Siege of Khartoum

For ten months in 1884 and 1885, the forces of the Sudanese religious leader Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, besieged Khartoum, the capital of Egyptian-ruled Sudan. The city was held by an Egyptian garrison under the British general Charles Gordon. Mahdist troops stormed it on the night of 25–26 January 1885, killing Gordon and his men just two days before a British relief force came in sight. The fall of Khartoum gave the Mahdists control of almost all of Sudan and became a lasting symbol of imperial failure in Britain.

Sudan had been under Egyptian rule since 1820, while Egypt itself had been under British military occupation since 1882. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad launched a revolt that drew on both religious fervour and resentment of Egyptian rule, the beginning of the Mahdist War. After the Mahdists destroyed an Egyptian army at El Obeid in November 1883, they overran much of the country, though several Egyptian garrisons held out. William Gladstone's government did not want to commit British troops and pressed Egypt to abandon Sudan altogether.

Gordon, who had governed Sudan from 1876 to 1879, was sent back as Governor-General with orders to organise the evacuation. He reached Khartoum on 18 February 1884 and found some 7,000 Egyptian soldiers and 27,000 civilians there. Instead of withdrawing at once, he set about governing, remitting taxes and, controversially, allowing slavery again to win local support. His appeals for reinforcements were refused. He fortified the city, which was guarded on two sides by the Blue and White Niles, with trenches, mines and wire on the desert side, and armed nine river steamers as gunboats.

From mid-March, when a sortie failed, the siege tightened. By April the tribes north of the city had joined the Mahdi and cut the telegraph to Cairo, leaving only couriers to carry messages. Gordon paid his men with notes he signed himself. In September a sortie towards the besieged garrison of Sennar was beaten with heavy losses, and a steamer sent downriver came to grief and its passengers, including Gordon's deputy, Colonel John Stewart, were killed. The Mahdi then brought most of his army to Khartoum, and the besiegers grew from around 30,000 to perhaps 50,000. Food meant to last about six months ran out, and hunger spread.

Under public pressure, Gladstone agreed in July 1884 to send about 9,000 British troops under Sir Garnet Wolseley. Moving up the Nile by boat was slow, and the force reached Sudan only in January 1885. A desert column fought its way through at Abu Klea on 17 January and Abu Kru two days later. Learning of its approach, the Mahdi ordered an attack. Using the low level of the river, his forces broke into the city around midnight on 25–26 January. The weakened garrison was wiped out, about 4,000 male civilians were killed, and many women and children were enslaved. Accounts of Gordon's death conflict, but his head was carried to the Mahdi at Omdurman.

A small advance party on two steamers sighted Khartoum two days later and turned back. The Mahdi ruled most of Sudan until his death in June 1885, and his successor, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, carried on the state. In Britain, Gordon was hailed as a martyr and Gladstone was blamed, including by Queen Victoria in a telegram that became public. Herbert Kitchener's army finally destroyed the Mahdist state's main force at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898.

Our 1880 map shows Sudan as an Egyptian possession on the eve of the revolt, and our 1900 map shows it after the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest.