Bonaparte, immersing himself in the ancient history of pharaohs, Alexander and Caesar, arrived in a semi-autonomous province of the Ottomans. Egypt, like most Ottoman territories, was now semi-independent, ruled by rapacious Mamluk-Turkish pashas. ‘This horde of slaves, bought in Caucasus and Georgia, has tyrannized the most beautiful part of the world,’ said Bonaparte, who ordered his troops to be tolerant of Egyptian culture: ‘Treat them as you treated the Jews and the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams.’
After landing at Alexandria, the vanguard under General Dumas, whom the Austrians nicknamed the Black Devil, rode south. But this irrepressible giant, ‘the handsomest man you ever saw’, resented Bonaparte’s ambitions and started plotting against him.
On 20 July 1798, just outside Cairo, Bonaparte defeated the Mamluks. The publicity maestro named this his ‘Battle of the Pyramids’, declaiming, ‘Soldiers, remember that, from these pyramids, forty centuries of history contemplate you’ – even though they were not actually in view. Dumas’s cavalry pursued the Mamluks. The French occupied Cairo, Africa’s largest city, but ten days later Bonaparte’s fleet, moored in Aboukir Bay, was destroyed by an impetuous one-eyed, one-armed British admiral, Horatio Nelson. Bonaparte was nonplussed, but his options were now limited. In October, the Cairenes rebelled; Bonaparte and Dumas crushed the revolt, killing 5,000 rebels and trapping the last of them in the Al-Azhar Mosque, which they bombarded with artillery and then stormed, with Dumas himself galloping into the mosque on horseback. But now Bonaparte learned of Dumas’s intrigue: he threatened to shoot him, but allowed him to return to France.* Dumas was replaced by Murat, that Gascon fighting cockatoo, his sword engraved ‘Honour and the Ladies’, who several times saved the French from Mamluk cavalry.
But an Ottoman army was approaching through Syria, supported by the pasha of Acre. Bonaparte marched north and besieged Acre. The expedition was a disaster: he massacred his prisoners, killed his own wounded soldiers and failed to take Acre. While pumping out mendacious bulletins about his achievements and gaining a rallying song, ‘
In October 1799, Bonaparte abandoned his entire army (not for the last time) and slipped past British ships. ‘Bah! We’ll get there,’ he said. ‘Luck’s never abandoned us!’ Accompanied by his Georgian slave-bodyguard Roustam, he arrived in Paris to exploit his political prestige. Back in Egypt, British and Ottoman forces converged on the French army, which was finally evacuated.* Sultan Selim III had ordered Egypt’s recapture, massing an army that included a Turkish-Albanian, Mehmed Ali, the exact same age as Bonaparte, who would become the Islamic Napoleon.
Born in Kavala (Greece), Mehmed Ali was the son of an Albanian Ottoman official and nephew of the governor, ‘brought up a gentleman’. But ‘when Napoleon invaded Egypt, his uncle enrolled him in a unit commanded by his own son. He arrived in Egypt in 1801 as the French withdrew and just as Cairo descended into chaos. The Ottomans failed to control the Mamluks. Yet Mehmed Ali, taking command of 4,000 aggressive Albanians, skilfully outmanoeuvred both. In May 1805, Cairene grandees dispatched a delegation to see him.
‘Who,’ he asked, ‘have you chosen as governor?’
‘We’ll accept no one,’ they replied, ‘but you.’ It was only now that he sent for his sons and family from Greece. After just four years in Egypt, scarcely speaking Arabic, illiterate until he was forty, Mehmed Ali ruled Egypt. Like Napoleon, he burnished his legend, often speaking in the Caesaresque third person; but, unlike the Corsican, he created a state and dynasty that endured. The most successful Islamic potentate in modern times, Mehmed Ali would dominate Egypt for forty-three years, conquering (like Napoleon) a vast but short-lived empire, almost causing a European war, but then creating the first industrial economy outside Europe and a dynasty that ruled Egypt until 1952.
In October 1799, arriving back in Paris, Bonaparte found the
