The 1811 Citadel massacre killed over 450 Mamluk emirs and triggered a pogrom.

Evidence

After years of attempting to pacify them the Pasha finally decided to get rid of their influence by expediently killing their leaders. On 1 March, 1811a festive ceremony was held in the Citadel to celebrate the appointment of his son, Tusun Pasha, to fight the Wahhabi rebels in Arabia. Mehmed Ali saw this as a golden opportunity to execute his deadly plan. He invited the heads of all the Mamluk households to attend the festive celebration and once they were on their way up a narrow alleyway leading to his court in the Citadel, he ordered his Albanian soldiers to open fire on them. Over four hundred and fifty of the Mamluk emirs were killed in that incident. This was followed by a ferocious pogrom against any Mamluk leaders who had succeeded in escaping the massacre in the Citadel. The Pasha’s Albanian troops were allowed to enter the Mamluks’ houses in Cairo plundering their property and raping their women. In the event around 1,000 Mamluk emirs and soldiers died in the city of Cairo alone during the few days that followed the massacre in the Citadel. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 431

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s standing interest in violent elite purges as a precondition for military reform; comparable to the Streltsy purges under Peter the Great.