In recognition of Ibrahim’s services to the Ottoman state in defeating the Wahhabis, Sultan Mahmud II promoted Muhammad ‘Ali’s son to the rank of pasha and named him governor of the Hijaz. In this way, the Red Sea province of the Hijaz became the first addition to Muhammad ’Ali’s empire. Henceforth, the Egyptian treasury would benefit from the customs revenues of the port of Jidda, which, given its importance in the Red Sea trade and as a gateway for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, were considerable. Muhammad ‘Ali substantially consolidated Egypt’s grip over the Red Sea in 1820 when his forces invaded Sudan. He had hoped to find mythical gold mines in Sudan to enrich his treasury while he sought a new source of slave soldiers for his army in the upper reaches of the Nile. The Sudan campaign was marred by great brutality. When Muhammad ’Ali’s son Ismail was killed by the ruler of Shindi, a region on the Nile to the north of Khartoum, the Egyptian expeditionary force retaliated by killing 30,000 of the local inhabitants. The gold never materialized, and the Sudanese quite literally preferred to die rather than serve in Muhammad ‘Ali’s army. Thousands of men who had been captured for military service became despondent when taken from their homes, fell ill, and perished in the long marches to training camps in Egypt: of 20,000 Sudanese enslaved between 1820 and 1824, just 3,000 survived to 1824.¹³ The only real gains to Egypt of the Sudan campaign (1820–1822) were commercial and territorial. By adding Sudan to Egypt’s empire, Muhammad ’Ali doubled the land mass under his control and dominated the trade of the Red Sea. Egypt’s hegemony over Sudan would endure 136 years, until Sudan regained its independence in 1956. Muhammad ‘Ali faced a severe constraint in the shortage of new recruits for the Egyptian army. His original Albanian forces had been decimated by wars in Arabia and the Sudan, and by age as well. By the time of the Sudan campaign, the surviving Albanians in Muhammad ?Ali?s army had been in Egypt twenty years. The Ottomans had placed an embargo on the export of military slaves from the Caucasus to Egypt in 1810, both to prevent a Mamluk revival and to contain the ambitions of Muhammad ?Ali himself. Nor were the Ottomans willing to send any of the empire?s soldiers to serve Muhammad ?Ali when they were needed on the European fronts. With no external source of new soldiers, the governor of Egypt was forced back on his own population. The idea of a national army—a conscript force that drew its ranks from the workers and peasants of the country—was still novel in the Ottoman world. Soldiers were seen as a martial caste taken from slave ranks. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the famous Ottoman infantry known as the Janissaries did modify their recruitment procedures as the devshirme (“boy levy”) fell out of practice. Soldiers took wives and enrolled their sons in the Janissaries’ ranks. But the notion of a military caste distinct from the rest of the population persisted. Peasants were dismissed as too passive and dull for military service. As the Ottomans began to lose wars to European armies in the eighteenth century, the sultans came to doubt the effectiveness of their own infantry. They invited retired Prussian and French officers to Istanbul to introduce modern European methods of warfare, such as square formation, bayonet charges, and the use of mobile artillery. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Sultan Selim III (r. 1780–1807) created a new Ottoman army recruited from Anatolian peasant stock dressed in European-style breeches and drilled by Western officers. He called this new force the Nizam-i Cedid, or “New Order” army (its soldiers were known as Nizami troops). Sultan Selim deployed a 4,000-man Nizami regiment to Egypt in 1801, where Muhammad ‘Ali would have seen the discipline of the corps firsthand. As one Ottoman contemporary recorded, the Nizami troops in Egypt “bravely combated the infidels and defeated them incessantly; and the flight of a single individual of that corps was never seen nor heard of.”¹⁴ However, the Nizami forces were a more immediate threat to the powerful Janissary corps than to any European army. If the Nizamis were the “new order,” the Janissaries were by implication the “old order,” and they weren’t going to accept redundancy while they still had the power to protect their own interests. In 1807 the Janissaries mutinied, overthrew Selim III, and disbanded the Nizami army. Though this first experiment in an Ottoman national army came to an inauspicious end, it still provided Muhammad ’Ali with a viable model to replicate in Egypt. The Napoleonic army gave Muhammad ‘Ali a second model to consider. The French levйe en masse was a citizen’s mass army that, when led by able commanders, had proven capable of conquering continents. However, Muhammad ’Ali viewed the people of Egypt as subjects rather than citizens, and he never tried to stir his troops with rousing ideological slogans as did French revolutionary commanders. He decided to draw on French military experts to train his recruit army, but otherwise he modeled the Egyptian Nizam-i Cedid on the Ottoman example. In 1822 he commissioned a veteran of the Napoleonic wars named Colonel S?ves?a French convert to Islam known in Egypt as Sulayman Agha?to organize and train a Nizami army drawn entirely from Egyptian peasant recruits. Within a year he had raised a force of 30,000 men. By the mid-1830s, that number would reach 130,000. The Egyptian Nizami army was not an overnight success. Egyptian peasants feared for their farms and the welfare of their families; their close attachment to their homes and villages made military service a real ordeal. Peasants avoided conscription by fleeing their villages when military recruitment teams approached. Others deliberately maimed themselves by chopping off fingers or striking out an eye to gain exemption on grounds of disability. Whole regions rose in revolt against the draft, and in Upper Egypt an estimated 30,000 villagers rebelled in 1824. Once pressed into military service, many peasants deserted. It was only through heavy punishment that Muhammad ’Ali’s government was able to force the peasants of Egypt to serve in the army. The astonishing thing is how successful this reluctant army proved on the battlefield. It was first put to the test in Greece. In 1821 the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire erupted in a nationalist uprising. The revolt was initiated by members of a secret society known as the Filiki Etairia, or the “Society of Friends,” established in 1814 with the goal of Greek statehood and independence. The Greeks of the Ottoman Empire were a distinct community held together by their language, their Orthodox Christian faith, and a shared history spanning the classical period to the Hellenic Byzantine Empire. As the first overtly nationalist uprising in the Ottoman Empire, the Greek War posed a danger of much greater magnitude than the eighteenth-century revolts by local leaders. In previous revolts, movements had been driven only by the ambitions of individual leaders. The novelty of nationalism was that it was an ideology capable of inspiring a whole population to rise up against their Ottoman rulers. The revolt broke out in the southern Peloponnesian Peninsula in March 1821 and quickly spread to central Greece, Macedonia, the Aegean islands, and Crete. The Ottomans found themselves fighting pitched battles on several fronts simultaneously, and they turned to Muhammad ’Ali for assistance. In 1824 his son Ibrahim Pasha set off for the Peloponnesian Peninsula at the head of an Egyptian army of 17,000 newly trained infantry, 700 cavalry, and four artillery batteries. As all of his soldiers were native-born peasants, it is the first time we can speak of a genuinely Egyptian army. The Egyptians achieved complete success in the Greek War, and the new Nizami army proved its mettle. Following his conquests in Crete and the Peloponnese, Ibrahim Pasha was awarded the governorships of those provinces, expanding Muhammad ‘Ali’s empire from the Red Sea to the Aegean. Ironically, the better his forces fared on the battlefield against the Greeks, the more concerned the sultan and his government grew. The Egyptians were subduing insurgencies that had withstood the Ottomans and expanding the territory under Cairo?s control. If Muhammad ?Ali were to rise in rebellion, it was not clear that the Ottomans would be able to withstand his troops. Egyptian victory and Greek suffering provoked concern in European capitals as well. The Greek War captured the imaginations of educated elites in Britain and France. As the cities of the classical world became modern battlefields, European Philhellenic societies clamored for their governments to intervene to protect the Christian Greeks from the Muslim Turks and Egyptians. The poet Lord Byron drew international attention to the Greek cause when he sailed to Messolonghi in 1823 to support the independence movement. His death in April 1824—of a fever, not at the hands of Ottoman soldiers—elevated him to the status of a martyr for the cause of Greek independence. Public calls for European intervention redoubled in the aftermath of Byron’s death. The British and French governments were susceptible to public pressure but were more concerned with larger geostrategic considerations. France had developed a privileged relationship with Muhammad ’Ali’s Egypt. In turn, the governor of Egypt made use of French military advisors for his army, drew on French engineers for his industrial needs and public works, and sent his students to France for advanced training. The French were keen to preserve their special relationship with Egypt as a means to extend their influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The expansion of Egyptian power to Greece, however, posed a dilemma for the government in Paris. It would not serve France’s interests to see Egypt grow stronger than France itself in the Eastern Mediterranean. The situation was more clear-cut for the British government. London watched Paris extend its influence in Egypt with mounting concern. Since Napoleon’s invasion, the British had sought to prevent France from dominating Egypt and the land-sea route to India. Britain had also been scarred by the continental wars of the Napoleonic era and worried that attempts by strong European powers to secure positions in Ottoman territory could reignite conflict between the European powers. The British government thus sought to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire to preserve the peace in Europe. It was clear that the Ottomans could not retain Greece on their own, and the British did not wish to see Egypt extend its power into the Balkans at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, British interests would best be served by assisting the Greeks to achieve greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and securing a withdrawal of both Ottoman and Egyptian troops from the disputed territories. Muhammad ‘Ali had nothing left to gain from his campaign in Greece. The war proved a tremendous drain on his treasury. His new Nizami army was overextended across Greece. The Ottomans were treating him with growing suspicion and clearly doing their best to deplete his army and his treasury. By the summer of 1827 the European powers had made clear their opposition to Egypt?s position in Greece and had assembled a combined Anglo-French fleet to force an Ottoman and Egyptian withdrawal. The last thing the governor of Egypt wanted was to engage the European powers on the battlefield. As Muhammad ?Ali wrote to his political agent in Istanbul in October 1827, ?We have to realize that we cannot stand up against the Europeans, and the only possible outcome [if we do so] will be sinking the entire fleet and causing the death of up to 30 or 40 thousand men.? Though he was proud of his army and navy, Muhammad ?Ali knew they were no match for the British or the French. ?Although we are men of war,? he wrote, ?yet we are still in the A-B-Cs of that art, whereas the Europeans are way ahead of us and have put their theories [about war] into practice.?¹⁵ Though he had a clear vision of possible disaster, Muhammad ’Ali committed his navy to the cause and dispatched his fleet to Greece. The Ottomans were unwilling to concede independence to Greece, and the sultan decided to call the European powers’ bluff and ignore their joint fleet. It was a fatal mistake. The allied fleet trapped the Egyptian ships in Navarino Bay and sank virtually all the seventy-eight Ottoman and Egyptian ships in a four-hour engagement on October 20, 1827. Over 3,000 Egyptian and Ottoman men were killed in the battle, along with nearly 200 men in the attacking allied fleet. Muhammad ‘Ali was furious at his losses and held Sultan Mahmud II responsible for the loss of his navy. Moreover, the Egyptians found themselves in the same position Napoleon had been in after the Battle of the Nile: thousands of soldiers were trapped, with no ships to provision or repatriate them. Muhammad ’Ali negotiated directly with the British to conclude a truce and repatriate his son Ibrahim Pasha and the Egyptian army from Greece without consulting the sultan. Mahmud II was outraged by his governor’s insubordination, but Muhammad ‘Ali no longer sought the sultan’s favor. His days of loyal service were through. Henceforth, Muhammad’Ali would pursue his own objectives at the sultan’s expense. Navarino was also a turning point in the Greek war of independence. Assisted by a French expeditionary force, Greek fighters drove Ottoman troops out of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and central Greece in the course of the year 1828. That December the governments of Britain, France, and Russia met and agreed to the creation of an independent Kingdom of Greece, then imposed their solution on the Ottoman Empire. After three more years of negotiations, the Kingdom of Greece was finally established in the London Conference of May 1832.