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Reviews of Books
investigates the circumstances in the West affecting
the response to requests as well as the situations in the
East occasioning the appeals.
Some general characteristics emerge. Appeals were
commonly discussed in assemblies in the East before
the dispatch of envoys. Those chosen to head missions
were usually leading clerics or members of the military
orders; only rarely were embassies led by secular
nobles. In the period from the 1160s to the 1180s, the
status of those selected tended to rise as the need for
help became more urgent. The mission of 1184-1185
thus comprised the patriarch of Jerusalem and the
masters of the Temple and Hospital. Appeals also
became more sophisticated in form, as illustrated by
the offer of the keys of Jerusalem to Louis VII in 1169,
which is seen to parallel an offer made to Charlemagne
in 800 and to have been a means of persuading the
French king to assume the role of protector.
Phillips shows that requests for help occurred at
more irregular intervals than Smail suggested. His
general conclusions are, however, not especially remarkable. The merit of this book lies chiefly in detailed and closely argued discussions that add to our
knowledge and understanding of particular events and
incidents. A cogent argument, for example, is advanced for seeing Edessa as the original objective of
the armies of the Second Crusade, and Phillips makes
a convincing case for questioning whether Byzantium
was the target of the expedition proposed in 1150.
Because of the lack of evidence, however, Phillips's
explanations are in some instances merely hypothetical. This is true of some of the factors that, he suggests,
occasioned the mission to find a husband for Amalric's
daughter Sibylla in 1169, and also of the reasons he
advances to explain why the proposed marriage to
Stephen of Sancerre did not take place. Some of
Phillips's interpretations of evidence are questionable.
He argues that the penance imposed in May 1172 on
the English King Henry II-whose crusading intentions are taken more seriously by Phillips than by some
other historians-obliged him to take the cross by
Christmas for a period of three years and to set out for
the Holy Land the following Easter. The text to which
Phillips refers, however, appears to state that Henry
was to take the cross within three years of the following Christmas and to set out by the summer (not
Easter) following his assumption of the cross. But the
author does provide a very useful and thoughtful
investigation of appeals and responses to them.
This book offers both more and less than its title
suggests. Relations with the Byzantine Empire are
discussed, especially from the 1150s onwards, when the
crusader states, lacking adequate help from the West,
turned to the Greeks for aid, seeking both marriages
and military assistance. But relations with the West
were not limited to the intermittent missions dispatched from the Holy Land and Western responses to
these. Through their representatives in the West, the
military orders, for example, were constantly seeking
financial support for themselves, utilizing papal privi-
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leges such as that offering a remission of penance to all
who made an annual benefaction to the Hospital or
Temple; and their convents in the West served as
recruiting centers. Much of the Western response to
the needs of the Holy Land took the form of providing
donations of property and supplying postulants to the
orders. A portion of the orders' revenues in the West
was to be sent out to the East each year, and most
recruits made their profession in the West. Phillips
gives this significant aspect of relations no more than a
passing mention.
A. J. FOREY
EMERITUS
University of Durham
JANE HATHAWAY. The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdiiglis. (Cambridge
Studies in Islamic Civilization.) New York: Cambridge
University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 198. $49.95.
This book figures centrally in a new trend in the
historiography of Egypt during the Ottoman period,
namely, its reintegration into an Ottoman and Mediterranean context. In her account of elite politics in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jane Hathaway
takes issue with the standard narrative that views the
powerful Qazdagli household, the object of her study,
less as an "Ottoman" phenomenon than as a revival of
Mamluk-style politics of the pre-Ottoman period. The
political life of the Mamluk regime, which ruled Egypt
and greater Syria from 1250 to the Ottoman conquest
(1517), centered on an institutionalized competition
among powerful households whose rank and file were
military slaves ("mamluks") recruited principally from
the Caucasus. Arguing against the "neo-mamlukist"
view, Hathaway situates the evolution of the Qazdagli
household in "an empire-wide military and administrative culture based on households" (p. 1).
As the introduction points out, the Qazdagli household is typically known either through the powerful
figure of its best-known head, Ali Bey, who challenged
Ottoman overlordship in the 1760s, or as a party of
Mamluks of Georgian origin encountered a generation
later by Napoleon Bonaparte. These Qazdaglis monopolized the beylicate, the group of grandee offices
that governed the sub-provinces of Egypt, controlling
the rural revenues of this "grainbasket" of the empire.
Historians have portrayed the Qazdaglis' late eighteenth-century predominance as the resurfacing or
reinvention in a time of Ottoman weakness of preOttoman models in tension with Ottoman practices.
Hathaway challenges this view by focusing on the
household's evolution from 1650 to 1750 and arguing
that its fortunes depended on multiple and shifting
strategies and alliances that defy such pigeon holing.
This textured reading of a neglected century of Ottoman Egyptian history is largely the result of the
author's extensive use of Ottoman central archives
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Middle East and Northern Africa
along with the standard Arabic chronicles, as well as
her use of less commonly read chronicles.
Hathaway undermines the notion of a persistent
Mamluk household culture by focusing on the formative processes characteristic of households in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cairo, in particular
their location and personnel. The Qazdagli household
(at the forefront of developments) originated among
the middle ranks of barracks officers rather than
around a leading grandee. The regiment-based household was thus a locus of political clout without necessarily taking shape as "a residence-based conglomerate." In addition, Hathaway argues, the Qazdagli
household did not conform to the Mamluk paradigm
of a household of slave recruits; rather, it consisted of
free-born recruits and adherents as well as military
slaves. In fact, the prevailing usage in this period-in
goverment documents and chronicles alike-was to
lump all household members together under the general rubric of "client" (tubi "),
The story of the Qazdagli rise is in large part the
story of the household's strategies for maximizing its
control of the revenues of this rich province. Its rising
fortunes were tied in large part to the brisk trade in
coffee as well as to the control of Cairo's markets. The
appearance of Caribbean coffee in the mid-eighteenth
century and the subsequent collapse of the local coffee
market accelerated Qazdagli efforts to gain control of
the beylicate, with its claim on agricultural revenues.
But what is significant, claims Hathaway, is that these
efforts began much earlier in the century than is
generally assumed, and that the Qazdaglis did not
abandon earlier strategies in their move to dominate
the beylicate but rather aimed to consolidate control of
a variety of income bases.
The study of the household-now recognized as a
quintessential feature of Middle Eastern culture and
history-is not new. This book is an important contribution, however, particularly as it advances our appreciation of the household as a flexible set of relationships and practices. Chapters on women as household
actors and on the office of the chief black eunuch as
key to the nexus between Egypt and the capital explore
some of these practices. The book demonstrates that,
just as Istanbul was frequently able to divert the fluid
politics of households to its own advantage, so local
households, through the long reach of their connections, exploited such basic components of empire as
the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and the sizeable
revenue it generated.
But the fact remains that the politics of households
was more salient in Egypt than in other provinces of
the empire. Although Hathaway persuasively argues
against a parochial historiography of Ottoman Egypt,
the absence of a comparative dimension leaves unanswered the question of whether the tenacious culture
of household politics in Egypt might not be tied to the
unique administrative demands of the province, dominated as it was by a Nile-based economy and the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
strategic importance of Cairo as the second city of the
empire.
LESLIE PEIRCE
University of California,
Berkeley
MICHAEL J. REIMER. Colonial Bridgehead: Government
and Society in Alexandria, 1807-1882. (State, Culture,
and Society in Arab North Africa.) Boulder, Colo.:
Westview of HarperCollins. 1997. Pp. xv, 251. $69.00.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Alexandria
harbored a small (estimated at 15,000), heterogeneous
population no larger than that of the Nile ports of
Rosetta or Damietta, but by the end of that century, it
had become Egypt's second city: the nation's link to
the international economy, home to a tumultuous
array of Easterners and Europeans, and seat of the
"summer capital" of a new dynasty. Michael J. Reimer
analyzes this transformation in the period between
1807, when the new Egyptian governor, Muhammad
'Ali Pasha first entered the city, and the British
occupation of 1882.
Part one describes Alexandria's disadvantageous
physical setting and its decline in the last years of
Mamluk-Ottoman rule. In part two, Reimer outlines
the city's rapid expansion under Muhammad 'Ali, who
broke the power of the surrounding Arab tribes and
the tyrannical Mamluk-Ottoman elite, bringing security to its inhabitants. His construction of the Mahmudiyya Canal linking Alexandria to the Nile, new
dikes, the arsenal and dockyard, and coastal fortifications attracted thousands of laborers, secured the city's
water supply, and helped further to commercialize
Egyptian agriculture, for which Alexandria was the
port of exchange. This section also explores the emergence of new administrative agencies that dealt with
such matters as public health, construction, traffic, and
crime in the expanding port.
In part three, Reimer examines the continued rapid
population growth (both from internal and international migration), the spatial patterns of residence and
employment, and the social relations among the various native and foreign communities after the death of
Muhammad 'Ali in 1849. The significantly larger numbers of Europeans, protected from Egyptian law and
Ottoman regulations by the capitulatory treaties of
their respective nations of origin, were particularly
troublesome as they became more deeply involved in
the affairs of the city.
Reimer uses the concept of a "colonial city" to
analyze Alexandria's expansion, assuming that the
sizable European population and its multifaceted involvement in the city's affairs did much to influence
the course of its development. It was through this
expanding port that Egypt's economy was linked to
Europe's; Alexandria's quarrelsome foreign communities helped to spark Egyptian nationalism and provoke
the British occupation of 1882. But Reimer also high-
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