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Originally Posted by Ibrahiim al Balooshi
The Mamluks were, at one distinct point in history, the greatest body of fighting men in the world and the quintessence of the mounted warrior............... the Ottoman Empire whose new slave soldiers, the Janissaries, would be the Mamluks' final nemesis.
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Actually I believe it was not the Janissaries that finally defeated the Mamluks, it was Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman Albanian general who defeated the Egyptian Mamluks in the early 1800s. After the withdrawal of the French occupiers of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha devised a plan to murder the whole remaining lot of them by luring Mamluk leaders to a celebration and ambushing them, the rest were eventually hunted down and killed, supposedly very few got away. Muhammad Ali Pasha declared himself the "khedive" of Egypt and interesting enough it was Europeans who controlled Egypt until the early 1900s.