1517–1801: (Ottoman Egypt — Mameluke Province Turned Autonomous Power Base, the Advance into the Red Sea and Nubia, Mameluke Beys Regaining Prominence, Pasha…

1517–1801: (Ottoman Egypt — Mameluke Province Turned Autonomous Power Base, the Advance into the Red Sea and Nubia, Mameluke Beys Regaining Prominence, Pashas Establishing Independent Dynasties, and Napoleon’s Invasion of 1798 Signaling the Beginning of Egypt’s Modern History and Anglo-French Rivalry): The Ottoman conquest of Mameluke Egypt in 1517 rendered the territory a province within a western Asian empire. During the sixteenth century, Egypt was used as a base to push south into Nubia and into the Red Sea — the Ottoman advance was partly a response to Portuguese incursions into the Indian Ocean, and the Ottomans took control of Massawa on the Eritrean coast. But Egypt achieved considerable autonomy: the Mameluke aristocracy gradually regained prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the powerful noble families taking the title of bey, while the viceroys — initially Turks appointed by Istanbul — also established independent dynasties. By the end of the eighteenth century, Egypt was an Ottoman province largely in name only. The event signaling the beginning of Egypt’s modern history was Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, repelled in 1801 by an Ottoman-British alliance — marking the beginning of a growing Anglo-French rivalry over Egypt that would dominate the territory’s later nineteenth-century history.