Ottomans Conquer Egypt

Between 1516 and 1517, the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim I destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate, which had ruled Egypt and Syria for more than two and a half centuries. The conquest roughly doubled the size of the Ottoman realm, brought the Arab heartland under Istanbul's control, and gave the Ottoman sultans guardianship of Mecca and Medina, a position that greatly raised their prestige across the Muslim world.

The Mamluks were a military caste of slave-soldiers, mostly of Turkic and Caucasian origin, who had seized power in Egypt in the mid-thirteenth century. They had halted the Mongols, expelled the last Crusader strongholds, and sheltered an Abbasid caliph in Cairo. By the early sixteenth century, however, they were under strain. Portuguese ships were disrupting the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade that fed Mamluk revenues, the treasury was troubled, and the regime relied on cavalry traditions that were slow to adapt to firearms. The Ottomans, by contrast, had built a disciplined army with extensive use of artillery and handguns.

Selim came to the throne in 1512 after pushing aside his father, Bayezid II, and then turned first against the Safavids of Iran, defeating them at Chaldiran in 1514. Relations with the Mamluks worsened as the two states competed over border territories in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria. In 1516 Selim marched south. The decisive battle took place at Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo, in August of that year. The Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghawri, died during or just after the fighting, and his army broke under Ottoman firepower. Accounts differ on the role of defections and internal rivalries, but most historians see both as contributing factors.

Syria fell quickly, and Selim entered Damascus. In January 1517 the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks again at Ridaniya, near Cairo, and took the city after further fighting. The last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay II, was captured and executed. The sharifs of Mecca, who controlled the holy cities, soon acknowledged Ottoman authority.

The consequences were lasting. Egypt became an Ottoman province, prized for its grain and revenue, though Mamluk households survived as a powerful elite and often held real influence in the countryside for centuries. Later tradition claimed that Selim also obtained the caliphate from the Abbasid line in Cairo, but historians regard this story as largely a later development. Even so, control of the holy cities and the Arab lands strengthened Ottoman claims to leadership of Islam and shaped the empire's politics until its end in the twentieth century.