style than his later operations. The campaign lasted two years, and terminated in the destruction of the Wahhabis as a political power. Ibrahim landed at Yembo, the port of Medina, on the 30th of September 1816. The holy cities had been recovered from the Wahhabis, and Ibrahim’s task was to follow them into the desert of Nejd and destroy their fortresses. Such training as the Egyptian troops had received, and their artillery, gave them a marked superiority in the open field. But the difficulty of crossing the desert to the Wahhabi stronghold of Deraiya, some 400 m. east of Medina, and the courage of their opponents, made the conquest a very arduous one. Ibrahim displayed great energy and tenacity, sharing all the hardships of his army, and never allowing himself to be discouraged by failure. By the end of September 1818 he had forced the Wahhabi leader to surrender, and had taken Deraiya, which he ruined. On the 11th of December 1819 he made a triumphal entry into Cairo. After his return he gave effective support to the Frenchman, Colonel Sève (Suleiman Pasha), who was employed to drill the army on the European model. Ibrahim set an example by submitting to be drilled as a recruit. When in 1824 Mehemet Ali was appointed governor of the Morea by the sultan, who desired his help against the insurgent Greeks, he sent Ibrahim with a squadron and an army of 17,000 men. The expedition sailed on the 10th of July 1824, but was for some months unable to do more than come and go between Rhodes and Crete. The fear of the Greek fire ships stopped his way to the Morea. When the Greek sailors mutinied from want of pay, he was able to land at Modon on the 26th of February 1825. He remained in the Morea till the capitulation of the 1st of October 1828 was forced on him by the intervention of the Western powers. Ibrahim’s operations in the Morea were energetic and ferocious. He easily defeated the Greeks in the open field, and though the siege of Missolonghi proved costly to his own troops and to the Turks who operated with him, he brought it to a successful termination on the 24th of April 1826. The Greek guerrilla bands harassed his army, and in revenge he desolated the country and sent thousands of the inhabitants into slavery in Egypt. These measures of repression aroused great indignation in Europe, and led first to the intervention of the English, French and Russian squadrons (see Navarino, Battle of), and then to the landing of a French expeditionary force. By the terms of the capitulation of the 1st of October 1828, Ibrahim evacuated the country. It is fairly certain that the Turkish government, jealous of his power, had laid a plot to prevent him and his troops from returning to Egypt. English officers who saw him at Navarino describe him as short, grossly fat and deeply marked with smallpox. His obesity did not cause any abatement of activity when next he took the field. In 1831, his father’s quarrel with the Porte having become flagrant, Ibrahim was sent to conquer Syria. He carried out his task with truly remarkable energy. He took Acre after a severe siege on the 27th of May 1832, occupied Damascus, defeated a Turkish army at Homs on the 8th of July, defeated another Turkish army at Beilan on the 29th of July, invaded Asia Minor, and finally routed the grand vizier at Konia on the 21st of December. The convention of Kutaiah on the 6th of May left Syria for a time in the hands of Mehemet Ali. Ibrahim was undoubtedly helped by Colonel Sève and the European officers in his army, but his intelligent docility to their advice, as well as his personal hardihood and energy, compare most favourably with the sloth, ignorance and arrogant conceit of the Turkish generals opposed to him. He is entitled to full credit for the diplomatic judgment and tact he showed in securing the support of the inhabitants, whom he protected and whose rivalries he utilized. After the campaign of 1832 and 1833 Ibrahim remained as governor in Syria. He might perhaps have administered successfully, but the exactions he was compelled to enforce by his father soon ruined the popularity of his government and provoked revolts. In 1838 the Porte felt strong enough to renew the struggle, and war broke out once more. Ibrahim won his last victory for his father at Nezib on the 24th of June 1839. But Great Britain and Austria intervened to preserve the integrity of Turkey. Their squadrons cut his communications by sea with Egypt, a general revolt isolated him in Syria, and he was finally compelled to evacuate the country in February 1841. Ibrahim spent the rest of his life in peace, but his health was ruined. In 1846 he paid a visit to western Europe, where he was received with some respect and a great deal of curiosity. When his father became imbecile in 1848 he held the regency till his own death on the 10th of November 1848.
See Edouard Gouin, L’Égypte au XIX e siècle (Paris, 1847); Aimé Vingtrinier, Soliman-Pasha (Colonel Sève) (Paris, 1886). A great deal of unpublished material of the highest interest with regard to Ibrahim’s personality and his system in Syria is preserved in the British Foreign Office archives; for references to these see Cambridge Mod. Hist. x. 852, bibliography to chap. xvii.
IBSEN, HENRIK (1828–1906), Norwegian dramatic and
lyric poet, eldest son of Knud Henriksen Ibsen, a merchant,
and of his wife Marichen Cornelia Altenburg, was born at Skien
on the 20th of March 1828. For five generations the family had
consisted on the father’s side of a blending of the Danish, German
and Scottish races, with no intermixture of pure Norwegian.
In 1836 Knud Ibsen became insolvent, and the family withdrew,
in great poverty, to a cottage in the outskirts of the town. After
brief schooling at Skien, Ibsen was, towards the close of 1843,
apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad; here he remained
through seven dreary years of drudgery, which set their mark
upon his spirit. In 1847, in his nineteenth year, he began to
write poetry. He made a gloomy and almost sinister impression
upon persons who met him at this time, and one of his associates
of those days has recorded that Ibsen “walked about Grimstad
like a mystery sealed with seven seals.” He had continued, by
assiduous reading, his self-education, and in 1850 he contrived
to come up as a student to Christiania. In the same year he
published his first work, the blank-verse tragedy of Catilina,
under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. A second drama,
The Viking’s Barrow, was acted (but not printed) a few months
later; Ibsen was at this time entirely under the influence of the
Danish poet Oehlenschläger. During the next year or two he
made a very precarious livelihood in Christiania as a journalist,
but in November 1851 he had the good fortune to be appointed
“stage-poet” at the little theatre of Bergen, with a small but
regular salary. He was practically manager at this house, and
he also received a travelling stipend. In 1852, therefore, he
went for five months to study the stage, to Copenhagen and to
Dresden. Among many dramatic experiments which Ibsen made
in Bergen, the most considerable and most satisfactory is the
saga-drama of Mistress Inger at Östraat, which was produced in
1855; and printed at Christiania in 1857; here are already
perceptible some qualities of his mature character. Much less
significant, although at the time more successful, is The Feast at
Solhaug, a tragedy produced in Bergen in 1856; here for a
moment Ibsen abandoned his own nascent manner for an
imitation of the popular romantic dramatist of Denmark, Henrik
Hertz. It is noticeable that Ibsen, by far the most original of
modern writers for the stage, was remarkably slow in discovering
the true bent of his genius. His next dramatic work was the
romantic tragedy of Olaf Liljekrans, performed in 1857, but
unprinted until 1898. This was the last play Ibsen wrote in
Bergen. In the summer of the former year his five years’
appointment came to an end, and he returned to Christiania.
Almost immediately he began the composition of a work which
showed an extraordinary advance on all that he had written
before, the beautiful saga-drama of The Warriors in Helgeland,
in which he threw off completely the influence of the Danish
romantic tragedians, and took his material directly from the
ancient Icelandic sources. This play marks an epoch in the
development of Norwegian literature. It was received by the
managers, both in Christiania and Copenhagen, with contemptuous
disapproval, and in the autumn of 1857 Ibsen could
not contrive to produce it even at the new theatre of which he
was now the manager. The Warriors was printed at Christiania
in 1858, but was not acted anywhere until 1861. During these
years Ibsen suffered many reverses and humiliations, but he
persisted in his own line in art. Some of his finest short poems,
