Western Arabia and Yemen during the ottoman period

Ottoman views of, and policies towards, the Ḣijāz as well as the Indian Ocean are well established. In Arabia, the Ottomans were the inheritors of three legacies from the Mamlūks whom they supplanted in Syria and finally in Egypt in 922/1517. The first involved the effort to repel the Portuguese, who had irrupted into the Indian Ocean world in 902/1497, and had set up a state based on commerce and warfare and which threatened to dominate the Indian Ocean as well as the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The second legacy was the Mamlūk occupation of the relatively rich province of Yemen, domination over which meant tax revenues, the effective protection of the Ḣijāz from the south and control of the trade that crossed into the Red Sea. The third legacy involved the incorporation of the Ḣijāz into the empire.