In the early hours of 26 January 1885 the forces of Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, broke into Khartoum, the capital of Egyptian-ruled Sudan, after a siege of more than ten months. The starving garrison was overwhelmed and many civilians were killed. The British general Charles Gordon, who had been defending the city, died in the assault, although accounts of how he died differ. Two days later British relief steamers came within sight of Khartoum and found it already lost.
Gordon and the siege
By 1884 a religious and political uprising led by the Mahdi had spread across Sudan, then ruled by Egypt. Gordon reached Khartoum in February 1884 with instructions to evacuate the Egyptian garrisons, but he made little move to leave and instead prepared the city for defense. Encyclopedia.com, the National Army Museum and the Melik Society all describe this choice.1
According to Encyclopedia.com, the Mahdists began their attack on Khartoum in March 1884 and cut communications with Egypt in April; the National Army Museum dates the investment of the city to May 1884. As the months passed, food ran out and the city starved.2
A relief force too late
In Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone's government was reluctant to send troops, and the press and public pressed it to act. Money for a relief expedition was voted in August 1884, and General Garnet Wolseley was given command of a force that went up the Nile. A Desert Column was sent ahead overland and fought its way through Mahdist forces at Abu Klea on 17 January 1885. Two days later it fought a second battle and reached Gubat on the Nile.3
From there two of Gordon's own river steamers, the Bordein and the Telahawiya, carried a small party under Sir Charles Wilson upstream. According to the Melik Society, which studies the Nile gunboats, they left on 24 January, one ran onto a rock the next day, and they sighted Khartoum on the morning of 28 January. No Egyptian flag flew over the governor's palace, the steamers came under fire, and Wilson turned back.4
The storming of the city
The Mahdi attacked before the relief could arrive, and in the hours before dawn on 26 January his forces broke into the city. The garrison was destroyed and many civilians were killed.5
Early reports were confused. The Illustrated London News of 14 February 1885, drawing on news sent back by Wilson, blamed treacherous officers for opening the gates and said Gordon had been stabbed as he left Government House. World History Encyclopedia gives a different picture: the low water of the Nile had exposed a muddy stretch of Gordon's defenses, and the Mahdist army stormed through this breach.6
How did Gordon die?
There is no single reliable account. A 2021 article by Iain Martin in Reaction summarizes the main versions: the most coherent early account, from Ibrahim Bey al-Burdayni, who heard it from the attackers, has Gordon going out unresisting to meet the Mahdists and being speared; and one Mahdist chronicle has him firing his pistol and fighting. The Austrian captive Rudolf Slatin was shown Gordon's head in the Mahdi's camp, and Reaction notes that the Mahdi had supposedly ordered that Gordon not be harmed.7
The famous image of Gordon facing the spears on the stairs comes largely from later art, such as George William Joy's painting of 1893, which Martin describes as echoing the official story. When the news reached Britain, 13 March 1885 was declared a national day of mourning. The Mahdist state continued to rule Sudan until an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener defeated it at Omdurman in 1898. For another defeat of a Victorian army, see our article on the Battle of Isandlwana.8 › Battle of Omdurman, 1898
