The coming of the Turkish troops with the caliph Mamun was an ominous event for the country.  Up to 846 all the successive governors had been Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves.  With some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple habits—­the Arabs were never luxurious—­and usually of strict Mohammedan principles.  They made money, honestly if possible, during their brief tenure; but they did not harass the people much by their personal interference, and left the local officials to manage matters in their own way, as had always been the custom.  They lived at the new capital, Fustat, which grew up on the site of the conqueror’s camp, and very near the modern Cairo; for Alexandria, the symbol of Roman domination, was dismantled in 645 after the Emperor Manuel’s attempt at reconquest.  If they did not do much active good, they did little harm, and Egypt pursued her immemorial ways.

The last Arab governor, Anbasa, was a man of fine character, and his term of office was distinguished by the building of the fort of Damietta, as a protection against Roman raids, and by a defeat of the tributary Sudanis near Dongola.

II.—­Turkish Governors

The Arabs have neither the ferocity nor the luxuriousness, nor, it should be added, the courage and the genius for administration of the Turkish race.  In the arrival of Turkish troops in 830 we see a symptom of what was going on all over the eastern caliphate.  Turks were taking the place of Arabs in the army and the provincial governments, just as the Persians were filling up the civil appointments.  The caliph’s Turkish bodyguard was the beginning of the dismemberment of the caliphate.  It became the habit of the caliphs to grant the government of Egypt, as a sort of fief, to a leading Turkish officer, who usually appointed a deputy to do his work and to pay him the surplus revenue.  Such a deputy was Ahmad-ibn-Tulun (868-884), the first of the many Turkish despots of Egypt.  Ibn-Tulun was the first ruler to raise Egypt from a mere tax-paying appendage of the caliphate to a kingdom, independent save for the recognition of the caliph on the coinage, and he was the first to found a Moslem dynasty there.  A man of fair Mohammedan education, iron will, and ubiquitous personal attention to affairs, he added Syria to his dominions, defeated the East Romans with vast slaughter near Tarsus (883), kept an army of 30,000 Turkish slaves and a fleet of a hundred fighting ships.

He beautified his capital by building a sumptuous palace and his well-known mosque, which still stands in his new royal suburb of Katai; he encouraged the small farmers and reduced the taxation, yet he left five millions in the treasury when he died in 884.  His son maintained his power, and more than his luxury and artistic extravagance; but there were no elements of stability in the dynasty, which depended solely upon the character of the ruler.  The next generation