With Napoleon's genius for
war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might
have been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in
reverse by a great Moslem multitude, might have suffered worse disasters
than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable
empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the
Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine. As it was, it was an
episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to
admire and understand.[11]
Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian
adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored
it to the Porte. Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he
inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the
Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it. He was within
an ace of succeeding. In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and
Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was
advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople. There, without doubt, he
would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all the essential elements
of the Sultan's admitted right on which to found a new claim.
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