Title Page; Contents; Preface; Permissions; List of Illustrations; List of Abbreviations; Glossary; Introduction; 1: The Mamluk Rulers of Egypt; 2: Egypt Imagined and the Realities of the Voyage; 3: The Maritime Port of Alexandria; 4: Sailing Upstream to Cairo; 5: Cairo: 'meeting place of comer and goer'; 6: Venetian Diplomacy and the Arrival of the Ottomans; 7: Exploring the Pyramids and Mummy Fields; 8: Pilgrims to the Monastery of St Catherine; 9: Adventures with the Mecca Caravan; 10: To the South; Appendix 1: Europeans in Egypt in the Reigns of the Mamluk Sultans up to 1517
Summary
How Many Miles to Babylon? uses the writing of European travellers to Egypt between c. 1300 and c. 1600 to give a picture of the country in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, drawing on sources that have hitherto been inaccessible to English-speaking audiences. These accounts portray an Egypt ruled by the despotic Mamluk sultans and the early Ottoman governors, a society at once cruel and sophisticated, dangerous and alluring. The Europeans wonderment at the exotic flora and fauna, the ancient ruins of temples and pyramids, and the astonishing summer rise of the Nile to irrigate
