Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Permissions
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The Mamluk Rulers of Egypt
- 2 Egypt Imagined and the Realities of the Voyage
- 3 The Maritime Port of Alexandria
- 4 Sailing Upstream to Cairo
- 5 Cairo: ‘Meeting Place of Comer and Goer’
- 6 Venetian Diplomacy and the Arrival of the Ottomans
- 7 Exploring the Pyramids and Mummy Fields
- 8 Pilgrims to the Monastery of St Catherine
- 9 Adventures with the Mecca Caravan
- 10 To the South
- Europeans in Egypt in the Reigns of the Mamluk Sultans up to 1517
- Europeans in Egypt in the Reigns of the Ottoman Sultans after 1517
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Cairo: ‘Meeting Place of Comer and Goer’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Permissions
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The Mamluk Rulers of Egypt
- 2 Egypt Imagined and the Realities of the Voyage
- 3 The Maritime Port of Alexandria
- 4 Sailing Upstream to Cairo
- 5 Cairo: ‘Meeting Place of Comer and Goer’
- 6 Venetian Diplomacy and the Arrival of the Ottomans
- 7 Exploring the Pyramids and Mummy Fields
- 8 Pilgrims to the Monastery of St Catherine
- 9 Adventures with the Mecca Caravan
- 10 To the South
- Europeans in Egypt in the Reigns of the Mamluk Sultans up to 1517
- Europeans in Egypt in the Reigns of the Ottoman Sultans after 1517
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
While Syria had suffered from the onslaughts of the Mongols and the wars of the Crusades, Cairo had escaped almost unmolested. Peace had enabled her to become the fabled cultural city of the Arab world. Foreign visitors were uniformly astonished by the opulence that unfolded before them. Ibn Battuta (b. Tangiers 1304) surpassed himself with his mellifluous prose when he dictated his memoirs on his return to Fez to Muhammad Ibn Juzayy, the current secretary of the sultan:
I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour. The meeting place of comer and goer, the halting place of feeble and mighty, whose throngs surge as the waves of the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity.
Mamluk Cairo was the backdrop against which were played out the fictional stories from the Arabian Nights, those romantic imaginings that took the listeners by the hand and led them round the markets and houses, the high and low life of the streets, and all that touched on the texture of life among the people. The infinitely varied skyline of minarets and domes on view in the capital was remarkable to all European visitors, who hastened to compare Cairo's size with Milan, Venice, Paris, or whichever city was theirs:
Of the riches of Cairo it is unnecessary to write, for they cannot be enumerated on paper or described in speech. They consist of gold and silver, of cloth of gold and silk, cotton and linen embroidered wares, of gems, pearls and other precious stones, vases of gold, silver and bronze uncomparably decorated in the Saracen style, glass objects most beautifully ornamented commonly made in Damascus, balsam oil, honey, pepper, sugar and various spices, and innumerable jewels of all kinds.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Cairo had a population approximating 250,000, though the number could be exaggerated by visitors among the jostling crowds in the streets. But due to the high mortality caused by the bubonic and the (even more lethal) pneumonic plague, which erupted with depressing frequency every few years, this figure fluctuated widely.
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- How Many Miles to Babylon?Travels and Adventures to Egypt and Beyond, From 1300 to 1640, pp. 112 - 150Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2003