the Levant]
the Sultan. Alexandria fell after a slight resistance, and the Battle of the Pyramids laid the country at the conqueror's feet. But if the French General had formed the gigantic projects which he afterwards put forward of conquering India and returning home by Constantinople to "take Europe in the rear," the possibility of their realisation vanished with the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir.
During the autumn and winter of 1798 Bonaparte busied himself with the suppression of revolts and the administration of the country, in which he received aid from the distinguished scholars and men of science whom he had brought with him and who formed the Institute of Egypt. But his hope that the Porte would not regard the seizure of Egypt as a casus belli was disappointed, for by September Turkey was at war with France. He determined to forestall an attack from the combined forces of the Sultan and the Mamelukes by invading Syria, and early in 1799 he fought his way by El Arish, Gaza and Jaffa to Haifa, whence he could discern two British men-of-war lying off Acre. After fierce fighting he abandoned the siege of Acre and led his reduced forces back to Egypt amid terrible hardships, entering Cairo in June, after an absence of six months. A month later he routed a Turkish army which had been brought by sea to Aboukir. But in the moment of his triumph he slipped away from Egypt to push his fortunes at home and to defend France against the Second Coalition, leaving the command to Kléber. In August, 1801, the last French troops surrendered to a British force, and the three years’ experiment in oriental conquest came to an inglorious end.
In June 1802, shortly after the Peace of Amiens, France and Turkey signed a treaty by which France recognised the Sultan's possession of Egypt. But the First Consul had no intention of abandoning his schemes in the East. In the autumn of 1802 he sent Sébastiani on a "commercial mission" to the Levant, in the course of which he visited Alexandria and Cairo, Acre, Smyrna, and Constantinople. Returning home
B
