Tuman bay II

Fourteen days between capture and the rope

Tumanbay II kept up armed resistance outside Cairo after the city fell, was betrayed and captured, and was handed to Ottoman forces on 30 March 1517. On 13 April 1517, fourteen days after his capture, Selim I ordered him hanged publicly at Bab Zuwayla, one of Cairo's principal gates.

Advisers reportedly urged Selim to execute Tumanbay rather than pardon or exile him. Former Mamluk commanders now serving the Ottomans — Khayrbak and Janbirdi al-Ghazali among them — argued that a living Tumanbay remained a rallying point for rebellion.

Ibn Iyas, the sympathetic Cairene chronicler who left the fullest account, says the condemned sultan asked the surrounding crowd to recite al-Fatiha with him three times, and that the execution rope failed before the hanging succeeded.

13 April or 15 April, and not a treaty either way

The date turns on a calendar conversion. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives the Islamic date 21 Rabīʿ al-awwal 923 and converts it to 13 April 1517, a reading Mustafa Banister's specialist study follows; other conversions produce 14 or 15 April.

The larger problem is the label. No consulted scholarly source identifies 15 April 1517 as the date of a peace treaty, a formal end of the war, or an empire-wide annexation decree.

What had already happened, and what had not

Ottoman incorporation was a process, not an act completed at the gate. The Levant had been overrun in 1516 and Cairo fell in late January 1517; the Hejaz was not folded in that April either, since Sharif Barakat's son presented his father's submission to Selim in Cairo on 3 July 1517, after which sharifian government continued under Ottoman suzerainty.

What the execution did end was the realistic hope of restoring the old regime. Mamluk households and personnel survived under Ottoman government; the independent Mamluk sultanate did not.

Tumanbay's body remained displayed above Bab Zuwayla for three days before burial in al-Ghawri's madrasa.