Selim I Conquers Egypt for the Ottoman Empire
The Mamluk Sultanate falls at Ridaniya and Egypt becomes an Ottoman province for the next four centuries
Quick facts
- Sultan
- Selim I (r. 1512-1520)
- Decisive battle
- Ridaniya, 22 January 1517
- Dynasty ended
- Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517)
- Caliphate claim
- No contemporary evidence Selim assumed the title in 1517
What happened
Sultan Selim I, having already defeated the Safavid Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in 1514, turned south against the Mamluk Sultanate, the slave-soldier dynasty that had ruled Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz since 1250. Ottoman forces defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq in August 1516 and again at Ridaniya near Cairo on 22 January 1517, bringing Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman control. Selim took custody of the last Abbasid caliph living in Cairo as a Mamluk figurehead and brought him to Constantinople. A later tradition claimed the caliph formally transferred his title to Selim in a ceremony, but a review of Selim's own contemporary letters, including his correspondence announcing the conquest to his son, finds no mention of any such transfer.
Why it matters
The conquest ended two and a half centuries of Mamluk rule and folded Egypt into the Ottoman Empire for the next four hundred years, governed from Constantinople rather than Cairo for the first time since the Fatimids. Egypt became one of the Ottoman Empire's wealthiest provinces, producing more tax revenue than nearly any other Ottoman territory, and remained under Ottoman sovereignty, at times only nominal, until the twentieth century.
How we know
The Ottoman-Mamluk war and the battle of Ridaniya are documented by the World History Encyclopedia's overview of the Ottoman Empire, and the absence of any contemporary evidence for a formal transfer of the caliphate is established by historian Hakan Karateke's review of Selim's own surviving correspondence.
Sources
- Hakan T. Karateke, Harvard University. Legitimizing the Ottoman Sultanate: A Framework for Historical Analysis · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)lucian.uchicago.edu · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match).
- World History Encyclopedia. Ottoman Empire · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Ottoman Empire → · Selim's conquest of Egypt was part of a wider Ottoman campaign against the Safavids and Mamluks; see the Ottoman Empire timeline for the full sweep of Selim's reign.