As a captive in Egypt, Louis IX was on hand to witness the unhappy end of Saladin’s dynasty, when Turan-Shah, the last of the line, was killed by his stepmother’s slaves in the river Nile.
For more than a century thereafter, Egypt was ruled by a coterie called the Mamluks, recruited from palace slaves. Under their government, sultans changed with astonishing rapidity, but the country itself prospered, for it controlled the trade routes betwen Europe and the East. With Baghdad destroyed by the Mongols, and the Moslem cities of Spain overrun by the Christians, Cairo dominated the Moslem world. But after the fifteenth century, when Western explorers found alternate routes for trading with India, a deadening economic depression overcame Egypt.
---Muhammad Ali executed one of the greatest land grabes in history. He confiscated the feudal farms of the Mameluk grandees and stripped Cairo’s religious institutions of their 600,000 prime acres of landholdings. Thus decapitating Cairo’s medieval order and Egypt was now the viceroy’s private plantation. With the help of the French, Muhammed Ali set about making changes. He ordered wide-scale planting of a new strain of cotton, which was to be the cash crop that would finance the economic revival. Since British textile manufacturers were willing to pay good money for such cotton, Ali ordered the majority of Egyptian peasants to cultivate cotton at the exclusion of all other crops. At harvest time, Ali bought the entire crop himself, which he then sold at a mark-up to textile manufacturers. In this way, he turned the whole of Egypt's cotton production into his personal monopoly. He also experimented with textile factories that might process cotton into cloth within Egypt, but these did not prove very successful. ---Read More:http://www.egyptianagriculture.com/muhammad_ali.html
The Ottoman Turks conquered the country in 1517. As a distant province of a corrupt ill-governed empire, Egypt sank into centuries of decadence, from which it was awakened only at the end of the eighteenth century when Napoleon invaded the country to block the British route to india. After him came scholars and explorers, such as the Italian Giovanni Belzoni. The antiquities were studied, the hieroglyphics deciphered, and expeditions sent out to discover the source of the Nile. In 1811 Mohammed Ali, a soldier in the Turkish army, seized control of the country and, like an enlightened eighteenth-century despot, proceeded to modernize it. But the pace of modernization was slow, for his descendents, down to the late King Farouk, were less competent or less benevolent than he had been. They borrowed money so recklessly that the country was soon in pawn-with the English as pawnbrokers- a situation which prevailed until the last British troops withdrew from Egypt in 1952.
---The Second of May 1808' (1814), also known as The Charge of the Mamelukes, by Francisco Goya---Read More:http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/File:Francisco_de_Goya_y_Lucientes_026.jpg
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