than they were accustomed to pay,” Mishaqa recorded, “the people began to despise them and, wishing for the rule of the Turks back again, manifested signs of rebellion.” The Egyptians responded by disarming and conscripting the Syrians into their service, which only compounded the opposition. “A soldier had no fixed period of service after which he would be free to return to his family, but rather his service was as everlasting as hell,” Mishaqa explained.18 Many young men took flight to avoid conscription, further undermining productivity in the local economy. Rebellion spread from the Alawite Mountains on the Syrian coast to the Druze in Mount Lebanon and southern Syria, to Nablus in the Palestinian highlands. Between 1834 and 1839, Ibrahim Pasha found his troops pinned down in the suppression of an accelerating cycle of revolts.
Muhammad ‘Ali was undeterred by popular unrest in the Syrian countryside and viewed Syria as a permanent addition to his Egyptian empire. He worked assiduously to gain European support for a plan to secede from the Ottoman Empire and to establish an independent kingdom in Egypt and Syria. In May 1838 he informed the Porte and the European powers of his determination to establish his own kingdom, offering the Ottomans a severance fee of £3 million ($15 million). British Prime Minister Palmerston responded with a stern warning that “the Pasha [Muhammad ’Ali] must expect to find Great Britain taking part with the Sultan in order to obtain redress for so flagrant a wrong done to the Sultan, and for the purpose of preventing the Dismemberment of the Turkish empire.”19 Even Muhammad ’Ali’s French allies warned him against taking measures that would draw him into confrontation with both the sultan and Europe.
Buoyed by European support, the Ottomans decided to take immediate action against Muhammad ’Ali. Sultan Mahmud II mobilized another massive campaign force. Since the violent disbanding of the Janissaries in 1826, Mahmud had made great investments in a new Ottoman Nizami army. His top officers assured him that his modern German-trained infantry was more than a match for the Egyptians, battle-weary after five years of suppressing popular rebellions in Syria. The Ottomans marched to the Syrian frontiers near Aleppo and attacked Ibrahim Pasha’s forces on June 24, 1839. Contrary to all expectations, the Egyptians routed the Ottomans in the Battle of Nezib, inflicting massive casualties and taking more than 10,000 prisoners.
Sultan Mahmud II never received word of his army’s defeat. Suffering from tuberculosis, the sultan’s health had been deteriorating for months, and he died on June 30 before learning of the disaster at Nezib. He was succeeded by his adolescent son, Sultan Abdulmecid I (r. 1839–1861), whose youth and inexperience did little to calm nerves among the commanders of the empire. The admiral of the Ottoman fleet, Ahmed Fevzi Pasha, sailed his entire navy across the Mediterranean and placed it under Muhammad ‘Ali’s command. The admiral feared the fleet might fall to Russian control if, as he expected, they intervened to prop up the young sultan. He also believed Muhammad ’Ali to be the leader most capable of preserving the Ottoman Empire; a virile rebel would make a better sultan than a callow crown prince. Panic spread across Istanbul. The young sultan faced the greatest internal threat in Ottoman history with no army or navy to defend him.
The European powers were no less concerned by the turmoil in Ottoman domains than the Ottomans themselves. Britain feared that Russia would take advantage of the power vacuum to seize the Straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles to secure access for its Black Sea fleet to enter the Mediterranean. This would overturn decades of British policies designed to contain the Russian fleet in the Black Sea and deny it access to warm water ports, preserving the balance of maritime power to Britain’s advantage. The British also hoped to frustrate French ambitions to extend its ally Egypt’s rule over the Eastern Mediterranean. Britain headed a coalition of European powers (from which France abstained) to intervene in the crisis, both to shore up the Ottoman dynasty and to force Muhammad ’Ali to withdraw from Turkey and Syria.
Negotiations dragged on for one year, as Muhammad ‘Ali tried to leverage his victory at Nezib to secure more territorial and sovereign privileges, while the British and the Porte pressed for Egypt’s withdrawal from Syria. In July 1840 the European coalition—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—offered Muhammad ’Ali lifetime rule over Damascus and hereditary rule over Egypt if his soldiers withdrew from the rest of Syria immediately. With the British and Austrian fleet assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean to take action, it was their last offer. Believing he had the support of France, Muhammad ’Ali rejected the offer.
The allied fleet approached the port city of Beirut under the command of British Admiral Napier, and on September 11 they bombarded Egyptian positions. The British used local agents to circulate pamphlets throughout Syria and Lebanon calling on the local people to rise up against the Egyptians. The people of Greater Syria had done so in the past, and were only too happy to do so again. The allied fleet meanwhile proceeded from Beirut to Acre to drive the Egyptians from the citadel. The Egyptians had assumed they could withstand any attack, but the joint Anglo-Austrian-Ottoman fleet took the citadel within three hours and twenty minutes, according to Mikhayil Mishaqa. The Egyptians had just taken delivery of gunpowder, which lay stacked and exposed in the center of the citadel. A shot from one of the allied ships detonated the powder “in such an unexpected fashion that the soldiers inside Acre fled, leaving no one to defend it.”20 The European and Ottoman forces retook Acre and established their control over the whole of the Syrian coast.
Ibrahim Pasha found his position increasingly untenable. Cut off from the sea, he had no means to resupply his troops, which were now constantly harassed by the local population. He withdrew his forces from Turkey and all parts of Syria to Damascus. As soon as his soldiers—some 70,000 in all—had assembled in Damascus, Ibrahim Pasha began an orderly withdrawal from Syria along the overland route to Egypt in January 1841.
The Egyptian menace had been contained, but the threat posed by the Second Egyptian Crisis to the survival of the Ottoman Empire required a formal settlement. In a deal brokered in London, the Ottomans conferred on Muhammad ‘Ali lifetime rule over Egypt and Sudan and established his family’s hereditary rule over Egypt. Muhammad’Ali, for his part, recognized the sultan as his suzerain and agreed to make an annual payment to the Porte as a token of his submission and loyalty to the Ottoman state.
Britain also wanted assurance that troubles in the Eastern Mediterranean would never again threaten the peace of Europe. The best insurance against conflict among the European powers for strategic advantage in the Levant was to ensure the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire—long a preoccupation of Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister. In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to “seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.” 21 This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory.
Between 1805 and 1841, Muhammad ‘Ali’s ambitions had gone full circle. He rose to rank of governor and made himself master of Egypt. Once he was secure in Egypt and had expanded the revenues of his province, he set about creating a modern military. He then expanded his territorial reach from Sudan and Hijaz in the Red Sea to include much of Greece for a while, and all of Syria. These gains were denied him by foreign intervention, and by 1841 he had been reduced to Egypt and Sudan. Egypt would have its own government and make its own laws, but it would remain bound by the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire. Though the Egyptians could strike their own coinage, their gold and silver coins would bear the sultan’s name, leaving the name of the Egyptian ruler for base copper. Egypt would have its own army, but its numbers were restricted to 18,000—a far cry from the massive army of 100,000–200,000 that Egypt formerly fielded. Muhammad ’Ali’s accomplishments were great, but his ambitions had been greater.
Muhammad ‘Ali’s final years in office were marked by disappointment and ill health. The pasha was now an old man—seventy-one years old by the time his army had returned from Syria. He had grown alienated from his son Ibrahim. Over the course of the Syrian campaign, father and son communicated through palace officials. Both fought illness—Ibrahim was sent to Europe to combat tuberculosis, and Muhammad ’Ali was beginning to lose his mental faculties to silver nitrate treatments he was given to combat dysentery. In 1847 the sultan recognized that Muhammad ‘Ali was no longer sufficiently competent to rule and appointed Ibrahim Pasha to succeed him. Ibrahim died six months later. By that time, Muhammad ’Ali was too far gone to notice. The succession passed to Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, Abbas, who officiated at Muhammad ’Ali’s funeral after the pasha’s death on August 2, 1849.
The age of local leaders had come to an end. As the Egyptians were divested of Crete, the Syrian provinces, and the Hijaz, the Ottoman government was careful to dispatch its own men to serve as governors in these provinces. The Azm family in Damascus, like the Jalilis in Mosul, lost their grip over the cities they had ruled for much of the eighteenth century. The autonomous government of Mount Lebanon collapsed as the Shihab family was overthrown for collaborating with Egyptian rule. Here too the Ottomans sought to impose their own governors, though with explosive consequences that would send Lebanon down the road to sectarian conflict. The bid for local autonomy from the Ottoman government had come at a high price for the working people of the Arab lands, who suffered through wars, inflation, political instability, and countless injustices at the hands of ambitious local leaders. They now wanted peace and stability.
The Ottomans too wanted to put an end to the internal challenges to their rule. While preoccupied by foreign threats and wars with Russia and Austria, they had seen the risks of leaving the Arab provinces unattended: the alliance between Ali Bey al-Kabir and Zahir al-Umar had threatened Ottoman rule in Syria and Egypt; the Wahhabis had ravaged southern Iraq and seized the Hijaz from Ottoman rule; and Muhammad ‘Ali used the wealth of Egypt to create an army that gave him control of an empire in his own right and the means to threaten the very survival of the Ottomans themselves. But for the intervention of the European powers, Muhammad’Ali could have toppled the Ottomans in the Second Egyptian Crisis. These experiences had impressed on the Ottoman government the need for reform. It would require not just a gentle tinkering with the standing institutions of government but a complete overhaul of the ancient machinery of rule.
The Ottomans recognized that they could not reform their empire on their own. They would need to draw on the ideas and technologies that had made their European rivals strong. Ottoman statesmen had noted how Muhammad ‘Ali succeeded in harnessing modern European ideas and technologies in creating his dynamic state. The dispatch of Egyptian missions to Europe, the import of European industrial and military technology, and the contracting of European technical advisors at all levels of the military and bureaucracy had played a large role in Muhammad ’Ali’s achievements.
The Ottomans were entering a new and complex era in their relations with their European neighbors. Europe would serve as the role model, the ideal to be attained in military and technological terms. But Europe was also a threat to be kept at arm’s length, both as a belligerent that coveted Ottoman lands and the source of dangerous new ideologies. Ottoman reformers would struggle with the challenge of adopting European ideas and technology without compromising their own cultural integrity and values.
The one thing the Ottomans could not do was ignore Europe’s progress. Europe had emerged as the dominant world power in the nineteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire increasingly would be obliged to play by Europe’s rules.