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The few who escaped massacre took refuge in Syria or Dongola. Whilst this horrible drama was being enacted in Cairo, similar scenes were taking place in those provinces whose governors had received stringent commands to butcher every remaining Mamluk in Egypt. THUs nearly all perished, and that famous corps was destroyed for ever.
There was another naval power to be reckoned with besides discredited Genoa and tributary Venice. Apparently they succeeded, for attack after attack from the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt failed to shake them from their stronghold, whence they commanded the line of commerce between Alexandria and Constantinople, and did a brisk trade in piracy upon passing vessels.
Then she married a leading Mamluk emir, to conciliate Moslem prejudice against a woman's rule, and thenceforth for more than two centuries and a half one Mamluk after another seized the throne, held it as long as he could, and sometimes transmitted it to his son. The throne, in fact, belonged to the man with the longest sword.
This work, only sixty-five years old, now stands so perilously near the undermined edge of the rock-cornice, that some day it will come down with a run. It is used by the garrison, and serves as a jail; but lately a Bedawi prisoner, like a certain Mamluk Bey, jumped down the precipitous cove-face and effected his escape.
That sultan, judging that Egypt was likely from its remoteness to throw off the dominion of Constantinople, and that a clever and ambitious pasha might create there an independent empire, had, as we have seen, devised a plan to frustrate such a motive, should it exist, by instituting a Mamluk soldiery; but it was the Mamluks, and not the pasha, who rendered themselves independent of Constantinople and the masters of Egypt.
The victorious soldier, however, now plotted against his master and took the lead in a military revolt. As a result of this, Ali Bey fell into an ambuscade set by his own rebellious subjects, and died from poisoning m 1786. Thus terminated the career of the famous Mamluk, a man whose energy, talents, and ambition bear a strong resemblance to those of the later Mehe-met Ali.
The Mamluk sultan took toll on every bale of goods that passed between Europe and India in the palmy days that preceded Vasco de Gama's discovery of the Cape route in 1497. It was an immense monopoly, extortionately used, and it was not resigned without a struggle.
After Turan Shah's death, his mother was proclaimed sultana, and the Mamluk Aibek became general of the army. Later, when the caliph of Baghdad revolted against the rule of a woman, Aibek assumed the title of sultan and married Shejret ed-Durr.
An inscription, with an illegible date, bears the name of Ahmed ibn Taylun, the founder of the Taylunide dynasty, in A.D. 868 884: this is another proof that the Mamluk Soldans were lords of the soil; and that, even in the ninth century, South Midian was a province, or a dependency, of Egypt.
These beys were under the control of a Turkish pasha, whose council was formed of seven Turkish chiefs, while one of the Mamluk beys held the post of Sheikh el-Beled or Governor of the Metropolis.
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