[1517–1798] Ottoman Rule

In the year 1517, a storm broke over Egypt. For over two and a half centuries, the Mamluk Sultanate had reigned—a kingdom ruled by a warrior caste of former slaves, renowned for their peerless cavalry and opulent court in Cairo. They were the masters of Egypt, the guardians of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. But on the horizon, another power was rising, one armed not just with courage, but with gunpowder. The Ottoman Sultan, Selim I, known to his own people as "the Grim," descended from the north. His army was a modern marvel of its time. While the Mamluk knights still charged forward on magnificent Arabian steeds, clad in shining chainmail and wielding Damascene steel, they were met with a terrifying new sound: the thunder of cannon and the disciplined crackle of thousands of muskets. The Janissaries, the elite infantry of the Ottoman Empire, stood their ground and fired in volleys. At the decisive Battle of Ridaniya, just outside Cairo's gates, the age of the knight was blown apart by gunpowder. The Mamluk Sultan was defeated and executed, and the 500-year-old Caliphate in Cairo was extinguished. Egypt was no longer a kingdom, but a province—an *eyalet*—of the vast Ottoman Empire. You must understand, however, that the Ottomans were pragmatic rulers. They did not simply erase the old order. Instead, they placed a new layer of control on top of the existing power structure. This created a delicate, and often violent, dance of power in Cairo for the next three centuries. At the top was the Ottoman Pasha, the Sultan’s appointed governor, who resided in the Citadel of Cairo, a symbol of distant authority from Istanbul. Beneath him were the commanders of the Ottoman garrisons, the Janissary Aghas, controlling the military might. But crucially, the Ottomans allowed the Mamluks to survive. Not as sultans, but as Beys—local lords and administrators. These Mamluk Beys, still steeped in their warrior traditions, were tasked with collecting taxes and maintaining order in the countryside. This created a permanent, simmering tension. The Pasha, the Aghas, and the Mamluk Beys were locked in a constant struggle for influence and wealth, a three-way tug-of-war for the soul of Egypt. For the common Egyptian, the *fellah* tilling the black, fertile soil along the Nile, life was a cycle of flood, planting, and harvest, dictated by the river and the taxman. The Ottomans institutionalized a system called *iltizam*, or tax-farming. Wealthy individuals—often the Mamluk Beys themselves—would bid for the right to collect taxes from a district. They would pay a fixed sum to the state and then were free to extract as much as they could from the peasantry. This system was brutally efficient for the state but often ruinous for the farmer, whose fate depended entirely on the greed or mercy of his local Bey. Yet, Cairo continued to thrive as a great metropolis. Walk through its labyrinthine alleys and your senses would be overwhelmed. The air, thick with the scent of cardamom, cumin, and roasting coffee—a new, revolutionary beverage that fueled conversation in hundreds of new coffeehouses. The clang of the coppersmith’s hammer echoed through the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, where merchants sold silks from Persia, spices from India, and fine Egyptian cotton. Men of the city increasingly adopted the Ottoman *tarboosh* or fez, while women’s clothing remained a complex layering of linen and cotton, their faces often shielded from the public gaze by a *burqa*. Architecturally, the period left its mark. While grand mosques on the scale of the Mamluk era were rare, the Ottomans perfected a more intimate form of public charity: the Sabil-Kuttab. It was a beautiful, uniquely Cairene combination of a public water fountain (*sabil*) on the ground floor to quench the thirst of passersby, and a Quranic school (*kuttab*) on the floor above for orphan boys. The Sabil-Kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda, built in 1744, is a masterpiece of the era, a jewel of carved marble, intricate tilework, and delicate wooden screens that stands today as a testament to this blend of Ottoman and Mamluk artistry. As the centuries wore on, the Sultan’s power in distant Istanbul began to wane. The Mamluk Beys, who had never forgotten their heritage as rulers, grew bolder. The 18th century saw their power resurge dramatically. This simmering pot of ambition finally boiled over in the 1760s with the rise of a truly extraordinary figure: Ali Bey al-Kabir. A Mamluk of Georgian origin, sold into slavery as a boy, Ali Bey rose through the ranks with cunning and ruthlessness. By 1768, he had expelled the Ottoman Pasha and declared Egypt's independence. It was an audacious gamble. He stopped sending the annual tribute to Istanbul, struck coins in his own name, and even attempted to build an empire of his own, conquering parts of Arabia and Syria. For a few brief, dazzling years, it seemed the Mamluk Sultanate had been reborn. But in the world of the Mamluks, loyalty was a currency as valuable and as fleeting as gold. Ali Bey was betrayed by his most trusted general, his own adopted son, who defeated him in battle and returned Egypt to a nominal Ottoman rule, while keeping the real power for himself. The last decades of Ottoman rule were defined by this chaos. Rival Mamluk factions, with names like the Qasimis and the Faqaris, engaged in endless, bloody street battles in Cairo, devastating the city's economy. The irrigation canals fell into disrepair, and the population, ravaged by recurrent plagues that could wipe out a third of Cairo in a single year, dwindled to perhaps 2.5 million people across the entire country. Egypt was weak, fractured, and isolated. Its once-feared warriors were fighting each other with tactics that had become obsolete. The province was an Ottoman possession in name only, a forgotten backwater ripe for the taking. And then, in the summer of 1798, a new kind of storm gathered. Off the coast of Alexandria, a fleet unlike any seen before appeared on the horizon, carrying a young general from France with revolutionary ideas and an insatiable ambition. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. The world was about to come crashing into Egypt, and nothing would ever be the same again.