by Alan Mikhail
The citadel of Aleppo
Although the Mamluks had suffered tremendous losses at Marj Dabiq, including the death of their sultan, they still controlled massive amounts of territory and enormous resources in the Middle East and North Africa. Before marching on Cairo, Selim would need to fortify his control over the key Syrian cities and towns left exposed in the wake of the ignominious Mamluk retreat. Aleppo was merely the critical first step. On September 16, Selim left Aleppo and arrived at Hama four days later. Straddling Syria’s longest river, the Orontes, Hama boasted seventeen large ancient waterwheels and several aqueducts. Selim and his troops stayed there for two days before moving on to Homs, about thirty miles due south on the Orontes. After reprovisioning his army from Homs’s rich fields of rice, grapes, olives, and other staples, Selim continued south to the Levantine port city of Tripoli, a key locus of Mediterranean silk production. The townspeople put up some initial resistance, as they would have to any outsider, but Selim overcame that quickly.
As in Aleppo, once he had secured control over Hama, Homs, and Tripoli, Selim brought the administrative and judicial bureaucracies under Ottoman governance. He was content, per established imperial policy, to keep most of the old order in place, provided those in power recognized his sovereignty. After conquest, exchanging the maintenance of precedent for loyalty made imperial transitions easier on everyone. Urban administrators wanted to keep their positions, and Selim needed to be confident in the trustworthiness and ability of his officials to uphold order while he waged war.
From Tripoli, Selim led his army inland toward Damascus, Syria’s most important city. News of his victories and the imposition of Ottoman hegemony had already reached the city, along with reports of his comparative largesse and the leniency of his rule. As in Aleppo and the other northern towns, the Mamluks had won no friends in Damascus, having seized the city’s cash, men, and food for their war effort, so the city’s residents stood ready to exchange the Mamluks for the Ottomans. On October 9, Selim entered the city quickly and painlessly. One of his first acts was to call a meeting in which he assured Damascus’s leaders that he would protect their authority as long as they recognized the sovereignty of their new Ottoman governor. Proving the desirability of Ottoman rule—especially when compared to the despoliations of the Mamluk army’s stay there—Selim made sure that his soldiers did nothing to harm the city’s residents or disrupt its robust trade. Indeed, he went so far as to pay his soldiers extra so as to diminish any incentive to plunder. And in a move that made Damascus’s many foreign merchants especially enthusiastic about the onset of Ottoman rule, Selim reduced customs duties from 20 percent to 5 percent.
Selim’s general policy of maintaining the existing local order while demonstrating the virtues of Ottoman hegemony often took on a religious dimension, alongside his overriding economic, legal, and political concerns. After seizing a territory, he would make a point of praying in iconic religious sites such as the Umayyad mosques of Aleppo and Damascus, after which he would visit the shrines of local saints and the residences of living holy men to publicly express his respect. Not only did this ingratiate him among the believers who venerated their holy men of old and revered their living spiritual guides, it also evinced his own piety, as he called on otherworldly power to aid him in his current and future endeavors.
A local legend from the southern Anatolian town of Aintab confirmed the vital importance of gaining local spiritual sanction for imperial political acts—and the potential perils of not doing so. When Selim took this city, one of its religious leaders punished the sultan by inflicting on him a severe case of constipation. The holy man only lifted the curse when Selim, after days spent writhing in discomfort, visited him to offer the proper respect, apologizing for any suffering he had caused, kissing the man’s hand, and promising to provide material support for his spiritual order. This and similar tales made clear to the Ottomans—and, indeed, to other imperial powers—that they would have to adjust to the customs of the places they sought to rule, deferring to local authorities and institutions.
In Damascus, this reconciliation of the Ottomans’ new imperial authority with longstanding local religious practice played itself out in dramatic fashion. After taking control of the city, Selim committed himself to discovering and reviving the tomb of Ibn ‘Arabi, a prominent thirteenth-century religious thinker, philosopher, and poet known simply as “the greatest master.” One of the most significant scholars in all of Islamic letters, the author of more than a hundred texts, Ibn ‘Arabi was born in Spain and died in Damascus in 1240, after a life of writing, teaching, and travel in the pursuit of knowledge. Because he lived his last years in Damascus, he was considered a local saint, a Damascene spiritual intercessor. According to the Selimname and other laudatory texts, the spiritual bankruptcy and political corruption of previous rulers in Damascus had led to the disappearance of Ibn ‘Arabi’s grave. The scholar’s body had been lost—whether by theft or because a structure had been built over the grave, no one knew. Before his death, the seer had predicted the loss and rediscovery of his own gravesite with the following cryptic couplet:
When the sīn enters the shīn, then will emerge the tomb of Muhy al-Dīn.
Muhy al-Dīn is Ibn ‘Arabi’s proper name. Sīn and shīn are letters of the Arabic alphabet that share the same shape but are distinguished by three dots over the shīn. The first letter of Selim’s name is sīn, and the first letter of the Arabic name for Damascus (Shām) is shīn. The couplet can therefore be interpreted as, “When Selim enters Damascus, the tomb of Ibn ‘Arabi will emerge.” Thus, the first of the couplet’s prophecies seemed to have been fulfilled, suggesting that Ibn ‘Arabi’s tomb would be found before too long.
One night soon after Selim took Damascus, Ibn ‘Arabi visited him in a dream and ordered him to mount a black horse first thing in the morning. Ibn ‘Arabi instructed Selim not to hold the horse’s reins, but to allow the animal to guide him. The next day, Selim followed the instructions. The steed carried him through the city and eventually meandered into a refuse dump. After wading through piles of trash, it began to dig with a front hoof in a nondescript spot. Selim dismounted and started to dig alongside the animal. There, buried under garbage, they found one stone and then another. Eventually, it became obvious to Selim that this was the grave of Ibn ‘Arabi. He ordered the site cleared and cleaned and spared no expense in building an ornate mausoleum for the Muslim saint.
According to this likely apocryphal account, one of the holiest men in all of Islamic history had predicted Selim’s entry into Damascus nearly three hundred years before it happened. Selim was therefore not a foreign conqueror but the rightful inheritor, even restorer, of Damascus; his arrival was the fulfillment of a blessed medieval prophecy. Selim’s recovery and reestablishment of Ibn ‘Arabi’s grave symbolized a centuries-old relationship, Selim’s respect for Damascus and its people, and the appropriateness of his rule.
Some accounts take the story a step further, claiming that the spiritual adviser of Osman, the progenitor of the Ottomans, had studied under Ibn ‘Arabi. This tied Ibn ‘Arabi to the very origins of the Ottomans. Leapfrogging back in time, Selim thus could draw an unequivocally direct connection between himself and the founder of the empire. This conveniently furthered one of Selim’s favorite suggestions: that all the sultans before him had strayed from the essence of Osman and that he represented a renewal of the empire’s true nature.
As we have seen, as much as conquests required armaments, they also needed legends and heroes. On the other side of the world, at almost the exact moment that Selim discovered Ibn ‘Arabi’s tomb, Hernán Cortés employed the power of stories and legends to explain his own conquests in Mexico—the Seven Cities of Cibola, tales about God favoring Christians over all others, the Aztecs welcoming light-skinned Europeans as gods. Creative narrative constructions, like Cortés’s in Mexico, and historical reconstructions, like Selim’s in Damascus, were crucial components of nearly all of the early mod
ern world’s imperial conquests. In Aintab, Damascus, and indeed in each town along Selim’s route toward Cairo, such fables helped to rationalize and justify the violence of war and to integrate new territories into the imagination and reality of the Ottoman Empire.
As a large and demographically diverse city, Damascus demanded more from Selim than any other city in Anatolia or Syria. He spent two months there, from the middle of October to the middle of December 1516. During that time, he met with officials from throughout Syria in order to effect its complete transition to Ottoman rule—cutting deals, doling out favors, and generally doing whatever he could to shore up his territorial gains and preserve peace. He remained committed to chasing down the old regime’s holdovers, publicly executing thousands of Mamluk loyalists in the last few months of the year. Significantly, from Damascus he also finalized the renewal of a peace treaty with Hungary, thus avoiding the complications of a potential war on the empire’s western front. Resolutely focused on Cairo, and confident that Syria was now largely secured, Selim led his forces at year’s end toward the third holiest city in Islam, Jerusalem. As his army marched out of Damascus, snow began to fall. He considered this an auspicious sign.
SELIM ENTERED JERUSALEM IN mid-December 1516, again with little incident as the city’s residents, like those of Damascus, expected his arrival. As one of his first acts in the city, he pledged to protect Jerusalem’s Christians and Jews. Had Columbus ever succeeded in conquering Jerusalem, an equivalent act of protection seems unimaginable, given his interests in destroying Islam. Selim also met with representatives of the Armenian, Coptic, and Abyssinian churches in Jerusalem, as well as with the heads of the Rabbinate, to assure them that Ottoman rule would not alter their ritual practices, property holdings, or community affairs. In fact, he increased the stipend of the Franciscan friars in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and reduced the visa fees for Christian pilgrims visiting the city.
During his brief but pleasant respite in Jerusalem, Selim, like al-Ghawri a few months earlier, visited all of its holiest places: the Church of the Resurrection, the Mount of Olives, and the Temple Mount. His entourage secured the winding streets of the Old City so that he and his closest advisers could roam as sightseers in this cradle of the three Abrahamic religions, temporarily free of any military concerns. We know they enjoyed the city’s marketplaces; Jerusalem’s famous sweets of honey, dough, and nuts; and the cool but salubrious breezes of December. The city’s cobblestone streets felt familiar to Selim from Istanbul, Aleppo, and Damascus. As he climbed the stairs up to the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, he surely felt the sanctity of the place from which Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.
The Dome of the Rock
Constructed in the seventh century, the imposing mosque—with its distinctive turquoise, azure, and cobalt blues—seemed to hover above the city, like a portal to heaven. Up close, the façade, detailed with bone-white calligraphy, was mesmerizing. Pious Muslims believe their prayers in the Dome of the Rock count five hundred times more than a normal prayer. Indeed, before Mecca was established, all Muslims in the world faced Jerusalem—specifically, the Dome of the Rock—during prayer. Inside the mosque, Selim bowed his head, no doubt asking God to protect his realm and begging for safety and victory as he marched his forces onward from Jerusalem.
All preceding Ottoman sultans had governed as Muslims over a mostly Christian population, but as Selim conquered the Middle East that winter, gaining vast swaths of new territory, he steadily changed the demographics of the empire, bringing more and more Muslims under Ottoman rule. But in order to achieve his long list of military desiderata—destroy the Mamluks, gain access to Africa and the Indian Ocean, win Mecca and Medina, protect the Red Sea from the Portuguese, capture North Africa, and unite the entire eastern Mediterranean under the Ottoman flag—he still had to seize the Mamluk capital, Cairo. That would require an enormous outlay of force, will, and cunning.
Selim and his army set out from Jerusalem in late December 1516, exiting the Old City via the southern Tanners’ Gate. Before departing, he sent word back to Istanbul to make arrangements for his prized, reprovisioned fleet to meet him in Egypt with new arms and additional troops. It would take this enormous convoy of 106 ships several months of winter seafaring to reach the Egyptian coast. If all worked according to plan, Selim’s army and navy would rendezvous in Egypt for the final push to defeat the Mamluks. Despite having rested in Jerusalem, Selim’s soldiers were weary, having fought and marched continuously since the summer, and they were running low on many basic supplies. Just before the new year, however, they secured the fertile coastal plains of Gaza, on the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, which provided them with enough food to reach Cairo.
Now Selim’s army faced a daunting logistical problem: how to cross the Sinai Desert—the mountainous, stark, and punishing continental hinge between Syria and Cairo—the site of the ancient world’s first turquoise mines, and the place where Moses, during the flight from Egypt, purportedly received the Ten Commandments. Using established overland routes that mostly followed the coastline, and shipping lanes in the Mediterranean and Red seas, the Mamluks had been able to manage the challenge posed by this desolate region in the very heart of their state. To Selim and the Ottomans, though, Sinai must have looked like a moonscape. They had never encountered such an environment; there were few obvious resting places or oases, only a few small streams, and the constant threat of Bedouin raids. Fortunately, it was winter, so at least the desert temperatures were tolerable. Every winter, even in the twenty-first century, migratory birds from the northern Mediterranean make their way south to nest in Sinai. The sight of golden eagles with seven-foot wingspans and swooping falcons trawling for mice surely added to the foreboding oddity of the region.
A reliable supply of water was the most pressing need facing Selim’s men. Thus, before leaving Gaza, Selim assembled a veritable second army of fifteen thousand camels carrying thirty thousand water bags. These beasts of burden were, he knew, essential if he was to cross Sinai; without them, he would be unable to attack Cairo. Their wide feet allowed them to walk on sand without sinking too deeply, almost as though they were floating over the landscape. Their long eyelashes, unlike those of horses, protected their eyes from windswept sand. They could go weeks without water, losing close to 40 percent of their body weight, and still carry enormous loads. He bought some from local Bedouin in Gaza and commandeered others.
Thus, with his convoy of cocoa-colored camels, horses, guns, and twelve large cannons, Selim and his troops set out across the desert. Aided by winter rains that firmed up the sandy terrain, the entire army covered the two-hundred-mile trip across Sinai to the outskirts of Cairo in just five days in mid-January 1517.
A WORLD AWAY IN his comfortable palace in cultured Cairo, Tuman Bey—now the Mamluk sultan, by dint of Sultan al-Ghawri’s death—dreaded what he knew was coming. He had heard the reports of the Ottomans treading on al-Ghawri’s body with their horses; he saw his empire dissolving before his large, almond-shaped eyes. Now the Ottomans were marching on the capital. That battle would be decisive: either the Ottomans would take Cairo, and then North Africa and the Hijaz (the territory on the other side of the Red Sea that contains Mecca and Medina, now western Saudi Arabia), thus ending the reign of the Mamluks forever, or Tuman and his troops would repel them and reclaim the upper hand.
At the end of 1516 and into 1517, Tuman had devoted himself exclusively to raising troops, amassing provisions and arms, and constructing fortifications around Cairo. He built his main line of defense at Raidaniyya, a town about ten miles northeast of the capital on the road from Sinai. In an enormous encampment, Tuman assembled Egyptian soldiers from the south, his elite security forces, and a regiment of North Africans stationed in Egypt—in truth, anyone he could compel to fight. Although several of his battalions were decimated and others exhausted from the failed six-month campaign in Syria, he forced them
to Raidaniyya. At this point, the Mamluk army had lost almost half the empire, thousands of troops, and massive amounts of provisions, weapons, and money. Morale was as depleted as the matériel. Nevertheless, remarkably, Tuman managed to assemble at Raidaniyya a force larger than the one al-Ghawri had taken into Syria, armed with cannons and muskets, supplied with armor and wagons as well as three Indian elephants that had been presented to the Mamluks as a diplomatic gift.
Tuman ordered a stone wall to be constructed, from behind which the Mamluk forces could shoot at the approaching Ottoman army. In front of this barrier was a ditch embedded with vertical spears, to impale the Ottomans’ horses and camels. Tuman himself carried heavy stones to help with the construction of the wall—which perturbed his men. Never before had they seen a sovereign doing the work of a common soldier. A sultan should not carry his own dinner, let alone the building blocks of a fortification. If his soldiers had any remaining doubts, they surely now understood that times were dire indeed.
Cairo’s bustling markets emptied as merchants gathered up everything from eggplants to copper plates, transferring their goods to storehouses for safekeeping. As is usual at the beginning of a war, the wealthy hid their belongings outside the city or in cemeteries, in the structures accompanying family burial plots. Meanwhile, refugees from the countryside—some avoiding conscription, others escaping food shortages—flooded into Cairo, assuming that once war erupted, they would be safer within the city walls. Cairo’s streets thus emptied of their normal traffic: merchants and water carriers, market overseers and judges, peddlers and urban residents on their way to work, the mosque, or the bazaar. Instead, soldiers preparing for war and beleaguered, homeless peasants took over Cairo’s wide thoroughfares and public squares. Overwhelming the call to prayer and the yogurt seller’s invitation to sample the day’s offerings, horns sounded to organize the movement of troops and enforce a citywide curfew. As these piercing calls sporadically interrupted the city’s eerie silence, a sense of inevitable calamity gripped Cairo’s half a million residents.