was proclaimed with the title Malik al-Ẓāhir. In a month’s time, however, there was another palace revolution, and the new Atābeg Kait Bey or Kaietbai (January 31st, 1468) was proclaimed sultan, the dethroned Timurbogha being, however, permitted to go free whither he pleased. Much of Kait Bey’s reign was spent in struggles with Ūzūn Hasan, prince of Diārbekr, and Shah Siwār, chief of the Dhu’l-Kādiri Turkomans. He also offended the Ottoman sultan Bāyezid II. by entertaining his brother Jem, who was afterwards poisoned in Europe. Owing to this, and also to the fact that an Indian embassy to the Ottoman sultan was intercepted by the agents of Kait Bey, Bāyezid II. declared war against Egypt, and seized Adana, Tarsus and other places within Egyptian territory; extraordinary efforts were made by Kait Bey, whose generals inflicted a severe defeat on the Ottoman invaders. In 1491, however, after the Egyptians had repeatedly defeated the Ottoman troops, Kait Bey made proposals of peace which were accepted, the keys of the towns which the Ottomans had seized being restored to the Egyptian sultan. Kait Bey endeavoured to assist his co-religionists in Spain who were threatened by King Ferdinand, by threatening the pope with reprisals on Syrian Christians, but without effect. As the consequence of a palace intrigue, which Kait Bey was too old to quell, on the 7th of August 1496, a day before his death, his son Mahommed was proclaimed sultan with the title Malik al-Nāṣir; this was in order to put the supreme power into the hands of the Atābeg Kānsūh, since the new sultan was only fourteen years old. An attempt of the Atābeg to oust the new sultan, however, failed. After a reign of little more than two years, filled mainly with struggles between rival amirs, Malik al-Nāṣir was murdered (October 31st, 1498), and his uncle and vizier Kānsūh proclaimed sultan with the title Malik al-Ẓāhir. His reign only lasted about twenty months; on the 30th of June 1500 he was dethroned by Tūmānbey, who caused Jān Belāt, the Atābeg, to be proclaimed sultan. A few months later Tūmānbey, at the suggestion of Kasrawah, governor of Damascus, whom he had been sent to reduce to subjection, ousted Jān Belāt, and was himself proclaimed sultan with the title Malik al-‘Ādil (January 25th, 1501). His reign lasted only one hundred days, when he was displaced by Kānsūh al-Ghūrī (April 20th, 1501). His reign was remarkable for a naval conflict between the Egyptians and the Portuguese, whose fleet interfered with the pilgrim route from India to Mecca, and also with the trade between India and Egypt; Kānsūh caused a fleet to be built which fought naval battles with the Portuguese with varying results.
In 1515 there began the war with the Ottoman sultan Selim I. which led to the close of the Mameluke period, and the incorporation of Egypt and its dependencies in the Ottoman empire (see Turkey: History). Kānsūh was charged The Turkish conquest. by Selim with giving the envoys of the Ṣafawid Isma‘il passage through Syria on their way to Venice to form a confederacy against the Turks, and with harbouring various refugees. The actual declaration of war was not made by Selim till May 1515, when the Ottoman sultan had made all his preparations; and at the battle of Merj Dabik, on the 24th of August 1515, Kānsūh was defeated by the Ottoman forces and fell fighting. Syria passed quickly into the possession of the Turks, whose advent was in many places welcome as meaning deliverance from the Mamelukes. In Cairo, when the news of the defeat and death of the Egyptian sultan arrived, the governor who had been left by Kānsūh, Tūmānbey, was proclaimed sultan (October 17th, 1516). On the 20th of January 1517 Cairo was taken by the Ottomans, and Selim shortly after declared sultan of Egypt. Tūmānbey continued the struggle for some months, but was finally defeated, and after being captured and kept in prison seventeen days was executed on the 15th of April 1517.
(8) The Turkish Period.—The sultan Selim left with his viceroy Khair Bey a guard of 5000 janissaries, but otherwise made few changes in the administration of the country. The register by which a great portion of the land was a fief of the Mamelukes was left unchanged, and it is said that a proposal made by the sultan’s vizier to appropriate these estates was punished with death. The Mameluke amirs were to be retained in office as heads of twelve sanjaks into which Egypt was divided; and under the next sultan, Suleiman I., two chambers were created, called respectively the Greater and the Lesser Divan, in which both the army and the ecclesiastical authorities were represented, to aid the pasha by their deliberations. Six regiments altogether were constituted by the conqueror Selim for the protection of Egypt; to these Suleiman added a seventh, of Circassians. As will be seen from the tables, it was the practice of the Porte to change the governor of Egypt at very short intervals—after a year or even some months. The third governor, Aḥmad Pasha, hearing that orders for this execution had come from Constantinople, endeavoured to make himself an independent ruler and had coins struck in his own name. His schemes were frustrated by two of the amirs whom he had imprisoned and who, escaping from their confinement, attacked him in his bath and killed him. In 1527 the first survey of Egypt under the Ottomans was made, in consequence of the official copy of the former registers having perished by fire; yet this new survey did not come into use until 1605. Egyptian lands were divided in it into four classes—the sultan’s domain, fiefs, land for the maintenance of the army, and lands settled on religious foundations.
It would seem that the constant changes in the government caused the army to get out of control at an early period of the Ottoman occupation, and at the beginning of the 11th Islamic century mutinies became common; in 1013 Troubles with the army. (1604) the governor Ibrahim Pasha was murdered by the soldiers, and his head set on the Bab Zuwēla. The reason for these mutinies was the attempt made by successive pashas to put a stop to the extortion called Tulbah, a forced payment exacted by the troops from the inhabitants of the country by the fiction of debts requiring to be discharged, which led to grievous ill-usage. In 1609 something like civil war broke out between the army and the pasha, who had on his side some loyal regiments and the Bedouins. The soldiers went so far as to choose a sultan, and to divide provisionally the regions of Cairo between them. They were defeated by the governor Mahommed Pasha, who on the 5th of February 1610 entered Cairo in triumph, executed the ringleaders, and banished many others to Yemen. The contemporary historian speaks of this event as a second conquest of Egypt for the Ottomans. A great financial reform was now effected by Mahommed Pasha, who readjusted the burdens imposed on the different communities of Egypt in accordance with their means. With the troubles that beset the metropolis of the Ottoman empire, the governors appointed thence came to be treated by the Egyptians with continually decreasing respect. In July 1623 there came an order from the Porte dismissing Muṣṭafā Pasha and appointing ‘Alī Pasha governor in his place. The officers met and demanded from the newly-appointed governor’s deputy the customary gratuity; when this was refused they sent letters to the Porte declaring that they wished to have Muṣṭafā Pasha and not ‘Alī Pasha as governor. Meanwhile ‘Alī Pasha had arrived at Alexandria, and was met by a deputation from Cairo telling him that he was not wanted. He returned a mild answer; and, when a rejoinder came in the same style as the first message, he had the leader of the deputation arrested and imprisoned. Hereupon the garrison of Alexandria attacked the castle and rescued the prisoner; whereupon ‘Alī Pasha was compelled to embark. Shortly after a rescript arrived from Constantinople confirming Muṣṭafā Pasha in the governorship. Similarly in 1631 the army took upon themselves to depose the governor Mūsā Pasha, in indignation at his execution of Kītās Bey, an officer who was to have commanded an Egyptian force required for service in Persia. The pasha was ordered either to hand over the executioners to vengeance or to resign his place; as he refused to do the former he was compelled to do the latter, and presently a rescript came from Constantinople, approving the conduct of the army and appointing one Khalīl Pasha as Mūsā’s successor. Not only was the governor unsupported by the sultan against the troops, but each new governor regularly inflicted a fine upon his outgoing predecessor, under the name of money due to the
