MEDLEVAL EGYPT.* This is the last volume of the projected
"History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Present Day." There is a, gap, however, to be filled up, reaching from the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty to the Greek Kingdom. And the story of modern Egypt has yet to be told. This last it may well be thought too soon to tell. And, indeed, much of the necessary material is not ripe for publication, and much absolutely in- accessible. Meanwhile, we may find much that is highly interesting, and not without present significance, in the narrative, covering some nine centuries, which Professor Lane- Poole has given us in this volume. It is a book which calls • History of Egypt in the Middle Aga. By Stanley Lane-Poole, Litt.D, London: Methuen tiiia co. 1684
for but the very slightest exercise of the critical function. That it is congested with names, events, and dates is evident, but obviously unavoidable.
The first and most obvious recommendation of the book is that it gives no in a convenient shape what it would take a vast amount of trouble to find elsewhere. Now and then we have a familiar parallel, as in Gibbon's narrative of the ex- pulsion of the Byzantine power by the lieutenant of the Caliph and its attempts to recover its ground, or in the story of Saladin, or of Louis IX. and the Eighth Crusade ; but, as a whole, the narrative is the first of its kind. As the reader follows it, he will find much that, unless he is unusually well informed, will be new to him; figures so striking, and inci- dents so picturesque, that he will wonder how they should have remained unknown to him. Passing over the period of something less than two centuries and a half during which Egypt was actually a province of the Caliphs, Omayyad (661-750) and 'Abbasid (750-868), we come to the rise of one of those remarkable adventurers of whom Egyptian history shows so long a succession. 'Ibn-Tulun was a Turk, son of a Bokharan slave who had risen to high rank in the Caliph's Court at Bagdad. It is a curious link with the past when we hear of him attending lectures on criticism and theology at Tarsus. He combined soldiering with study, had the good fortune to render valuable service to the Caliph, and was accepted as the representative of his stepfather Bakblik when this Emir was appointed Governor of Egypt. In pro- cess of time Baikbak was beheaded, but 'Ibn-Tulun remained where he was. The new Governor was his father-in-law, and was either unwilling or unable to disturb him. For a time he continued to pay a handsome surplus income to his nominal chief at Bagdad, but his own expenses increased, for he had fine taste in architecture, useful and ornamental—the mosque called after him, the south aqueduct at Cairo, and the Nib. meter at Rode still remain to testify to it—and kept up a royal establishment. An attempt to bring him back to obedience failed. His next act was to annex Syria and stretch his dominion as far as the Euphrates. He even attempted to seize Mecca. A war with the Eastern Empire followed, and, though successful, brought 'Ibn-Tulun to his death. The general of the victorious army proclaimed his independence; 'Ibn-Tulun marched against him, fell sick at Antioch, and died in spite, or possibly in consequence, of the energy with which ne crucified or flogged the physicians whose prescriptions failed to relieve him. The dynasty ran 'the usual course of families so elevated. The son had his father's tastes developed into extravagance. He made peace with the Caliph, strengthening the alliance by giving him his daughter in marriage with a splendid trousseau, including four thousand jewelled waistbands. His own establishment was on the most gorgeous scale. Among his personal belongings was an air- bed rocked on a lake of quicksilver, watched by a tame lion, a protection which would not soothe all restless sleepers. Khumiiraweyh—this was his name—was assassinated after a reign of twelve years. An incapable son succeeded him, and he soon gave place to a brother equally incapable, and after a duration of thirty-seven years the 'Ibn-Tulun dynasty came to an end. Some eighty years after the rise of 'Ibn-Tulun we are attracted by a similar figure. Kaffir was an Abyssinian slave purchased for something less than ten pounds by the Governor of the time. He showed such ability that he was made tutor to the Governor's sons. When the time came for these to succeed their father—the Egyptian Vizierate naturally became hereditary—the tutor retained his authority. The Princes lived in luxurious seclusion, and the black slave ruled the land, "at once," as our author puts it, "the Lucullus and the Maecenas of the age." In both characters his taste was somewhat outré. Quince cyder was his favourite drink, while the act of literary patronage which has been selected for notice is the gift of a thousand dinars (the Orientalised denarius) to a poet who had attributed the earthquakes of
Egypt to the fact that the land could not but dance for joy at the virtue of its ruler. Kaffir died after twenty-two years of rule, virtual or titular, in 968.
The following year saw the establishment of a new dynasty, the Fatimite Caliphs. The narrative of their rise is one of the strangest in the whole history of Islam. The first bore the ominous name of El-Mahdi. Intended by a revolutionary prophet to serve as the figurehead of his own schemes of aggrandisement, he made himself independent of his patron, ,and extended his power over a wide region of Northern Africa. It was his great-grandson El-Meizz (El-Moez) who in 969, taking advantage of the disorder caused by the death of Kaffir, conquered Egypt. This event was marked by the rise of the new capital, Cairo (so called from el-Kahir, the Arabic equiva- lent of Mars, which was the planet in the ascendant when the first sod was turned). Moizz was an able ruler, not without spiritual gifts, and possessed with the taste for splendour which the air of Egypt seems to develop in its rulers. One of his daughters left at her death five sacks of emeralds, thirty thousand pieces of Sicilian embroidery, and three thousand chased and inlaid vessels ; another left twelve thousand dresses. Our author quotes these amazing figures without comment, perhaps the wisest course to pursue. One figure irresistibly provokes an expression of incredulity. He cannot away with the "ten tons of gold," with the possession of which one of the Egyptian rulers is credited by the annalists of the time. Yet the figure is quite credible. It equals, at the present price of gold, about £1,250,000. Alexander found twenty times as much in the treasures of Persepolis ; Tiberius left £11,000,000; Nadir Shah acquired £30,000,000 at Delhi ; and the Bank of England has about this last amount in its cellars to-day. Moez reigned two-and-twenty years ; his successor, Aziz, had some of his father's virtues, and exaggerated his faults ; after him came Hakim, an Arabian Caligula ; and then a succession of do-nothing rulers, the most remarkable of whom was Mustansir, who, coming to the throne at the age of seven months, "broke the record" for length of rule among the Mahometan Sovereigns of all time, reigning fifty-eight years. The Fatimite Dynasty lasted just over two centuries, giving place at last to the most splendid figure in all the records of medireval Egypt, Salah-ed-din (" Honour of the Faith "), softened in Western parlance to the familiar Saladiu. Here we touch ground made familiar to all of us both by history and by romance. It is a real pleasure to find that Pro- fessor Lane-Poole, who is careful to go for his history to original sources, is able to say of the great Caliph that "the popular conception of him has not erred. Magnanimous, zhivalrous, gentle, sympathetic, pure in heart and life, ascetic and laborious, simple in his habits, fervently devout, and only severe in his zeal for the faith, he has been rightly held to be the type and pattern of Saracen chivalry." Utinant noster faisset ! Our own Richard shows but poorly beside him. We have to go on for more than fifty years—Saladin died March 4th, 1193—before we find his equal, in Louis IX. There is no need to go over the story of the Holy War, so splendid in its first successes, so disastrous in its close. The King and his suite were held to ransom at £400,000, reduced by a quarter, however, by the reigning Sultan, who was greatly impressed by the French King's indifference to money. The rule of the emancipated slave was now to become the rule in Egypt. The Mamlfiks (" owned ") began to rule in 1250, and held power for nearly three centuries. The beginning of the new order of things was strange in the extreme. The widow of the last of the Ayyubid Sultans was made Queen—" almost the only Queen who has ruled a Ilohammadan country before the late Empress of India "—and, on a hint from the Caliph at Bagdad, furnished with a husband. She had a stormy reign, quarrelled with her husband, murdered him, and met the fate of Jezebel. Three years afterwards the first and greatest of the Mamlak Sultans, Beybars L, by the familiar method of conquering the enemy abroad— this time the Mongols under Hfiliga—and murdering his master at home, reached the throne. He was what we should call now a Cossack, who had been sold for £20, certainly a, low price for a great soldier, "not inferior to Julius Cresar," as a chronicler of the time described him, who, during his reign of twenty-seven years, made Egypt as great as it had ever been under a fLahommedan ruler. The two hundred odd years that followed his death were, perhaps, the hardest of all the hard times that the Egyptian people, the most patient and enduring of all the races of mankind, ever had to endure.' A succession of soldiers, making haste to enjoy their brief spell of power, exhibits what may be called the very ideal of misgovernment. A more dismal record of oppression by the strong, and suffering of the weak, could scarcely be found in the history of the world. Probably things were not actually so bad as they seem, focussed, so to speak, in the brief pages of history. But England will have to do its very beat if the balance is to be made even for this long-suffering land.
Previous page
