Salah al-Din dethroned the Fatimids in 1192 with an army of Turkish slaves . Eventually, the Crusader States fell one by one. MAMLUKS & OTTOMANS Salah al-Din's slave armies became a problem for his successors. The Mamluks were technically property of the sultan, but they threatened his authority. In 1250, 'Izz al-Din, a Mamluk of the Bahri clan, resolved to rule the sultanate directly. By 1291, Mamluks controlled all of the former Crusader outposts. When the Ottoman Empire gained formal sovereignty over Palestine and Egypt in the early part of the 16th century, the Mamluks still retained most of their political power. Through appointments, bribery, and assassination, however, the Ottoman sultans garnered real and effective control. When the gates of Vienna stood firm against Ottoman armies in 1683, the Otto- mans began worrying about the fate of their increasingly decrepit empire. The ports of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt had once provided the sole access to the East; now sailors steered their way around the Horn of Africa. Spanish discovery of the New World created opportunities for major economic expansion. The once-formi- dable Ottoman Empire became "the sick man of Europe." ZIONISM Although small Jewish communities were present in Palestine over the 18 centu- ries following the Roman exile, the vast majority of the world's Jews existed in diaspora communities in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and, more recently, the Americas. Throughout this period, many Jews maintained the hope of someday returning to and rebuilding the ancient homeland. This became the focus of the Zionist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1882, a group of Jews made aliya to the "Old-New Land," forming agricultural settlements based on private land ownership . Many were sponsored by Parisian Baron Edmund de Rothschild. In 1896, Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl published a pamphlet entitled The Jewish State, promoting the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the answer to Jewish persecution. Settlement in Israel had been pro- posed in such earlier works as Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation, and spiritual Zionism had garnered support among Eastern European Jews through the work of Arjad Ha'am. Herzl, however, was the first Western, secular Jew to not only articu- late the need for action, but to use political means to achieve that end. He initially considered Uganda and South America as sites for the Jewish state. Only Pales- tine, however, had the emotional lure to unite diaspora Jews. The second aliya witnessed the development of cooperative agri- cultural settlements . Zionism diverged into two distinct move- ments: "Political Zionism," inspired by Herzl, sought to gain international support for the establishment of a Jewish state; "Practical Zionism," sparked by Ahad Ha'am and the "ovevei Zion, aimed to build the Jewish community in Palestine as a source of spiritual cohesion.