Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

CHAPTER 1

From Cairo to Istanbul

The hot summer sun beat down upon al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, forty-ninth sultan of the Mamluk dynasty, as he reviewed his troops for battle. Since the founding of the dynasty in 1250, the Mamluks had ruled over the oldest and most powerful Islamic state of its day. The Cairo-based empire spanned Egypt, Syria, and Arabia. Qansuh, a man in his seventies, had ruled the empire for fifteen years. He was now in Marj Dabiq, a field outside the Syrian city of Aleppo, at the northernmost limits of his empire, to confront the greatest danger the Mamluks had ever faced. He would fail, and his failure would set in motion the demise of his empire, paving the way for the conquest of the Arab lands by the Ottoman Turks. The date was August 24, 1516. Qansuh wore a light turban to protect his head from the burning sun of the Syrian desert. He wore a regal blue mantle over his shoulders, on which he rested a battle axe, as he rode his Arabian charger to review his forces. When a Mamluk sultan went to war, he personally led the troops in battle and took most of his government with him. It was as if an American president took half his cabinet, leaders of both houses of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and a synod of bishops and rabbis, all dressed for battle alongside the officers and soldiers. The commanders of the Mamluk army and the four chief justices stood beneath the sultan’s red banner. To their right stood the spiritual head of the empire, the caliph al-Mutawakkil III, under his own banner. He too was dressed in a light turban and mantle, with a battle axe resting on his shoulder. Qansuh was surrounded by forty descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, who wore copies of the Qur’an enveloped in yellow silk cases wrapped around their heads. The descendents were joined by the leaders of the mystical Sufi orders under green, red, and black banners.

THE ARAB WORLD IN THE OTTOMAN ERA, 1516-1830

Qansuh and his retinue would have been impressed and reassured by the spectacle of 20,000 Mamluk soldiers massed in the plains around them. The Mamluks—the word in Arabic means “one possessed” or “slave”—were a caste of elite slave soldiers. Young men were brought from Christian lands in the Eurasian steppe and the Caucasus to Cairo, where they were converted to Islam and trained in the martial arts. Separated from their families and homelands, they owed their total loyalty to their masters—both those who physically owned them and those who taught them. Trained to the highest standard in warfare and indoctrinated into total devotion to religion and state, the mature Mamluk was then given his freedom and entered the ranks of the ruling elite. They were the ultimate warriors in hand-to-hand combat and had overpowered the greatest armies of the Middle Ages: in 1249 the Mamluks defeated the Crusader army of the French king Louis IX, in 1260 they drove the Mongol hordes out of Arab lands, and in 1291 they expelled the last of the Crusaders from Islamic lands. The Mamluk army was a magnificent sight. Its warriors wore silk robes of brilliant colors, their helmets and armor were of the highest craftsmanship, and their weapons were made of hardened steel inlaid with gold. The show of finery was part of an ethos of chivalry and a mark of confidence of men who expected to carry the day. Facing the Mamluks across the battlefield were the seasoned veterans of the Ottoman sultan. The Ottoman Empire had emerged at the end of the thirteenth century as a minor Turkish Muslim principality engaged in holy war against the Christian Byzantine Empire in Anatolia (the Asian lands of modern Turkey). Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottomans had integrated the other Turkish principalities and conquered Byzantine territory in both Anatolia and the Balkans. In 1453 the seventh Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II, succeeded where all previous Muslim attempts had failed when he seized Constantinople and completed the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Henceforth Mehmed II would be known as “the Conqueror.” Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, became the Ottoman capital. Mehmed II’s successors proved no less ambitious in expanding the territorial reach of their empire. On this day in 1516, Qansuh was about to engage in battle with the ninth Ottoman sultan, Selim I (r. 1512–1520), nicknamed “the Grim.” Paradoxically, Qansuh had hoped to avoid going to war by making a show of strength on his northern frontier. The Ottomans were engaged in hostilities with the Persian Safavid Empire. Ruling in what is now modern Iran, the Safavids spoke Turkish like the Ottomans and were probably of Kurdish ethnic origins. Their charismatic leader, Shah Ismail (r. 1501–1524), had decreed Shiite Islam the official religion of his state, which put him on an ideological collision course with the Sunni Ottoman Empire.¹ The Ottomans and Safavids had fought over Eastern Anatolia in 1514–1515, and the Ottomans had emerged victorious. The Safavids urgently sought an alliance with the Mamluks to contain the Ottoman threat. Qansuh had no particular sympathy for the Safavids, but he wanted to preserve the balance of power in the region and hoped that a strong Mamluk military presence in northern Syria would confine Ottoman ambitions to Anatolia, leaving Persia to the Safavids and the Arab world to the Mamluks. Instead, the Mamluk deployment posed a strategic threat to the Ottoman flank. Rather than run the risk of a two-front war, the Ottoman sultan suspended hostilities with the Safavids to deal with the Mamluks. The Mamluks fielded a great army, but the Ottoman force was greater by far. Its disciplined ranks of cavalry and infantry outnumbered the Mamluks by as much as three to one. Contemporary chroniclers estimated Selim’s army to number 60,000 men in all. The Ottomans also enjoyed a significant technological advantage over their adversaries. Whereas the Mamluks were an old-fashioned army that placed much emphasis on individual swordsmanship, the Ottomans fielded a modern gunpowder infantry armed with muskets. The Mamluks upheld medieval military values while the Ottomans represented the modern face of sixteenth-century warfare. Battle-hardened soldiers with extensive combat experience, the Ottomans were more interested in the spoils of victory than in gaining personal honor through hand-to-hand combat.

As the two armies engaged in battle at Marj Dabiq, Ottoman firearms decimated the ranks of the Mamluk knights. The Mamluk right wing crumbled under the Ottoman offensive, and the left wing took flight. The commander of the left wing was the governor of the city of Aleppo, a Mamluk named Khair Bey who, it transpired, had been in league with the Ottomans before the battle and had transferred his allegiance to Selim the Grim. Khair Bey’s treachery delivered victory to the Ottomans shortly after the start of battle. The Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghawri, watched in horror as his army collapsed around him. The dust on the battlefield was so thick that the two armies could hardly see each other. Qansuh turned to his religious advisors and urged them to pray for a victory he no longer believed his soldiers could deliver. One of the Mamluk commanders, recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, took down the sultan’s banner, folded it, and turned to Qansuh, saying: “Our master the Sultan, the Ottomans have defeated us. Save yourself and take refuge in Aleppo.” As the truth of his officer’s words sunk in, the sultan suffered a stroke that left him half paralyzed. When he tried to mount his horse, Qansuh fell and died on the spot. Abandoned by his fleeing retinue, the sultan’s body was never recovered. It was as though the earth had opened and swallowed the fallen Mamluk’s body whole. As the dust of battle settled, the full horror of the carnage became apparent. “It was a time to turn an infant’s hair white, and to melt iron in its fury,” the Mamluk chronicler Ibn Iyas reflected. The battlefield was littered with dead and dying men and horses whose groans were cut short by the victorious Ottomans in their eagerness to rob their fallen adversaries. They left behind ?headless bodies, and faces covered with dust and grown hideous? to be devoured by crows and wild dogs.² It was an unprecedented defeat for the Mamluks, and a blow from which their empire would never recover.

Victory at Marj Dabiq left the Ottomans masters of Syria. Selim the Grim entered Aleppo unopposed and went on to occupy Damascus without a fight. News of the defeat reached Cairo on September 14, some three weeks after the battle. The surviving Mamluk commanders gathered in Cairo to elect a new sultan. They chose Qansuh’s deputy, al-Ashraf Tumanbay, as his successor. Tumanbay was to be the last Mamluk sultan, his reign lasting only three and a half months. Selim the Grim wrote Tumanbay from Damascus, offering him two options: to surrender, and rule over Egypt as a vassal of the Ottomans, or to resist and face total annihilation. Tumanbay wept with terror when he read Selim’s letter, for surrender was not an option. Fear began to grip the Mamluk sultan’s soldiers and subjects alike. In a bid to preserve discipline, Tumanbay issued a proclamation forbidding the sale of wine, beer, or hashish, under penalty of death. However, the chroniclers claim, the anxious inhabitants of Cairo paid no attention to his orders and sought relief from the imminent threat of invasion in drugs and alcohol.³ When news reached Cairo of the conquest of the coastal town of Gaza, where the Ottomans had put to death 1,000 townspeople, the smell of fear swept through the city. In January 1517, the Ottoman army entered Egypt, heading for the Mamluk capital. When Selim reached the northern outskirts of Cairo on January 22, Tumanbay’s soldiers showed little enthusiasm for the fight. Many troops had failed to report for duty. Town criers were sent through the streets of Cairo threatening to hang any deserters before their own front doors. By such means Tumanbay assembled all the soldiers he could muster—a force of some 20,000 horsemen, infantry, and Bedouin irregulars. Learning from the experience of Marj Dabiq, Tumanbay dispensed with the chivalric prohibition on firearms and armed a large number of his soldiers with muskets. He also lined up 100 wagons bearing light cannon to confront the attackers. The men and women of Cairo came to the battlefield to cheer on the army and to offer prayers for their success. Unpaid, lacking in confidence, and largely unreliable, the Mamluk army approached the day of battle as a group of men fighting for their own survival rather than victory. The battle took place on January 23, 1517, “a tremendous engagement,” wrote Ibn Iyas, “the mere mention of which is enough to strike terror into the hearts of men and its horrors to unhinge their reason.” The drums beat for battle, and the Mamluk cavalry mounted their horses and set off across the field. They ran into a much larger Ottoman force that “came on like locusts.” Ibn Iyas claimed that the ensuing battle was yet worse than the earlier defeat at Marj Dabiq, the Turks ?coming up from every direction like clouds,? the ?noise of their musketry deafening, and their attack furious.? Within one hour the Mamluk defenders had suffered heavy casualties and were in full retreat. Tumanbay fought on longer than most of his commanders before he too retreated from the battle, vowing to fight again another day.⁴ The victorious Ottoman troops stormed Cairo and pillaged the city for three days. The helpless civilian population, left to the mercy of the invading army, could do nothing but watch as their homes and possessions were plundered. The only refuge against the violence of the Ottoman soldiers was the Ottoman sultan himself, and the people of Cairo bent over backward to honor their new master. The Friday prayers in mosques, which had traditionally been recited in the name of the Mamluk sultan, were now delivered in Sultan Selim’s honor, one of the traditional means of acknowledging sovereignty. “God save the Sultan,” the preachers intoned, “son of the Sultan, King of the two continents and the two seas; conqueror of the two armies, Sultan of the two Iraqs, servant of the two sacred cities, the victorious King Selim Shah. O Lord of both worlds, grant that he may ever be victorious.” Selim the Grim responded to Cairo’s submission and instructed his ministers to announce a public pardon and the restoration of security. Sultan Selim waited nearly two weeks after defeating the Mamluk army to enter the city of Cairo. This was the first chance most of Cairo’s residents had to scrutinize their new master. Ibn Iyas gives a graphic portrait of the Ottoman conqueror:As the Sultan passed through the city he was cheered by all the populace. He was described as having a fair complexion, a clean-shaven chin, and large nose and eyes, as being short in stature, and wearing a small turban. He showed levity and restlessness, turning his head from side to side as he rode along. He was said to be about forty years of age. He had not the dignity of former Sultans. He was of an evil disposition, blood-thirsty, violent-tempered, and intolerant of being answered.⁵

Selim did not rest easily in Cairo while the Mamluk sultan was still at large. So long as Tumanbay lived, the Ottomans knew that his partisans would plot his restoration. Only a very public death would dash those hopes forever. Selim the Grim was given the opportunity in April 1517, when the fugitive Tumanbay was betrayed by Bedouin tribesmen and handed over to the Ottomans. Selim forced Tumanbay to march through the center of Cairo to dispel any doubt that he was in fact the deposed Mamluk sultan. Tumanbay’s procession ended at Bab Zuwayla, one of the main gates of the walled city of Cairo, where he was taken by his executioners and hanged before the horrified crowd. The hanging rope broke—some say it broke twice?as if reflecting divine reluctance to permit regicide. ?Once he surrendered his soul, a loud cry went up from the crowd,? the chronicler recorded, capturing the sense of public shock and horror at this unprecedented spectacle. ?Never in the past have we witnessed such an event as the hanging of a sultan of Egypt at Bab Zuwayla, never!?⁶ For Sultan Selim, the death of Tumanbay was cause for celebration. With the termination of the Mamluk dynasty, Selim completed his conquest of their empire and the transfer of all their wealth, lands, and glory to his own dynasty. He could now return to Istanbul having added Syria, Egypt, and the Arabian province of the Hijaz to the Ottoman Empire. The Hijaz carried particular importance as the birthplace of Islam. It was here, in the city of Mecca, that Muslims believe God first revealed the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad, and it was in nearby Medina that the Prophet established the first Muslim community. Selim now added the religious legitimacy of being Servant and Protector of the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina to the sultan’s imperial title. These gains confirmed Selim as sultan of the greatest Islamic empire in the world. Before leaving Cairo, Selim asked to see one of the famous Egyptian shadow plays, a puppet theater performed with silhouette figures before a lit screen. He sat in private to enjoy the spectacle. The puppet master made a model of Bab Zuwayla and a figure of Sultan Tumanbay at the moment of his hanging. When the cord broke twice, the Ottoman sultan “found the spectacle very funny. He gave the artist 200 dinars and a velour cloak of honour. ‘When we leave for Istanbul, come with us so that my son can see this,’ Selim told him.”⁷ His son, Sьleyman, would succeed to the Ottoman throne three years later and inherit all Selim had conquered from the Mamluks.

The Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Empire was a major turning point in Arab history. The fateful clash of arms between Mamluk swordsmen and Ottoman riflemen marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age in the Arab world. The Ottoman conquest also meant that for the first time since the rise of Islam, the Arab world was ruled from a non-Arab capital. The Umayyads, Islam’s first dynasty, ruled their rapidly expanding empire from Damascus between AD 661 and 750. The Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) ruled the greatest Muslim empire of its day from Baghdad. Cairo, founded in 969, served as capital to no less than four dynasties before the advent of the Mamluks in 1250. From 1517 onward, the Arabs would negotiate their place in the world through rules set in foreign capitals, a political reality that would prove one of the defining features of modern Arab history. That said, the shift from Mamluk to Ottoman rule had proved easier than many had initially feared at the time of Selim the Grim’s bloody conquests. The Arabs had been ruled by Turkish-speaking foreigners since the thirteenth century, and the Ottomans were in many ways similar to the Mamluks. Elites in both empires came from Christian slave origins. Both empires were bureaucratic states that observed religious law and protected Islamic domains from foreign threats with strong armies. Moreover, it was too early to speak of a distinct Arab identity that would object to ?foreign? rule. Before the age of nationalism, identity was linked to either one?s tribe or town of origin. If Arabs thought in terms of a broader identity, it was more likely to be based on religion than ethnicity. For the majority of Arabs, who were Sunni Muslims, the Ottomans were perfectly acceptable rulers. The fact that the administrative center had moved from Arab lands to Istanbul, a city straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, seems not to have been problematic to people at the time. The Arab peoples seem to have been pragmatic rather than ideological in assessing the change from Mamluk to Ottoman rule. They were far more concerned about questions of law and order, and reasonable taxation, than what it meant for Arabs to be ruled by Turks. The Egyptian historian ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, writing in the early nineteenth century, captured this respect for early Ottoman rule:At the outset of their reign, the Ottomans were among the best to rule the [Islamic] community since the Rightly-Guided Caliphs.⁸ They were the strongest defenders of religion and opposers of unbelievers, and for this reason their dominions expanded through the conquests which God gave to them and to their deputies. They controlled the best inhabited regions on earth. Kingdoms far and wide submitted to them. They did not neglect the state, but guarded its territory and its frontiers. They upheld the performance of Islamic rites and . . . honoured the religious leaders, supported the maintenance of the Two Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, and upheld the rules and principles of justice by observing Islamic laws and practices. Their reign was secure; their sway endured; kings stood in awe of them; free men and slaves obeyed them.⁹

The villagers and townspeople of Syria did not mourn the passing of the Mamluk Empire. Ibn Iyas relates that the residents of Aleppo, who had suffered from overtaxation and arbitrary rule, barred the retreating Mamluks from entering the city and “treated them worse than the Ottomans had” after their defeat in Marj Dabiq. When Selim the Grim entered the city of Aleppo, “the town was illuminated in celebration, candles lighted in the bazaars, voices were raised in prayer for him and the people rejoiced” at their deliverance from their former Mamluk overlords.¹⁰ The people of Damascus were also unperturbed by the change in political masters, according to the Damascene chronicler Muhammad ibn Tulun (1475–1546). His account of the last years of Mamluk rule is replete with references to overtaxation, the greed of officials, the powerlessness of the central government, the unscrupulous ambition of the Mamluk amirs, the lack of security in the countryside, and the economic woes that resulted from such maladministration.¹¹ By comparison, Ibn Tulun had favorable things to say about Ottoman rule, which brought law and order and regular taxation to the province of Damascus. The fall of the Mamluks probably changed the Ottoman Empire more dramatically than it affected the Arab world. The Ottoman heartlands were in the Balkans and Anatolia, and the capital—Istanbul—straddled the European and Asian provinces of the empire. The Arab lands were far from the Ottoman center, and the Arab peoples were a novel addition to the heterogeneous population of the empire. The Arabs were themselves a diverse people, their common Arabic language divided into dialects that grew mutually incomprehensible as one moved from the Arabian Peninsula through the Fertile Crescent to North Africa. Whereas most Arabs were (and are) Sunni Muslims like the Ottoman Turks, there were sizable minority communities of splinter Muslim sects, Christian communities, and Jews. There was also tremendous cultural diversity across the Arab world, with distinct cuisine, architecture, and musical traditions in different Arab regions. History too had divided the Arab peoples, as different regions had been ruled by separate dynasties over the Islamic centuries. The integration of the Arab lands fundamentally changed the geographic reach and the culture and demography of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans faced a real challenge to devise viable administrative structures for their new Arab possessions. The Arabs entered the Ottoman Empire at a time of rapid expansion in Persia, the Black Sea region, and the Balkans. The territorial reach of the empire expanded much faster than the government’s ability to train and post qualified administrators for these new acquisitions. Only those regions closest to the Ottoman heartlands—like the northern Syrian city of Aleppo—came under standard Ottoman rule. The farther one traveled from Anatolia, the more the Ottomans sought to preserve the preexisting political order to ensure the smoothest transition to their rule. Pragmatists rather than ideologues, the Ottomans were more interested in preserving law and order and collecting regular taxes from their new possessions than imposing their own ways on the Arabs. As a result, Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces was marked by great diversity and extensive autonomy in the early years after the conquest.

The first challenge facing the Ottomans in Syria and Egypt was to shape a loyal government from Mamluk administrators. Only the Mamluks had the knowledge and experience to rule Syria and Egypt on the Ottomans’ behalf. Yet the Ottomans could not count on the loyalty of the Mamluks. The first decade of Ottoman rule was marked by a number of violent rebellions as key Mamluks sought to break from the Ottoman Empire and restore Mamluk rule in Syria and Egypt. For the first few years after the conquest of the Mamluk Empire, the Ottomans left the institutions of the former state more or less intact, under Mamluk amirs, or “commanders.” They divided the former Mamluk domains into three provinces based around the cities of Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo. Aleppo was the first to come under the full instruments of Ottoman rule. An Ottoman governor was appointed over the province, which was closely integrated into the political and economic life of the Ottoman Empire. Though the populace could not have known it then, the Ottoman conquest would initiate a real golden age in Aleppo lasting through the eighteenth century, in which the city would emerge as one of the great centers of the overland trade between Asia and the Mediterranean. Though it lay some 50 miles from the coast, Aleppo attracted the offices of the Dutch, British, and French Levant companies and became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Arab world.¹² When William Shakespeare had the first witch in Macbeth say of a sailor’s wife “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger” (act I, scene 3), his audiences in the Globe knew of where she spoke. Sultan Selim chose Mamluks to serve as his governors in Damascus and Cairo. The two men he appointed could not have been more different. He named Janbirdi al-Ghazali as his governor in Damascus. Janbirdi had been a Mamluk governor in Syria and had fought valiantly against the Ottomans at Marj Dabiq. He led the Mamluk attack on Selim’s forces in Gaza, where he was wounded. He retreated to Cairo with the remainder of his army to stand by Tumanbay in the defense of Cairo. Clearly Selim respected the integrity and loyalty Janbirdi had shown to his Mamluk sovereigns and hoped to turn that sense of loyalty to his new Ottoman master. In February 1518 Selim invested Janbirdi with all of the functions exercised by the former Mamluk governors of Damascus, in return for an annual tribute of 230,000 dinars.¹³ There were clear risks in transferring so much power to one person without checks or balances on his authority. In Cairo, Selim chose Khair Bey, the former Mamluk governor of Aleppo. Khair Bey had corresponded with Selim before the battle of Marj Dabiq and transferred his loyalty to the Ottoman sultan. It was Khair Bey who broke ranks in the Battle of Marj Dabiq and left the field to the Ottomans. He was later arrested by Tumanbay and placed in prison in Cairo. Selim released Khair Bey when he captured Cairo, and then honored the former governor of Aleppo for his services. However, Selim never forgot that Khair Bey had betrayed his former Mamluk sovereign and, according to Ibn Iyas, used to pun on his name, calling him “Khain Bey,” or “Sir Traitor.”¹⁴ For so long as Sultan Selim lived, these administrative arrangements held without challenge. In October 1520, news spread of Selim’s death and the ascension of the young prince Sьleyman to the Ottoman throne. Some Mamluks believed they had given their allegiance to Sultan Selim as their conqueror rather than to his dynasty as a whole. With the Ottoman succession, the new Sultan S?leyman faced a number of revolts in his Arab provinces. The first Mamluk revolt broke out in Damascus. Janbirdi al-Ghazali sought to restore the Mamluk Empire and declared himself sultan, taking the regal name al-Malik al-Ashraf (“the most noble king”). He donned the clothes and light turban of a Mamluk and banned the people of Damascus from wearing Ottoman fashions. He forbade preachers in the mosques from reciting the Friday prayers in Sultan Sьleyman’s name. And he set about purging Ottoman soldiers and officials from Syria. The towns of Tripoli, Homs, and Hama rallied to his cause. He raised an army and set out to seize Aleppo from the Ottomans.¹⁵ The people of Aleppo remained faithful to the Ottoman sultanate. They mourned the death of Selim and recited the Friday prayers in Sьleyman’s name. When the governor learned of the approach of the rebel army, he set about strengthening Aleppo’s defenses. In December, Janbirdi’s force laid siege to the city. The rebels fired cannons at the gates of Aleppo and sent burning arrows flying over the city walls, but the defenders repaired the damage and kept Janbirdi’s forces at bay. The Damascenes maintained the siege for fifteen days before withdrawing. Some 200 residents of Aleppo had been killed in the course of the siege, as well as a number of soldiers.¹⁶ As Janbirdi watched his rebellion falter, he returned to Damascus to consolidate his position and rally his forces. In February 1521, he set out to fight an Ottoman army on the outskirts of Damascus. His army was quickly routed, and Janbirdi was killed in battle. Panic swept Damascus. In supporting Janbirdi’s futile bid to secede from the Ottoman Empire and to reestablish Mamluk rule, the Damascenes had forfeited the benefits of a peaceful submission to Ottoman rule. The army that had just defeated Janbirdi’s forces now turned to sack the city of Damascus. According to Ibn Tulun over 3,000 people were killed, the town quarters and neighboring villages were plundered, and women and children were taken into captivity. Janbirdi’s head and the severed ears of 1,000 fallen soldiers were sent to Istanbul as trophies.¹⁷ Mamluk influence in Damascus was now at an end. Henceforth Damascus would be placed under an Ottoman governor appointed from Istanbul. In Egypt, the Ottomans faced repeated challenges to their rule. Although Selim had questioned the integrity of his Mamluk governor in Cairo and called him “Sir Traitor,” Khair Bey preserved the Ottoman order in Egypt until his death in 1522. It took the Ottoman authorities the better part of a year to name a new governor to replace him. Two provincial governors from Middle Egypt took advantage of the interregnum to launch a rebellion in May 1523, supported by a number of Mamluks and Bedouin leaders. The revolt was quelled swiftly by Ottoman troops in Egypt, with many of the Mamluk insurgents subsequently imprisoned or killed. The next challenge came from the new Ottoman governor himself. Ahmad Pasha had aspired to be grand vezir, or prime minister of the Ottoman government. Frustrated by his appointment as a mere provincial governor in Egypt, Ahmad Pasha sought to satisfy his ambitions by establishing himself as an independent ruler in Egypt. Shortly after his arrival in September 1523, he began to disarm the Ottoman troops posted to Cairo and shipped many of the infantrymen back to Istanbul. He released the Mamluks and Bedouins that had been imprisoned for taking part in the previous year?s uprising. Ahmad Pasha then declared himself sultan and ordered his supporters to kill the remaining Ottoman troops in the Citadel. Like Janbirdi, Ahmad Pasha had Friday prayers recited and coins struck in his name. His rebellion, however, was short-lived. His opponents attacked him and forced him to retreat to the countryside, where he was captured and beheaded in March 1524. Istanbul dispatched a new governor to Cairo with clear instructions to bring Mamluk influence to an end and to draw Egypt more fully under the central government?s rule. Thereafter, Sultan S?leyman proved more than capable of commanding the loyalty of his Arab subjects, and no further rebellions threatened Ottoman rule for the rest of his reign.