Conclusion

The increasing imbalance between the revenues of the amirs and of the sultan, in the context of the internal struggles for influence typical of a military society, led in the fifteenth century to the dysfunction of the system for integrating the mamiuks and to the defeat at Marj Dabiq. The formation of a military aristocracy, which soon had no thought but the defence of its privileges, was another effect of the dysfunction and grew up to destroy the system. When the Circassian state collapsed in 1517, what disappeared was a political and military structure in crisis and too burdensome for the country’s resources. The last sultans had sought to keep it going by means of

J.-C. Garcin, “Note sur les rapports entre bedouins et fellahs a I’epoque mamluke,” Al,

14 (1978), 147-63M. Miiller-Wiener, Eine Stadtgeschichte Alexandrias von S64/1169 bis in die Mine des Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1991), 71-89, 172,-2,33.

Khalil al-Zahiri, Zubda, 33.

Brutal fiscal extortion;*’ one of their failures was undoubtedly that they were incapable of innovation in that field or of making use of exceptional tax systems that often allowed wars (as happened in the monarchies of western Europe at that period) in order to ensure that the state functioned more smoothly. But that would have militated against the privileges of the regime’s notables. Yet the Ottomans would inherit an experience of administration in which the measures taken were already frequently a matter of accepted secular practice and the liberalities of the first Mamluk state had gradually been abandoned, despite the criticisms of the “avarice” of the sultans. In their way, and under the pressure of circumstances, the Circassians had favoured the emergence of the more modern state of the Ottomans in Egypt. The Circassian aristocracy would remain in place; it was now firmly entrenched. In the course of becoming settled, the Bedouin had imposed their presence in the countryside and, when they could, the rural inhabitants left for the towns, whose population remained constant. The capital was more huddled together and had taken on the more orderly, more compartmentalized appearance of the traditional towns, around a real urban commercial centre and the al-Azhar mosque. The city had its festivals and firmly fixed devotions, in the course of which the population experienced a sense of unity. This Egypt would last a very long time.