Ottoman Egypt was an administrative division of the Ottoman Empire after the conquest of Mamluk Egypt by the Ottomans in 1517. The Ottomans administered Egypt as a province (eyalet) of their empire (). It remained formally an Ottoman province until 1914, though in practice it became increasingly autonomous during the 19th century and was under de facto British control from 1882.
Egypt always proved a difficult province for the Ottoman Sultans to control, due in part to the continuing power and influence of the Mamluks, the Egyptian military caste who had ruled the country for centuries. As such, Egypt remained semi-autonomous under the Mamluks until Napoleon Bonaparte's French forces invaded in 1798. After Anglo-Turkish forces expelled the French in 1801, Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian military commander of the Ottoman army in Egypt, seized power in 1805, and established a quasi-independent state.
Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty remained nominally an Ottoman province. In reality, it was practically independent and went to war twice with the empire—in 1831–33 and 1839–41. The Ottoman sultan granted Egypt the status of an autonomous vassal state or Khedivate in 1867. Isma'il Pasha (Khedive from 1867 to 1879) and Tewfik Pasha (Khedive from 1879 to 1892) governed Egypt as a quasi-independent state under Ottoman suzerainty until the British occupation of 1882. Nevertheless, the Khedivate of Egypt (1867–1914) remained a de jure Ottoman province until 5 November 1914, when the Sultanate of Egypt was declared a British protectorate in reaction to the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire joining the First World War on the side of the Central Powers (October–November 1914).
History
Early Ottoman period
After the conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I left the country. Grand Vizier Yunus Pasha was awarded the governorship of Egypt. However, the sultan soon discovered that Yunus Pasha had created an extortion and bribery syndicate, and gave the office to Hayır Bey, the former Mamluk governor of Aleppo, who had contributed to the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Marj Dabiq.
The history of early Ottoman Egypt is a competition for power between the Mamluks and the representatives of the Ottoman Sultan.
The register by which a great portion of the land was a fief of the Mamluks was left unchanged, allowing the Mamluks to quickly return to positions of great influence. The Mamluk emirs were to be retained in office as heads of 12 sanjaks, into which Egypt was divided; and under the next sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, two chambers were created, called the Greater Divan and Lesser Divan, in which both the army and the ecclesiastical authorities were represented, to aid the pasha by their deliberations. Six regiments were constituted by the conqueror Selim for the protection of Egypt; to those Suleiman added a seventh, of Circassians.
It was the practice of the Sublime Porte to change the governor of Egypt at very short intervals, after a year or less. The fourth governor, Hain Ahmed Pasha, hearing that orders for his execution had come from Constantinople, endeavoured to make himself an independent ruler and had coins struck in his own name. His schemes were frustrated by two of the emirs whom he had imprisoned and who, escaping from their confinement, attacked him in his bath and attempted to kill him; although Ahmed Pasha escaped wounded, he was soon captured and executed by the Ottoman sultan's forces.
1527 to 1610
In 1527, the first survey of Egypt under the Ottomans was made, the official copy of the former registers having perished by fire; this new survey did not come into use until 1605. Egyptian lands were divided into four classes: the sultan's domain, fiefs, land for the maintenance of the army, and lands settled on religious foundations.
The constant changes in the government seem to have caused the army to get out of control at an early period of the Ottoman occupation, and at the beginning of the 17th-century mutinies became common; in 1604, governor Maktul Hacı Ibrahim Pasha (then known just as Ibrahim Pasha) was murdered by the soldiers, and his head set on the Bab Zuweila, earning him the epithet Maktul, "the Slain". The reason for these mutinies was the attempt made by successive pashas to put a stop to the extortion called the tulbah, a forced payment exacted by the troops from the inhabitants of the country by the fiction of debts requiring to be discharged, which led to grievous ill-usage.