Qansuh al-Ghawri
Qansuh al-Ghawri was the last but one of the Mamluk sultans, a Circassian slave-soldier who took the throne at sixty in 1501 after five sultans in five years, held it for fifteen, and died of a stroke on the field of Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo in August 1516 as his army broke before Selim's guns, which ended the Mamluk state in Syria that day and in Egypt within the year. He had been bought as a boy by the sultan Qaitbay, governed provinces, and was made sultan by the emirs as a compromise they expected to control; he said he accepted on condition that they would not kill him. He was a builder and a collector, put up the complex that bears his name in Cairo, restored the Kaaba's water supply and the Cairo citadel, kept a court of poets and Persian scholars, and raised money for it by debasing the coinage, taxing the waqfs and selling offices, which the chroniclers held against him. The two threats came together. The Portuguese had rounded Africa and were strangling the Red Sea spice trade on which Egypt lived; he built a fleet at Suez with Ottoman timber and gunners and sent it to India in 1508, where it won at Chaul and was destroyed off Diu in 1509. And the Ottomans under Selim I, having beaten the Safavids at Chaldiran in 1514, were now on his Syrian border. He mobilised the Mamluk cavalry, the finest in the world and the last army in the world that despised firearms, and marched to Aleppo in 1516 to hold the balance between Selim and Shah Ismail; Selim treated the move as an alliance with Persia and attacked. At Marj Dabiq on 24 August the Ottoman artillery and janissaries held the centre while the governor of Aleppo, Khair Bey, who had been bought, led the left wing off the field. The old sultan, watching the rout, fell from his horse dead, and his body was never found. His nephew Tuman Bay held Cairo until January 1517 and was hanged at the Zuwayla gate.
- Lived: 1441 CE – 1516 CE
- Nationality: Mamluk
- Roles: sultan, monarch
