After a 250-year rule over Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk sultanate was on the wane. By the time the elderly sultan al-Ghawri reluctantly agreed to ascend the throne in 1501 at sixty years of age, the taxes that had customarily flowed into Mamluk coffers, culled from the lucrative spice trade, were seriously depleted, leaving a gaping hole in the treasury. To the north the power of the Ottoman Empire was steadily rising. These and other factors were the cause of friction, apprehension and increasing paranoia.

Because of threats to the frontiers of Egypt, the disparate Europeans in Cairo found themselves the objects of the sultan's displeasure. In 1511, Pietro Zen, the Venetian consul in Damascus, with Signore Contarini, the Alexandrian consul, four merchants from Tripoli, and three from Aleppo were imprisoned in Cairo on 6 January where they were interrogated and ignominiously subjected to the bastinado. They were charged with having favoured the Persian ambassador, who had been arrested near Aleppo and found to be carrying proposed plans for an alliance with Venice from the Safavid ruler Isma‘il Shah, who had united Persia in 1501. Qansuh al-Ghawri, who tended to favour the French above the Venetians at this time, feared that Mamluk Syrian territories might be compromised, so proceeded to take immediate action. Among several other Cairo merchants incarcerated in the Cairo dungeons were the Franciscan friars Francesco Suriano and his superior the Father Guardian, Bernadino del Vecchio of Siena. They no longer enjoyed the grateful protection of the old sultan Qaitbay, who had died aged 80 in 1496. Qansuh al-Ghawri coerced Francesco into writing to Albuqerqes, Master of the Knights of Rhodes, warning him to desist from impeding Egyptian trade, and threatening him with reprisals against the Europeans living in his territories and the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre. The friars remained in their prison for two long years before they were released in 1512 through the good offices of Domenico Trevisan, the special envoy from Venice who had disembarked at Alexandria in April of that year.

Leaving Alexandria for Cairo, Domenico, his son Marcantonio, and his ‘famiglia di persone venti’ had camped for the night on the road that bordered the sea shore, before they embarked on the Nile at Rosetta.