Charles Gordon at Khartoum: Defying Gladstone to a 10-Month Siege

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In the early 1880s Sudan was ruled by Egypt, itself under British financial control, when Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi and led a revolt fueled by religious fervor and hatred of crushing Egyptian taxes. Prime Minister William Gladstone wanted no British money or blood spent and ordered every foreign garrison evacuated. To run the withdrawal he chose Major General Charles George Gordon, a former governor general of Sudan who believed the Mahdi had to be stopped. At Berber, Gordon told tribal chiefs that Egypt was leaving for good, pushing them toward the rebels, and on reaching Khartoum in February 1884 he began preparing for a siege instead of a retreat.

He armored nine paddle steamers, buried fougasse mines on the southern approach, burned instruments of torture, cancelled taxes, and legalized slaveholding again to win over the city's elite. By April the Mahdists had cut the telegraph, and their army grew to an estimated 50,000. Public pressure and Queen Victoria pushed Gladstone to send Sir Garnet Wolseley's relief force, but it crawled up the Nile. On the night of January 25 to 26, 1885, with the river low, the Mahdists stormed the starving city, and Gordon was killed.

• Gordon paid his garrison in hand-signed siege notes, tying the merchants' fortunes to a British rescue.
• Colonel Stewart's steamer ran aground in September, and its captured dispatches told the Mahdi how desperate Khartoum's food supply was.
• Wolseley hired hundreds of Canadian boatmen to pilot rowboats through the Nile cataracts.
• Three versions of Gordon's death survive, including his servant Khalil Agha Orfali's account of a fight on the palace stairs.
• The first relief steamers came within sight of Khartoum two days too late, and Herbert Kitchener returned to crush the Mahdist state at Omdurman in 1898.