1492 was a very bad year in Egypt. It was a particularly bad plague visitation year, in a place with a large aging elite class. The only thing worse than thousands of geezers who still control everything and have all the money piled up is having most of them die within a few months, causing chaos. 200,000 people died in Cairo, and the survivors heard rumors of evil Jinns and visions of the Prophet, both portending disaster and destruction. There were food riots and the Mamluk king, who was about 80, was badly injured in a fall from a horse.
The Mamluk system had been falling apart in the last few decades, which is why they were so dependent on veterans for leadership and even active military duty. Economic hardship had made it more difficult for them to defend their northern territories. They barely held onto Aleppo and Damascus against the Ottomans, but the effort left the treasury drained. The Ottomans now held the lands farther north where Mamluk slaves had been purchased, so in addition to running short on money, they also ran short on slave supply (no doubt driving up the prices). The descendants of Mamluks had always been barred from becoming Mamluks themselves, but they lived in Cairo off their grandparents’ trust funds. There was probably more wealth among individuals than in the treasury. The Mamluks ran so short on soldier recruits that they actually did form some units of Mamluk descendants, but just as they’d predicted, it wasn’t the same.
The gunpowder arms race was another huge issue for them. Mamluk training had traditionally emphasized archery, which took years to learn. At this point in small arms development, bows were actually more effective than arquebuses and early muskets. They didn’t create clouds of smoke, they could be fired more rapidly (and farther), and they probably had much better aim. But it was the large artillery that traditional weapons couldn’t compete with, as we saw in the fall of Constantinople. Field guns light enough to be portable, but heavy enough to be lethal, were impossible to fight back with arrows and swords. A few of them wouldn’t be enough, since they had to be cooled down between shots, but they were very expensive.
There were two ways to obtain large artillery: make it or buy it. Making it meant getting enough bronze or iron, in addition to all the components of gunpowder. Some of these things could not be obtained within Egypt or its remaining territories, so they had to buy even the materials from rivals and enemies. It’s possible, too, that Muslim countries were at first disadvantaged in casting cannon because they had never learned to cast bells, as Christians had done. Early Mamluk do-it-yourself experiments exploded in all the wrongs ways, so for a while they just had to buy imported guns—probably from sellers who didn’t want them to get the best stuff (just as it is today).
The Ottomans had begun to learn these things about two generations earlier, since it was the only way to keep up with the European armies that were pioneering such inventions. Also, the Ottomans were in the stage of vigorous expansion, as the Mamluks had been once. They could afford anything, as they kept conquering more territory. They had a solid tax base and an expanding supply of replacement soldiers. So their armies typically numbered close to 100,000 with large units of field artillery, and even after a crushing defeat, they could quickly replace 10,000 or 20,000 soldiers. By contrast, the Mamluks near the end were doing really well to come up with a few thousand.
The old Sultan was dying, and the jousting to replace him had begun, when Vasco da Gama invaded the Indian Ocean. If it was any empire’s responsibility to fight him away from the ports of East Africa, it was Egypt’s. When the “new Sultan roulette” had finally stopped at an aging mediocrity named al-Ghawri, the Portuguese were harder to dislodge. The Mamluks fortified Jedda and began fighting to regain their ports south of the Horn of Africa. Interestingly, the Ottoman Sultan helped; he sent men and materials for the Jihad. Hindsight makes this much less surprising; whoever “helps” also has men on the ground when the tide turns, and makes the takeover power transition much easier.
Last week we were talking about whether the Portuguese end-run around Africa really made a difference to the vast Muslim empires. Here’s a few lines out of The Knights of Islam: Wars of the Mamluks by James Waterson. He’s quoting Ibn Ayas, a chronicler of the time:
“The prefect of Jeddah collected from the Indian merchants a tenth of their income, an act discouraging them from entering the port at all—which thus fell idle. Their goods became scarce in Egypt, and the town was deserted. Similarly, the ports of Alexandria and Damietta were abandoned because Frankish merchants ceased entering them. European merchandise also disappeared.”
In addition to the Portuguese sea route, Venice had settled a truce with the Ottomans and returned to trading through Constantinople, so merchants could take a northern Silk Road route. Egypt suffered most as the Red Sea passage became irrelevant.
Meanwhile, just as the Ottomans and Mamluks had settled a truce in the region of Syria, where the Mamluks still held onto a few cities, new pressures came from the boy Shah of Iran. In the years before the Ottomans beat him so badly at Chaldiran, the newly energized Shi’ite Turkish tribesmen were raiding those cities. Then the Mamluk Sultan learned that the boy Shah was sending messages to the kings of Europe, seeking alliances against the Ottomans—and the Mamluks. The Shi’ite Shah wiped out the last Khan of the Crimean Tatars and, Waterson says, he even sent the Khan’s skull as a drinking vessel to Egypt for a “what about an alliance?” gift. The new Iranian kingdom was pretty flexible at that point, ready to ally with anyone who could contribute to its growth or fight anyone who couldn’t.
Egypt’s last Mamluk years, 1511 through 1516, were continually more miserable. The shrinking fighting corps was hardly paid and hardly fed. Any money went into the gunpowder arms race, and the other Mamluks resented that. They kept having near-uprisings and riots. Nobody knew if the army would follow the Sultan into battle—the aging Mamluks had found it harder and harder to leave Cairo, for decades now—-and when the final showdown came, fewer than a thousand Royal Mamluks (the really elite ones) could be mustered.
After the boy Shah was wounded and the Shi’ites’ confidence in his and their invincibility was shaken, apparently the Mamluk Sultan had the poor judgment to send messengers to seek a defensive alliance against the Ottomans—with whom Egypt had a truce. He also rode to his Syrian territories to muster an army (perhaps the smallest force the Mamluks had fielded). If the Ottomans had gone back to Tabriz to finish off the Shi’ite Shah, Egypt might have been okay. But with the Mamluk forces massed on the border, looking ready to break the truce, Sultan Selim turned aside.
In the decisive battle just north of Aleppo, summer 1516, the Mamluks at first did surprisingly well. Even as veterans and retirees, they still had great discipline and skill. But when the battle began to turn against them, the Sultan had a stroke and fell from his horse. Then it all disintegrated. Aleppo and Damascus both surrendered to the Ottomans.
The Mamluks crowned one last king, but he presided in Cairo only long enough for the Ottoman army to invade. In January 1517, the last Mamluk Sultan placed all the field artillery they had managed to obtain in the front lines to stop the advancing Turks. But he didn’t have sufficient number of guns to keep a steady fire, since they had to be cooled between shots. The Ottoman Sultan entered Cairo in triumph. There was one last battle among the pyramids at Giza, when the Turks mopped up and captured the last Mamluk king. He was carried back to Cairo, where he expected negotiated surrender. Instead, he was publicly hanged, with other Mamluk emirs.
Some Mamluks remained at large and continued to harry the Ottoman conquerors, while some were re-appointed to administrative roles. During their waning years, they started to become legends in their own time. Ottoman students started reading about Mamluks as heros, now that the legacy of Egypt had been adopted. Mamluks were Islam’s answer to Europe’s knights and heros. But while its former glories were bruited abroad, Egypt remained under Ottoman centralized authority, turning into just a province, until Napoleon disrupted the quiet flow of time in the desert.
