The Birth of Modem Egypt 53
tion of Greeks, became violently indignant when Ibrahim
began deporting them as slaves to Cairo. It was, in fact,
to stop this slave trade that the British arranged the
naval demonstration of allied fleets at Navarino that
ended in the destruction of the Egyptian and Turkish
fleets (October 20, 1827). Which disaster was not with-
out compensation for Mehemet Ali. For as he suspected,
and soon afterwards ascertained, the Turkish fleet were
at Navarino with orders to deport Ibrahim's army to Con-
stantinople. Freed from the Turks, Ibrahim went on
sacking Greece and sending the Greeks as slaves to
Egypt, arrogantly ignoring the sharp warnings of the
British Admiral Codrington. c< I never saw such a lout
or heard such language/* complained Ibrahim to his
French interpreter. This was, in fact, the first, but by
no means the last, collision between the Egyptian and
the English temperament. And the inevitable end came
when Codrington appeared off Alexandria and delivered
an ultimatum under threat of bombardment; while a
French expedition disembarked in the Morea (Sep-
tember, 1828). The Egyptian troops then evacuated
the Morea by agreement between the British and
Mehemet Ali—his first formal recognition. The Egyptian
revolution thus equalled the feat of the French Revolu-
tion in uniting the Great Powers for the limitation of its
imperial expansion.
Thereupon followed the ten years' struggle between
Mehemet Ali and Mahmoud, in which the armies of
Egypt overran the Ottoman Empire and almost over-
threw the peace of Europe. The Sultan had never
abandoned attempts to rid himself of his all too power-
ful Pasha; the Grand Vizier Khosrew had never for-
given his discomfiture and deportation from Egypt.
So Mehemet Ali, being absent at Mecca on the Sultan's