Campaign in Egypt
At this time, Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire, but Napoleon viewed invading Egypt as a way to threaten British dominance in the Mediterranean Sea and threaten the British position in India, and to gain prestige for revolutionary arms.
Napoleon raised a large army including scientists and cultural experts, and sailed from Toulon on 19 May. Stopping to capture Malta on 12 June, he landed near Alexandria on 2 July and took the city. Napoleon's army proceeded to march against the Mameluke armies in Cairo, and met them at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July. Facing a huge army, Napoleon organized his army into squares and used his artillery to disperse the Mameluke attacks. The Mameluke army retreated into Syria, leaving Napoleon dominant in Egypt.
Read more about this topic: Campaigns Of 1798 In The French Revolutionary Wars
Famous quotes containing the words campaign and/or egypt:
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
—Mario Cuomo (b. 1932)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)