ABSTRACT
Lithgow was full of admiration for Cairo, ‘the most admirable and greatest City, seene upon the earth, being thrice as large of bounds as Constantinople, and likewise so populous’, although he did not consider Cairo’s buildings as impressive as the soaring mosques of the imperial capital.192 Since Selĩm I’s conquest of Egypt in 1517 from the Mamluks, Cairo had, it was true, become
a provincial capital, the centre of an eyĆlet or province of the Ottoman empire, although in practice the central government in Istanbul interfered little in the local administration of Egypt, one taken over from the Mamluks, provided that the annual tribute, the irsĆliyye, was forwarded to Istanbul regularly. The province thus enjoyed in practice a considerable degree of autonomy.193 Cairo’s political dependence on Istanbul could not in any case affect Egypt’s strategic position as the meeting-point of three continents and its economic and commercial pre-eminence within the central lands of the Islamic world as a centre of production for a wide variety of textiles, an entrepôt for products of the eastern Sudan and beyond that, East Africa, and, increasingly in the seventeenth century, an entrepôt for the coffee of Yemen, some of which found its way to Europe.194
