s, the British troops remaining till 1803. Then Mehemet Ali, a small
tobacconist of Kavala, Macedonia, coming with Albanian mercenaries, made
himself governor, and later (1811), by massacring the Mamelukes, became
the actual master of the country, and after seven years' war brought
Arabia under Egypt's rule. He subdued Nubia and Sennar in 1820-22; and
then, requiring a larger army, he obtained instructors from France. To
them were handed over 1000 Turks and Circassians to be trained as
officers, who later took command of 30,000 Sudanese. These died so
rapidly in Egypt from pneumonia[8] that Mehemet Ali conscripted over
250,000 fellahin, and in so arbitrary a fashion that many peasants
mutilated themselves to avoid the much-dreaded service. The common
practice was to place a small piece of nitrate of silver into the eye,
which was then kept tightly bandaged till the sight was destroyed.
Battalions were then formed of one-eyed men, and of soldiers who, having
cut off their right-hand fingers, were made to shoot from the left
shoulder. Every man who could not purchase exemption, with the exception
of those living in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, on becoming 19 years old
was liable nominally to 12 years' service; but many men were kept for 30
or 40 years, in spite of constant appeals. Nevertheless the experiment
succeeded. The docile, yet robust and hardy peasants, under their
foreign leaders, gained an unbroken series of successes in the first
Syrian War; and after the bloody battle of Konia (1832), where the raw
Turkish army was routed and the grand vizier taken prisoner, it was only
European intervention which prevented the Egyptian general, Ibrahim
Pasha, from marching unopposed to the Bosphorus. The defeat of the
Turkish army at Nizib (Nezeeb or Nisib), in the second Syrian War
(1839), showed that it was possible to obtain favourable military
results with Egyptians when stiffened by foreigners and well commanded.
Ibrahim, the hero of Konia, declared, however, that no native Egyptian
ought to rise higher than the rank of sergeant; and in the Syrian
campaigns nearly all the officers were Turks or Circassians, as were
several non-commissioned officers. In the cavalry and artillery many of
the privates were foreigners, numbers of the janissaries who escaped the
massacre at Stamboul (1832) having joined Mehemet Ali's army.

In the reign of Abbas, who succeeded Mehemet Ali, the Egyptian troops
were driven from Nejd, and the Wah