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

24 NAPOLEON’S EGYPThad declined, in part because of the toll taken by their wars with one another. 4The French believed that all the emirs were slave soldiers, called in ArabicMamluk, having been imported to serve in the Egyptian military. Since othershad never been slaves, however, this ruling group is better referred to as emirs(Arabic for “commanders”) or, at the higher ranks, beys (from a Turkish wordmeaning “lord”). A government of beys is a beylicate, and this group ruledEgypt as vassals of the Ottoman sultan. The Ottoman-Egyptian grandees andtheir wives owned vast estates and maintained magnificent mansions. Moiretdescribed them, saying that the beyspossess everything: houses, lands, and other properties, and have a considerableannual income. The clothing of the rich differs from that of the pooronly in the fineness of the material. Beneath a silk shirt, they wear a habit likethat of former monks in France, but of an exorbitant price; trousers of suchamplitude that they must take ten or twelve ells of cloth to make; and forfootwear they sport slippers of Moroccan leather of enormous dimensions.Their turbans must, given their fineness, cost them a great deal. They shavetheir heads, except for a small tuft in the middle of their pate. It is by this,they say, that at their final moment Muhammad will grab hold of them andpull them into paradise.The emirs and Mamluks defending Alexandria now charged for a secondtime, but failed to break through the French lines, which typically had formedinto impenetrable squares of men with firearms and bayonets raised. The OttomanEgyptians retired, then tried again, and again, never with success.Horses, for all their spirit and maneuverability, will not charge into a disciplinedinfantry square bristling with bayonets and gunfire. Fixed socket bayonets thatallowed infantrymen to fire their weapon and to use the bayonet as a pikeagainst cavalry had given eighteenth-century foot soldiers a powerful new advantage,as the emirs suddenly became aware. French battalions were being reinforcedat every moment. Since Bonaparte still lacked heavy artillery, which thenavy had not yet been able to offload, he had no means to punch a hole inAlexandria’s walls.Around noon, the Europeans mounted a decisive offensive. They chasedaway the defenders’ cavalry and then took Alexandria by scaling the walls. Theycamped partly inside and partly outside the walls of Alexandria that night, whilethe general staff lodged with families of wealth and position. They all sufferedfrom mosquitoes, the heat, and brackish water. Initially, some of the townspeoplepeppered the French with gunfire or pelted them with stones, even after the