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

THE FERMENT OF THE MIND53carbine (a short-barreled handheld firearm easier to shoot from horseback). Allfirearms were either attached to the man or the horse, giving him a facility withthem and ensuring that he never had to put them away. Many wore coats of mailand helmets, which lacked visors but did have a bar to protect the face. Theirsabers, though fine, were fragile, made for swift, direct slashing at the enemy,not for parrying sword thrusts (in the course of which they would soon break).It was the horse that evaded the opponent’s blade.Those local Egyptians who had not fled sought a modus vivendi with thenewcomers. A village cleric brought Bonaparte his flag. The commander inchief told him, according to Malus, “Return to the mosque, thank God for havinggiven victory to the most just cause.” Bonaparte, elated, wrote GeneralMenou an account of the battle. “The day before yesterday, we encountered andfought the enemy. Murad Bey and three or four thousand Mamluks on horseback,twenty artillery pieces, and some launches with cannon, desired to preventus from getting past Shubrakhit. We took his cannons, and we killed orwounded some fifty of his men, among them many principal chiefs. A launcharmed with cannon, with a Turk commander aboard, was sunk. From this day,the Mamluks have fled night and day. It is probable that we will not see thembefore Cairo.” 13The French had already conquered much of Buhayra province, and theircolumns were now daggers pointing at the capital. What was the society likeover which Bonaparte aspired to rule? What exactly was he supplanting? Egyptwas a largely Arabic-speaking society, but it was at that time under the nominalrule of the Ottoman Empire, with its capital in Istanbul (which had been Constantinopleunder the Romans and Byzantines). When the Ottomans conqueredEgypt in 1517, they displaced a ruling caste of slave soldiers called Mamluks,most of them initially Christian youths from Circassia in the Caucasus, wherethey were taken as slaves when defeated on local battlegrounds. Medieval Muslimrulers often feared that if they depended too heavily on local tribal warriors,or on an army recruited from a pastoral population with strong clan ties, thenthese kinship groups would retain their own regional interests and would set therulers aside in a coup. Rulers had often depended on imported slave soldiers, becauseslavery is a form of social death in which the individual is cut off from hisfamily and place of origin. Slaves, they thought, would lack such thick networksof kinship and so would be more loyal to the sovereign. They were converted toIslam, and most lost close contact with their families abroad. Mamluks, despite