Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

88 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTwhere they demanded provisions. Al-Jabarti said that the locals refused, so theFrench “attacked them, beat them, broke them, pillaged the town, and thenburned it.” The civilizational mission progressed. The Egyptian chronicler saidthat all the French troops, led by Bonaparte, then headed for the provincial capital,Bilbeis.Bonaparte thought of Bilbeis as potentially a site of significant wealth,since some of the returning merchant pilgrims of the pilgrimage caravan hadgone there. Al-Jabarti says, however, that most travelers had dispersed. The returningpeasant pilgrims in the Mecca caravan had hired Bedouin to providethem with carriage and to deliver them and their wives and families to theirhometowns in Gharbiya, Minufiya, and other provinces to the west. The caravanleader, or “amir al-hajj,” Salih Bey, and some of the great merchants hadinitially come to Bilbeis at the invitation of Ibrahim Bey, but when he flednortheast, so did they. In earlier correspondence with them, Bonaparte had attemptedto convince the merchant-pilgrims to come to Cairo and had promisedthem a 4,000-man escort. But at the same time, Ibrahim Bey had writtento them asking that they join him at his capital. A few, willing to brave Christianrule, headed for Cairo. (Malus reported having encountered a small caravansplinter group with forty camels near al-Matariya early in the campaign.)Most went initially to Bilbeis.With Ibrahim Bey and his supporters gone, the French found Bilbeis undefendedand they took it without firing a shot. Bonaparte explained in his laterdispatch to the Directory that before they arrived at the provincial capital, theFrench forces had rescued the caravan coming from Mecca, which the Bedouinhad captured and taken to the desert. The richer merchants must have bribedsome Bedouin to defect, since the French found four hundred or five hundredcamels accompanied by about a hundred Bedouin guards. A commander of anengineering battalion, Detroye, said there were about 2,000 pilgrims, nearly reducedto begging, and a few poor, plain women, with some others hidden inpalanquins. “At the approach of the commander in chief, the pilgrims greetedhim as though he were the king of France, since he had manifested the intentionof protecting them.” 7 Bonaparte had this caravan escorted to Cairo in safety.Bilbeis, Detroye reported, was a small village with little to offer save that itwas an excellent site for a garrison, being a sort of amphitheater in the midst ofa naked plain. The inhabitants immediately set up a market for their visitors. Itwas not the only commerce of the town. “The women of the country, for theirpart, engaged in the commerce of displaying their charms openly right in thestreet for a small coin, and many aficionados lined up.” Along with other inno-