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

THE FALL OF THE DELTA AND THE ARABIAN JIHAD231the great caravan merchant Ahmad al-Mahruqi, whom Bonaparte had rescuedfrom the Bedouin near Bilbeis the previous summer, and Ibrahim Effendi, secretaryof the spice trade, who narrowly escaped being executed for sedition afterthe Cairo revolt. The Coptic financier Jirjis al-Jawhari went along as well. 18Given that he brought the Egyptian commercial and financial elite along withhim, his trip to Suez in part aimed at preparing for the assertion of dominanceover the trade of the Red Sea by the French Republic of Egypt, and for the expansionof that commerce. He would also want it fortified against an Ottomanor British counterattack during his planned campaign in Syria. Suez was an importantlink in Egyptian commerce with the Arabian Peninsula. From Suez, theEgyptians dispatched wheat to Jidda and Hudayba, and to it those merchantssent back valuable commodities such as coffee.The opportunity to get out of Cairo no doubt also attracted the restlessCorsican. On exiting the capital, Doguereau remembered, “The general inchief broke into a gallop, and we all rode hell for leather, our horses arrivingwinded.” 19 The next day they entered the desert and camped that night in adesolate spot, shivering as the winter desert quickly radiated the heat it hadborrowed from the daytime sun. They made a fire the Bedouin way by rubbingcamel bones together. The chieftains of the Tarrabin and Bili tribes accompaniedthem and taught them how to mix into their grub some dry herbsthey knew how to spot in the environs. What the French called the desert wasmost often not the completely desolate yellow sand dunes characteristic of,say, the deep Sahara. It was a brown and chartreuse land dotted with hardyshrubs. They arrived at Suez, horses exhausted, the night of 26 December,having outrun their baggage. Al-Jabarti complained that before the commanderin chief arrived, French troops plundered coffee and other merchandisefrom the port.On the twenty-seventh, Bonaparte toured Suez and ordered it fortified, lestthe British prove able to land troops there from India. The few remaining localmerchants complained to him about having been pillaged, and he promised tomake restitution to them, asking for a list of what had been taken. One of thetwo larger vessels anchored at the port and bearing coffee from Yemen hadsunk. Bonaparte had French divers bring the coffee up, according to al-Jabarti.The French conquest of Suez alarmed the merchants of the Red Sea ports, andAmir Ghalib of Mecca abruptly forbade ships to go there from Jidda. Bonapartepursued a correspondence from Suez with notables of the Hejaz in nearby Arabia,urging them to resume trade ties with Egypt, and he wrote the sharif ofMecca personally. Despite his having received Sultan Selim III’s declaration of