T
H
E
ARABIAN HORSE IN H I S TO RY
Tajar T H E
Swift by Linda White
Napoleon Bonaparte, atop an Arabian of his own, pictured in a mural at Versailles Palace, France. Photo courtesy of JosĂŠ V. Resino
318
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
T
H
E
ARABIAN HORSE IN H I S TO RY
Tajar T H E
Swift by Linda White
E
verywhere we look, we see that the Arabian
horse, mankind’s strongest ally, also has been a constant victim of man’s treachery and warlike tendencies. In the desert-bred stallion Tajar’s journey alone, we find all the elements of good and evil. Human slavery has been another evil constant, but over and over again man’s obsession with domination and subjugation has backfired in his face. Tajar’s story tells such a tale. Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
319
n the 13th century—1285 to be exact—a Turk named Osman, or Othman, in Arabic, set out on a mission. In Othman’s mind his ghaza (armed raid) was also going to be a jihad (holy war). For this fierce nomad and his men, riding out to war was an everyday activity, and to Othman and his warriors’ way of thinking, the enfeebled Byzantine Empire to the west, crippled by a series of four Christian Crusades, provided an irresistible target. Ardent Muslims, the Ottoman Turks, as Othman’s followers came to be called, saw themselves as ghazi, an Arabic word for warrior, but with fervent religious undertones. The Ottoman horsemen lacked the armaments and equipment to overpower fortified Byzantine towns. Instead, they plundered the surrounding countryside, effectively demoralizing their victims into submission. Four years after Othman’s death in 1326, Murad I, of the fledgling Ottoman Empire, founded the first Ottoman standing army. It was initially formed of non-Muslims, especially Christian youths, who were war captives and slaves. In later centuries Albanian, Serbian and Bulgarian mercenaries were preferred because of their higher morale. They were expected to remain celibate and were encouraged to convert to Islam. Most did. For all practical purposes, they belonged to the sultan. After each skirmish, the surviving regiment members inherited the property of their dead. In 1517 Egypt became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but in name only. Perennially difficult to control, Egypt may have “belonged” to the Turks, but it was, in fact, under mameluke rule. Mameluke was the name given to slaves, not unlike the original Ottoman army, whom Egyptian beys, or leaders, had brought back from the Balkans and the Caucasus. This arrangement made the Turks and European leaders very uneasy. When Egypt’s rulers formed the mamelukes into a standing army, they ushered in a predictable bloodbath. The mamelukes raised one of their own to supreme power and allied themselves with the Ottoman Turks. Not surprisingly, the Egyptian slaves’ warlike descendants grew into a wellmounted cavalry, commanded by the formidable Murad Bey, a mameluke chieftain and a breeder of the Arabian horses so essential to his troops.
IN MARCH 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, one of history’s most grasping, ambitious leaders, proposed a military expedition to Egypt. His shameless aggression, ostensibly to protect French trade interests, was designed to undermine Britain’s trade routes to India. Desperate to oppose his British foes, and to promote his own reputation, Bonaparte sailed from Toulon in 1798. In June, Bonaparte’s forces grabbed Malta from the Knights of Saint John, managing to elude his nemesis, Britain’s Royal Navy, which was in hot pursuit.
320
The first of July, despite strong winds and high seas, French forces disembarked in Egypt’s Bay of Marabout, east of Alexandria. Napoleon did not waste a moment, and the campaign began brilliantly. Following an all-night march, the French attacked the fortified city of Alexandria at dawn the next day. By noon, the city had fallen. Bonaparte’s forces were greatly outnumbered by Murad Bey’s cavalry (four to one), but Bonaparte, with his superior arms, came out the victor. “The French are not making war on suzerain Turkey or on the Egyptians,” he announced piously in the Egyptians’ language, as documented in Ben Weider’s Life of Napoleon. “We come only to rid you of the Mamelouks and to bring you liberty, prosperity, and happiness.” Already plagued with dysentery and disease, the French again made a horrendous march, this time through the deserts of the Sinai, and arrived at Aboukir on July 13, in good enough condition to meet the awaiting mameluke cavalry. Murad Bey had assembled his 4,000 men and horses on the left bank of the Nile. With a shout, scimitar held high, he led his turbaned horsemen in an all-out charge. However, Napoleon, sufficiently forewarned, had ample time to prepare his reception. Murad’s valiant cavalry sustained heavy losses. Horses and men fell in great numbers, their scimitars and small arms no match for the French artillery and muskets. Clearly repulsed by the superior force, a bloodied Murad Bey sounded his retreat. Undeterred in his resolve, he recruited more of his mameluke sympathizers, mounting newcomers and Aboukir survivors on the equine reserves he had been breeding and training at his stables. A week after the second debacle, when the French Army arrived outside Cairo, just north of the Pyramids of Giza, Murad Bey and his horsemen were again waiting, this time more than 6,000 strong. Napoleon, informed of the ambush by his network of scouts, told his officers, “Remember; from atop these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you.” Murad Bey led his entire cavalry force of 6,000 against them, but they were easily driven back into the Nile by the French counterattack. As men and horses threw themselves into the water, the Nile became a foaming, red sea of tangled, desperately struggling bodies. In three hours of combat, Murad Bey lost 2,000 men and horses, the river’s strong current carrying away the battle’s gruesome toll. Following this resounding defeat, Murad fled to Upper Egypt, where until his death in 1801 he continued to breed and raise purebred Arabian warhorses. Meanwhile, the British Royal Navy managed to hammer away at Napoleon by sea. French forces were crippled when Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet, in pursuit like a persistent pack of hounds, finally caught up with the French navy and sank all but four of the 17-ship force. Bonaparte saw his goal of strengthening the French position in the Mediterranean Sea come to nothing, as his army faced disease, developing instability and political uprisings back
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
THE ARABIAN HORSE
Battle of the Pyramids © The Art Archive/Musee de Chateau de Versailles/Dagli Orti.
IN HISTORY
home. Bonaparte abandoned his North African campaign and returned to Paris in August 1799, his departure leaving a power vacuum in war-torn Egypt.
“Remember; from atop these pyramids forty centuries look down
EGYPT’S OTTOMAN LEADER was now Mehemet Ali Pasha. An Albanian by birth, he knew that eventually he would have to deal with the mamelukes if he ever truly wanted to control Egypt. Murad Bey, Ibrahim Bey and their mameluke collaborators, still very much alive, were Egypt’s feudal owners, and their land was still a huge source of wealth and power. Disaffected by their non-Egyptian pasha (a title formerly used for military or civil officers), the fading Ottoman Empire’s provincial governors (beys) became divided in their allegiances. From the time of Napoleon’s departure until the spring of 1811, the mameluke beys and Mehemet Ali Pasha sustained an uneasy truce. Some even came to live in Cairo, but tranquility was far from a reality. In late February of 1811, Mehemet Ali Pasha, hearing of a possible plot to overthrow him, issued a formal invitation to all the mameluke beys then in Cairo. He requested their presence at the ceremony of investing his favorite son, Tuslin,
upon you.” Napoleon had told his troops before they faced mameluke fighters just outside Cairo.
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
with command of the army. On the first day of March, the mameluke chiefs gathered in the citadel, where the pasha courteously received them. They were served refreshments, then were asked to remount and form into a procession, which was quietly surrounded by Mehemet Ali Pasha’s armed Albanian, Serb and Bulgarian mercenaries. The unsuspecting riders, each mounted on his Arabian charger, solemnly descended the steep, narrow alley down from Mukatamb Hill that led to the citadel’s great Al-Azab gates.
321
As the first of them arrived at the point of exit, the portals at each end were suddenly slammed shut. In a stunning deception, Mehemet Ali Pasha had launched one of history’s most treacherous coups de grâce. Last to leave before the gates were shut, the heavily armed mercenaries, fore and aft, scrambled up the walls and houses hemming in the narrow alleyway. Some stationed themselves on the rocky promontories through which the road was cut and opened fire on the hapless riders. Horrified and astonished, the betrayed mamelukes crouched in their saddles as their horses panicked, rearing, screaming and plunging. Some dismounted and threw off their outer robes, grabbing their swords and thinking, in their terror, to escape by some other gate. The dreadful carnage continued. Of the estimated 700 mamelukes who entered the citadel, only one was reported to have escaped the wholesale slaughter. One account, alleged to be that of a soldier at the event, is taken from E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published in 1898. The account is graphic enough to be first-hand. “Another chief, Hasan Bey, who was the brother to Elfi, urged the noble animal which he rode to an act of greater desperation,” the chilling account begins. “He spurred his mount violently ‘til he made him clamber upon the rampart, and preferring rather to be dashed to pieces than to be slaughtered in cold blood, drove the horse to leap down the precipice, a height that has been estimated at from thirty to forty feet, or even more. Fortune so favoured him, that, though the horse was killed in the fall, the rider escaped.
322
“An Albanian camp was below, and an officer’s tent very near the spot on which he alighted; instead of shunning it, he went in, and implored that no advantage might be taken of him; which was not only granted, but the officer offered him protection, even at his own peril, and surprisingly, kept him concealed so long as the popular fury and the excesses of the soldiery continued. “Of the rest of that devoted number, thus shut up and surrounded, not one went out alive. All Cairo was filled with wailing and lamentations; and, in truth, the confusion and horrors of that day are indescribable, for not alone the mamelukes, but others also, were indiscriminately put to death. For myself, I have reason to be thankful that though I was one of the soldiers stationed in the citadel that morning, I shed none of the blood of those unhappy men, having had the good fortune to be posted at an avenue where none of them attempted to pass, so that my pistols and musket were never fired. During the two following days the pasha and his son rode about the streets and tried to stop the atrocities; but order was not soon restored. The heads of the beys were stuffed with straw and sent to Constantinople.”
THIS MASSACRE WAS the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of mamelukes throughout Egypt. More than 3,000 mamelukes and their relatives were killed, and in Cairo, itself, the horses that had survived the wholesale slaughter were given over to the mercenaries. However, these professional cutthroats preferred hard cash to valuable horseflesh, so the horses were offered for sale. Tajar, long considered the most select of Murad Bey’s stallions, had been the personal
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
THE ARABIAN HORSE
Engraving of the 1811 Massacre of Mamluks in Cairo, 1860. © Chris Hellier/Corbis
IN HISTORY
charger of mameluke leader Latif Bashar, this most ferocious of Murad Bey’s henchmen who died at the Battle of the Pyramids. His white charger, for the last few years a spoil of war, had been passed through several hands, the last of which had perished during the Cairo massacre. Baron von Fechtig, a Hungarian horseman who happened to be in Cairo at the time, saw the exceptional mameluke warhorse offering. Von Fechtig became a prominent importer because of his frequent trips to the desert, as well as his shrewd eye for quality. The nobleman eventually established his own stud, which he managed until his death in 1855, but most notable was his timely recognition of the unusual that rescued Tajar from oblivion. When he asked the locals about the beautiful, white stallion’s provenance, he learned that the horse had been bred and raised by Murad Bey. He promptly bought Tajar and several mares—inexpensively, by European standards. Von Fechtig loaded Tajar and the others on a merchant ship in Cairo and sent them to Trieste. According to several accounts, Tajar sustained serious abdominal injuries on the stormy voyage, but survived, recovered and was resold. Hungary had become a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1699, but 173 previous years of Ottoman Turkish
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
“Horrified and astonished, the betrayed mamelukes crouched in their saddles as their horses panicked, rearing, screaming and plunging. Some dismounted and threw off their outer robes, grabbing their swords and thinking, in their terror, to escape by some other gate.” rule had left Hungarian breeders with a distinct preference for “Oriental” horses. Avid Hungarian Arabian horse breeders often exchanged breeding stock with Poland, Germany and other countries. In 1789, Emperor Josef II formally established the Babolna stud farm in Hungary. In
323
1326
Egypt becomes a part of the Ottoman Empire, but only in name.
1400
1300
Osman, a Turk, begins leading raids on Byzantine towns.
1200
1517
The first standing Ottoman army is formed of war captives and slaves.
1500
1285
Start and rise of the Ottoman empire.
The empire takes most of the Byzantine lands and starts gaining territories in Europe and around the Eastern Mediterranean.
324
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
THE ARABIAN HORSE
IN HISTORY
fact, Babolna claims to be the oldest breeder in the world. Its first recorded stud was founded by Prince Arpad (d. 907). Count Josef Hunyadi had established a huge, private stud near the Hungarian city of Urmeny, complete with castle and more than 200 horses, at the beginning of the century. His taste for the finest Oriental bloodstock led him to seek out the world’s best Arabian stallions and mares. Learning of von Fechtig’s Cairo importation, Count Hunyadi sent his agent to Trieste, and the purchase was made. The 22-yearold stallion soon became Hunyadi’s favorite. In her excellent book, The Arab Horse in Europe, author Erika Schiele describes his reception. “Tajar through his progeny exercised such an influence on Hungarian breeding that he is generally acknowledged as their foundation sire ... His large, lively eyes, his charm, and his noble lineaments delighted every visitor, including many painters. He proved a brilliant sire, and took a lively interest in his surroundings. “Count Feltheim,” Schiele adds, “in his day a noted authority, considered Tajar the model of ‘the true courser of the Arabian desert.’ In Feltheim’s view, had Tajar been brought to England, he would have become as famous as the Darley or the Godolphin Arabian.” Schiele then waxes downright poetic as she discusses Tajar’s last years at Urmeny. “Despite his great age,” she writes, “he surpassed all other horses in speed and handiness. An inspector of the stud farm named Muller was in the habit of riding him out every evening. The heath at Urmeny seemed to remind Tajar of the broad expanses of his homeland, for as soon as he got onto it, he set off, and went on and on, until his rider was out of breath ... Like a fleeting, lightfooted gazelle he sped across the ground, a silver arrow in the evening light.”
“Tajar through his progeny exercised such an influence on Hungarian breeding that he is generally acknowledged as their foundation sire ... His large, lively eyes, his charm, and his noble lineaments delighted every visitor.” The old stallion continued to cover and settle mares, siring 206 foals through 1826. He was then retired, but lived an additional four years, finally having to be euthanized because he no longer had teeth with which to chew his food. According to several sources, his skeleton was preserved in the museum at Vienna’s Veterinary High School, where the oldest textbook in the German language on the internal diseases of the horse, written by Stefan Greiner, was published in 1770. In 1827 Professor of Anatomy and Physiology Michael von Erdalyi had the opportunity to see Tajar. Von Erdalyi’s description of the gallant old horse is particularly eloquent. “He looks up at the clouds and the birds flying overhead, which so delight him that he seems to be longing to fly after them.” And so he did fly after them, three years later.
1798
1811
Expansion of the Ottoman empire. Conquering areas deep into Europe and North Africa, the Ottoman empire also expands south to the Persian Gulf. They also form a powerful navy.
Arabian Horse Times • January 2007
Mameluke massacre by Egypt’s Ottoman head, Mehemet Ali Pasha.
1800
1700
1600
Napoleon campaigns in Egypt, looking to undermine Britain’s trade routes to India.
Decline of the Ottoman empire.
Slowly the empire begins losing some of its outlying territories and there is an unsuccessful attempt at modernization.
325