great portion of
the land was a fief of the Mamelukes was left unchanged, and it is said
that a proposal made by the sultan's vizier to appropriate these estates
was punished with death. The Mameluke amirs were to be retained in
office as heads of twelve sanjaks into which Egypt was divided; and
under the next sultan, Suleiman I., two chambers were created, called
respectively the Greater and the Lesser Divan, in which both the army
and the ecclesiastical authorities were represented, to aid the pasha by
their deliberations. Six regiments altogether were constituted by the
conqueror Selim for the protection of Egypt; to these Suleiman added a
seventh, of Circassians. As will be seen from the tables, it was the
practice of the Porte to change the governor of Egypt at very short
intervals--after a year or even some months. The third governor, Ahmad
Pasha, hearing that orders for this 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
amirs whom he had imprisoned and who, escaping from their confinement,
attacked him in his bath and killed him. In 1527 the first survey of
Egypt under the Ottomans was made, in consequence of the official copy
of the former registers having perished by fire; yet this new survey did
not come into use until 1605. Egyptian lands were divided in it into
four classes--the sultan's domain, fiefs, land for the maintenance of
the army, and lands settled on religious foundations.

Troubles with the army.

It would seem that the constant changes in the government caused the
army to get out of control at an early period of the Ottoman occupation,
and at the beginning of the 11th Islamic century mutinies became common;
in 1013 (1604) the governor Ibrahim Pasha was murdered by the soldiers,
and his head set on the Bab Zuwela. The reason for these mutinies was
the attempt made by successive pashas to put a stop to the extortion
called _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. In 1609 something like
civil war broke out between the army and the pasha, who had on his side
some loyal regiments and the Bedouins. The soldiers went so far as to
choose a sultan, and to divide provisionally the regions of Cairo
between them. They were defeated by the governor Mahomme