Who ruled Cairo?

Cairo sits on the east bank of the Nile just above the point where the river divides to form its delta. Whoever held this spot controlled traffic between Upper and Lower Egypt, and capitals have stood nearby for five thousand years: ancient Memphis lay a short way upstream, and the pyramids of Giza now rise at the edge of the modern city. Cairo itself is a medieval Islamic foundation, a series of royal towns built side by side that merged into what became, by the 14th century, the largest city in Africa and the Middle East.

In the age of ancient Egypt the area held the temple city of Heliopolis and lay close to Memphis, but it had no great city of its own. Under Roman rule a fortress called Babylon guarded a canal linking the Nile with the Red Sea, and around it grew a Christian Coptic town. In 640 to 641 an Arab army under Amr ibn al-As besieged and took the fortress, and after the fall of Alexandria Amr founded a garrison town beside it, Fustat, which became the capital of Egypt under the Rashidun Caliphate and its successors. Later governors added their own quarters to the north-east, including al-Qata'i, founded by Ahmad ibn Tulun in 870, whose great mosque still stands.

In 969 the armies of the Fatimid Caliphate, a Shia dynasty from North Africa, conquered Egypt and laid out a walled palace city that they named al-Qahira, "the Victorious", from which the name Cairo comes. The caliph moved there in 973, and the mosque of al-Azhar, founded in those years, grew into one of the oldest centres of learning in the Islamic world. Fustat remained the commercial city until 1168, when much of it was burned to keep it out of the hands of crusaders.

Saladin ended the Fatimid caliphate in 1171 and began the hilltop Citadel that served as the seat of Egypt's rulers for nearly seven centuries. Under the Mamluk Sultanate, from 1250 to 1517, Cairo reached its medieval height. Its sultans and emirs filled the city with mosques, colleges and tombs, and it controlled the spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, but the Black Death of 1348 and later plagues killed a large share of its people.

The Ottoman sultan Selim I took Cairo in 1517, and it became the capital of an Ottoman province, still large and prosperous but no longer an imperial capital. A French army under Napoleon occupied it from 1798 to 1801. Muhammad Ali, who seized power in 1805, and his descendants modernised Egypt while nominally serving the sultan. Khedive Ismail, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, built a new European-style downtown west of the old city, but debts led to British occupation in 1882.

Egypt became formally independent in 1922, though British influence lasted much longer. In 1952 rioters burned much of the downtown, and months later army officers overthrew the monarchy. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser Cairo became a centre of Arab nationalism, and migration from the countryside made it grow at great speed. In 2011 mass protests in Tahrir Square forced President Hosni Mubarak from office. Greater Cairo now has over 20 million people, the largest urban area in Africa and the Arab world, and since the 2020s the government has been moving ministries to a new administrative capital in the desert to the east.