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

THE FALL OF THE DELTA AND THE ARABIAN JIHAD227recruited as Mamluks under Ottoman rule, though some Anatolians and Caucasiansmay have originally had a peasant background.The operation reported by the cavalryman was particularly well mannedand executed, but it was not typical. Many Delta villagers had a Bedouin past,and the Egyptian rural population was used to fleeing from Mamluk troops,floods and other menaces. Often peasants simply disappeared when the Frenchtax collectors approached. Laugier described how, on 18 December, GeneralDugua sent him out from Mansura with 280 men against two villages, Nabiluhaand Kafr Nabiluha, that had refused to pay taxes five times in a row, despite receivingrepeated written French demands. “I found the village of Nabiluha absolutelydeserted, the inhabitants having withdrawn to that of Kafr Nabiluha.”He marched his men across the inundated Delta swamp to the latter as fast aspossible. “The inhabitants fled, with the exception of some women and a veryfew men, among whom was found the village headman.” The headman pledgedthat the villagers would pay up, but when the French let him go on the pledgethat he would retrieve his absent compatriots, he vanished. Laugier burned thehouses of the village headmen in each village and returned empty-handed. 10The northeast remained insecure. A fellow engineer, Fèvre, told Jollois latethat fall of the dangerous situation in that part of the Delta. He had returnedfrom an assignment under General Andréossi to map Lake Manzala. 11 The expeditiondownriver had, he said, been extremely costly. “The destruction ofmany skiffs, with twenty, thirty, or even sixty French aboard, and an attack onAndréossi himself on his way there—all these events only too well demonstratedhow grievous the imprudence of the French and the fierceness of the inhabitantshad been for us.” On arriving again at Damietta, Fèvre informed Jollois,Andréossi had found the city in the most frightful disorder.We do not have far to go in seeking the reason for the French despair. CaptainMoiret revealed in his memoir that Hasan Tubar resumed his own assaultson the French while the troops in Cairo were tied down there. He said, “Duringthe revolt in Cairo a local adventurer and pirate, Hasan Tubar, who was backedby a supposed firman of the Ottoman Grand Vizier, made raids by boat over thelake on Damietta.” 12 That Tubar took advantage of the Cairo revolt to raidDamietta, hundreds of miles downriver, shows that the Egyptians retained theability to communicate up and down the Nile, and strove sometimes to coordinatetheir resistance.Tubar was said to derive his power in part from his many wives and concubinesand the sons they bore him. Marriage in particular was a way for himto make alliances with powerful Bedouin and other clans. At length, he was