On 24 August 1516, on the meadow of Dabiq north of Aleppo, the Ottoman army of Sultan Selim I met the Mamluk army of Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, ruler of Egypt and Syria. The Mamluk horsemen charged first and drove back the Ottoman wings, but Ottoman firearms and guns stopped them. The governor of Damascus fell, the governor of Aleppo left the field, and by afternoon the Mamluk army was in flight and the old sultan was dead. Within weeks Syria was in Ottoman hands, and in January 1517 Selim's victory at Ridaniya, outside Cairo, brought Egypt under Ottoman rule as well.
Battle of Marj Dabiq
24 August 1516 · 510 years ago
Meet us at Dabiq
After beating the Safavids of Persia at Chaldiran in 1514, Selim turned on the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria. According to Feridun Emecen, writing in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, and Seyyid Muhammed es-Seyyid, Qansuh al-Ghawri expected the winner of the Ottoman-Safavid war to turn on him next, sought an alliance with Shah Ismail and marched north; he entered Aleppo on 11 July 1516.1
The Cairo chronicler Ibn Iyas records that the Mamluk envoy, Moghul Bey, came back stripped of his horses, baggage and clothing, with Selim's message: “Tell your master that he can meet us on Merj Dābeḳ”.2
Cavalry against guns
The armies met on the morning of Sunday 24 August 1516, 25 Rajab 922 in the Islamic calendar; Hammer and Muir also date the battle to 24 August. Emecen thinks the Ottoman army reached only about 80,000, although some sources give about 120,000, and puts the Mamluk army at 70,000 to 80,000. Gary Rashba, in Military History, writes that Ottoman sources estimated the Mamluk force at 20,000 to 30,000, and that the Ottoman army was said to number anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000. Emecen describes about 300 gun carriages chained together in front of the janissaries at the Ottoman center.3
Sibay, governor of Damascus, held the Mamluk right and Khayr Bey, governor of Aleppo, the left. The Mamluks attacked first and drove back the Ottoman wings. Ibn Iyas writes that they captured “seven standards, the guns on the carriages, and the musketeers”. In Emecen's account the Ottomans reinforced the wings from the center and the musketeers stopped the charge.4
Ibn Iyas, the Austrian historian Joseph von Hammer, Emecen and Rashba all describe a split in the Mamluk army: the older qaranisa mamluks fought while the sultan's own recruits, the julban, held back. Ibn Iyas writes that the julban “might have been blocks of wood for all the stir they made”. Sibay was killed and his wing gave way; then Khayr Bey's left wing broke, and the Ottoman center advanced on the sultan's own troops. Ibn Iyas writes that the battle lasted “from sunrise till the afternoon”, and Emecen that it went on until the afternoon prayer; Hammer and Seyyid write that it did not last long.5
Treason or defeat?
Ibn Iyas, who gives his account of the battle “as received by us”, says that Khayr Bey “was said to be secretly in league with Ibn ‘Othmān against al-Ghūrī, a report which was confirmed later”, that he was the first to flee and that he “proclaimed defeat”. After the battle, Ibn Iyas adds, Selim gave him a robe of honor and called him “Khāin Bey (traitor) because he betrayed his own Sulṭān”. Rashba and Sir William Muir also tell the story of treason.6
Seyyid calls Khayr Bey a spy for Selim in his article on the sultan, but in his article on Khayr Bey, citing Ibn Iyas, he gives only the withdrawal: when Sibay died and his men scattered, Khayr Bey left the field and the left wing collapsed. Emecen rejects the claim that Khayr Bey and Janbirdi al-Ghazali broke the army by betraying it and announcing the sultan's death. According to the sources of the time, he writes, Yunus Pasha caught Khayr Bey as he fled and brought him before Selim, who later sent him and Janbirdi back to learn the state of the scattered Mamluks, so “these developments took place after the end of the battle” (our translation). Khayr Bey later became the Ottoman governor of Egypt.7
As if the earth had swallowed him
Ibn Iyas writes that al-Ghawri, standing under his flag with a few mamluks, called out: “Oh, sirs, now is the time to quit yourselves like men, this is the time to show your valour”. When an emir urged him to save himself, “a kind of paralysis fell upon him, which affected one side, and caused his jaw to drop”; he drank a little water from a golden cup, turned his horse, “fell off his horse, stood for a moment, and died from the shock of his defeat”.8
His body, Ibn Iyas writes, “was not found amongst the dead, nor was it ever known what became of it; it was as if the earth had swallowed it up there and then”. Seyyid writes that, according to one account, he fell from his horse and his body was not found, and Rashba too that it was never found. According to Emecen, an inquiry after the battle established that he had suddenly fallen ill while fleeing, fallen from his horse and died.9
Hammer, citing Ottoman chroniclers such as Saadeddin, writes that a chavush sent to view the body cut off its head and laid it at Selim's feet. Muir writes that the sultan's head “was carried to the Conqueror”, while noting that accounts vary. Ibn Iyas and Seyyid put al-Ghawri's age at about 78; Hammer calls him eighty, after Venetian reports, and lists other figures of 70, 76 and 86.10
The end of the Mamluk sultanate
Ibn Iyas writes that “the killed on both sides were innumerable” and, citing some authorities, that Selim thought of retreat or surrender because over 10,000 of his men had been killed; Hammer writes that barely a thousand of the qaranisa fell on the field. Emecen records that about 2,000 Mamluk soldiers were executed after the battle.11
Selim entered Aleppo without a fight, and Rashba writes that within weeks the Ottomans occupied all of Syria and Palestine. In Cairo Tumanbay became sultan. He refused to submit, and in January 1517 Selim defeated him at Ridaniya outside Cairo. Rashba writes that the Mamluk sultanate then came to an end and Egypt became an Ottoman satellite, and Emecen calls Marj Dabiq the first important step in its disappearance.12
Selim's life and campaigns are told in our biography of Selim I, and his victory over the Safavids in our article on the Battle of Chaldiran.
Battle of Málaga, 1704: the great sea fight after Gibraltar
24 August 1704 · 322 years ago
Off Vélez-Málaga in southern Spain, an Anglo-Dutch fleet under George Rooke fought a Franco-Spanish fleet weeks after the allied capture of Gibraltar, in the War of the Spanish Succession. The hard fight brought no clear winner on the day, and both fleets later drew apart.
Read the full story of Battle of Málaga, 1704: the great sea fight after Gibraltar ›Also on this day
1814: at Bladensburg, Maryland, British troops under Major General Robert Ross defeated the American army of Brigadier General Winder and that night entered the capital. Ross put the American army at eight or nine thousand men with three or four hundred cavalry. Winder wrote that he brought about five thousand men to Bladensburg, and Niles' Weekly Register that the force really opposing the British did not exceed 1,500 and the British force, seamen included, probably did not exceed 6,000. Winder wrote that the action began about 1 p.m. and continued about an hour, and Gleig, an officer in the expedition, that it lasted till four.13
Gleig writes that apart from Commodore Barney's sailors “no troops could behave worse than they did”. Barney reported that his guns beat back three British advances before, as he wrote, “I received a severe wound in my thigh”, and Ross that Barney was wounded and taken prisoner. The return sent with Ross's dispatch gives totals of 1 captain, 2 lieutenants, 5 serjeants and 56 rank and file killed, and 2 lieutenant colonels, 1 major, 1 captain, 14 lieutenants, 2 ensigns, 10 serjeants and 155 rank and file wounded; Gleig puts the loss at upwards of five hundred killed and wounded. The return and Gleig list Colonel William Thornton, who led the attack, as severely wounded; the Register reported him killed.14
In Washington, Ross reported, the Capitol, the President's palace and other public buildings were “set fire to and consumed”; the National Intelligencer, reprinted in the Register, also wrote that the British destroyed the interior of the Capitol, the President's house and the public offices. The Intelligencer wrote that the navy yard was burnt by order of American officers, the Register that it was destroyed “by our own people”, and the return of captured ordnance printed with Ross's dispatch that it had been “set on fire by the enemy before they retired”; Ross's own list of buildings set on fire includes the dock-yard, and Gleig counts it in the British destruction.15
