On this date in 1885, British Major General Charles Gordon–who had been hired by the Ottoman Sultan to rescue Khartoum, capital of the Ottoman province of Sudan, from the massed forces of the Muhammad Ahmad, the Sudanese Mahdi–was killed, along with all the Egyptian military assisting him. Sudan would become al-Mahdiyah, the “Mahdist state,” until 1898 and its conquest led by another British General, Horatio Herbert Kitchener.