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

56 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTSyria. His rebellion ended, but after a while the beys of Cairo again ceased payingtribute to the Ottoman sultan, provoking an Ottoman invasion in 1786 thathalted the province’s slide toward autonomy. Although in earlier decades wehistorians tended to write of the eighteenth century as a time of the resurgenceof Mamluk government in Egypt, as though the old state of the 1200s throughthe 1400s had been revived, we now know that this way of speaking is inaccurate.The Ottomans had endowed Egypt, however independent it sometimesbecame, with their own institutions, including their distinctive form of slavesoldiery. For this reason, it is more accurate to call the eighteenth-century rulingelite “Ottoman Egyptians.” Arabic chronicles of the time often called them“ghuz,” a reference to the Oghuz Turkic tribe, which also implied that theywere best seen as Ottomans (a Turkic dynasty). Most gained fluency in bothOttoman Turkish and Arabic, while retaining their knowledge of Caucasianlanguages such as Georgian and Circassian. Not all of the emirs had a slavesoldierbackground, and some were Arabic-speaking Egyptians.The eighteenth century was not kind to Egypt. Between 1740 and 1798,Egyptian society went into a tailspin, its economy generally bad; droughts wereprolonged, the Nile floods low, and outbreaks of plague and other diseases frequent.The slave-soldier houses fought fierce and constant battles with one another,and consequently raised urban taxes to levels that produced misery. Nowa new catastrophe had struck, in the form of Bonaparte’s plans to bestow libertyon Egypt.The French army resumed its progress south. From the edges of Buhayraprovince to Cairo is about eighty-five miles. Vigo-Roussillon recalled, “The armyadvanced, just as it had the day before, marching in deep-order squares—that is tosay, six ranks deep. The artillery was in the gaps between the battalions.” 17 He saidthat this formation had great advantages for fighting an enterprising enemy cavalry,but one that lacked mobile artillery. “When one wanted to form columns foran attack, the first three ranks separated out and went ahead, and the three otherskept their formation and presented a reserve formed of squares.”Bonaparte at this point allowed his army to march near the Nile, to guaranteeaccess to fresh water. Bread, on the other hand, was scarce, and the soldiershad to adopt the Egyptian peasant cuisine of fava beans ( ful). Sometimes theFrench soldiers got water buffalo meat, though on occasion horse meat had tobe substituted. They marched until 16 July without encountering any more Ottoman-Egyptiansoldiers, though the Bedouin dogged them mercilessly and