1517 to 1801 · Africanspan
Egypt spends three centuries as an Ottoman province in name only
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The Ottoman army destroyed the Mameluke sultanate in 1517 and Egypt became a province governed from Istanbul. The Ottomans used it as a base to push south into Nubia and out into the Red Sea, taking the port of Massawa on the Eritrean coast, largely in answer to Portuguese warships that had entered the Indian Ocean and were interfering with Muslim trade. Control loosened over time. The Mameluke military aristocracy recovered its position through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its leading households taking the title of bey, while the viceroys sent out from Istanbul founded local dynasties of their own. By the late eighteenth century Cairo answered to the sultan on paper and to nobody in practice. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded in 1798 and was forced out in 1801 by an Ottoman and British alliance. That episode opened the contest between Britain and France over Egypt which shaped the country for the rest of the nineteenth century.
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