Egypt by Robert L. Tignor

Author:Robert L. Tignor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Qazdaghli Period, 1730–1798

The Qazdaghli household dominated the last period of Ottoman Egyptian history prior to the French invasion of 1798. The founder of the household, Mustafa Qazdaghli, had arrived in Egypt from Anatolia in the seventeenth century and joined the prestigious Janissary corps, rising to the rank of katkhuda or second in command before his death in 1704. At first the Qazdaghlis worked within the Faqari faction, which destroyed its bitter Qasimi foes in 1730, but by the 1740s, the Qazdaghlis had become the dominant force in Egypt. In addition to gaining control of most of Egypt’s important administrative offices, the Qazdaghlis drew wealth from Egypt’s flourishing coffee trade.

The most impressive of the Qazdaghli leaders in this period was a ruthless but dynamic man, Ali Bey al-Kabir, who ruled Egypt from 1760 to 1772. He made Egypt virtually autonomous from Istanbul. Not only did Ali Bey depose two governors whom the sultan sent to Egypt, but he also had his name recited in the Friday prayers immediately after that of the sultan and in place of the imperial appointee. He also had coins minted in his name. Although he had sprung from one of the non-Mamluk, Ottoman military units in Egypt—the Janissary corps—in fact his period in power and that of his successor, Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab, who ruled from 1772 until 1775, more closely resembled the old Mamluk era than any other period in Ottoman Egyptian history. These two rulers, often designated as neo-Mamluks, sought to turn Egypt into an independent state and to detach it from Ottoman suzerainty. Ali Bey invaded Syria against the wishes of his superiors in Istanbul and conducted his own diplomatic negotiations with European diplomats. But these two renegade rulers were ultimately not successful. The Ottomans reestablished their control over Egypt in 1775, only to lose it to the French, who invaded the country in 1798, and then to an Albanian military adventurer, Muhammad Ali, who prevailed in a three-cornered struggle with the Ottoman governor, the Mamluks, and his Albanian stalwarts and had himself installed as the ruler of Egypt in the early nineteenth century.

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