Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517): Selim I Ends the Mamluks

The Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1516–1517 brought down the Mamluk Sultanate, which had ruled Egypt and Syria for more than 250 years. Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo in August 1516 and at Ridaniya outside Cairo in January 1517, and Egypt, Syria and the holy cities of Arabia became part of the Ottoman Empire. The conquest made the Ottomans the leading power of the Islamic world and gave them control of Egypt’s great wealth for three centuries.

Background

The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt was founded in 1250 by slave soldiers of Turkic and later Circassian origin. From Cairo the Mamluks ruled Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz, protected the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and hosted a line of Abbasid caliphs who held religious prestige but no real power.

By the early sixteenth century the sultanate was in difficulty. Plague, falling revenues and Portuguese attacks on Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade weakened it. Its army still relied on elite cavalry and was slow to adopt firearms on a large scale.

Relations with the Ottomans had long been tense. The two powers had fought an inconclusive war in 1485–1491 over the borderlands of south-eastern Anatolia. After Selim I defeated Shah Ismail at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 and then conquered the Mamluk-protected Turkmen principality of Dulkadir in 1515, the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri feared he would be next.

Marj Dabiq, August 1516

In 1516 Selim gathered an army, apparently for another campaign against Iran. Qansuh al-Ghawri, then about 75 years old, marched north into Syria with his army. Selim turned against him.

The armies met on 24 August 1516 at Marj Dabiq, a plain north of Aleppo. The Ottomans had artillery and musket-armed Janissaries; the Mamluks fought mainly as cavalry. Their army was also divided. Khayr Bey, the Mamluk governor of Aleppo, withdrew his troops during the battle, apparently by prior arrangement with the Ottomans.

The Mamluk army collapsed and Qansuh al-Ghawri died on the battlefield, probably of a stroke or heart failure rather than a wound. Aleppo opened its gates, and Damascus submitted without a fight a few weeks later; Selim entered the city in early October. Within weeks the whole of Syria was in Ottoman hands.

Across the desert to Cairo

In Cairo the surviving Mamluk emirs chose Tuman Bay, a nephew of the dead sultan, as sultan in October 1516. He tried to negotiate, but Selim demanded submission. An Ottoman force under Hadım Sinan Pasha defeated a Mamluk army near Gaza in late 1516, and in January 1517 the main Ottoman army crossed the Sinai desert, a difficult march made possible by careful supply arrangements and Bedouin guides.

Tuman Bay fortified a position at Ridaniya, just north-east of Cairo, with trenches and cannon. On 22 January 1517 the Ottomans outflanked his defences, avoiding the prepared guns, and won a decisive victory. Hadım Sinan Pasha, Selim’s grand vizier, was killed in the fighting.

The fall of Cairo

The Ottomans entered Cairo, but Tuman Bay and his men returned and fought in the streets for several days. The fighting and the reprisals that followed caused heavy loss of life in the city. Contemporary figures are unreliable, but thousands of people are believed to have died.

Tuman Bay fled south and continued resistance for some weeks. He was eventually betrayed by a Bedouin leader, captured and hanged at Bab Zuwayla, one of the great gates of Cairo, in April 1517. The Cairo chronicler Ibn Iyas, an eyewitness of these events, described the hanging and the shock it caused in the city.

Why the Ottomans won

Several factors explain the speed of the Ottoman victory. The first was firepower. The Ottomans fielded large numbers of musket-armed Janissaries and mobile field artillery, tested against the Safavids at Chaldiran. The Mamluk elite valued mounted combat as the mark of their status and had been reluctant to give firearms a central role; the guns Tuman Bay placed at Ridaniya were static and easily bypassed.

The second was division within the Mamluk ranks. The Mamluk sultanate was not hereditary, and rival factions of emirs competed for power. Khayr Bey’s withdrawal at Marj Dabiq, and the willingness of other emirs and local notables in Syria to come to terms with Selim, showed how shallow loyalty to the regime had become.

The third was leadership and organisation. Selim was an experienced and decisive commander, his army was battle-hardened, and Ottoman logistics allowed it to cross the Sinai in winter. By contrast, the Mamluks lost their sultan in the first battle and had to choose a new one in the middle of the war.

Key people

• Selim I (c. 1470–1520), the Ottoman sultan known as Yavuz, “the Grim”, who conquered Syria and Egypt within five months.
• Qansuh al-Ghawri (c. 1441–1516), Mamluk sultan from 1501, a builder and patron of the arts who died at Marj Dabiq.
• Tuman Bay II (died 1517), the last Mamluk sultan, remembered in Egypt for his determined resistance.
• Khayr Bey (died 1522), governor of Aleppo who changed sides and was rewarded with the governorship of Egypt.
• Ibn Iyas (1448–c. 1524), Egyptian historian whose chronicle is the main contemporary account of the conquest from Cairo.

The caliphate and the holy cities

Selim remained in Egypt until September 1517. The Sharif of Mecca, Barakat, sent his son to Cairo to submit, and Selim became the protector of Mecca and Medina, adopting the title “Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries”. This gave the Ottoman sultans great prestige among Muslims and responsibility for the annual pilgrimage.

Selim also took the last Abbasid caliph of Cairo, al-Mutawakkil III, to Istanbul, together with many Egyptian scholars, officials and craftsmen. A popular story says that al-Mutawakkil formally transferred the caliphate to Selim. This claim appears only in sources written long afterwards, especially in the late eighteenth century, and historians generally regard it as a later legend. Al-Mutawakkil was later allowed to return to Cairo, where he died in 1543.

Timeline

• 1514, 23 August: Selim I defeats the Safavids at Chaldiran.
• 1515: The Ottomans conquer the Dulkadir principality, a Mamluk client.
• 1516, 24 August: Ottoman victory at Marj Dabiq; Qansuh al-Ghawri dies.
• 1516, early October: Selim enters Damascus.
• 1516, October: Tuman Bay II becomes sultan in Cairo.
• 1517, January: The Ottoman army crosses the Sinai desert.
• 1517, 22 January: Ottoman victory at Ridaniya; Cairo is taken after street fighting.
• 1517, April: Tuman Bay II is hanged at Bab Zuwayla.
• 1517, September: Selim leaves Egypt for Istanbul.

Consequences

Egypt became an Ottoman province governed by a pasha appointed from Istanbul. Khayr Bey served as its first governor until his death in 1522. Egypt was the empire’s richest province, sending large sums of money to the treasury and grain to Istanbul and the holy cities.

The Mamluks did not vanish. Mamluk households, still recruiting slave soldiers from the Caucasus, became part of the provincial elite and in the eighteenth century often dominated Egypt in practice. Their power was finally broken by Muhammad Ali Pasha, who had many of their leaders killed at the Cairo Citadel in 1811.

The conquest also brought the Ottomans to the Red Sea, where they soon competed with the Portuguese for the Indian Ocean trade. Selim died in 1520, and his son Suleiman inherited an empire that had almost doubled in size in eight years.

Why it matters

The conquest of Egypt ended one of the great medieval Islamic states and made the Ottoman Empire the dominant power in the Middle East and the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites. Egypt remained under Ottoman sovereignty, at least formally, until the First World War.