ABSTRACT
The Ottoman Empire captured Egypt and much of the Arab Middle East from the Mamluks in 1517. With this conquest came many spoils: a near doubling of the empire’s territory; the inclusion of Islam’s holiest sites into Ottoman domains; access to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean; strategic control of most of the eastern Mediterranean; sovereignty over some of the largest cities in the Middle East; and a massive influx of money, people, and resources from these newly conquered lands. Most of the current scholarship on Ottoman shipbuilding and timber provisioning in the Red Sea focuses on the sixteenth century. This was the period when the Ottomans first expanded into the Red Sea and captured parts of Yemen, Bahrain, and other sites on the Arabian Peninsula. Wood in the Ottoman Empire was harvested in the forests of southwestern Anatolia and parts of the southern Black Sea coast every three to four years by peasants in those areas.
