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Various sizes, totaling five pages. Two have Islamic dates, one (10 Muharam 1215) clearly corresponds to June 2, 1800, the other probably dating from April-May of that year.

Murad Bey (1750-1801) was an Egyptian Cavalry Commander who was joint ruler of Egypt when Napoleon invaded the country in 1798, defeating Murad’s Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids and occupying Cairo. Murad then fled to Upper Egypt and mounted a guerilla campaign against the French, while Napoleon himself hurriedly returned to France, leaving the French forces under the command of General Jean Baptiste Kleber. Failing to sign an armistice with the Ottoman Turks who next invaded Egypt with British support, and faced with a native uprising in Cairo, in March 1800, Kleber desperately negotiated a peace with Murad, who became the French Republic’s Governor General of Upper Egypt. Kleber then defeated the Turks on March 20, and, with Murad’s support, quelled the Cairo revolt in April. These documents appear to be contemporary French translations of flowery letters Murad sent to Kleber from the beginning of their alliance until Kleber was assassinated by an Egyptian fanatic on June 14, 1800. After Murad renewed his alliance with Kleber’s successor, a French convert to Islam, the French enjoyed nine months of peace in Cairo until the British invaded the country in 1801. Murad then agreed to come to Cairo to aid the French but while en route, he contracted bubonic plague and died on April 7, 1801. Contemporary French documents from this unhappy two years of French rule in Cairo after Napoleon’s abandonment are both rare and historically significant as Murad’s original correspondence with Kleber has apparently not survived.