THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE 119would follow, but the revolutionary fever in Europe bought the Empire
another 100 years of existence.
If the Empire was to be spared the hammer blows of her more advanced
neighbors, there were still misadventures aplenty. In 1799 the French—
Turkey’s most reliable European ally—invaded Egypt, sending a fleet and
army ample to break Mamluk power, but insufficient to form a permanent
foothold. In the Balkans, bandits and murderers took advantage of Turkish
weakness to terrorize the Muslim populations as efficiently as generations
of Ottoman-supported bandits had terrorized Christian populations in the
past. In the early nineteenth century no imperial troops restrained them.
On July 21, 1799, Mamluk general Ibrahim Bey and nearly 100,000
Mamluks and militia confronted the much smaller French army at Giza,
in the shadow of the Pyramids. The battle was a contest between two
traditions. On one hand was the 2,000-year-old heritage of the eastern
horse warrior that the Mamluks brought with them, undeniably the finest
battlefield light cavalry in the world. On the other hand were the disci-
plined conscripts of the west who brought firepower instead of tradition
to the battlefield. In a short battle the new ideas destroyed the old, and
Mamluk valor was shattered by the volley fire of the modern world. The
brief French occupation of Egypt would end in 1801, not because of Ot-
toman force of arms, but because of the arrival of a British army.
Between 1806 and 1811, yet another Russian War erupted, but the in-
tense pressure of Napoleonic France held Russian power in check in the
north, and for once, the sultan’s levies held on long enough for a negoti-
ated treaty to return the status quo ante. This defensive victory was nearly
the only bright Ottoman moment in a long and gloomy nineteenth century.
In the 1820s the Greeks revolted, spurred on by post-Napoleonic romantic
movements in Western Europe, Russian gold, and guns from Eastern Eu-
rope. What might have been just an untidy revolt became complicated
when the local Turkish governor rebelled against the sultan in Istanbul in
support of the rebels.If the Greek Revolution is to be noted for anything,
it must be for the absolute savagery with which each side dealt with the
other. Atrocity and massacre were commonplace on both sides. The hatred
that erupted between these two nations continues to this day and takes
physical form on the island of Cyprus.
Repeated losses on land and a covert European naval presence were
enough to break Greece free from the Empire by 1822. But in the Balkans
freedom frequently means little more than the freedom to kill one’s neigh-
bor, and soon the Greeks were fighting among themselves. The sultan, in
despair, asked his Egyptian vassal Mehmet Ali to crush the rebellion,
but the Europeans, caught up in the romantic mythology of Greek inde-