by John Keegan
Yet, this devotion to cavalry warfare was to spell their doom. As a group they were shielded from military developments in the wider world, which might have warned them that the days of the horsemen were numbered; unlike the armoured knights of western Europe, they made no encounter either with primitive gunpowder weapons or with upstart, common infantrymen demanding their rights. Until the end of the fifteenth century their status, both political and military, remained unchallenged, to such an extent that, though a Mameluke would go nowhere but on horseback, the exercises of the furusiyya fell into decay.
There was one excellent feature of the Mameluke system. It was entirely unhereditary. Though Mamelukes could marry and father free children, indeed themselves became legally free on graduation (though not free to leave the institution or choose another master than the sultan), no son of a Mameluke could become one. That ought to have ensured an infusion of new ideas as well as of new blood. In practice it did nothing of the sort. New Mamelukes continued to arrive in Egypt from the steppe frontier throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but after their training in the novitiate and the furusiyya, they became indistinguishable from their predecessors. There were good reasons for that. The status of the Mameluke was highly privileged. The institution had seized power and privilege, as it was in the logic of military slavery that it should. No doubt its members thought that these were best retained by an unwavering dedication to the practices that had made them great in the past.
Then, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Mamelukes were simultaneously confronted by the gunpowder revolution in its developed form from two different directions. Their control of the Red Sea was contested by the Portuguese, who had sailed around Africa in ships mounting heavy cannon. And the security of the frontiers of Egypt was threatened by the Ottoman Turks, whose cavalry armies had been heavily supplemented by well-trained musketeers. In haste, the Mameluke sultan tried to repair a century of military neglect. Large numbers of cannon were cast. Units of gunners and musketeers were formed. The furusiyya exercises were revived and the Mamelukes set to re-learning the skills of lance, sword and bow with intensity. But, fatally, the re-militarisation of the Mamelukes and the espousal of gunpowder were kept quite separate. No Mameluke was trained or would train in any use of firearms whatsoever; gunners and musketeers were recruited from outside the Mameluke caste, from black Africans and people of the Maghreb, the Arab west.37
The outcome was predictable. The gunners and musketeers who went to the Red Sea achieved considerable success against the Portuguese, who were fighting in confined waters, which did not favour their ocean-going ships, and at the extreme limit of their lines of communications. The Mamelukes who rode out to confront the Ottoman gunpowder armies at the battles of Marj Dabiq in August 1515 and Raydaniya in January 1516 were utterly defeated. The ‘institution’ was overthrown and Egypt became a province of the Ottoman empire.
The two defeats at Marj Dabiq and Raydaniya took a similar form. In the first the Ottomans, commanded by Sultan Selim I, placed their artillery on the flanks and their musketeers in the centre, and waited for the Mamelukes to attack them. They did so in the traditional Turkish crescent deployment and were thrown back in rout by Ottoman firepower. In the second, the Mamelukes, who had assembled some artillery, hoped that the Ottomans would attack them but found themselves outflanked and were tempted to make a cavalry charge again. Its impetus broke one Ottoman wing, but firepower saved the day; 7000 Mamelukes were killed and the survivors fell back on Cairo, which they were shortly forced to surrender.
The tactics of the two battles are much less interesting than subsequent Mameluke lamentation over the means by which they were defeated. Ibn Zabul, the Mameluke historian who deplored his caste’s downfall, speaks for generations of preux chevaliers in the speech by the Mameluke chieftain, Kurtbay, which he contrives:
Hear my words and listen to them, so that you and others will know that amongst us are the horsemen of destiny and red death. A single one of us can defeat your whole army. If you do not believe it, you may try, only please order your army to stop shooting with firearms. You have here with you 200,000 soldiers of all races. Remain in your place and array your army in battle order. Only three of us will come out against you … you will see with your own eyes the feats performed by these three … You have patched up an army from all parts of the world: Christians, Greeks and others, and you have brought with you this contrivance artfully devised by the Christians of Europe when they were incapable of meeting the Muslim armies on the battlefield. The contrivance is that musket which, even if a woman were to fire it, would hold up such and such a number of men.… And woe to thee! How darest thou shoot with firearms at Muslims!38
Kurtbay’s lament echoes the disdain for mechanical weapons of the French knight Bayard, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, who habitually had crossbowmen prisoners killed, and anticipates the spirit of the ‘death charge’ of von Bredow’s cavalrymen into the muzzles of the French rifles at Mars-la-Tour in 1870. It is the defiant cry of the warrior horseman, in the twilight of the warhorse, from around the world. Yet there was more to Kurtbay’s outburst than caste pride, resistance to change, religious orthodoxy or contempt for underlings. There was recent and solid experience that edged weapons could overcome gunpowder by their mediation through the martial qualities which the Mamelukes believed made them fit to lord it over the rest of the world. In 1497 a boy sultan, Sa’adat Muhammad, had formed in Cairo a regiment of black slave musketeers, accorded them privileges and used them in faction fights. It may be that he foresaw the gunpowder revolution; it may be simply that he thought firearms made him strong. Whatever the case, the Mamelukes were outraged and when Sa’adat married a favourite black, Farajallah, to a Circassian slave girl — most Mamelukes were by then Circassians — their temper broke.
The Royal Mamluks [recorded the historian al-Ansari] expressed their disapproval to the Sultan, and then they put on their steel and armed themselves with their full equipment. A battle broke out between them and the black slaves who numbered about five hundred. The black slaves ran away and gathered again in the towers of the citadel and fired at the Royal Mamluks. The Royal Mamluks marched on them, killing Farajallah and about fifty of the black slaves; the rest fled; two Royal Mamluks were killed.39
Yet as the Mamelukes were to discover, when men of equal worth fight on unequal terms, the side with the better weapons wins. That was the lesson of Marj Dabiq and Raydaniya. That was to be the lesson, 400 years later, of the Japanese war against the Americans in the Pacific when, at their last gasp against the power of American industry, Japanese suicide pilots wore their samurai swords in the cockpits of the kamikaze aircraft they flew against the enemy’s aircraft-carriers. It was to be the lesson of both Germany’s world wars in the twentieth century, when their military caste’s contempt for their enemies’ superiority in the Materialschlacht — battle of attrition — ultimately availed their soldiers’ courage not at all.
The Mamelukes would not take this lesson to heart. The Ottoman victories of 1515–16 did not mean the end of the Mameluke institution, since its form was too useful for the Ottomans to dispense with it. Indeed, it could be argued that Islam, until infected by the essentially antipathetic concept of nationalism in the twentieth century, could accommodate no system of professional military organisation not based on slavery. In any event subordinate Mameluke dynasties not only crept back to power in Ottoman Egypt but achieved it also in other distant conquered provinces like Iraq, Tunis and Algiers. Though they might regain position, however, they proved irreformable as soldiers. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the Mamelukes again rode out to oppose cannon and musket with the exercises of the furusiyya and were, of course, routed in the Battle of the Pyramids; Napoleon, enchanted by their noble savagery, took one of them, Rustum, to be his personal attendant to the end of his reign. The surviving Mamelukes, still ready to defy the modern age from horseback, were eventually massacred by the ruthless Mu
hammad Ali, an Ottoman satrap who had no qualms about practising ‘Christian’ methods of warmaking, in Cairo in 1811.40
The Battle of the Pyramids certainly, the Cairo massacre of the Mamelukes probably, were events of which Clausewitz was aware. Each ought to have been an indication that culture is as powerful a force as politics in the choice of military means, and often more likely to prevail than political or military logic. But Clausewitz, if he knew the facts, did not draw the inference. By an odd twist of circumstance, his pupil, Helmuth von Moltke, was to witness the culmination of Muhammad Ali’s role as an agent of Ottoman power in the old Mameluke lands, in a series of events which demonstrates how much more persistent culture is than political decision as a military determinant.
Moltke was sent in 1835 by the Prussian army on a mission to help modernise Turkish military organisation and practice. He found the experience dispiriting. ‘In Turkey,’ he wrote, ‘even the least gift becomes suspect, as soon as it comes from the hand of a Christian.… A Turk will concede without hesitation that the Europeans are superior to his nation in science, skill, wealth, daring and strength, without it ever occurring to him that a Frank might therefore put himself on a par with a Muslim.’ In military affairs this attitude translated into mulish disrespect. ‘The colonels gave us precedence, the officers were still tolerably polite, but the ordinary man would not present arms to us, and the women and children from time to time followed us with curses. The soldier obeyed but would not salute.’
Moltke was to accompany the Turkish army in the expedition which the Ottoman sultan sent to Syria to bring Muhammad Ali, the rebellious ruler of Egypt, to heel in 1839. It was a bizarre encounter. The Ottoman army was superficially modernised, or ‘Christianised’, but the Egyptian one very much more so. Muhammad Ali was, indeed, himself a European, a Muslim Albanian, who had first learned the superiority of ‘Christian’ methods in the Greek War of Independence; some of his confederates in the war against the Mamelukes, like the French Colonel Sève, were renegade Philhellenes. Muhammad Ali’s army disposed of the Ottomans in a battle, at Nezib, in Syria, at which Moltke found himself a bystander; the spectacle of the Turks — mainly conscript Kurds — fleeing in disorder before the Egyptians sent him back to Prussia profoundly disillusioned by the resistance of the Ottoman sultan’s peoples to necessary reform.
Ottoman Turkey did nevertheless eventually succeed in creating a modern army, though only at the expense of restricting membership of it to ethnic Turks proper. That arbitrary limitation of the relationship between his peoples and the sultan greatly undermined the authority of the Ottoman government over its Muslim but non-Turkish subjects. That narrowing of his basis of power was certainly a major contribution to the strains that the Ottoman empire underwent when, as commander of a ‘Christianised’ army, the Sultan-Caliph was drawn into war on the side of Germany in 1914. The outcome of the war left Turkey without an empire, and soon without a sultan or caliphate. All that was left of it was the army it had sacrificed everything to create.
There was an ultimate irony in any impatience that the successors of Clausewitz and Moltke felt with their Turkish pupils. For the collapse of the Turkish empire in 1918 coincided, of course, with the collapse of their own, and through exactly the same medium: the deliberate choice of war for misconceived political ends. The ‘Young Turks’ — all deeply involved in the ‘Christianisation’ of the Sultan’s army — went to war on Germany’s side because they believed that would help to make Turkey strong. Germany had gone to war because it believed that going to war was a means in itself of making Germany strong. Clausewitz, too, would doubtless have felt the same. This cultural distortion of outlook spelled death equally to traditional German culture and to that of the servants of the Caliph.
The Samurai
At much the same time that the Mamelukes were going under to gunpowder, another military society at the opposite end of the world assured its survival by outrightly defying the circumstances that threatened it. In the sixteenth century the Japanese sword-bearing class was confronted by the challenge of firearms; it contrived means to rid Japan of firearms and thereby to perpetuate its social dominance for another 250 years. While the Western world, which touched it briefly in the sixteenth century, commercialised itself, voyaged, industrialised and underwent political revolution, the Japanese samurai closed their country to the outside world, extirpated such bridgeheads of foreign religious and technical influence as had intruded, and entrenched the traditions by which they had lived and ruled for a thousand years. The impulse is not without parallels — it was strongly felt in China in the nineteenth century — though the achievement is unique. For all its uniqueness, however, the achievement is evidence that political logic need not dominate warmaking, that, on the contrary, cultural forms, when they find strong champions, may prevail against the most powerfully besetting temptations to choose technical expedients as a means to victory, particularly when the price of victory is that of overturning ancient and cherished values.
The samurai were, in crude terms, Japan’s feudal and knightly class. They owed their origins to Japan’s insular isolation and to the internal subdivision of the Japanese islands by their mountain chains. The leaders of Japan’s valley clans (akin to the ‘valley lords’ of Ottoman Anatolia) gave allegiance to an emperor whose ancient lineage was deeply revered but whose power was purely nominal. From the seventh century AD, when a clan chief, Fujiwara Kamatari, instituted a central government modelled on that of the T’ang dynasty in China, it was effectively administered by a clan family, at first his own, later by more successful rivals. Rivals could compete for and eventually usurp the Fujiwaras’ power because of their tax-raising powers: in a misguided concession to Buddhism, a state-sponsored import from China, the Buddhist monasteries had been exempted from tax, and their secular neighbours soon extracted similar rights for themselves, at the same time enforcing the practice of making the peasants pay tax directly to the local clan lord. With the wealth that tax-raising brought, first one, then another lordly family came to dominate the imperial court, until in the twelfth century the current power-holder prevailed on the then ruler, a boy emperor, to grant him the title of Sei-i tai-Shogun, or generalissimo. Yoritomo, the first shogun, had already established a new seat of government, the Bakufu, literally the ‘camp office’, and thereafter it exercised central authority until the nineteenth century, when, at the Meiji restoration, real power was returned to the court, if not the emperor, by its overthrow and then that of the last valley magnates.
The shoguns, the leaders of the other military clans who repetitively competed with them for dominance, and their samurai followers (the large warrior class whose members, distinguished by their right to wear two swords, insisted on their gentlemanly status) were not mere thugs, as their equivalents in medieval Europe so often were. They were certainly fierce and talented warriors. Proof of that was originally given by their decisive defeat of the Mongols who, at the opposite extremity of their push into the Arab world in 1260, succeeded in setting foot on the Japanese archipelago in 1274. When they returned in 1281 a typhoon destroyed much of their fleet and they departed never to return.
‘Style’ was central to the samurai way of life — style in clothes, armour, weapons, skill-at-arms and behaviour on the battlefield; in that they did not much differ from their chivalric contemporaries in France and England. In their cultural outlook, however, they differed very greatly. The Japanese were a literate people and the literary culture of the samurai was highly developed. The greatest nobles of Japan, those who resided at the court of the powerless god-emperor, did not seek military reputation at all, but strove for literary glory. Their example set the tone for the samurai, who commonly wished to be known both as swordsmen and poets. Buddhism in its Zen form, that adopted by the samurai, encouraged a meditative and poetic outlook on the universe. The greatest warriors of feudal Japan were therefore also men of the mind, the spirit and the cultivated senses.
Feudal Japan
was politically chaotic, because of the endemic competition for the shogunate, but chaotic within accepted limits. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, feuding had got out of hand and the social order was threatened; established leaders were being overthrown by upstarts, some mere bandits; the shogun’s power became as fictional as the emperor’s. Order was restored in the years 1560–1616 by a succession of three outstanding strongmen, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, acting in the name of the shogun. They systematically put down the power of the Buddhist monasteries, the errant clan leaders, and the lawless bands of lordless men. Ieyasu’s pacification concluded with the siege of the fortress of Osaka in 1614, last stronghold of his opponents, after which he decreed the destruction of all non-residential castles in Japan. Such was his authority that decastellation, which took kings decades in Europe, was completed in a few days.
Superior generalship was not the only explanation of the restoration of central power. The three strongmen were also exponents of a new weapon. Portuguese voyagers had brought cannon and firearms to Japan in 1542. Oda Nobunaga was greatly impressed by the power of gunpowder, rapidly equipped his armies with muskets and peremptorily deritualised the mode of battle-fighting in Japan. Thitherto Japanese battles had traditionally begun, in the ancient and almost worldwide fashion of warmaking between champions, by the leading men on each side shouting challenges to each other, identifying themselves and displaying their weapons and armour. The ritual continued even after the introduction of firearms, but Oda Nobunaga would have none of it. He taught his musketeers to unleash volleys in ranks of up to a thousand and, at the decisive battle of Nagashino in 1575, swept away the enemy in a torrent of fire.41 This was a revolutionary change from the battle of Uedahara, in 1548, when the side possessing firearms missed the chance to use them because the other charged with swords the instant the rituals had been concluded.
