Ottoman Conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate
By 1490 the Mamluk Sultanate was in compound crisis: a cavalry elite that disdained firearms, a fiscal base dependent on the Indian Ocean spice trade that Portuguese rounding of the Cape was redirecting, and chronic factional violence that cycled through sultans without permitting investment in artillery. In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim I, fresh from his victory over the Safavids at Chaldiran, turned south. At the Battle of Marj Dabiq near Aleppo (August 1516), Ottoman cannon and Janissary muskets annihilated the Mamluk army and killed Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri. Syria fell at once. Selim pressed into Egypt and crushed the last Mamluk resistance at Ridaniya outside Cairo in January 1517, executing the final sultan Tuman Bay. The conquest annexed Egypt, Syria, and the holy cities of the Hejaz, making the Ottoman sultan custodian of Mecca and Medina and roughly doubling the empire's revenue. The Coptic administrative class and Arab urban merchants, with no stake in Mamluk survival, accommodated the new rulers, confirming the political weakness that had doomed the sultanate.
- Year: 1516 CE
- Category: Military
