It was partly to counteract the Austrian threat, and partly to secure the Black Sea coastline for an attack on southern Russia and the Crimea, that the French sent an expeditionary force into the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta in late July. The force was made up of Bashi Bazouk irregulars (called the Spahis d’Orient by the French) under the command of General Yusuf as well as infantry from the 1st (General Canrobert’s), 2nd (General Bosquet’s) and 3rd (Prince Napoleon’s) Divisions. Captured as the 6-year-old Giuseppe Vantini in Elba in 1815 by the Barbary corsairs and brought up in the palace of the Bey of Tunis, Yusuf was the founder and commander of the Spahi cavalry employed by the French in their conquest of Algeria. His success there made him the ideal candidate to organize the Bashi Bazouks under French command. By 22 July he had assembled at Varna a cavalry brigade of 4,000 Bashi Bazouks given to the French by the Ottomans, along with various other detachments of irregulars, including a Kurdish band of horsemen commanded by Fatima Khanum. Known as the Virgin of Kurdistan, the 70-year-old Khanum led her tribal followers, armed with swords and knives and pistols, under the green banner of a Muslim war. Yusuf too appealed to the idea of a jihad to motivate his men against the Russians and give them something to fight for other than the prospect of plunder, their traditional incentive, which the French were determined to stamp out. ‘We have come to save the Sultan, our caliph,’ a group of Bashi Bazouks told Louis Noir, whose Zouave brigade joined Yusuf’s force on its march north from Varna; ‘if we die fighting for him without payment, we will go directly to heaven; if we were paid to fight, none of us would have a right to paradise, for we would have received our recompense on earth.’35
But not even the promise of paradise could ensure the discipline of Yusuf’s cavalry. As soon as they were ordered to set off from Varna, the Bashi Bazouks began to desert, claiming they would not fight for foreign officers (Yusuf spoke a Tunisian Arabic which the Syrians, Turks and Kurds under his command could not understand). An advance squadron of cavalry ran away en masse on their first sighting of the Cossacks near Tulcea, leaving the French officers to fight them on their own (they were all killed). On the 28th, Yusuf’s troops beat the Cossacks and forced them to retreat, but then they lost all discipline, plundering the villages, killing Christians and bringing their heads back to General Yusuf, in the hope of a reward (the Turkish army customarily paid a bounty for the heads of infidels, including civilians, defeated in a holy war). Some men even murdered Christian women and children, cutting their bodies into pieces also in exchange for a reward.36
The next day, the first of Yusuf’s troops succumbed to cholera. The marshes and lakes of the Danube delta were infested with disease. The death toll was alarming. Dehydrated by the disease and by days of marching in the scorching heat, men fell down and died beside the road. Yusuf’s force disintegrated rapidly, as soldiers fled to escape the cholera or lay down in the shelter of a tree to die. Yusuf ordered a retreat to Varna, and the remnants of his force, some 1,500 men, arrived there on 7 August.
