Des relations observées entre l’aristocratie militaire et la classe industrieuse, chez les peuples d

CHAP. 33: > Of the relations observed between the military aristocracy and the industrious class, among the peoples of the Caucasian species of northwest Africa. — Of the influence of these relations on the prosperity of the country and on the number of the population.

We see, in the preceding chapter, that the military aristocracy that succeeds the government of the Arabs is not composed, at any epoch, of individuals born in Egypt: this aristocracy, from its origin to its extinction, is recruited from among the barbarians of central Asia, or from among peoples no less barbarous from the Caucasus. In admitting into its midst children come from one or the other of these two countries, it gives to their intellectual and physical faculties only the development most proper to render their moral dispositions more terrible. To handle untamed horses with skill, to know how to execute or command military evolutions, to use the most terrible weapons with rare ability, to speak the language of the country with enough facility to intimate the orders of power, and to consider the infidels as a prey delivered to the believers, such are the talents or opinions required to attain the highest posts [190]. Having been born, and having received their first moral impressions, in regions where civilization has never penetrated, they can be considered as ferocious beasts that skillful masters train for combat. Their vices are not the product of the soil or the climate of Egypt; they are the result of their primitive barbarism, and pass from one to another by tradition [191].

We see the population placed on the soil of Egypt, divided into two great fractions: one, not numerous, but strongly organized, forms a military aristocracy; the other, very numerous, but devoid of all organization, forms the mass of the population and has no power. In such a position, the Turks arrive and come to take part in the profits of the exploitation: their intervention changes nothing in the primitive division; they are new masters who come to enter into a share with the old ones, until they find the means to exterminate them and thus remain exclusive possessors of the soil and of the people who cultivate it. The relations of the diverse fractions of the population being known, it remains to expound the action of some with regard to others, and the influence of this action whether on morals or on wealth.Foreigners who present themselves in Egypt can distinguish, at first glance, the men who belong to the military aristocracy from those who belong to the conquered population: the brilliance and prodigality of luxury contrast with the rags and nudity of misery, the excess of opulence of a few with the hideous destitution of the most numerous class. If commerce pours riches into a few families, they are buried or carefully disguised; the men who have acquired them make only clandestine use of them, for fear of exciting the cupidity of the power, and of being exposed to the extortions that the rulers have consecrated under the name of avanies; so that all the individuals who belong to the conquered race present more or less the same appearance [192].

But, although the men of the aristocratic class show themselves only in the most brilliant exteriors, although they are covered in the richest clothing and mounted on horses of great price, they are neither less coarse nor less brutal than the men of the lowest ranks. The finery of luxury is the envelope of the most complete barbarism, and if this barbarism appears more hideous and more ferocious still in the populace, it is because it is there laid bare, and the eyes are not deceived by the veneer of magnificence. If some arts are cultivated, they are so by foreigners. The two extremes of the population have more connection between them; the bey and the coarse man from the dregs of the people are equally ignorant, equally fanatical [193].

The Egyptians were once despoiled of their lands by a sacerdotal and military aristocracy. We do not know by whom they were possessed under the conquerors who succeeded one another from the Assyrians to the Arabs. It is probable that they changed masters with each change of domination.

The Arabs, to remain masters of the lands, thus had only to take the place of the last conquerors. Under their successors, we see that the lands are in the hands of three classes of persons. The first part, which is the most considerable, is in the hands of the beys and their slaves; it is possessed by the military aristocracy. The second part is possessed by the ulemas, or Muslim priests. The third part is possessed by individuals who belong to neither of these two classes [194]; but its products are absorbed by the tribute paid to the sultan. Thus, in the last period of the Mamluks’ domination, as in the time of the Pharaohs, all the lands are in the hands of the priests, the soldiers, and their common chief. However, they continue to be cultivated by the vanquished. We shall see further on what share of the products the masters attribute to themselves, and what share they leave to the cultivators.

A republic composed of twenty-four military officers, equally ignorant, ambitious, and fanatical, could not remain at peace, especially when it has in its midst the delegate of a power whose every effort tends to put it in a state of war and to destroy it. The dignity of chief and the advantages attached to it are, in effect, for them, causes of continual dissensions; each bey takes the side of the candidate he favors, and the entire country is transformed into a battlefield [195]. The Mamluks, to win the favors of the beys their masters, give themselves over to the same vices and the same crimes as the latter do to become chiefs of the aristocracy. These soldiers, devoured by ambition, lend themselves to every compliance and to the most shameful passions; intrigue, perfidy, treason, and assassination are their means; the one closest to power slaughters its possessor to take his place [196]; the party that succumbs in the wars is despoiled of its properties at the same time as its power [197].

The sultan’s delegate foments dissensions among the beys; he excites jealousy between them by the favors he distributes to some in his master’s name; and when a party strong enough to support him has formed among them, he has the opponents slaughtered by his slaves in full council. A sultan, for his part, counts on the fidelity of his delegate only insofar as he sees him disposed to work toward the destruction of the beys; it is enough for a pasha to be suspected by his master for him to be obliged to justify himself by the murder of some of them [198].

If such are the relations of the great among themselves, let one judge those that must exist between the members of this aristocracy and the mass of the population. The beys transmit to their children neither their properties nor their power; whether they follow by habit a law that was imposed on them by the Arabs their first masters, or whether the instinct of tyranny has taught them that their domination would be compromised by the degeneration of their race and the hereditary transmission of power, they prefer adoptive children, chosen from among their slaves, to the children to whom they themselves have given birth. Their children being excluded from their succession, it would be difficult for them to admit to succeeding their own fathers the children born in the inferior ranks: thus all succession is devolved to the government, that is to say, to the members of the aristocracy. A son can take possession of his father’s inheritance only after having bought it from the chiefs, and he is not always sure of obtaining it: the highest bidder or the individual who has the most credit obtains the investiture [199].

A child who has managed to buy his father’s immovable properties from the chiefs preserves them only under the harshest conditions; at every moment there is a contribution to pay, a damage to repair. Maintained by the charter of Sultan Selim in the power to levy arbitrary tributes, the cachefs and the sangiaks continue to commit unheard-of vexations. Often, the unfortunate agriculturalist, in the midst of the abundance that surrounds him, lacks what is necessary and sells the instruments of tillage to pay the impositions; multiplied extortions put him in the impossibility of cultivating the most fertile lands [200]. In the wars that take place between the members of the aristocracy, each of them hastens to demand the tribute from the cultivators on whose soil he finds himself; and if, after having collected it, he is vanquished, the cultivators are obliged to pay the new master. This fear of paying twice determines the peasants to revolt as soon as the country is threatened with some trouble, and to wait, to discharge their debt, until a decisive victory has made known which of the two competitors has the right to collect the tribute; but they are harshly punished for their revolt, if the one to whom they refused to pay it remains the victor [201].

The tributes are levied only by armed force; each great man goes to camp, with a troop of brigands who have become soldiers to avoid the punishment due to their crimes, near the villages of his domination; when, by fear or by violence, he has torn from the cultivators the fruits of their labors and exhausted their means of existence, he moves to another point of the country and commits the same exactions there. If the impossibility of satisfying his avidity pushes the peasants to revolt, the country presents disorders of another kind: the fields are abandoned or ravaged; the cultivators leave them to run to arms; the herds are carried off or massacred; all foodstuffs become the prey of enemies and brigands; the roads, closed by bands of thieves, refuse all manner of communication and relations; finally, desolation reigns on a soil that fertility disputes with barbarism [202].

Movable properties excite the avidity of the governing soldiery no less than immovable properties. Often, with no other motive than the avidity of a powerful man and the denunciation of an enemy, a man suspected of having money is cited before a member of the aristocracy; a sum is demanded of him; if he refuses it, he is thrown on his back, given two or three hundred blows of a stick on the soles of his feet, and sometimes he is beaten to death. A hundred spies are always ready to denounce any man suspected of being well-off; it is only by the outward appearance of poverty that he can escape the rapines of the power. The governing fraction, in a word, attributing to itself, by right of conquest, the exclusive right to all property, treats the governed fraction only as a passive instrument of its enjoyments.

“One speaks,” says Volney, “only of civil troubles, of public misery, of extortions of money, of bastinados and murders. No security for life and property. The blood of a man is shed like that of an ox [203].”

As there exists no rule that fixes the punishments to be applied to each offense, every individual charged with maintaining order determines himself, for each particular case, the penalty it pleases him to attach to it. In populous cities, such as Cairo, a police officer, followed by a multitude of executioners, patrols the streets day and night; he supervises the weights and measures, and the goods brought to market; he has suspect persons carried off, arrests thieves, prevents or represses seditions; if he surprises a merchant selling by false weight or false measure, he has him given five hundred blows of a stick on the spot, or even has his head cut off. This officer judges without examination and without appeal: at the first order, a wretch’s head falls into a leather sack, where it is received for fear of soiling the square. The pashas sometimes conduct the police themselves, and do not disdain to fill the functions of executioner. The terror inspired by these officers and the numerous executioners who accompany them is such that everyone hides or takes flight from the moment they are perceived: a single one is sometimes enough to carry dread among the people [204].

The administration of justice between private individuals is exercised in a less violent manner. The officers who render it are not under the dependence of the pashas; but, as their jurisdiction is founded on the same principles, it has the same inconveniences. In a bare, dilapidated apartment, open to everyone, the cadi sits on a mat or on a poor carpet; at his sides are scribes and domestics. The parties appear and state their reasons themselves; if they let themselves be carried away by the heat of the discussion, the cries of the scribes and the cadi’s stick re-establish order and silence. This judge finally pronounces his judgment, founded on the infallibility of the Koran, and if neither of the two parties is the object of a particular favor, they are put out the door with great blows of a stick. Justice attributes to itself a tenth of the value of the thing in dispute [205].

But, although the cadis are independent of the great men of the country, although they administer justice publicly, they are far from being impartial; they have the morals and the vices of the power by which they are elected.

“Daily experience confirms,” says Volney, “that there is no country where justice is more corrupt than in Egypt, Syria, and doubtless in the rest of Turkey. Venality is nowhere more bold, more impudent; one can bargain for one's lawsuit with the cadi, as one bargains for a commodity. In the crowd, there are examples of equity, of sagacity; but they are rare for the very reason that they are cited. Corruption is habitual, general; and how could it not be, when integrity can become onerous and improbity lucrative; when each cadi, arbiter in the last resort, fears neither review nor punishment; when, finally, this lack of clear and precise laws offers to the passions a thousand means of avoiding the shame of an evident injustice [206].”

Venality is not a vice particular to the men to whom the administration of justice is entrusted; it is a vice common to all the agents of the power, from the smallest to the most elevated; among them, it is a custom, a received usage; it is agreed that with money one can achieve the most difficult things; not much is even needed to reach one's goal [207].

In the time when the members of the aristocracy were independent of the Turkish government, they alone could consider themselves charged with watching over the interests of the country. The lack of transmission of their properties to their children, and the dissensions that arose between them, doubtless often made them neglect these interests; however, as their power lasted, in general, as long as their life, and as it is in the nature of man to flatter himself about his future, they took care not to let the source of their riches run dry through too great a negligence. But as soon as the authority of the sultan is recognized, as soon as the beys have engaged to pay him a tribute and have admitted the presence of a pasha, matters change face. The obligations relative to the conservation of general interests, those, for example, of providing for the maintenance of the canals and of preventing the invasions of the Bedouin Arabs, are considered as being the charge of the sultan. The pashas or the beys retain, for this object, a part of the tributes they must pay them; but, instead of applying them to the objects for which they retain them, they divert them to their own profit. Having learned, by experience, that their functions in the country will have but a short duration, the pashas hasten to profit from it, to make their fortune and to acquire the means of buying the favor of the sultan’s ministers; they draw from the country or the inhabitants all they can tear from them, but make no expense, either to watch over public security, or for the conservation of the works necessary for the prosperity of the country [208].

The fear of extortions and the absence of any authority that watches over the conservation of public properties produce the effects that one must naturally expect from them. No one dares to permit himself to build, to plant, or to have executed any kind of work that would announce that he has accumulated some savings. If some imprudent person is found who wishes to plant or build, he is promptly punished for it by avanies. The men of power say: This man has money; they have him come and ask him for it; if he denies it, he gets the bastinado; if he grants it, he is given it again to obtain more. If it happens that men bring some improvements to agriculture, they are obliged to renounce them almost immediately, because the contributions of which these improvements are the cause do more than absorb their products. Everyone is thus obliged to give to gold or silver the preference over all other wealth, because it is the easiest to hide. Houses and capital engaged in agriculture or in other branches of industry are left to fall into decay [209].

“They build as little as they can,” says Denon, speaking of the Egyptians; “they never repair anything: a wall threatens ruin, they prop it up; it collapses, that is a few less rooms in the house; they make do next to the rubble: the edifice finally falls, they abandon the soil, or, if they are obliged to clear the site, they carry away the rubble as little as they can; this is what has raised around almost all the cities of Egypt and particularly Cairo, not hillocks, but mountains at which the eye of the traveler is astonished, and of which he cannot at first account [210].”

However, as men cannot live deprived of dwellings, the Egyptian cultivators raise bad huts, either with sun-dried bricks, or with earth mixed with chopped straw. In the countryside, these huts generally have the shape of a beehive; they are composed of two rooms: one, on the ground floor, for the owner, his family, his hens and his chickens; the other, on the first floor, for his pigeons. In some villages, these huts, with the exception of the door, have no other opening than a hole to give passage to the smoke, and the inhabitants sleep on the ground like savages. There, covered with devouring insects, enveloped by smoke and suffocated by the heat, they are besieged by the diseases engendered by filth, dampness, and bad food [211].

Most of the inhabitants of the cities are no better housed than those of the countryside. The most populous and most flourishing cities have entirely perished under the domination of the Mamluks and the Turks. Alexandria, which excited such lively admiration among the Arabs, and which was still so brilliant in the fifteenth century, no longer presents, in a space of two leagues, anything but marble columns, debris of pilasters, capitals, obelisks, and mountains of ruins piled one on top of another [212]. Kous, so opulent in the time of the Arabs, has likewise perished under the domination of the Mamluks and the Turks: there remain, on the place where it existed, only a few miserable hovels [213]. Thebes, Canopus, Latopolis and other less famous cities, offer no more than ruins around which a small number of men, fallen back into the savage state, have raised a few earthen huts [214]. The remains of the monuments that the barbarians could not destroy have become the refuges for their herds, and the marble columns of the palaces have been sawn, and transformed into millstones [215].As time destroys the houses of the towns that are not yet deserted, the inhabitants replace them with constructions so frail that, if they were not spared by the climate, they would be destroyed as soon as they were formed; they are, as in the villages, huts of earth or sun-dried bricks [216]. As no house is repaired, one walks in the streets only through rubble; even the cities that from afar have a certain air of grandeur, like Damietta, present up close the aspect of destruction and misery. Seeing this collection of holes, large stones, pestilential canals, and ruined houses, one would believe, says a traveler, that the city has just endured a long siege followed by a murderous assault [217]. The destruction of dwellings being sometimes even more rapid than that of the population, the people crowd into the smallest possible space: in Cairo, according to Savary, two hundred individuals occupy less space than thirty in Paris [218].

If the fear of appearing rich leads to the destruction of private properties, the withholding of contributions and the instability in employments lead to the ruin of public properties. All the public or religious edifices found in Egypt—kans, fountains, mosques—offer only ruins, and are fit only to serve as a refuge for jackals. The most admirable monuments of the piety of the caliphs and the exquisite taste of the Arab architects are threatened with imminent destruction; they are crumbling like the enchanted palaces of the beys, and follow a third of the city of Cairo into the dust [219]. The ruined fountains water abandoned gardens, and transform them into infectious and impassable swamps [220]. Finally, the fortresses and castles that belong to the sultans present only ruins throughout the extent of the Turkish empire [221].

The men who are charged with the police have no care for either the cleanliness or the salubrity of the cities. The narrow, winding streets are neither paved, nor swept, nor watered, and are almost always encumbered with rubble, filth, and animal carcasses. A multitude of stray dogs—thin, emaciated, and gnawed by a mange that often degenerates into a kind of leprosy—form an independent republic there, quartered by families and by districts. These hideous animals, which have no masters and whose multiplication is checked only by the lack of subsistence, feed on carrion, and dispute it with disgusting vultures and a crowd of jackals hidden by the hundreds in the gardens and among the rubble and tombs. It is to the excessive multiplication of these filthy animals that the Egyptians owe being rid of the carcasses of donkeys and camels incessantly thrown into the interior or the environs of their cities [222]. In the capital, all the filth flows into a canal that is opened once a year, during the greatest heat, to be cleaned, and which infects the air with the putrid matter it contains [223].

In the time when Egypt was still subject only to the yoke of the Arabs, artificial lakes and numerous canals brought coolness to the cities, while at the same time fertilizing the countryside; but, under the domination of the Mamluks and the Turks, these works have almost entirely perished; the canals have closed up, the lakes have been transformed into swamps or have dried up, and lands, once fertile and flourishing, have changed into sandy deserts where the saddened traveler finds neither shrubs, nor plants, nor greenery [224]. As industry at the same time ceased to put obstacles in the way of the encroachments of the Desert, the sands have advanced upon the cultivated lands and upon the villages.

“The mouth of the Nile valley (opposite Beni Suef),” says Denon, “offers only a sad plain, of which a narrow strip on the riverbank is alone cultivated: beyond this strip, one still perceives some remains of villages devoured by the sand; they offer the afflicting spectacle of a daily devastation produced by the continual encroachment of the Desert on the inundated soil. Nothing is as sad as to walk over these villages, to tread their roofs underfoot, to encounter the tops of their minarets, to think that here were cultivated fields, that here grew trees, that here again lived men, and that everything has disappeared [225].”

One traveler has estimated at a third of the territory of Egypt the part converted into desert by the destruction of the lakes and canals, or by the invasion of the sands [226]; but it is difficult to determine what was, in this country, the extent of the cultivated land, when one sees that travelers have found, even in the very heart of the Desert, valleys and petrified woods [227]. Is this not proof that forests and rivers once existed there? And must this circumstance not authorize us to believe that the population extended further than has been commonly believed [228]?

A part of the lands that are still susceptible to cultivation often remain unproductive, either because the means to sow them have been taken from the farmers, or because the necessity of paying taxes has obliged them to sell their instruments of tillage, or finally because the state of trouble and oppression in which they habitually live has made them fear seeing their harvests destroyed or carried off. One thus encounters, in the vicinity of the villages, extensive and fertile lands that wait in vain for the hand of the farmer to spread seed there: in the districts open to the Arabs, such as the environs of the Coptic monastery, the land always remains fallow, or the farmer sows with weapons in hand [229].

Finally, the lands that are cultivated are so only in a coarse manner.

“The art of cultivation,” says Volney, “is in a deplorable state: for lack of affluence, the farmer lacks instruments, or has only bad ones; the plow is often only a tree branch cut below a fork and guided without wheels. They plow with donkeys, cows, and rarely with oxen; they announce too much affluence; thus, the meat of this animal is very rare in Syria and in Egypt [230].”

It is difficult to determine in a very exact manner what has been the decrease of the population, from the epoch at which Egypt found itself in the most flourishing state, to the time in which we live. In the oriental countries, no register of deaths or births is kept, and it is not easy for travelers to penetrate into the interior of families. If one wishes to inquire, among these peoples, about the population of the cities, they always speak of some hundreds of thousands; but the estimates they give rest on no basis and are in general greatly exaggerated [231]; on the other hand, the estimates of historians, on the population of ancient Egypt, offer much uncertainty and do not appear exempt from exaggeration. Even if one were to admit that there existed twenty thousand cities in the time of the pharaohs, as Pliny and Herodotus claim, one would have only a very uncertain piece of data, since it would remain to determine what was the population of each of these cities [232].

However, although it is impossible for us to know in an exact manner what the decrease of the population has been, it is easy to see that the destruction has been immense: several of the most populous cities have become deserted; all the inhabitants have perished; ancient Alexandria contained about three hundred thousand free persons and more than double that in slaves; the new one is but a small town whose population does not exceed five to six thousand individuals [233]; Faoué, which, in the fifteenth century, was the most populous city after Cairo, contained, in the last century, only a few poor inhabitants [234]; the population of Kous, which, at the same epoch, was hardly less considerable, consisted, two centuries later, of only ten miserable fishermen. I do not speak of the numerous population of Thebes replaced by a small number of savages who live in the caves of the rocks like ferocious beasts, nor of that of so many other cities of which only a few vestiges remain, or whose location scholars can barely determine [235]: most of these cities had been destroyed long before Egypt was invaded by the Arabs [236].

Savary, judging by the ruins that still cover the soil of Egypt, and considering the reports of historians to be exaggerated, thought that the population of the cities was three times more numerous in antiquity than it was in his time [237]. At the epoch when he was writing (in 1777, 1778, and 1779), he estimated it at four million [238]; and yet, this latter estimate appears to exceed the truth by a great deal, since Félix Mengin estimates the Egyptian population, in 1823, at only 2,514,400 inhabitants [239]. Thus, the population of Egypt has been reduced, under the military domination that succeeded the power of the Arabs, to roughly a third of what it was in the time of the Romans, when it furnished subsistence to Italy and the neighboring provinces [240].