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The Ottoman Turks had conquered Egypt in 1517 and still officially ruled it, but de facto control had been long wrested from them by the Mamluks, a military caste originally from Georgia in the Caucasus.
Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the geographical key to the world’.
His ultimate ambition – or fantasy – may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’.
General Louis-Nicolas Davout,
It was a formidable officer corps, abounding with talent and promise.
Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library,
Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists
he did enlist the fifty-one-year-old novelist, artist and polymath Vivant Denon, who made more than two hundred sketches during his travels.
the mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom dolomite was named).
The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.
Napoleon’s armada left Toulon for Alexandria in fine weather on Saturday, May 19, 1798
It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean.
This gigantic armada was fortunate to make it across the Mediterranean without being set upon by Nelson, who was looking for him with thirteen ships-of-the-line.
To evade Nelson on three occasions was extraordinary; the fourth time they would not be so lucky.
On June 10 the fleet reached Malta, which commanded the entrance to the eastern Mediterranean.
in 1798 the Knights were in schism – the pro-French knights refused to fight and their Maltese subjects were in revolt.
He added that the first town they would enter had been founded by Alexander the Great, something that meant much more to him than to them.
On Sunday, July 1 the fleet arrived off Alexandria and Napoleon landed on the beach 8 miles away at Marabut at 11 p.m. He captured Alexandria the next morning by storm,
Napoleon had the dead buried beneath the granite Pompey’s Pillar, and inscribed their names on its sides.*
The hour of their chastisement has come. For too long this rabble of slaves, purchased in Caucasus and in Georgia, has tyrannized over the fairest part of the world, but God, on whom everything depends, has decreed that their Empire shall be no more! … People of Egypt! I am come to restore your rights, to punish usurpers. I reverence … God, his prophet Muhammed, and the Koran! … Have we not destroyed the Pope, who made men wage war on the Muslims? Have we not destroyed the Knights of Malta, because those fools believed it to be God’s will to fight against Muslims?
Probably referring to the 1536 Franco-Ottoman alliance between François I and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent,
It was the first desert crossing by a modern Western army.
On July 19, while they were at Wardan on the way to Cairo, Junot confirmed what Napoleon might have already have suspected: that Josephine had been having an affair with Hippolyte Charles.
No letters from Napoleon to Josephine survive from the Egyptian campaign, which some historians have taken to mean they were lost or destroyed, but a much more likely explanation is that he simply didn’t write any.
Because the Mamluks traditionally went into battle carrying their life savings, a single corpse could make a soldier’s fortune.
By direct decree Napoleon established a postal system, street lighting and cleaning, a coach service between Cairo and Alexandria, a mint and a rational tax system with lower impositions on the Egyptian fallaheen (peasantry) than the Mamluks’ extortionary demands. He also abolished feudalism, replacing it with rule by the diwans, set up a new French trading company, built modern plague hospitals and produced Egypt’s first printed books (in three languages).
None of these reforms were undertaken on orders from the Directory, who were unable to get messages through; they were entirely on Napoleon’s initiative.
Asked two decades later whether he had ever truly embraced Islam, Napoleon laughingly replied: ‘Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.’
As it turned out, no amount of complying with Islamic ceremonies, salutations and usages prevented Selim III from declaring jihad against the French in Egypt, meaning that any attacks upon them were thenceforth blessed.
But by the time his messenger reached Aboukir Bay, there was no fleet: it had been sunk on August 1 after an exceptionally daring attack by Admiral Nelson.
In addition to cutting him off from France, with all the problems that implied, the Aboukir Bay catastrophe left Napoleon with a pressing cash-flow problem, since the Maltese ‘contribution’, estimated at 60 million francs, had gone down with L’Orient.
Institut d’Égypte,
Ahmed Jezzar, the pasha of Acre (discouragingly nicknamed ‘The Butcher’),
On October 20 Napoleon learned that a Turkish army was gathering in Syria to attack him.
He therefore reappeared in Cairo ten weeks before he was expected, to find his wife installed in the grounds of Napoleon’s Elfey Bey palace and nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’.
The affair deflected charges of cuckoldry from Napoleon, which for a French general then was a far more serious accusation than adultery.
She later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.
(Little could he have guessed that his own nephew would be involved in building its successor in 1869.)
It was on this sightseeing trip from Suez into Sinai (he never reached Mount Sinai itself) on December 28 that Napoleon appears to have come as close to death as he ever did in any of his battles, after taking advantage of the low tide to cross a section of the Red Sea.*
‘The frontiers of states are either large rivers, or chains of mountains, or deserts. Of all these obstacles to the march of an army, the most difficult to overcome is the desert.’
In February 1799
On March 12 the War of the Second Coalition began, with France eventually pitted against the monarchs of Russia, Britain, Austria, Turkey, Portugal and Naples, and the Pope.
‘I constantly read Genesis when visiting the places it describes and was amazed beyond measure that they were still exactly as Moses had described them.’
On February 25, Napoleon chased the Mamluks out of Gaza City, capturing large amounts of ammunition, six cannon and 200,000 rations of biscuit.
The French finally rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.
As his remarks on the September Massacres in Paris and his actions in Binasco, Verona and Cairo demonstrated, Napoleon approved of uncompromising – indeed lethal – measures if he felt the situation demanded them.
Napoleon left Jaffa for Acre on March 14, the day before the British commodore Sir Sidney Smith and the French royalist military engineer and Brienne contemporary Antoine de Phélippeaux arrived off the port with two Royal Navy frigates, HMS Theseus and HMS Tigre.
The city had been captured in 1104 by the crusading King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who built walls 8 feet thick. The intervening centuries had left its defences much weakened, but the walls were still there, if not so high, and there was a deep moat.
his headquarters were on the Turon hillside 1,500 yards from Acre – coincidentally the place Richard the Lionheart had chosen for the same job in 1191
(Of the four skeletons found on the battlefield in 1991, two had been decapitated.)
