Middle East - Anthony Ham [47]
1192 Saladin signs a peace treaty with his long-time enemy, Richard the Lionheart. The Crusaders get the coast, the Muslims get the interior and Saladin dies three months later.
1250 The Mamluks, a military empire forged from the ranks of the Muslim armies who fought the Crusaders, seize power for themselves and begin a 300-year rule over Egypt, Syria and Palestine.
1258 Baghdad is sacked by the Mongol hordes sweeping down out of Central Asia, destroying the city and officially ending the Abbasid Cailphate. In Anatolia, Osman (founder of the Ottomans) is born.
1291 With energy drained from the Crusader cause, the Mamluks drive the last Crusaders from their coastal fortress of Acre (now Akko in Israel) and from the Middle East, formally ending one of the region’s bloodiest chapters.
1453 After encircling the city during his Eastern European conquests, Sultan Mehmet II of the Ottoman Empire captures Constantinople, which had never before been in Muslim hands.
1492 Muslim Al-Andalus falls to the Christian armies of the Spanish Reconquista, ending seven centuries of enlightened but increasingly divided rule. The Jews will soon also be expelled and refugees begin arriving across the Middle East.
1520–66 Süleyman the Magnificent rules over the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, expanding the boundaries of the empire down into Arabia (including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), Persia and North Africa.
1571 Five years after the death of Süleyman the Magnificent, Spain and Venice defeat the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in the Aegean. Ottoman power has peaked and will never be the same again.
1683 The Ottoman armies march on Vienna, but their defeat marks the end of Ottoman expansion and furthers the centuries-long period of Ottoman decline.
1760s The Wahhabi movement in central Arabia calls for a return to Islam’s roots and denounces the Ottoman rulers. Wahhabi Islam still prevails in Saudi Arabia and an extremist interpretation of the Wahhabi doctrine forms the basis for al-Qaeda thought.
1798 Napoleon invades Egypt, ushering in the period of colonial rivalry between France and Britain (who force the French out in 1801) that would ultimately redraw the map of the Middle East.
1839 Mohammed Ali of Egypt, an Albanian Ottoman soldier, establishes de facto control over declining Ottoman Empire from his base in Egypt. The dynasty he founded would rule Egypt until 1952.
1860 The massacre of Christians by the Druze in Lebanon’s mountains prompts the French to send troops to restore order. The Ottomans remain nominal sovereigns, but the French never really leave.
1869 Ismail, the grandson of Mohammed Ali and ruler of Egypt, formally opens the landmark engineering feat that is the Suez Canal. Although Egypt is supposedly independent, Britain is heavily involved in Egyptian affairs.
1882 Weary of the Egyptian government’s alleged financial ineptitude, the British formalise their control over the country, making it their first full-blown colonial possession in the Middle East.
1896 Theodor Herzl publishes Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), in which he makes a call for a Jewish state in Palestine. This event is often described as the moment when Zionism was born.
1897 Herzl helps found the World Zionist Organization. He writes after the World Zionist Congress in Basel: ‘At Basel I founded the Jewish State. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.’
1914 WWI breaks out. The Ottomans side with Germany, while the Allies persuade the Grand Sherif of Mecca to support them in return for promises of post-war independence for the Arabs.
1915 In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s Armenian population is driven from the country. More than a million Armenians are killed in what Armenians claim was a genocide. Turkey denies the charge.
1916 Despite the promises Britain had made to the Arabs, the French and British conclude the secret Sykes-Picot