The Burgi, or Circassian Mamluks (1382-1517), were little more than chief among the emirs.  Widespread corruption, the open sale of high offices and of “justice,” and general debauchery characterised their rule.  Yet they built many of the loveliest mosques in Cairo, and the conquest of Cyprus, long a nest of Mediterranean piracy, by Bars Bey in 1426 may be added to their credit.  Kait Bey (1468-1496) was a great builder, and in every way a wise, brave, and energetic, public-spirited sovereign, and was an exception to the general baseness.

Egypt was rich in his day.  The European trade had swelled enormously, and the duties brought in a prodigious revenue.  The Italian Republics had their consulates or their marts in Alexandria, and Marseilles, Narbonne, and Catalonia sent their representatives.  The Indian trade was also very considerable; we read of L36,000 paid at one time in customs dues at Gidda, then an Egyptian port on the Red Sea.  The Mamluk sultan took toll on every bale of goods that passed between Europe and India in the palmy days that preceded Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the Cape route in 1497.  It was an immense monopoly, extortionately used, and it was not resigned without a struggle.  The Mamluk fleet engaged the Portuguese off Chaul in the Bay of Bengal in 1508 and defeated them; but Almeida avenged the honour of his country by a victory over the Mamluk admiral Hoseyn off Diu in the following year, and the prolific transit trade of Egypt was to a great extent lost.

This final effort was made by the last great sultan of the Circassian dynasty, Kansuh Ghuri (1501-1516), who also exerted himself manfully in defending his country from the impending disaster of Ottoman invasion.  But the Othmanli Turks, greatly heartened by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, had been steadily encroaching in Asia, and, after defeating the shah of Persia, their advance upon Syria and Egypt was only a matter of time.  The victory was made easier by jealousies and treachery among the Mamluks.  Kansuh fell at the head of his gallant troops in a battle near Aleppo in August 1516; a last desperate stand of the Mamluks under the Mukattam Hill at Cairo in January 1517, was overcome, and Sultan Selim made Egypt a province of the Turkish empire.  Such it remains, formally, to this day.

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RAPHAEL HOLINSHED

Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland

Raphael Holinshed, who was born about 1520, is one of the most celebrated of English chroniclers.  The “Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” known by his name, cover a long period of English history, beginning with a “Description” of Britain from the earliest times, and carried on until the reign of Elizabeth, in the course of which, between 1580 and 1584, Holinshed died.  The work did good service to Shakespeare, who drew from it much of the material for his historical plays.