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

54 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTstarting as slaves, were often paid very handsomely and had the opportunity torise high in the military, the bureaucracy, or the court. On reaching adulthood,they were awarded their freedom but remained loyal to their former master.Ironically, barracks full of slave soldiers often established new networks offriendship and professional contacts that allowed them in some instances tomake successful revolts against their sultans. The Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, themost famous member of which was Saladin, the nemesis of the crusaders, maintaineda large number of Mamluks. In 1250, when their Ayyubid monarch died,and as Egypt faced a potential onslaught from invading Mongol hordes, theMamluk soldiers made a military coup and took over the country and then ruledit themselves for two and a half centuries.When, on 24 January 1517, Sultan Selim I of the Ottoman Empire sweptinto Cairo, he reduced it to an appendage of Istanbul. 14 The Ottomans incorporatedEgypt into one of the largest empires in the history of the world, a flourishingtrade emporium that linked India in the east with Istanbul via Iraq, andthen Istanbul with Marseilles in the west across the Mediterranean. The empireat its height had thirty-two provinces, of which thirteen were Arabic-speaking,and Egypt, among the more populous and the most agriculturally productive,became its granary. The Ottomans subordinated the Circassian slave soldiers inEgypt to their own bureaucracy and their own system of military slavery. Istanbulfamously established seven long-lasting regiments in Egypt. Five of themwere cavalry regiments, and two were infantry. These regiments were staffed bya multicultural and polyglot elite, held together only by their loyalty to the sultanand Islam, their mastery of the Ottoman language (an aristocratic, Persianinflectedform of Turkish), and Ottoman military and bureaucratic techniques.They comprised Anatolian Turks, Bosnians, Albanians, converted Jews, Armenians,Georgians, and Circassians. Within the military, a strong divide existedbetween those soldiers originally recruited as slaves, who remained at the top ofthe hierarchy, and the free volunteers from the poor villages of Anatolia. ManyTurkish-speaking soldiers from Anatolia could not live on their regular pay, andgradually they became artisans or shopkeepers in their spare time.In the 1600s and 1700s Egypt emerged as the center of a vast and lucrativecoffee trade. 15 Coffee trees probably came to Yemen from Ethiopia, and in the1500s the people of Cairo first learned that brewing the beans and drinking thehot juice had become popular in Sanaa, especially among Sufi mystics seeking tostay up late for prayer and meditation. By the 1600s, the custom of coffee-drinkinghad spread beyond the mystics to the general public, and coffeehouses openedall over the Ottoman Empire, often to the dismay of authoritarian sultans and