Ottoman Conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate
Selim I destroyed the Mamluk sultanate in two battles and doubled the size of the Ottoman Empire. The Mamluks had ruled Egypt and Syria since 1250 through a self-perpetuating military caste of purchased and manumitted slave soldiers, mostly Circassian by the sixteenth century, who elected their own sultans and who had stopped the Mongols at Ain Jalut and expelled the last crusaders. Their weakness by 1516 was money and technology. The Portuguese route round Africa had cut into the spice revenues that funded them, and the Mamluk cavalry regarded firearms as dishonourable and had almost no field artillery. Selim, having spent his early reign fighting the Safavids in the east, turned south when the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri moved troops in support of Persia. The armies met at Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo in August 1516. Ottoman artillery and janissary musketry broke the Mamluk charge, a Mamluk governor changed sides, and the sultan died of a stroke on the field. Syria fell in weeks. Ridaniya outside Cairo in January 1517 finished it, and the last Mamluk sultan was hanged at a city gate. The consequences were large. The Ottomans took Egypt's grain and revenue, control of the Red Sea and the routes to India, and the guardianship of Mecca and Medina, which the Sharif of Mecca conceded that year. The last Abbasid caliph in Cairo was taken to Istanbul, and later Ottoman claims to the caliphate rest on it. The Mamluks were not eliminated as a class. They kept their lands and much of their local power under Ottoman governors and reasserted control of Egypt in practice within two centuries, which is who Napoleon was fighting at the pyramids in 1798.
- Year: 1516 CE
- Category: Military
