Siege of Jaffa

Siege of Jaffa
Part of Egypt-Syria Campaign
The painting Napoleon visiting the plague victims of Jaffa, by Antoine-Jean Gros depicts the aftermath of this battle.
Date 3 - 7 March 1799 Location Jaffa Result French victory
Belligerents
French First Republic	Ottoman Empire
Commanders and leaders
Napoleon Bonaparte	Djezzar

The Siege of Jaffa was fought on from 3 to March 7, 1799 between France and the Ottoman Empire. The French were led by Napoleon Bonaparte, and they captured the city.

Course

Jaffa was surrounded by high walls, flanked by towers. Djezzar entrusted its defense to his elite troops, including 1200 artillerymen. Napoleon had to win Jaffa before he could advance any further, and the whole expedition's success depended on its capture - the town was one of Syria's main mercantile centres, it had a harbour which would provide vital shelter for his fleet.

All the exterior works could be besieged; a breach was feasible; when Bonaparte sent a Turk to the city's commander to order its surrender, he instead decapitated the Turk and ordered a sortie. He was pushed back and as early as the evening of the same day the weight of the besiegers caused one of the towers to collapse and so, despite hopeless resistance by its defenders, Jaffa was taken.

According to some sources, the French messengers who brusquely told the city of Napoleon's ultimatum had been arrested, tortured, castrated and decapitated, and their heads impaled on the city walls. This harsh treatment led Napoleon, when the city fell, to allow his soldiers 2 days and nights of slaughter and rape. He also executed the Turkish governor Abdallah bey. Bonaparte no longer wished to honour the promises of his adopted son Eugene de Beauharnais that prisoners' lives would be spared and so, also motivated by economic reasons, ordered that a large part of the Turkish prisoners (according to some sources around 2440, according to others 4100), many of them Albanians, to be shot or stabbed to death with bayonettes. Napoleon's eulogists later wrote of this decision:

"For, to keep in submission so considerable a number of prisoners, it would have been necessary to detach guards for them, which would have severely diminished his army's numbers; and if he had allowed them to leave free men, it was reasonable to fear that they might swell the ranks of Djezzar's troops."

Aftermath

Napoleon also allowed hundreds of Egyptians to leave, hoping that the news they would carry of Jaffa's fall would intimidate the defenders of the other cities in "Syria". This backfired, since their news instead made these defenders fight all the more fiercely. On the other hand, the new one of these exploits will take to an even bolder resistance against the attacks of its forces, whilst a plague epidemic caused by poor hygiene in the French headquarters in Ramla decimated the local population and the French army alike. As he had also suggested during the siege of Acre, on the eve of the retreat from Syria-Palestine Napoleon suggested to his army doctors (led by Desgenettes), that the seriously ill troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of laudanum, but they forced him to give up the idea. Overcome in the north of the country by the Turks, Napoleon abandoned Palestine. After his departure the English, allied to the Turks and commanded by William Sidney Smith, rebuilt Jaffa's city walls.

In the years 1800 - 1814, after a new 9 month siege, power at Jaffa was taken by the one who had earlier withstood Napoleon at Acre, Ahmed Pacha, Acre's governor, who was of Bosnian origins. Because of his cruelty or maybe due to his past as a butcher in Egypt, he was known as Djezzar Pacha ("djezzar" = butcher, in Arabic).