Ciudadela de El Cairo

A medieval fortress on a spur of the Muqattam hills, looking down over the whole of Cairo, and for more than six centuries the seat of Egypt's rulers. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities calls it one of the most impressive defensive fortresses of the Middle Ages. Inside its walls stand the domes and pencil minarets of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, the mosque of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, the Ottoman-era mosque of Sulayman Pasha and several museums.

It is the place where the Egypt of the pharaohs and the Egypt of the sultans meet most directly, because some of the stone for this new city was taken from the old one. The question it answers is what medieval Cairo made of the pyramids on its horizon.

Salah al-Din, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, ordered the fortress built in 1176 AD, but did not live to see it finished. It was completed under Sultan al-Kamil, who in 1207 made it his residence, and it remained the official home of Egypt's rulers until Khedive Ismail moved to Abdeen Palace in the mid-nineteenth century.

The same reign reached out to Giza. Mark Lehner cites the scholar Abd al-Latif, who reports that the emir Karakoush destroyed a number of small pyramids there during Salah al-Din's reign, and Lehner suggests that Karakoush removed the satellite pyramid beside Khafre's and began dismantling Khufu's small queens' pyramids. Blocks from the Giza pyramids also went into arches built across the floodplain under Salah al-Din. In 1196 his son spent eight months trying to take Menkaure's pyramid apart and managed only to scar its north face.

For nearly eight centuries the Citadel saw the great events of Egyptian history, from the Ayyubids through the Mamluks and Ottomans to the dynasty of Muhammad Ali, which ruled until the revolution of 1952.

Walls and towers, three mosques from three different eras, museums, and the view. The Mosque of Muhammad Ali has its own page. Our suggestion is to stand at the walls and look west across the city towards Giza, remembering the traffic in stone that once ran between the pyramids and this hill.