i MEHEMET ALI: CREATOR OF MODERN EGYPT 9
message from Khusrev filled the cup of Mehemet All's resentment. He did not at once venture upon open rebellion against the Sultan. His feud was, he alleged, only with Khusrev, who was betraying the interest of their cpmmon lord and master. But he nevertheless crossed the Rubicon when an army under his son Ibrahim marched at the end of 1831 into Palestine, and joining up with the Egyptian fleet at Jaffa proceeded to take Acre by storm. Nor did an Imperial Firman of May 2nd, 1832, declaring Mehemet Ali an outlaw and deposing him from the Pashalik of Egypt, have any terrors for him. Ibrahim routed all the forces hurriedly moved up against him from Asia Minor. He took Horns, Kama, and Aleppo in his stride, and by the end of the year he had utterly defeated a great Turkish army in the heart of Asia Minor and occupied Konia, the ancient capital of the Ottoman Sultans, where the sword of Empire is still preserved with which each in turn receives his investiture on succeeding to the throne of Othman. Ibrahim was barely more than a week's march from Constantinople, and no Turkish force could have arrested his triumphant progress.
The moment, however, had come when he and Mehemet Ali were to pay for the political blunder of their Morean adventure and the savagery that had further aggravated it. By throwing in his lot with the East against the West and assisting Turkey to crush the Greek rebellion, Mehemet Ali had alienated the good will of Europe which he had begun to gain by his friendly and liberal attitude towards foreigners in Egypt. The European Powers, alarmed at the prospect of an immediate dissolution of the Ottoman Empire which Ibrahim's astounding victories were rapidly opening up, hastened to intervene at Cairo and at Constantinople. Russia offered the Sultan substantial military support against the Egyptian upstart whom the whole Turkish population had acclaimed as a mightier Defender of the Faith than their own degenerate Sultan. France, who hoped for great things for her own interests in Egypt from Mehemet Ali's leaningse and strained the resources ofne to death in the streets of the capital. Egypt wasit in Egypt. Within the first year of the Occupation