page_title: Turkish Sudan
section_title: Sudanese slave soldiers
hierarchical_section_title: Turkish Sudan / Sudanese slave soldiers
caption_attribution_description: English: Sudanese Battalion in Mexico 1863-1867, fighting for Maximilian I
context_page_description: Turkish Sudan, also known as Turkiyya, describes the rule of the Eyalet and later Khedivate of Egypt over what is now Sudan and South Sudan. It lasted from 1820, when Muhammad Ali Pasha started his conquest of Sudan, to the fall of Khartoum in 1885 to Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi.
context_section_description: In the 1830s, as Muhammad Ali's military ambitions drew his attentions elsewhere, Egyptian manpower in Sudan was reduced and 'Ali Kurshid Pasha, Governor General of the Sudan 1826–38, had to increase the size of the locally recruited slave garrisons.  He made periodic raids into the upper Blue Nile region and the Nuba Mountains, as well as down the White Nile, attacking the Dinka and Shilluk territories and bringing slaves back to Khartoum.  
  Slave raiding was a demanding and not always profitable business however - in 1830 his assault on the Shilluk at Fashoda involved 2,000 soldiers but took only 200 slaves; in 1831-2 an expedition of 6,000 attacked Jabal Taka in the Nuba Mountains. The assault was not successful, and Khurshid lost 1,500 men. Rustum Bey, Governor of Kordofan under Khurshid, had rather more success, conducting slaving expeditions in the west. In January 1830, he led an expedition which took 1,400 captives. He selected 1,000 young males from among them and sent them to Egypt. in 1832, a similar expedition by Rustum yielded another 1,500 captives, who were recruited for the army. Khurshid's successor as Governor-General, Ahmed Pasha, found a more economical way of recruiting slaves. Instead of raiding to fill the gaps in his black regiments, he imposed a new tax whereby each taxable individual was obliged to buy and hand over one or more slaves. Governor-General Musa Pasha Hamdi (1862-65) combined both practices, requiring shaykhs and chieftains to supply him with specified numbers of slaves, and personally leading raids to capture others when this proved insufficient. Under the reign of the Khedive Abbas I (1848-54), each local shaykh or chieftain was required to supply the government with a specific number of men as part of their annual taxes. In 1859 his successor Muhammad Sa'id (1854-63) ordered the formation of a personal bodyguard of black soldiers, and slaves continued to be taken mainly for the Sudanese regiments and for this bodyguard even after the official prohibition of the slave trade.
  In 1852, the Egyptian army in Sudan was 18,000 strong, and by 1865 it had increased to over 27,000. The bulk of the Egyptian occupation forces in Sudan were either slaves, or voluntarily recruited from within the country. The officers and non-commissioned officers were 'Turks' (meaning Turkish-speaking, whether Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Slavic or Arab) and Egyptians, although in later years some trusted Sudanese of long service were promoted to the rank of corporal and sergeant, and indeed, under Khurshid, to commissioned officer ranks.
  Occasionally, Sudanese slave troops were used outside Sudan.  In 1835, Kurshid received orders to raise two black regiments for service in Arabia against the Wahhabi insurgents. In 1863, Napoleon III asked Muhammad Sa'id to lend him A Sudanese regiment to fight in the humid, malarial climate of Veracruz in support of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. In January 1863, 447 Sudanese troops sailed from Alexandria. They proved to be excellent fighters against the Mexican rebels, and endured the climate much better than Europeans. 
   An exceptional case of a Sudanese slave who ended up fighting outside his homeland was Michele Amatore, probably from the Nuba mountains, who joined the Bersaglieri regiment of the Piedmontese army in 1848.
caption: Sudanese Battalion in Mexico 1863–1867, fighting for Maximilian I
exif: {"Image Software": "Google"}