by Amin Maalouf
He seemed to be thinking intently. A wry expression hovered over his lips. Then he said, as if continuing a private conversation:
‘But with a sultan, nothing is ever simple. If I press him too much, he will say to himself that I am trying to get him away from Cairo, and he will no longer want to leave.’
His confidence made me bolder:
‘Why shouldn’t you leave with the army yourself? Aren’t you thirty years younger than he is?’
‘If I won a victory, he would fear my return at the head of the army.’
Letting his eyes wander round him, the secretary of state noticed the icon and the Coptic cross on the wall. He smiled and scratched his head in a conspicuous fashion. He had good reasons to be puzzled: a Maghribi, dressed in the Egyptian style, married to a Circassian woman, the widow of an Ottoman amir, and who decorated his house like a Christian! I was about to explain to him how the house had come to me, but he interrupted:
‘The sight of these objects does not offend me. It is true that I am a Muslim by the grace of God, but I was born a Christian and baptized, like the sultan, like all the Mamelukes.’
With these words he jumped to his feet and took his leave, repeating his thanks.
Seated in a dark corner of the room, Nur had not taken part in the conversation. But she seemed satisfied with it.
‘For this meeting alone I do not regret having come so far.’
Events seemed to prove her right quickly enough. We learned that the sultan had finally decided to leave. His battalion was seen leaving the hippodrome, crossing Rumaila Square before going up the Hill of the Oxen and Saliba Street, where I had gone that day in expectation of a spectacle. As the sultan moved forward, greeted with cheers, a few paces away from me, I noticed that the openwork golden bird, the emblem of the Mamelukes, on the top of his parasol, had been replaced by a golden crescent; it was murmured around me that the change had been ordered as the result of a letter from the Ottoman casting doubt on Qansuh’s religious ardour.
At the head of the interminable procession of the sultan were fifteen lines of camels, harnessed with bobbles in gold brocade, fifteen others harnessed with bobbles in many-coloured velvet. The cavalry came next, with two hundred chargers at its head, covered with steel caparisons encrusted with gold. Further away one could see palanquins on mules decked out with yellow silk coverings, to carry the royal family.
The previous evening, Tumanbay had been appointed lieutenant-general of Egypt, with full powers; but it was rumoured that the sultan had taken all the gold in the treasury with him, several million dinars, as well as precious objects from the royal warehouses.
I had asked Nur to come with me to be present at the event which she had worked for. She begged me to go alone, saying that she felt unwell. I thought that she did not wish to show herself too much in public; I soon discovered that she was pregnant. I did not dare to rejoice too much, because although, at the approach of my thirtieth year, I ardently desired a son of my blood, I realized that Nur’s condition would henceforth prevent me from leaving her, and even from fleeing from Cairo with her, which prudence was commanding me to do.
Three months passed, during which we received regular news of the sovereign’s progress: Gaza, Tiberias, then Damascus, where an incident was reported. The master of the mint, a Jew named Sadaqa, had thrown some newly-minted silver pieces at the sultan’s feet at the time of his triumphal entry into the city, as was the custom. Qansuh’s guards had rushed forward to pick up the coins, in such a way that the sultan, severely jostled, had almost fallen off his horse.
It was known that after Damascus the sultan went to Hama and then Aleppo. Then there was silence. For three weeks. A silence which at the beginning was not interrupted by the slightest rumour. It was only on Saturday, the sixteenth of Sha‘ban, 14 September 1517, that a messenger arrived at the Citadel, out of breath and covered with dust; a battle had taken place at Marj Dabiq, not far from Aleppo. The sultan had taken part in it, wearing his little hat, dressed in his white cloak, with his axe on his shoulder, with the caliph, the qadis and the forty bearers of the Qur’an around him. In the beginning, the army of Egypt had had the upper hand, taking seven flags from the enemy and some large artillery pieces mounted on carriages. But the sultan had been betrayed, particularly by Khairbak, the governor of Aleppo, who was in league with the Ottomans. While he was commanding the left flank, he had turned back, which immediately spread discouragement throughout the whole army. Realizing what was happening, Qansuh suffered a stroke. Falling from his horse, he died at once. In the confusion, his body had not even been recovered.
The inhabitants of Cairo were appalled, the more so as other rumours soon followed one another about the advance of the Ottomans, who followed the route of the Egyptian army in reverse. Thus Aleppo had fallen into their hands, then Hama. At Khan al-Khalili, several shops belonging to Turks from Asia Minor or to Maghribis were looted, but order was energetically restored by Tumanbay who announced the abolition of all taxes and reduced the prices of all essential goods in order to alleviate the effect of this news.
Although the secretary of state had the situation in hand, he waited a month before having himself proclaimed sultan. That very day, Damascus had just fallen in its turn into Salim’s hands; Gaza would soon follow it. Lacking sufficient soldiers, Tumanbay ordered the setting up of popular militias for the defence of the capital. He emptied the prisons and announced that the crimes of all those who enlisted would be pardoned, including homicides. In the last days of the year, when the Ottoman army was approaching Cairo, the Mameluke sultan drew up his troops in Raydaniyya camp, to the east of the city. He also brought several elephants and some newly-cast cannons, and had a long deep trench dug, in the hope of sustaining a long siege.
However, this was not the Ottoman’s intention. After having given his army two days to rest after the long crossing of Sinai, Salim ordered a general assault, with such a profusion of cannons and such an overwhelming numerical advantage that the Egyptian army scattered in a few hours.
It was thus that on the very last day of the year the Grand Turk made his solemn entry into Cairo, preceded by criers who promised the inhabitants that their lives would be spared, calling on them to resume their normal lives the next day. It was a Friday, and the caliph, who had been captured in Syria and brought back in the suite of the conqueror, had a sermon pronounced in all the mosques in the capital in the name of ‘the sultan son of the sultan, sovereign of the two continents and the two seas, destroyer of the two armies, master of the two Iraqs, servant of the holy sanctuaries, the victorious King Salim Shah.’
Nur’s eyes were bloodshot. She was so distressed by the triumph of the Grand Turk that I feared for the life of the child she was carrying. As she was a few days from her time, I had to make her swear to stay still on her bed. As for me, I found consolation in promising myself to leave this country as soon as she recovered. In my street, all the notables had hidden their precious possessions and their flags in their family vaults out of fear of looting.
Nevertheless, that day my orderly and his donkey presented themselves outside my door as usual to take me into the city. The boy told me with some hilarity that on the way he had stumbled over the severed head of a Mameluke officer. As I did not laugh at all, he permitted himself to voice the opinion that I was taking things too seriously. Which earned him a blow from the back of my hand.
‘So,’ I growled in a fatherly way, ‘your city has just been occupied, your country has been invaded, its rulers have either been massacred or have fled, others replace them, coming from the ends of the earth, and you reproach me for taking things too seriously?’
His only reply was a shrug of his shoulders and this phrase of centuries-old resignation:
‘Whoever takes my mother becomes my step-father.’
Then he started laughing again.
One man, however, was not at all resigned. It was Tumanbay. He was girding himself to write the most heroic pages in th
e history of Cairo.
The Year of Tumanbay
923 A.H.
24 January 1517 – 12 January 1518
Master of Cairo, the Grand Turk strutted about as if he was intent on brushing over each holy place, each quarter, each door, each frightened look with his indelible shadow. In front of him, the heralds never wearied of proclaiming that no one should fear for their life or property, while at the same time massacres and looting were taking place, often a few paces from the sultan’s retinue.
The Circassians were the first victims. Mamelukes or descendants of Mamelukes, they were hunted down relentlessly. When a high dignitary of the old regime was captured, he was perched upon a donkey, facing backwards, his hair in a blue turban and decked out with little bells which were hung around his neck. Thus accoutred, he was paraded around the streets before being decapitated. His head was then displayed upon a pole, and his body thrown to the dogs. In each camp of the Ottoman army hundreds of these poles were planted in the earth, each alongside the other, macabre forests through which Salim liked to wander.
Of course the Circassians, deceived for a moment by the Ottoman promises, did not take long to get rid of their customary headdresses, skull caps or light turbans, and put on large turbans in order to merge with the rest of the population. In consequence the Ottoman soldiers began to arrest all passers-by indiscriminately, accusing them of being Circassians in disguise and forcing them to pay a ransom to be allowed to go. When the streets were empty the soldiers forced open the doors of houses, and under the pretext of flushing out escaping Mamelukes, gave themselves over to pillage and rape.
The fourth day of that year, Sultan Salim was in the suburb of Bulaq, where his army had set up the largest of its camps. He had attended the executions of several officers and had then ordered that the hundreds of decapitated corpses which were cluttering up the camp should immediately be thrown into the Nile. Then he had gone to the hammam to purify himself before going to the evening prayer at a mosque near the landing stage. By nightfall he had returned to the camp and called several of his aides around him.
The meeting had just begun when an extraordinary tumult broke out; hundreds of camels, laden with burning tow, rushed towards the Ottoman positions setting fire to the tents. It was already dark, and in the ensuing chaos thousands of armed men invaded the camp. Tumanbay was at their head. There were certainly regular troops among his soldiers, but it was mostly the common people, sailors, water carriers, former criminals who had joined the popular militia. Some were armed with daggers, others had only slings, or even clubs. However, with the assistance of nightfall and surprise, they sowed death among the ranks of the Ottomans. In the most intense moment of the battle, Salim himself was surrounded on all sides, and only the determination of his bodyguard enabled him to force his way out. The camp was in the hands of Tumanbay, who, without losing a moment, ordered his partisans to throw themselves into the pursuit of the occupation troops in all the quarters of Cairo, and to take no prisoner.
Street by street the capital was reconquered. The Circassians set about chasing the Ottoman soldiers, with the active assistance of the population. The victims, now turned executioners, were merciless. I saw with my own eyes, not far from my house, the execution of seven Turks who had fled into a mosque. Chased by twenty Cairenes, they had taken refuge at the top of the minaret, and had begun to fire shots on the crowd. But they were caught, their throats cut and their bloody bodies thrown from the top of the building.
The battle had begun on Tuesday evening. On Thursday Tumanbay went to set himself up in the Shaikhu Mosque in Saliba Street, which he turned into his headquarters. He seemed so much in control of the city that the next day the Friday sermon was once more pronounced in his name from the tops of the pulpits.
But his position was no less precarious. Once they had got over the surprise of the initial attack, the Ottomans had rallied. They had retaken Bulaq, infiltrated into old Cairo as far as the area around my street, and, in their turn gradually recaptured the lost ground step by step. Tumanbay mostly controlled the popular quarters of the centre, to which he had prevented access by hastily-dug trenches or barricades.
Of all the days which Allah has created, it was on that Friday and no other that Nur chose to feel the pains of confinement. I had to creep out and edge my way across my garden to call the neighbourhood midwife, who only agreed to come at the end of an hour’s entreaty, and then for gold: two dinars if it was a girl, four dinars if it was a boy.
When she saw the fragile pink cleft between the baby’s swollen thighs, she called out to me in a vexed tone:
‘Two dinars!’
To which I replied:
‘If everything ends well, you’ll get four all the same!’
Overjoyed at such generosity, she promised to return several days later to perform the excision, which she would do for nothing. I asked her not to do so, explaining that this practice did not exist in my country, at which she seemed surprised and upset.
To me my daughter seemed as beautiful as her mother, and as pale-skinned. I called her Hayat, Life, for whom my dearest wish, as for all my family, was simply to be able to escape alive from the murderous orgy of Cairo, where two empires confronted one another, the one intoxicated by its triumph, the other determined not to die.
In the streets the battle was still raging. The Ottomans, who had regained control of most of the suburbs, tried to push towards the centre, but they only advanced slowly and sustained heavy losses. However, the outcome of the battle was no longer in doubt. Soldiers and militiamen gradually deserted Tumanbay’s camp, while at the head of a handful of faithful followers, some black fusiliers and the Circassians of his personal bodyguard, the Mameluke sultan struggled on through another day. On the Saturday night he decided to leave the city, although without having lost any of his determination. He said that he would soon return with more troops to flush out the invaders.
How can I describe what the Ottomans did when they were able to enter the quarters of Cairo once more? This time it was no longer a question of eliminating the Circassian troops who had opposed them as it had been after their first victory. They now had to punish the entire population of Cairo. The soldiers of the Grand Turk poured into the streets with orders to kill anything that breathed. No one could leave the accursed city, since all the roads were cut; no one could find themselves a refuge, since the cemeteries and the mosques were themselves turned into battlefields. People were forced to crouch in their own homes, hoping that the hurricane would pass. On that day, between dawn and the last quarter of the night, it is said that more than eight thousand were slain. The streets were all covered with corpses, men, women, children, horses and donkeys, mingled together in an endless bloody procession.
The next day, Salim had two flags hauled up outside his camp, one white, the other red, signifying to his men that vengeance had henceforth been taken and that the carnage should stop. It was high time, because if the reprisals had continued for several days with the same intensity, the Grand Turk’s only conquest in this country would have been an enormous charnel-house.
Throughout these bloody days, Nur had not stopped praying for victory for Tumanbay. My own sentiments were scarcely different. Having welcomed the Mameluke sultan under my roof one evening, I admired his bravery even more. Above all, there was Bayazid. Sooner or later, a suspicion, a denunciation, an indiscretion, would hand him over to the Ottomans, with all his family. For the security of the outlawed child, and for our own, Tumanbay had to be victorious. When I realized, in the course of the Sunday, that he had definitely lost the fight, I flared up against him, from suppressed disappointment, fear and rage, declaring that he should never have thrown himself into such a hazardous enterprise, dragging the population in his wake and bringing down the wrath of Salim upon them.
Although she was still very weak, Nur sat up with a start, as if she had been awoken by a bad dream. Only her eyes could be seen in her pallid face, staring at nothing.
‘Remember the pyramids! How many men have died to build them, men who could have passed many more years working, eating and mating! Then they would have died of the plague, leaving no trace behind them. By the will of Pharaoh they have built a monument whose silhouette will perpetuate the memory of their labour for ever, their suffering, their noblest aspirations. Tumanbay has done no different. Are not four days of courage, four days of dignity, of defiance, worth more than four centuries of submission, of resignation and meanness? Tumanbay has offered to Cairo and to its people the finest gift that exists: a sacred flame that will illuminate and kindle the spirit in the long night that is beginning.’
Nur’s words left me only half-convinced, but I did not try to contradict her. I simply put my arms around her gently to put her back to bed. She was speaking the language of her people; I had no other ambition than to survive, with my family, no other ambition than to go away, in order one day to relate on a piece of glazed paper the fall of Cairo, of her empire, of her last hero.
I could not leave the city for several weeks, until Nur was in a position to travel. In the meantime, life in Cairo became increasingly difficult. Provisions became rare. Cheese, butter and fruit could not be found, and the price of cereals rose. It was said that Tumanbay had decided to starve out the Ottoman garrison by preventing the provisioning of the city from the provinces which he still controlled; in addition, he had made agreements with the nomad Arab tribes, who had never submitted to any authority in Egypt, that they should come and lay waste the surroundings of the capital. It was said at the same time that Tumanbay had brought the materials of war, arrows, bows and powder from Alexandria, that he had assembled fresh troops and was preparing to launch a new offensive. In fact clashes multiplied, particularly around Giza, making impassable the road to the pyramids which we needed to take to fetch Bayazid.
Should we, in spite of everything, try to flee, at the risk of being intercepted by an Ottoman patrol, by Mameluke deserters or some band of looters? I hesitated to do so until I learned that Sultan Salim had decided to deport several thousand inhabitants to Constantinople. At first it was the caliph, the Mameluke dignitaries and their families, but the list continued to lengthen: masons, carpenters, monumental masons, pavers, blacksmiths, and all kinds of skilled workers. I soon learned that the Ottoman civil servants were drawing up lists of the names of all Maghribis and Jews in the city with a view to deporting them.