Massacre of the Mamluks at the Cairo Citadel
Muhammad Ali had the Mamluk leadership killed in the Cairo citadel in March 1811 after inviting them to a ceremony. The Mamluks had governed Egypt as a military caste since 1250 and had survived the Ottoman conquest of 1517 as the country's effective landholders and rulers under nominal Ottoman authority. Muhammad Ali was an Albanian officer sent with the Ottoman force that expelled the French in 1801, who had manoeuvred himself into the governorship by 1805 with the support of Cairo's religious scholars and merchants. He spent six years unable to govern with the Mamluks in place and unable to remove them by war. The occasion was a procession to mark his son's appointment to command an expedition against the Wahhabis in Arabia. Some 470 Mamluk beys and their retainers rode up to the citadel in ceremonial dress, were entertained, and formed up to leave through a narrow lane between high walls. The gates at both ends were shut and Albanian troops fired down from the walls for about an hour. Almost none survived; the story of one man jumping his horse over the parapet is doubtful. Their households across Egypt were hunted down over the following weeks. Muhammad Ali then confiscated the land, abolished the tax-farming system, monopolised cotton and grain, built a conscript army on French lines and a navy, invaded Sudan, Arabia, Greece and Syria, and founded a dynasty that ruled until 1952. The state he built is the reason he is called the founder of modern Egypt, and the method is worth stating plainly. A ruling class was invited to a party and shot, and the reforms that historians praise were only possible because it was.
- Year: 1811 CE
- Category: Political
