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Sat 05 May 2007The Little Corporal in the LevantHistoryIn 1798, the French republic, looking to deal a knockout blow to Great Britain, entrusted a sizeable army and much of its fleet to a young, gifted, and enormously ambitious Corsican general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who despite an early association with the Jacobin faction had emerged unscathed from the revolution.The target of this expedition was Egypt, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire but in practice a separate country ruled by a foreign self- perpetuating caste, the Mamelukes. Increasingly identified by Europe's philosophers of the day as the source of western civilisation, Egypt seemed, from merchants' reports, to be frozen in time by Mameluke rule. The expedition's strategic goal was to threaten Britain's profitable connection with India, by posing a twin threat: overland, through the Middle East and Persia, or maritime, from potential bases on the Red Sea.