reinforcements to the besieged, General Stewart was compelled to retreat; and a dragoon was despatched to Lieutenant-colonel Macleod, commanding at Hamād, with orders to fall back. The messenger, however, was unable to penetrate to the spot; and the advanced guard, consisting of a detachment of the 31st, two companies of the 78th, one of the 35th, and De Roll’s regiment, with a picquet of dragoons, the whole mustering 733 men, was surrounded, and, after a gallant resistance, the survivors, who had expended all their ammunition, became prisoners of war. General Stewart regained Alexandria with the remainder of his force, having lost, in killed, wounded and missing, nearly 900 men. Some hundreds of British heads were now exposed on stakes in Cairo, and the prisoners were marched between these mutilated remains of their countrymen.
The beys became divided in their wishes, one party being desirous of co-operating with the British, the other with the pasha. These delays proved ruinous to their cause; and General Fraser, despairing of their assistance, evacuated Alexandria on the 14th of September. From that date to the spring of 1811 the beys from time to time relinquished certain of their demands; the pasha on his part granted them what before had been withheld; the province of the Fayum, and part of those of Giza and Benī-Suef, were ceded to Shāhīn; and a great portion of the Sa‘īd, on the condition of paying the land-tax, to the others. Many of them took up their abode in Cairo, but tranquillity was not secured; several times they met the pasha’s forces in battle and once gained a signal victory. Early in the year 1811, the preparations for an expedition against the Wahhābīs in Arabia being complete, all the Mameluke beys then in Cairo were invited to the ceremony of investing Mehemet Ali’s favourite son, Tūsūn, with a pelisse and the command of the army. As on the former occasion, the unfortunate Mamelukes fell into the snare. On the 1st of March, Shāhīn Bey and the other chiefs (one only excepted) repaired with their retinues to the citadel, and were courteously received by the pasha. Having taken coffee, they formed in procession, and, preceded and followed by the pasha’s troops, slowly descended the steep and narrow road leading to the great gate of the citadel; but as soon as the Mamelukes arrived at the gate it was suddenly closed before them. The last of those to leave before the gate was shut were Albanians under Sālih Kush. To these troops their chief now made known the pasha’s orders to massacre all the Mamelukes within the citadel; therefore, having returned Final massacre of the Mamelukes. by another way, they gained the summits of the walls and houses that hem in the road in which the Mamelukes were confined, and some stationed themselves upon the eminences of the rock through which that road is partly cut. Thus securely placed, they began a heavy fire on their victims; and immediately the troops who closed the procession, and who had the advantage of higher ground, followed their example. Of the betrayed chiefs, many were laid low in a few moments; some, dismounting, and throwing off their outer robes, vainly sought, sword in hand, to return, and escape by some other gate. The few who regained the summit of the citadel experienced the same fate as the rest, for no quarter was given. Four hundred and seventy Mamelukes entered the citadel; and of these very few, if any, escaped. One of these is said to have been a bey. According to some, he leapt his horse from the ramparts, and alighted uninjured, though the horse was killed by the fall; others say that he was prevented from joining his comrades, and discovered the treachery while waiting without the gate. He fled and made his way to Syria. This massacre was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of the Mamelukes throughout Egypt, orders to this effect being transmitted to every governor; and in Cairo itself the houses of the beys were given over to the soldiery. During the two following days the pasha and his son Tūsūn rode about the streets and tried to stop the atrocities; but order was not restored until 500 houses had been completely pillaged. The heads of the beys were sent to Constantinople.
A remnant of the Mamelukes fled to Nubia, and a tranquillity was restored to Egypt to which it had long been unaccustomed. In the year following the massacre the unfortunate exiles were attacked by Ibrahim Pasha, the eldest son of Mehemet Ali, in the fortified town of Ibrīm, in Nubia. Here the want of provisions forced them to evacuate the place; a few who surrendered were beheaded, and the rest went farther south and built the town of New Dongola (correctly Dunkulah), where the venerable Ibrahim Bey died in 1816, at the age of eighty. As their numbers thinned, they endeavoured to maintain their little power by training some hundreds of blacks; but again, on the approach of Ismail, another son of the pasha of Egypt, sent with an army in 1820 to subdue Nubia and Sennār, some returned to Egypt and settled in Cairo, while the rest, amounting to about 100 persons, fled in dispersed parties to the countries adjacent to Sennār.
See A. A Paton, History of the Egyptian Revolution (2 vols., 2nd ed., enlarged 1870); and French Revolutionary Wars. (E. S. P.; S. L.-P.; D. S. M.*)
3. Modern History.
(1) Rule of Mehemet Ali.—Mehemet Ali was now undisputed master of Egypt, and his efforts henceforth were directed primarily to the maintenance of his practical independence. The suzerainty of the sultan he acknowledged, and at the reiterated commands of the Porte he despatched in 1811 an army of 8000 men, including 2000 horse, under the command of his son Tūsūn, a youth of sixteen, against the Wahhābīs (q.v.). After a successful advance, this force met with a serious repulse at the pass of Jedeida, near Safra, and retreated to Yembo’ (Yambu). In the following year Tūsūn, having received reinforcements, again assumed the offensive, and captured Medīna after a prolonged siege. He next took Jidda and Mecca, defeating the Wahhābīs beyond the latter place and capturing their general. But some mishaps followed, and Mehemet Ali, who had determined to conduct the war in person, left Egypt for that purpose in the summer of 1813. In Arabia he encountered serious obstacles from the nature of the country and the harassing mode of Wars in Arabia. warfare adopted by his adversaries. His arms met with various fortunes; but on the whole his forces proved superior to those of the enemy. He deposed and exiled the sharif of Mecca, and after the death of the Wahhābī leader Saud II. he concluded in 1815 a treaty with Saud’s son and successor, Abdullah. Hearing of the escape of Napoleon from Elba—and fearing danger to Egypt from the plans of France or Great Britain—Mehemet Ali returned to Cairo by way of Kosseir and Kena. He reached the capital on the day of the battle of Waterloo. His return was hastened by reports that the Turks, whose cause he was upholding in Arabia, were treacherously planning an invasion of Egypt.
During Mehemet Ali’s absence in Arabia his representative at Cairo had completed the confiscation, begun in 1808, of almost all the lands belonging to private individuals, who were forced to accept instead inadequate pensions. By this revolutionary method of land “nationalization” Mehemet Ali became proprietor of nearly all the soil of Egypt, an iniquitous measure against which the Egyptians had no remedy. The attempt which in this year (1815) the pasha made to reorganize his troops on European lines led, however, to a formidable mutiny in Cairo. Mehemet Ali’s life was endangered, and he sought refuge by night in the citadel, while the soldiery committed many acts of plunder. The revolt was reduced by presents to the chiefs of the insurgents, and Mehemet Ali ordered that the sufferers by the disturbances should receive compensation from the treasury. The project of the Nizām Gedid (New System), as the European system was called, was, in consequence of this mutiny, abandoned for a time.
Tūsūn returned to Egypt on hearing of the military revolt at Cairo, but died in 1816 at the early age of twenty. Mehemet Ali, dissatisfied with the treaty concluded with the Wahhābīs, and with the non-fulfilment of certain of its clauses, determined to send another army to Arabia, and to include in it the soldiers who had recently proved unruly. This expedition, under his eldest son Ibrahim Pasha, left in the autumn of 1816. The war was long and arduous, but in 1818 Ibrahim captured the Wahhābī capital of Deraiya. Abdullah, their chief, was made prisoner,
