Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in the Holy Land

In the late 1700's a young 29 year-old General, named Napoleon Bonaparte, was going from strength to strength while expanding French domination in Europe. 

In 1798, after defeating the Austrian army on Italian soil, the French government appointed Napoleon to conquer Egypt from the hands of the British. According to one theory, this task was assigned to keep him away from Paris in order to overcome his growing popularity. 

The main and formal purpose of the Egyptian campaign was to cut off the British Empire which was the archenemy of the French from India, while causing damages to their allies, the Mamluks. By that time the Mamluks had already ruled Egypt for long periods, both before and after the occupation by the Ottomans. They were regarded to by the local population as outsiders and were obscene by it.

On 19 May 1798, Napoleon set sail from Toulon to Egypt, accompanied by 35,000 French troops.

On July 21, 1798 the French invaders encountered the Mamluks which outnumbered the French army, about four miles from Cairo. Despite this disadvantage, Napoleon gained achievements when he succeeded in capturing the outskirts of Cairo and pushed the Mamluk leaders out of the Egyptian city. The temporary success had quickly turned into a disaster when British forces led by Admiral Horatio Nelson located Napoleon's fleet which was anchored in the Gulf of Aboukir and destroyed it, effectively cutting-off all supplies and means of transportation from the French forces. This was a turning point in Napoleon's campaign as rumors started to spread about a British-Ottoman alliance to flank the stranded French army. The French general had estimated at this point that the action against him will be held in a pincer movement: A British landing on the beaches of Egypt that will be assisted by Ottoman movements of soldiers coming from the Holy Land and the Sinai Desert. Napoleon had to swiftly change strategy. He decided to destroy the right arm of the pincer by taking the Holy Land and Syria thus preventing any movement of troops.

On 6 February 1799, Napoleon has dispatched on his way to the Holy Land. After a few conquests in the Sinai, the French army began its blitzkrieg with the capturing of Gaza on 24 February, and seven days later the city of Ramla was captured taken with no resistance.

From Ramla Napoleon and his troops arrived at the city of Jaffa, which was one of the main targets of the French campaign. Jaffa was a heavily fortified port city and for four days the city walls held against Napoleon artillery, until they were breached on March 7. Frustrated by weeks and months of battles in the Middle Eastern deserts, hundreds of French soldiers began rampaging through the streets of Jaffa, killing everyone in their path - Jews, Muslims and Christians. Thousands of innocents were killed by the soldiers and much of the property in the city was looted.

Napoleon Bonaparte  in Jaffa -  The Louvre

From Jaffa Napoleon turned north towards Haifa and Acre. While heading north along the costal line, the French warlord felt a rising threat coming from inland. Earlier, with the beginning of his Holy Land campaign, Napoleon declined crossing his path with the mountains of Judah and Samaria, claiming they were strategically unnecessary for his military objectives. Surely enough the French had encountered with a Mamluk cavalry force which after a short battle made an orderly retreat into the Samaritan mountains, dragging a French force led by general Jean Lannes towards the city of Nablus. The French force was beaten at the outskirt of the city, suffering the highest rate of casualties of its Holy Land campaign and leaving Napoleon furious after his commands to avoid the inland mountains have been ignored.

On March 20, after capturing the city of Haifa without resistance, Napoleon besieged the city of Acre.  Acre was well prepared for the arrival of the French with an ongoing British assistance. It was built on a small peninsula that penetrated the sea and it was fortified by a surrounding wall which made intrusion possible only from inland. To make things worse for Napoleon, the Mediterranean shores were dominated by that time by the British Navy, which had rushed to catch up with the progress of the French campaign. Napoleon thought at first he could take the city easily, as have happened in Jaffa. Confident in their victory, his soldiers stormed the city on March 28, 1799, only to find out this assault was a total failure. Many of the French died in the moats and the walls of Acre were not breached. This failure led to a long siege, in which the French army was forced to protect its rear while expanding its conquests up to Lebanon and Syria during the following months. In the course of the siege around 3,000 French soldiers found death, many of them in a plague which spread in Napoleon's camp. The plague results, along with rumors of an uprising in Egypt and the desperation among the soldiers, led Napoleon to the conclusion that he could not take Acre.

On May 18, 1799 the French began their withdrawal from the city completing their full withdrawal from the Holy Land during the following weeks, on June 1. 

Two years later in June 1801, the last of the French soldiers left Egyptian soil, ending Napoleon campaigns in the Middle East and the Holy Land.