13

From the ‘New Order’ to the ‘Re-ordering’

THE CHAOTIC SITUATION in the Balkan provinces of the empire at the turn of the century was closely related to the Great Power realignment of the time. Following Ottoman recognition of Napoleon as emperor in February 1806, he sent his envoy General Sebastiani to Istanbul to negotiate an alliance with the Ottomans against Russia; Napoleon intended Selim’s army to act as a buffer, permitting further French advance into the Balkans to consolidate his victories at Ulm and Austerlitz late the previous year – his wild dream for Iran to be the third party to the alliance, thus offering him a passage to India, was realized the following spring.

In June 1806 there was upheaval close to Istanbul, when a force of ‘New Order’ troops recruited in Anatolia marched from the capital towards Edirne with the intention of intimidating the janissaries of the area – who to a man opposed Selim’s military reorganization – into accepting it. The people of the region refused to supply provisions for the force on the orders of a local magnate, Dağdevirenoğlu (‘Son of the Overturner of Mountains’) Mehmed Agha, who had the support of his fellow notables who like him objected both to Sultan Selim’s new army and to his plans for recruitment in the Balkans. In Edirne, the official who proclaimed the Sultan’s recruitment plans was lynched, and the Sultan’s name was omitted from the Friday prayer across the region. Grand Vezirİsmail Pasha was secretly in contact with the rebels, however, and tried to persuade the Sultan not to insist on imposing the ‘New Order’ in the Balkans – but to no avail. As Dağdevirenoğlu Mehmed summoned his fellows (including the Ruse magnate Tirsiniklioğluİsmail Agha) to Edirne, the people of the town of Çorlu, halfway between Istanbul and Edirne, barred the road to the ‘New Order’ troops sent from the capital,¹ who pounded Çorlu with cannon-fire, causing great losses to both sides.² Selim gave orders for his troops to proceed no further, no more blood was spilt, but the incident marked the beginning of the end of the ‘New Order’ project.³

Selim was seduced by the restoration of good relations with France; this greatly disturbed the British who in February 1807, forcing the Dardanelles in the teeth of heavy fire from the Ottoman batteries on its shores, sailed several ships as far as the Princes’ Islands, off the coast of Istanbul. But heavy seas permitted only one vessel to advance and drop anchor off Topkapı Palace, and plans to bombard the city on 22 February were dropped at the last minute; bad weather and resolute diplomacy on the part of the British conspired to force the fleet’s withdrawal, and it sailed away having achieved nothing – except for bolstering Selim’s confidence in his alliance with France.

At war with Russia since December 1806, in April 1807 the Ottoman government again sent its forces into the Balkans, to Silistra on the Danube, effectively the front line against this aggressive foe. During the intervening months Selim had pursued further innovations intended to improve the morale and performance of the army, provoking further anti-‘New Order’ disturbances in Edirne; these disturbances spread to Rumeli as conscription proceeded, and as local notables saw how the power they had accumulated could all too easily be swept away. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the Sultan announced that he wished to wear the European-style uniform of the ‘New Order’ troops to the mosque for the Friday prayer and as he took the salute; moreover, he expressed a desire that the militia of the Upper Bosporus fortresses guarding the Black Sea approaches to Istanbul should also wear it. Some of his advisers warned that this was a misguided notion, but the opinion of the overseer responsible for the security of the Bosporus that the men would even wear headgear as outlandish as a hat if the Sultan wished them to do so won the day. On Monday 24 May the superintendent of these fortresses, former chancellor Mahmud Raif Efendi (called ‘İngiliz’ because he had spent time in London between 1793 and 1797 as first secretary to the first permanent Ottoman ambassador there), read out to the assembled men the Sultan’s decree that they must accept the ‘New Order’ and adopt its uniform, examples of which he and his deputy had with them.⁴

The matter of the ‘New Order’ aroused such violent passions among contemporaries as to colour their accounts, which also vary in their detailed relation of the sequence of events; what cannot be doubted is that the militia who garrisoned the fortresses of the Upper Bosporus were not promising material for recruitment into Selim’s new army, having more in common with the unruly forces who had precipitated the Serb revolt. In the ‘Hungarian Bastion’ on the Asian shore of the Upper Bosporus⁵ the leader of the garrison troops drew his pistol and shot Mahmud Raif Efendi’s deputy in the stomach, according to one witness. Reckoning that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, the rebels also determined to kill Mahmud Raif, whom they held responsible for the innovation being forced upon them; they must have known him as a convinced proponent of the ‘New Order’ reforms, and may have been aware that he had published a work in Ottoman, French and German explaining Selim’s military and naval reforms to the world at large.⁶ Word of their intentions reached Mahmud Raif at the fortress of Rumeli Kavağı across the Bosporus, and he fled, but the militia men crossed the water, caught up with him and shot him too.⁷ By the time news of these murders reached the Sultan, the mutinous troops had managed to enlist the support of the janissaries, who declared common cause with them. The only units capable of restraining the insurgents were the reduced number of ‘New Order’ troops at Levent Çiftliği in the Rumelian Bosporus hills and at Harem in Üsküdar, but the Grand Vezir’s proxy, Köse (‘Beardless’) Musa Pasha, who had remained in Istanbul while his superior – İbrahim Hilmi Pasha, successor to İsmail Pasha – went off on campaign, was a conservative, and confined them to barracks. By Wednesday night the rebels had marched unimpeded down the Bosporus shore to Tophane, the cannon foundry below Galata, only a short boat-ride from the palace.⁸

At this moment of crisis, Sultan Selim proved himself hesitant and frightened. In audience at Topkapı Palace with a number of janissary leaders, he denied that he had been trying to force the Bosporus militia to become ‘New Order’ troops and offered to abandon his cherished project to reform his military forces, but when this was reported to their rank-and-file, they refused to believe the Sultan who, they said, had refused to disband his ‘New Order’ army so far, despite the trouble it had caused across Rumeli and Anatolia. The Bosporus militia spread through the city, attracting all manner of malcontents to their side. Government officials fled as the mob arrived at the janissary barracks in the city, and the Sultan told clerics who thought to seek refuge in the palace to remain where they were, in the grand vezir’s office. Required to order their men to stamp out the uprising, retired janissary leaders meeting in the courtyard of the Süleymaniye mosque vacillated, suggesting that the sheikhulislam, Şerifzade Seyyid Mehmed Ataullah Efendi, and the chief justices of Rumeli and Anatolia should meet them in their barracks.⁹

With the Grand Vezir and the janissary commander-in-chief away on campaign, the task of dealing with the militia and the janissaries allied with them fell most heavily on the Sheikhulislam, the Grand Vezir’s proxy Köse Musa Pasha, and the janissary second-in-command, Mehmed Arif Agha. Both Seyyid Mehmed Ataullah Efendi and Köse Musa had sympathized with the rebellion against the ‘New Order’ in Edirne the year before¹⁰ and Ataullah Efendi had been appointed sheikhulislam – as a conservative who might make the reforms more palatable – in the wake of events there. It was true that Köse Musa’s refusal to order the ‘New Order’ troops to nip the Bosporus uprising in the bud had avoided a bloody confrontation – but it had also denied the Sultan a military solution.

The pattern of the rebellion was a familiar one. The janissary parade ground seethed with janissaries and men belonging to the armourers’ corps and the militia. The cauldrons in which the janissaries’ food was cooked were brought out onto the square and overturned, the customary gesture of defiance against a sultan. Deliberations inside the barracks had produced a list of twelve high-ranking officials whom the rebels held responsible for their grievances, and some of them marched to the Hippodrome to demand that these men be handed over, on the way murdering a clerk of the janissary corps who was foolhardy enough to suggest moderation. The janissary leaders tried to calm the mob, but they wanted to get their hands on the officials on the list, have the ‘New Order’ dissolved and all traces of it expunged. Fearfully, Sultan Selim agreed to comply with these demands, promising a return to the system of sultan’s infantry and cavalry which had prevailed in the days of Sultan Süleyman I.¹¹

When rumours of the imminent disbandment of the ‘New Order’ reached their barracks at Harem and Levent Çiftliği, Selim’s cherished troops simply left their posts and wandered off. Some of the government officers whose names were on the rebels’ list were discovered in hiding, taken to the janissary parade ground and murdered, and the Sultan, in a bid to save himself, had others executed in the palace and their heads sent out to the janissaries. That evening the rebellious soldiers announced that the safety of the heirs to the throne – Selim’s cousins, Sultan Abdülhamid I’s sons Mustafa and Mahmud, who were in their twenties – needed to be ensured, implying that Selim might do them harm. The proclamation the Sultan had read out in the office of the grand vezir and at the janissary parade ground brought tears even to the eyes of the rebels according to one witness to these events:

I have no children. The Princes are my sons and the light of my eye. God forbid that I should be the cause of extinguishing and annihilating the state and dominion of the Ottoman dynasty and the pure Ottoman line by assassinating them. I could never entertain such thoughts. Pray God that day will never come. Let God give them long life!¹²

It was Thursday 28 May and both the clerics and the janissary leaders – at pains throughout these events to disassociate themselves from the rank-and-file – assumed that Selim’s sentimental appeal of the previous night had brought the uprising to an end: the Sultan had, after all, acceded to the demands of the rebels, the ‘New Order’ army had been disbanded, and many of the government officers named on the list of twelve had been murdered. The men of the Bosporus militia could be conciliated with money, they thought, their leaders with the customary robes of honour and award of ranks. When this offer was put before the militia, however, their leader Kabakçı (‘Pumpkin-seller’) Mustafa protested that they had one further demand – the removal of Sultan Selim and the succession of Prince Mustafa: they no longer accepted Selim as either their temporal or their spiritual leader. Asked what was to become of Selim, those speaking for the militia informed the Sheikhulislam that they had no intention of harming him and reminded him that Sultan Ahmed III had lived out his days in peace in the palace after his deposition in 1730. The appropriate Koranic invocation for the succession was read forthwith, prayers were said, and the sound of massed voices assenting ‘So be it’ welled up from the parade ground below.¹³ Sheikhulislam Ataullah Efendi was afraid of going alone to convey the news of his deposition to Selim and effect the enthronement ceremony, but he accepted an escort of 2,000 men and moved towards the palace in the midst of a growing crowd. The palace gate was closed, so a letter was sent inside, to the Chief Black Eunuch, stating that the mutinous soldiers would not disperse until Selim stepped down and the oath of allegiance to the new sultan, Mustafa IV, was concluded.¹⁴

A crowd of 50,000 filled the area outside the palace and around Ayasofya, chanting ‘We want Sultan Mustafa’. As the Sheikhulislam and the Grand Vezir’s proxy and their entourages waited outside the palace, the Chief Black Eunuch delivered the deposition ultimatum to Selim in the Circumcision pavilion in the Hanging garden (today, the fourth court). In despair, but knowing what he must do, Selim went into the harem to find his cousin Mustafa who emerged hesitantly after his long years of confinement. The new sultan was set upon a throne before the Gate of Felicity, and his statesmen swore the oath of allegiance to mark his accession.¹⁵

Sultan Mustafa IV was enthroned after sunset on the day of Selim’s deposition; the next day, Friday 29 May, prayers were held in Ayasofya. The Bosporus militia had secured their new sultan – but they held out for more. Their leaders demanded, and were awarded, positions of command; the rank-and-file clamoured for pay rises; the militia leader Kabakçı Mustafa was appointed overseer of the Bosporus castles on the European shore. The new sultan issued an edict confirming the disbanding of the ‘New Order’ troops and requesting an undertaking from the militia that they would never again mutiny, in return for which they would be pardoned without recrimination. By the first days of June the uprising was over; the janissaries and militia received a generous accession bonus, and all military men returned to barracks.¹⁶

Like Sultan Osman II in 1622, Sultan Selim III was brought down in response to his plans to reorganize military manpower – if this is indeed what Osman intended, about which there is some doubt. In the popular imagination the fate of both sultans has a tragic quality about it – but Selim’s reign, at least, was not all hard work. His private secretary wrote a detailed and personal record of his sovereign’s reign, a day-by-day account of court life uncontaminated by cares of state, of royal progresses along the waterways of the city, of picnics and hunting parties, of musical soirées and royal audiences, as much as of military reviews.¹⁷ For all his serious purpose, Selim – who was himself a composer of talent – and his circle were as much inclined to the pursuit of pleasure as Ahmed III and his courtiers.

There were other parallels with the reign of Ahmed III. Like that of 1730, the revolt of 1807 was named for the man who emerged as the first to voice demands for the deposition of the Sultan: in 1730 it was Patrona Halil who had this distinction, and in 1807 Kabakçı Mustafa. Like Patrona Halil, Kabakçı Mustafa was from the underclass of Ottoman society; he came from the north-central Anatolian region of Kastamonu, and numbered Georgians and Albanians among his closest associates. He and his cohorts, having signed up as militia, were not given the training necessary to make an armed and unruly rabble into the disciplined soldiers the state needed, and the concessions they gained did nothing to make a compliant force of them: on the pretext of patrolling the Bosporus, they got drunk and looted and got into fights, and made money illicitly by bringing prostitutes back to the castle.¹⁸

A week after his enthronement, Sultan Mustafa celebrated Friday prayer at the New mosque on the waterfront in the Eminönü district and visited the nearby tomb of his father Sultan Abdülhamid I. Six days later he visited the tomb of Sultan Mehmed II, and that of Ayyub Ansari at the head of the Golden Horn, where he was girded with the sword believed to be that of Osman, the first Ottoman sultan, and the following Friday attended prayers in the mosque of Sultan Bayezid II and visited his tomb. This careful observance of time-honoured rituals did not, however, endow Mustafa with the moral authority and legitimacy he sought. In the weeks following his accession he tried to strengthen his position by ordering the exile or murder of many of Selim’s officials, but not all his attempts to remove key figures associated with the violent demise of the ‘New Order’ were successful. Köse Musa Pasha was dismissed but briefly reinstated two weeks later, and janissary discontent with the new appointment to the office of sheikhulislam also brought the reinstatement of Ataullah Efendi. Others were less fortunate, however. The second-in-command of the janissaries, Mehmed Arif Agha, who had played a crucial role in conciliating the rebels and bringing the recent uprising to a conclusion, was accused of financial irregularity. He was removed from office and exiled from Istanbul, his wealth confiscated and used to pay the janissaries; as he passed through Bursa on his way to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca he was murdered, and his head sent to Istanbul. The janissaries also forced the sacking of Grand Vezir İbrahim Hilmi Pasha who was absent at the Danubian front, and secured the appointment of their own candidate as janissary commander-in-chief.¹⁹

On 18 October 1807, the north Anatolian grandee and opponent of the ‘New Order’ Canikli Tayyar Mahmud Pasha returned to Istanbul from the Crimea where he had fled in 1806.²⁰ He was soon appointed proxy to the new grand vezir Çelebi Mustafa Pasha but was dismissed within a few months, having antagonized and threatened key statesmen: most significantly, it was said that the janissaries did not want him. In March 1808 he was exiled with a large entourage to Didymoteicho in western Thrace, but his estate was not forfeit, and Sultan Mustafa sent him a pension.²¹

With the failure of Tayyar Mahmud Pasha’s bid to play a leading part in government in the post-‘New Order’ regime, another provincial grandee sought to take the state into his own hands. The magnate Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha had come to prominence following the murder in summer 1806 of the powerful and disruptive Tirsiniklioğlu İsmail Agha, to whom he had been second-in-command on the Danubian front. Tirsiniklioğlu İsmail’s domains in the Silistra area had passed to Bayrakdar Mustafa, and the commander of the ‘New Order’ army was instructed to limit his influence, but – as was so often the case with the empire’s provincial strongmen – the Sultan was effectively left with little choice but to accept him as the dominant power in the region,²² for Bayrakdar Mustafa’s services were essential to the empire’s defence against the Russians in the phase of warfare that had just begun. On 3 February 1807 he was appointed military commander on the Danube front, and governor of the province of Silistra.²³

The providentially strategic location of the territories he controlled brought Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha great responsibilities and rewards, and at the end of the 1807 campaigning season several high-ranking statesmen who had found themselves on the Danube front when Selim was deposed had chosen to remain with him in Ruse rather than return to Istanbul. All proponents of the ‘New Order’, they planned to restore the reforming sultan. When Bayrakdar Mustafa heard news that Grand Vezir Çelebi Mustafa Pasha had invited rival Danubian notables to meet him in Edirne as he returned from campaign, he marched towards the city with 10,000 men in a display of strength which struck fear into the population not just there but in Istanbul. Through an ally who acted as intermediary he reached an understanding with the Grand Vezir who, hoping to defuse this potentially dangerous situation, sent Bayrakdar Mustafa’s rivals away from Edirne and invited him into the city on the pretext of discussing the condition of the army. Sultan Mustafa had neither anticipated nor sanctioned Çelebi Mustafa’s action, and could not understand why Bayrakdar Mustafa had abandoned his responsibilities at the front in the middle of a war with Russia²⁴ – albeit that an armistice had been agreed in August 1807 following the Treaty of Tilsit.

Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha had in fact a great deal to say about the condition of the Danubian army. In a devastating report forwarded to the Grand Vezir’s proxy in Istanbul on 4 July 1808, he complained of a shortage of troops – only a fraction of those requested had reported for duty, as had also been the case the previous year – and of supplies: once local provisions and those from the further Balkans had been consumed, there was such a critical shortage that in the 1807 season he had had to use the produce of his own estates to feed his men; furthermore, at great personal expense he had bought food from the peasants north of the Danube. He pointed out that the Ottoman peasants were suffering under the demands made upon them and, following the example of the Serbs (whose rebellion was under way at this time), were refusing to provide food and fodder for the army. Without troops, provisions and money, he said, it was impossible to conduct the war against Russia. He was scathing about the numbers of non-combatants who accompanied the army, and complained in particular of the 30,000–40,000 soldiers deemed necessary to escort the sacred standard ‘to impress the enemy’, all of them demanding to be fed; he had suggested the previous year that the sacred standard should either not accompany the army at all, or at least remain at Edirne, but to no avail. Soldiers, he said, were needed for fighting.²⁵

The exasperation that underlay Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha’s words was evident. He stressed that he would not have travelled to Edirne unless he had thought it essential to discuss these matters with the Grand Vezir – every hour, he said, cost him money. His sole motivation was the well-being of the state, and the service of the Sultan. He needed provisions and troops – including militia, which he considered an essential component of the campaigning army – for both the Russian and the Serbian fronts, and he needed them now. He saw discipline as one of the main problems besetting the Ottoman war effort, and recommended that trustworthy vezirs be appointed to each stretch of the Danube to co-ordinate the activities of the men under his overall command; he needed a reliable fighting force, not thousands of what he deemed totally worthless pen-pushers. Desertion was another serious problem, said Bayrakdar Mustafa, especially among soldiers from Anatolia.²⁶

Like so many Ottoman provincial malcontents before him, Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha stated his desire to present his respects to the Sultan personally. Even had he wished to, the Grand Vezir could not have resisted this inevitability; he wrote to one of Sultan Mustafa’s closest confidants, a black eunuch in the harem, of Bayrakdar Mustafa’s intentions, but they amounted to a fait accompli. Searching for a way of delaying Bayrakdar Mustafa’s arrival in Istanbul, Sheikhulislam Ataullah Efendi and the Grand Vezir’s proxy suggested the Sultan write to the Grand Vezir to remind him of the customary rituals to be observed on the return of the sacred standard to Istanbul with the army. Whatever their apprehensions, however, they were determined not to provoke a confrontation which could only have a bloody outcome, so the response to the Grand Vezir made it clear that Bayrakdar Mustafa did have the Sultan’s permission to travel to the city.²⁷

As Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha approached Istanbul, Kabakçı Mustafa was hunted down and murdered – on whose orders, whether those of Bayrakdar Mustafa or Sultan Mustafa, is unclear. On 19 July 1808 the Sheikhulislam and the Grand Vezir’s proxy rode out from Istanbul with their retinues to play their part in the ceremony of receiving the sacred standard from the returning army. Sultan Mustafa went to the customary site to the west of Istanbul, near the mustering ground of Daud Pasha, and formally accepted the standard from Grand Vezir Çelebi Mustafa Pasha. Handing it over to the standard bearer, he then returned to the palace ahead of Çelebi Mustafa. Although Bayrakdar Mustafa had reached Daud Pasha, he remained in his tent and did not observe the ceremony.²⁸

The delay occasioned by the ceremony of receiving the sacred standard from the returning army had still not allowed the Sultan and his advisers enough time to devise a plan to confront Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha. Two days later Bayrakdar Mustafa entered a city whose people watched and waited apprehensively to see what would transpire. He first made his way to the grand vezir’s office and there dismissed Çelebi Mustafa Pasha – for having broken the pact they had agreed in Edirne to restore Sultan Selim to the throne. Çelebi Mustafa had been manipulated by Bayrakdar Mustafa for his own ends – and finally outwitted. On Bayrakdar Mustafa’s orders, Sheikhulislam Ataullah Efendi and other high-ranking clerics were dismissed and exiled. Bayrakdar Mustafa next went with his men to the palace, and demanded that the former sultan be produced. Sultan Mustafa’s courtiers knew well enough what this portended, and told their master what he already knew – that as long as Selim lived, his own position was insecure.

On the pretext of bringing Selim before Sultan Mustafa, Mustafa’s men went into the deposed sultan’s quarters and, when he refused to come out, murdered him – when Bayrakdar Mustafa entered the palace he found he was too late. He asked the new Sheikhulislam whether Sultan Mustafa, murderer of an innocent, could any longer be considered the legitimate ruler; receiving the answer he anticipated, he had Mustafa’s brother Mahmud brought from his quarters. Bayrakdar Mustafa and all the senior statesmen swore allegiance to the new Sultan Mahmud II, who offered Bayrakdar Mustafa the grand vezir’s seal of office taken from Çelebi Mustafa Pasha; after initially demurring, he accepted the honour. Those officials held responsible for murdering Selim were executed and their heads displayed at the outer gate of the palace, each with a placard identifying them as ‘traitors to religion and state who had dared to martyr Sultan Selim’.²⁹ Tayyar Mahmud Pasha was another victim of the rise of Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha; his star shone briefly during the reign of Mustafa, who soon after exiling him to Thrace had appointed him to command the fortress of Varna, on the Black Sea coast south of the Danube, but he was executed shortly after the Sultan was deposed.³⁰

The sudden deposition of Mustafa IV and accession of 23-year-old Prince Mahmud on 28 July 1808 surprised everyone. He had no natural allies, and was a mere pawn in the hands of Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha, who had come to Istanbul to reinstate Selim as sultan. Two months after Mahmud’s accession Bayrakdar Mustafa presided over an unusual assembly which brought together members of the central government, including the commanders of the sultan’s regiments and the Sheikhulislam, and some of the leading provincial notables, Bayrakdar Mustafa’s erstwhile peers – a total of 25 men.³¹

The pact which resulted from their deliberations consisted of seven articles imposing a set of obligations on the 25, who pledged allegiance to the new sultan and recognized Grand Vezir Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha as his representative, to whom they undertook to defer as long as he acted justly. They proposed to stamp on janissary or other disorder in Istanbul, and agreed to provide troops for the army and observe the financial demands of the state. All swore to act justly in all matters, guaranteed that their absent fellows would observe their obligations, and undertook to act against them if they did not. In recompense for these solemn promises, the notables awarded themselves the right to pass their lands on to their successors in perpetuity. It was a blatant attempt to formalize the independence from Istanbul for which the notables had struggled so tenaciously, and it was presented to Sultan Mahmud as a fait accompli.³² Only four of the 25 men who signed the pact were provincial notables, those who were supposed to be party to the form of government and power-sharing it laid out; the others were officers of the central government. Mahmud was powerless to resist; the empire was still at war with Russia, the statesmen on whom he might have relied for support against the notables were signatories to the pact – and he could only append his own signature. The original signed document no longer survives, however: it seems that Sultan Mahmud had it destroyed at the first opportunity.³³

The text of the pact survives only in the works of contemporary historians. Two of the four signatories represented the Cebbarzade (Çapanoğulları), and Karaosmanoğulları dynasties, both supporters of Selim’s ‘New Order’.³⁴ Among those provincial notables whose signatures do not appear was Tepedelenli Ali Pasha of Ioannina, who had for so long set out to thwart the authority of Istanbul, and who did not approve of Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha setting the terms of their future relationship with the Sultan and with each other. In the event, the pact never came into effect. Within a few weeks, on 15 November, Bayrakdar Mustafa was killed in a violent janissary revolt which erupted in response to his plans for the creation of a new military corps together with reorganization of the janissaries and curtailment of their privileges. Janissary efforts to secure the restoration of Mustafa IV came to nothing: Mahmud had him murdered as they marched on the palace after setting fire to the mansions of leading statesmen.³⁵ Mahmud was thus left as the only male of the Ottoman dynasty.

Istanbul was yet again the scene of bloody fighting, and even after Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha’s death it took some days of decisive action to bring the janissaries under control. Ayasofya came under attack and the water supply to the palace was cut. Barely able to hold their own, troops loyal to Mahmud hunted down the rioting janissaries wherever they were to be found – in all, some 5,000 janissaries and 600 loyal troops were said to have lost their lives. The navy bombarded the janissary barracks from the Golden Horn, causing much destruction, and fires consumed large areas of the city.³⁶ The price of janissary submission was the disbandment of the new military units organized by Bayrakdar Mustafa as a thinly-disguised alternative to Sultan Selim’s ‘New Order’ troops and the murder of those of Bayrakdar Mustafa’s close associates who could be found; many others were sent into internal exile.³⁷ Despite their high losses, the janissary corps survived: their elimination, considered to be the defining event of Mahmud’s sultanate, was not undertaken until 1826. The legal and bureaucratic reforms of his reign, of which the so-called Tanzimat ‘re-ordering’ of Ottoman public life was a logical outcome and continuation, began earlier, however, and made a far deeper impression than the reforms of Selim III, which had been directed primarily towards enhancing Ottoman military effectiveness.

The piecemeal adoption of infidel armaments and training methods, both early in Selim III’s reign and before that, had singularly failed to bring the Ottomans the victories they sought. The more radical innovations of Selim’s ‘New Order’, seen by him as a first step towards the creation of a modern, disciplined army, failed because they struck at the core of the Ottomans’ perception of their own identity. The pivotal importance of the army, and of the janissaries in particular, to the continuing existence of the state was one of the foundations of this sense of identity, for over the centuries they had been instrumental in making a Sunni Islamic whole out of sprawling and disparate territories. The creation of a new, parallel force seen to be favoured over the traditional guardians of the Ottoman state threatened to undermine their privileged position in society, and the essential role played by these numerous and vociferous troops and the militia who aspired to share their prestige and rewards. Their antipathy to Selim’s reforms was further exacerbated by their inability to make a living, for they were as deeply affected as the rest of the population by the economic downturn of this period.

That fewer policy-makers and power-wielders should have supported Selim’s reform efforts than opposed them is not surprising. Western weaponry was an obviously useful tool in the achievement of specific aims common to both the Ottomans and their rivals – yet there was a body of opinion which would have agreed with an anonymous commentator writing towards the end of the 1768–74 Russian war when he questioned why the Ottomans should have to resort to western military methods, when the infidels had always claimed it was the religious zeal of the Ottomans that made them unbeatable.³⁸ Even among those willing to embrace technological changes seen to be advantageous, however, there were few ready to countenance the cultural transformation implied by the importation of alien ways. For reform to succeed, the impetus had to come from inside Ottoman society – or at least be represented as having done so – otherwise it was unlikely to gain acceptance beyond a limited circle of statesmen and intellectuals. Over the course of the eighteenth century the concept of the ‘ever-victorious frontier of the expanding empire’ had given way to that of the ‘welfare of religion and state’ as a more realistic raison d’être. By the end of the century, diplomacy and the conduct of war were largely the preserve of bureaucrats in the Ottoman state, as they were in Europe, a change in the administrative and cultural landscape that further emphasized the irrelevance of such ancient institutions as the janissaries.

The task of writers at this time who favoured reform was to rationalize change in state and society and present it within an Islamic context; the idea that the welfare of religion and state could – and often should – imply peace rather than war only gradually won wide acceptance, and in this transitional period was rejected by many in ruling circles as well as by those who controlled the means of violence.³⁹ Few stood to gain materially from reform, and Selim’s efforts went too far, too fast: the line between an acceptable and an unacceptable level of imposed change was a very fine one. Over the past hundred years the central government had relinquished administrative and financial authority in a bid both to raise money for the treasury and to expand the class with a vested interest in the perpetuation of the empire, and this had had unforeseen consequences for domestic politics. In some instances the devolution of power to local notables was sufficient to retain their loyalty, but on the periphery of the empire in particular, and where it was accompanied or followed by Great Power meddling, the pressures compounded to exert a decentralizing tendency. Selim had too many disparate interests to satisfy; his loss of legitimacy may be attributed to his misjudgement of the limits of the possible.

By the summer of 1808 the Ottoman Empire was already afflicted by the ‘Western Question’ that eventually brought about its destruction: the Great Powers had abandoned any pretence of respecting the balance-of-power framework within which relations between states had been conducted since the seventeenth century, and instead gave free rein to their all-consuming rivalries – acting them out largely on Ottoman soil. The new strategic configurations of the Napoleonic age meant that the assumptions on which the Ottoman special relationship with France had been based could no longer be taken for granted. The ties that bound Egypt to Istanbul had been weakened still further as a result of the French invasion of 1798, and France was now not averse to discussing partition of the sultan’s domains with Russia. The Ottoman–Russian war which had begun in 1806 dragged on: Ottoman efforts to negotiate a peace settlement had failed, and the status of Moldavia and Wallachia remained in dispute. The Serb revolt also continued. There had been a lull in the fighting while Tsar Alexander of Russia attempted to reach a modus vivendi with Napoleon and to agree with him a common vision of how Europe and the Ottoman Empire might look in the future. As both emperors came to realize, however, each had strategic concerns which prevented a workable relationship, so that the Treaty of Tilsit in fact created more problems than it solved. Nevertheless, the thaw in relations between France and Russia briefly gave Russia hope of an ally to support its territorial claims in the Principalities.

Britain was also beginning to enter the politics of the Near East, although to little effect as yet. British relations with France, Russia and Austria were of greater importance to it than those with the Ottomans, and the ‘phoney war’ of 1807 – occasioned by a British naval show of strength off Istanbul in protest at the diplomatic ascendance of France’s ambassador, but compounded by an expedition intended to prevent the return of the French to Egypt – was concluded by a peace between Britain and the Ottomans in January 1809.⁴⁰ By 1808 Russia occupied Moldavia and much of Wallachia, and in 1810 the Russian army advanced south across the Danube, capturing fortresses essential to Ottoman security as it went; by the end of 1811 Sultan Mahmud was seeking peace. Russia, now itself threatened by Napoleon’s invasion, agreed to settle and under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest of 1812 acquired no more of the Principalities than Bessarabia – the part of Moldavia between the Dniester and the Prut rivers – and certain territories she had won in the Caucasus, which were to prove a continuing source of conflict with the Ottomans.⁴¹ Again, as in the wars of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans were committed to paying reparations to the Russians and although the first of the three instalments was waived, the second and third could be paid only by means of expensive loans negotiated by local and foreign money-brokers.⁴²

Russia’s increased influence in the Balkans was mirrored by her advances against the Muslim states of the Caucasus, where the Ottoman sultans had lost prestige through their unwillingness or inability to protect their coreligionists from Russian encroachment.⁴³In the Arab provinces, and as a result of a Muslim rather than a Christian challenge – extremely damaging to the sultan as protector of the Holy Places – Mecca and Medina were no longer in Ottoman hands. Egypt itself was under the control of a governor – Mehmed Ali Pasha – who was establishing a personal dominion destined to change the relationship with Istanbul for ever. The Ottomans felt beleaguered, as though their empire was no more than a pawn in the politics of the Great Powers. Like other victims of Great Power expansionism – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, Hungary and Venice, for instance – they felt themselves to be suffering, and they offered asylum to fellow sufferers: Poles fleeing the Third Partition of the Commonwealth between Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1795 were only the first of many such immigrants⁴⁴ who followed in the footsteps of Charles XII of Sweden, driven by the Russians to seek asylum at Tighina in 1709, and the Transylvanian prince Francis Rákóczi, when his homeland was finally annexed by the Habsburgs in 1710.

Peace with Russia had its consequences for the Serbian struggle against the Ottomans. Like the Principalities, Serbia had enjoyed a measure of respite while Russia and France argued, but in 1809 an Ottoman army took back much lost territory. Outside events sealed the fate of the rebels, for Serbia was of secondary importance to Russia when war with Napoleon was in prospect. The Treaty of Bucharest provided for a settlement in Serbia, giving the Ottomans the right to reoccupy the territory in return for concessions to the Serbs regarding self-administration.⁴⁵ Resistance continued, however, and was only gradually suppressed, in part because local Ottoman notables refused to co-operate with Istanbul. Belgrade was retaken by the Ottomans in the autumn of 1813 but the pacification of Serbia eluded them: another uprising broke out in 1815, in protest at the harsh policies of the Ottoman governor of Belgrade.

Ottoman incompetence in the Russian war and the events surrounding his accession demonstrated two things to Sultan Mahmud: first, the incontrovertible fact that the janissaries were as unsuited to the task of defending Ottoman frontiers as they were dangerous when idle in Istanbul; second, that the power of the provincial notables exceeded all reasonable bounds. The capital experienced episodes of disorder provoked by janissary uprisings in 1809, 1810 and 1811; most of those called up to serve on the 1811 campaign deserted almost before they had left Istanbul, and Mahmud soon introduced some measures to improve discipline in the corps.⁴⁶ Like that of the janissaries, the performance of the Balkan provincial notables in the 1806–12 war had been less than commendable: although some had given the government the assistance it sought, others, especially those on the Danubian front, had refused to co-operate and had surrendered territory to the Russians without putting up any serious defence.⁴⁷

Mahmud inherited the knotty problem of Mehmed Ali of Egypt, the provincial dynast who most resolutely resisted any attempt by Istanbul to reassert central authority. Of all the quasi-independent territories within the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed Ali’s Egypt had gone furthest down the road to full autonomy. Mahmud must have looked on with a mixture of envy and dismay as this former Albanian soldier ruthlessly eradicated opposition. One of his more notorious acts was the destruction of the military class which had dominated Egypt before his arrival there: in 1811, 450 men assembled for a ceremonial occasion were bloodily massacred, another thousand were murdered by a military expedition led to Upper Egypt by his son İbrahim Pasha, and their tax-farms were appropriated for the treasury.⁴⁸

Mehmed Ali’s example demonstrated that centralization of power made for a strong state. The restructuring of Ottoman finances which had begun at the end of the seventeenth century with the introduction of life-term tax-farming had facilitated the growth of a magnate class, in Istanbul and in the provinces. The provincial magnates whom the state came to rely on to furnish troops and supplies from the time of the Russian wars of the later eighteenth century, in particular, all too frequently disregarded Istanbul’s authority and acted on their own initiative – with unpredictable consequences for the Ottoman political order. Sultan Selim had taken the first faltering steps to regain power for the central authority, but Sultan Mahmud proposed more resolute measures to deprive the magnates of the resources on which their power rested, and at the same time to both lighten the burden imposed on the peasantry by these tax-farmers and strengthen the government’s financial foundation by redirecting provincial revenues from the pockets of local dynasts to the central treasury. From 1813, accordingly, tax-farms that came up for auction could be bid for only by senior administrators of the area where they were situated.⁴⁹ One notable family reined in by this means was the Çapanoğulları of central Anatolia: when Süleyman Bey, head of the dynasty, died in 1813, his domains were awarded to officers of the state to administer.⁵⁰ Although several other notables were subdued at this time,⁵¹ this first attempt to starve provincial strongmen of funds was in general less than successful.⁵² The Egyptian model was clearly unsuited to the unwieldy territories of an empire.

Mehmed Ali was securely entrenched in Egypt, and Mahmud was powerless to dislodge him. The governorship of Thessalonica offered him in 1806 proved insufficiently alluring,⁵³ and in truth he was needed to retrieve Ottoman honour in the Hijaz, where Wahhabi expansion was every bit as unwelcome to Mehmed Ali as to the central government. A campaign was mounted in 1811 for which Mehmed Ali was given responsibility – though with some anxiety as to whether he could be trusted not to retake Mecca and Medina on his own account. The campaign dragged on until 1813, by which time both Mecca and Medina were recovered from the Wahhabi. Mehmed Ali’s son İbrahim Pasha was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces in the Hijaz: by 1818 he had captured the Sa‘udi capital at al-Dir‘aiyah, now a suburb of Riyadh, which was razed to the ground, and the Sa‘udi emir ‘Abd Allah bin Su‘ud, who was sent to Istanbul and beheaded. İbrahim was appointed governor of the Hijaz as his reward.⁵⁴

Accounts of the Ottoman nineteenth century have too often treated the emergence of nationalism in the Balkans as though it were the inevitable result of Ottoman ‘misrule’ in the region – as though Balkan Christians had heroically resisted their Ottoman masters for centuries while awaiting the right moment to break free. This, however, is to ignore both the complicated historical processes that led to the dismemberment of the empire, and events particular to the formation of each successor state created during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was more to the history of the times than the separatist national movements of Ottoman Balkan Christian subjects, but they loom so large in the historical accounts of these nations as to lend weight to this reductionist understanding of the later years of the empire.

The path that led to the creation of the modern Greek state was very different, for example, from the events that resulted, fitfully, in an independent Serbia. No doubt the people of the Peloponnese remembered the anti-Ottoman uprising of 1770 in that region, but by the early nineteenth century Russia had other preoccupations and was no more inclined to foment trouble again among her Orthodox co-religionists in this distant and backward corner of the empire than she was to aid the Serbians. Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, who had held sway in Ioannina from the late 1780s, was quasi-sovereign in the territories he controlled, which at the peak of his power included much of present-day continental Greece and Albania. In his territories the economy was healthy and the social scourges of piracy and banditry were kept in check; although he pursued his own, often independent line in trade and foreign relations,⁵⁵ he was generally conciliatory in his dealings with Istanbul. Despite Sultan Mahmud’s policy of subduing provincial notables, therefore, the government was wary of attacking him: when Ottoman statesmen discussed the matter in 1819, there were those who detected the portents of rebellion in the Peloponnese and Euboea, and feared the consequences of neglecting these in order to fight Tepedelenli Ali. In 1820, however, after much deliberation in his councils of state, the Sultan declared Tepedelenli Ali a rebel and sent an army against him, prompting him to call for an anti-Ottoman uprising in Greece and Albania. The Sultan’s army became bogged down in the effort to subdue Tepedelenli Ali, but ignoring advice from its commander-in-chief in the area, Ahmed Hurşid Pasha, the government insisted that he stick to this objective rather than send forces to deal with the unrest in the Peloponnese – which took the form of attacks on Muslim communities and symbols of the Ottoman authorities, as well as an increased level of brigandage.⁵⁶

Traditionally, 1821 marks the start of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Intent on its policy of suppressing the Balkan notables, the government in Istanbul seemed unaware of the perils of the resulting power vacuum at the local level; nor did it comprehend that with its forces tied up in subduing Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, few men were available to stamp out unrest elsewhere. Greek independence is now annually celebrated on 25 March, in commemoration of the day in 1821 when Germanos, metropolitan of Old Patras, raised the Cross in defiance of the Ottoman authorities at Kalavryta in the northern Peloponnese. Dissatisfied with the reaction of his ministers to the revolt, Mahmud dismissed his grand vezir and sheikhulislam at the end of March. The government called upon the Orthodox Patriarch, Gregory V, to excommunicate the rebels, and the Church was enlisted to use its influence to restore order.⁵⁷ Once the scope of the uprising in the Peloponnese became clear, however, he was unceremoniously hanged – on Easter Saturday, 22 April 1821 – at the gate of the Patriarchate in Istanbul; he was deemed to have forfeited the trust placed in him by the Sultan as leader of the Orthodox subjects of the empire – to have broken the compact with the sultans which dated back to the days of Mehmed the Conqueror.⁵⁸

In March 1821, as Tepedelenli Ali Pasha was resisting Ottoman forces in the western Balkans, an aide-de-camp to the Tsar, General Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, who claimed descent from the Byzantine princely dynasty of the Comnenus, led a small force south across the Prut, hoping to gain support from anti-Ottoman elements in Moldavia and Wallachia. When news reached Istanbul of his audacious move, the Patriarch anathematized him and his followers as ‘impious leaders, desperate fugitives and destructive traitors’⁵⁹– but it did not prevent his hanging. The Ottoman government was taken quite by surprise, and took measures to disarm and register the sizeable Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul and Edirne and other large cities – though at the same time the Sultan issued an edict intended to prevent Muslim mobs attacking them.⁶⁰ Ypsilantis was briefly able to take over the government of Moldavia, but Wallachia was in turmoil – in the throes of an anti-boyar revolt under the militia leader Tudor Vladimirescu – and in late June his meagre forces were defeated by an Ottoman army. The Russian government did not back him, and the Serbian prince Miloš Obrenović – Kara George’s successor – failed to respond to his proposal for combined resistance to the Ottomans.⁶¹ Indeed, it is uncertain whether Ypsilantis’s expedition was co-ordinated with the disturbances in the Peloponnese, or whether it was simply a quixotic gesture by a man who dreamed of a recreated Byzantine Empire in the Ottoman Balkans in which Orthodox Christianity replaced Islam.

In February 1822 Tepedelenli Ali Pasha was murdered. His part in the inception of the Greek revolt is still debated, but when his severed head was exposed in a dish in the first courtyard of Topkapı Palace it was accompanied by a detailed narrative of his crimes, describing him as ‘a traitor to our religion. . . who has sent huge sums to the infidels of the Morea [i.e. the Peloponnese]. . . to encourage them to revolt against the Muslims’.⁶² His nemesis, the vezir Halet Efendi, whose insistence that Tepedelenli Ali was a rebel had led to the campaign against him in 1820,⁶³ had betrayed the undertaking of Commander-in-Chief Ahmed Hurşid Pasha that Tepedelenli Ali would be left alive if he surrendered.⁶⁴ By a sweet irony, Halet Efendi met with a similar fate: his crime, according to the bill pinned up beside his head, was his propensity to intrigue and discord.⁶⁵ Halet Efendi had been Mahmud’s favourite, winning the Sultan’s trust in the early years of his reign in the struggle against the provincial magnates. He traded on his influence to amass a great fortune, and secretly worked to inhibit Mahmud’s proposed reforms of the janissary corps by warning him that they would provoke disorder, and directing his attention to other affairs of state. A measure of Halet Efendi’s influence is that in 1821 his bold proposal to issue more arms to the janissaries was accepted by the state authorities. The next year, however, widespread discontent following Ottoman failure in the Peloponnese caused the Sultan to question his faith in him – the system of selling offices to buy janissary support which had served the Vezir for so long began to unravel. When janissary leaders appealed to Mahmud to remove Halet Efendi, he took the request seriously and dismissed his favourite before ordering his execution.⁶⁶

Even if the 1770 uprising in the Peloponnese and Russia’s part in it were not direct antecedents of later Greek anti-Ottoman revolts, since the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 Russia had seen itself as the protector of Orthodox Christians under Ottoman sovereignty, and the Crimea – quasi-independent under Russian protection after 1774, then annexed by Russia in 1783 – provided a base for further resistance against Ottoman rule. Greeks moved into the Crimea at Russia’s behest as refugees from the Peloponnese fiasco, brought there by Catherine’s general Orlov to man the fortresses at the outlet of the Sea of Azov,⁶⁷ and the numbers of Greek merchants in Black Sea, as well as in Aegean and Adriatic ports, grew during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Educated Greeks were receptive to the revolutionary ideas emanating from America and France in the 1770s and 1790s, and to the notions of liberalism and nationality circulating in Europe during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The far-flung mercantile communities thrived, and funded the establishment of churches and schools and libraries and publishing houses, which they set up more freely than in Ottoman territory. The first stirrings of a liberation movement among Greek intellectuals emanated from Odessa where a secret society, Philiki Etairia or the ‘Friendly Society’, was founded in 1814, dedicated to fostering Greek patriotism. It was influenced by the work of an İzmir-born scholar who passed more than half his life in France, Adamantios Korais, and a Hellenized Vlach, Rigas Velestinlis. Korais’s translations of Greek classics into a more demotic language brought the sense of an inspiring Greek past to his readers, while Rigas sought inspiration in the model of a new Byzantium with the governing institutions of republican France.⁶⁸

The struggle that took place in the Peloponnese over the next years was bloody and, in territorial terms, inconclusive. A first republican constitution was declared at Epidavros in January 1822, but following the promulgation of a revised version the following year, civil war broke out as the leaders of the revolt competed for power, adding further horror to the inter-communal massacres taking place in the Peloponnese and the islands.⁶⁹ Opposed to those who dreamed of nationhood were those who considered their interests best served by a continuance of the status quo – the upper echelons of the Greek Church who enjoyed status and privilege under the Ottomans, and prominent Greeks in Istanbul or the provinces; nor could anything be expected from the uneducated rank-and-file of the faithful.⁷⁰ Russia maintained a cautious stance vis-à-vis the Greek revolt,⁷¹ its desire to encourage co-religionists in their struggle against the Ottomans perhaps tempered by an awareness that such encouragement might serve as an example to its own aggrieved Muslim subjects. The other European powers, reluctant to see Russia gain advantage in the Balkans, were adamant in their refusal to co-operate in schemes which might result in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans themselves were handicapped in their response by hostilities on their eastern frontier where intermittent border incursions by the Qajars led to war against Iran between 1820 and 1823, which further limited the number of troops available to put down the Greek uprising. In 1824 Mahmud took the desperate step of inviting Mehmed Ali of Egypt to assist with his modernized army and navy, in return for which İbrahim Pasha was to be awarded the governorship of the Peloponnese. İbrahim Pasha set sail in July from Alexandria, but was not able to land in the bay of Methoni until February 1825 because of Greek superiority at sea. First capturing several key coastal strongholds in the Mani, the Egyptian expeditionary force soon controlled most of the Peloponnese; on the Greek mainland, Missolonghi, at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, fell in April 1826 after a siege of fifteenth months, and Athens a year later – little territory remained in the hands of the rebels. İbrahim Pasha’s success served only to concentrate the attention of the European powers, however; Britain, France and Russia set aside their differences, and two years of complex diplomatic moves culminated in the Sultan’s refusal of a mediated armistice and the decision of the Powers to blockade the Peloponnese.⁷² On 20 October 1827 the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet was destroyed in the battle of Navarino by a combined Anglo-French–Russian fleet at Pylos in the south-western Peloponnese, and İbrahim Pasha’s troops were evacuated. The Ottoman defeat made Great Power intervention in the incipient Greek state inevitable.

In May 1826 Sultan Mahmud issued an edict for the formation of a new military corps, initially numbering in excess of 7,500 men, to be recruited by drawing 150 men from each of 51 janissary companies in Istanbul – around one-fifth of the total number of janissaries on active duty. Unlike Selim’s ‘New Order’ troops, they were not intended to form a parallel army; the hope was, rather, to reform the janissary corps from within, by means of restructuring, and providing them with the drill and other military skills they sorely needed if they were to have any chance of standing up to the might of Russia. Just before the proclamation of the edict, senior clerics, janissary officers, and other high-ranking officials both of the court and of the auxiliary military forces were required to sign an undertaking that they would all accept Mahmud’s reform plan and do nothing to undermine its chance of success.⁷³

The passions aroused by the creation of the ‘New Order’, and the terrible consequences of the failure of Selim’s reforms to take hold at that time, were a salutary lesson to Sultan Mahmud that he must prepare the ground before embarking on his own innovations. Following the removal of Halet Efendi in 1822 he began to gather around him men he could trust, and to win over all groups which might threaten his intended reform of military manpower, but it was another four years before he felt secure enough to proceed.İbrahim Pasha’s victory at Missolonghi in April 1826 seemed to indicate that the tide was turning in favour of the Ottomans, and gave a necessary boost to the Sultan’s confidence.⁷⁴

Determined to succeed where Selim had not, Mahmud continued the tradition established by his predecessors of requiring leading clerics to debate matters of religion in his presence as a means of keeping informed of currents of thought outside the palace.⁷⁵ In general, high-ranking clerics had been inclined to support the mostly military reform measures of the later eighteenth century, but their subordinates tended to be more conservative and had more influence among the common people – janissary opposition to reforms, for example, had often been buttressed by the traditionalism of low-ranking clerics⁷⁶ – and it was necessary for the Sultan to conciliate these lower echelons and the common people, by visibly displaying his sincere commitment to religion and his view of it as a cornerstone of the state which he had no intention of jeopardizing by the reforms he had in mind. To this end he attended religious gatherings, enjoined the observation of prayers, endowed foundations, and built mosques in Istanbul and in the provinces.⁷⁷Implementation of the edict for the reorganization of the janissaries was declared to be a religious duty, and an imam was assigned to each newly-established company to lead them in their religious observance.⁷⁸

The clerical establishment was easier to win over than the janissaries themselves. Religious symbolism was used by the Ottomans’ imperial neighbours, Russia and Austria, to boost the morale of their military manpower – Tsar Alexander I tried to persuade his cannon fodder to believe in a religious Utopia, while on the Habsburg frontier with the Ottomans, Catholics and Orthodox alike went to war under the banner of the Virgin Mary – and Mahmud tried to employ Muslim symbolism to similar ends.⁷⁹ A year earlier the imperial press had issued an Ottoman-language translation of a well-known, ninth-century Arabic treatise on the law of war in Islam; this was the first occasion on which the example of the Prophet Muhammad was invoked to encourage the janissaries to fight more enthusiastically – and it met with resistance from them.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, Mahmud persevered in seeking ways to cloak his reforms in familiar language: in order that the revamped janissary army be considered Muslim rather than western in inspiration, drill was to be based explicitly on that used by Mehmed Ali’s army which had, it was said, proved its worth in the Hijaz and in the Peloponnese.⁸¹ (Interestingly, in 1822, Mehmed Ali had ordered İbrahim Pasha to adopt the ‘New Order’ model of Selim III.)⁸² In a calculated appeal to tradition, Mahmud named the new corps eşkinci after one that had been important in the time of Sultan Mehmed II.⁸³

Murmurings of dissent among the janissary rank-and-file were evident from the time of the proclamation of the edict for their reform: they were not impressed by the Sultan’s proposals for a new corps to be created within their ranks. Nevertheless, the first drill of the eşkinci corps, on 12 June 1826, went off without trouble, albeit in an atmosphere of great apprehension; shortage of uniforms and equipment meant that the number of men present to be put through their paces was only several hundred out of the 5,000 already enrolled. The next day’s drill also passed off completely without incident.⁸⁴

The following evening, barely two weeks after Sultan Mahmud had proclaimed his reform of the janissaries, an insurrection began. On the night of 14 June small bands of janissaries began to gather at their parade ground; some among them roamed the streets of Istanbul, firing guns and starting fires and looking for their commander-in-chief whom they felt had sold them out. He managed to evade them,⁸⁵ but at dawn the many hundreds by now assembled at the parade ground – one eyewitness dubbed them ‘prattling curs’⁸⁶ – overturned their cauldrons in the traditional gesture of defiance. Again they surged through the city, looting as they went; one group sacked Grand Vezir Selim Mehmed Pasha’s mansion, and the women of his household escaped only by hiding in an underground cavern in the garden.⁸⁷ The Sultan was at his palace in Beşiktaş when the insurrection broke out. Some of his predecessors, apt to hide at the first sign of a janissary mutiny, would have stayed where they were, but Mahmud took a caique down the Bosporus to Topkapı Palace. So inevitable had been a janissary uprising against the reforms, and such pains had the Sultan taken to ensure that they succeeded, that a contingency plan had already been prepared.⁸⁸ State officials gathered in the palace and held an emergency council before the trouble could get out of hand; when they sent to ask the janissary rebel leaders the cause of their dissatisfaction, the answer came back:

We will not do this sort of drill. Our ancient practice and drill for war is to hit earthenware jugs with rifle shot, and to hack at felt matting with the sabre. We want [to lay our hands on] those responsible for this innovation.⁸⁹

Contemporary sources suggest that more than 13,000 loyal troops were with the statesmen and officials in the palace; some put the figure as high as 23,000 – or even 60,000. The Sultan made a stirring speech on his arrival there, and following the Sheikhulislam’s juridical opinion to the effect that Islamic law permitted such an uprising to be put down with force, Mahmud went into the treasury and brought out the sacred standard of the Prophet. The standard was duly taken from the palace and hung up on the pulpit in the mosque of Sultan Ahmed on the Hippodrome. It worked its magic, and as criers went around the city calling all true Muslims to assemble beneath it, the populace hurried to do so. Officers of state who gathered in the mosque to discuss how to proceed decided to reject negotiation. A body of loyal troops – artillerymen, sappers and bombardiers – made for the janissary barracks, but the gates were shut fast against them as the rebel janissaries barricaded themselves inside. The imperial cannoneers opened fire, and the barracks were soon ablaze; those who could, fled, to engage in hand-to-hand battle with the loyal troops waiting outside – the rest burned inside.⁹⁰

Mahmud had not intended to wipe the janissaries off the face of the earth in such a violent manner, but both his care in preparing for the introduction of his reform of the corps, and the realism that demanded a contingency plan should matters go awry, meant that when he found himself with no other option, he could resolutely bring the operation to its grisly conclusion. Both an Ottoman witness and the British ambassador Stratford Canning put the number of dead at around 6,000.⁹¹ In addition to those killed in the attack on the janissary barracks – which according to another Ottoman witness lasted only 21 minutes⁹² – many thousands more were hunted down in the succeeding days. Roads and ports were strictly controlled so that news of the ‘Auspicious Incident’, as it was called, and of the new edict formally abolishing the janissary corps, could not get out before provincial governors had received their instructions on how to proceed. They were ordered to confiscate all janissary equipment they could lay their hands on, and evacuate the janissary garrisons from all forts, replacing them with their own men; the word ‘janissary’ was to be expunged from the vocabulary – a typical Ottoman compromise. Men who called themselves janissaries had been bringing disorder to provinces all over the empire for years, and people everywhere embraced the chance to take revenge: many local janissary leaders were executed, but many of the rank-and-file must have melted back into the civilian life they had never truly forsaken. Although its members had played no part in the janissary rebellion, the militia garrisoning the Bosporus forts – which had proved its unreliability with its rebellion against Sultan Selim’s ‘New Order’ – was dissolved. The government also took the opportunity to cleanse Istanbul of those it considered undesirable – people of the underclass of the crowded city, who needed little encouragement to join in any disorder. During the two and a half months following the liquidation of the janissaries 20,000 people were expelled and sent back to their native provinces – and they were forbidden to return.⁹³

Mahmud quickly set about creating a new army. The ‘Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad’ was initially to consist of 12,000 infantry and some 1,550 cavalrymen in Istanbul, with further units in the provinces. Detailed regulations governed their conditions of service – they would serve for a minimum of twelve years, with a right to leave once a year – and their dress, which was European-style.

At the appointed times, majors will each be allocated by the state treasury a heavy jacket with frogging of gilt thread and a pair of full-fashioned trousers, close-fitted to the top of the shins, of dark red broadcloth, and a loose-fitting robe and, for the head, a quilted calpac-type cap ornamented with gilt thread and a Lahore shawl [i.e. of fine wool]; these will be replaced as necessary, on the occasion of the payment of salary. On 6 May each year, adjutant majors will each be allotted a short heavy jacket and a short loose-fitting robe and a quilted calpac-type cap ornamented with gilt thread and a Baghdad shawl [i.e. probably of silk or cotton] in a floral pattern and, to the captains and lieutenants and standard-bearers and sergeants, the aforementioned garments minus the shawl; and to each of the rank-and-file soldiers and scribes a full-length heavy jacket of broadcloth blended with raw silk. The uniform of the rank-and-file will also consist of a plain quilted calpac-type cap and a drill cloak of strong coarse wool and a short loose-fitting robe and full trousers, snug up to the top of the shins, of homespun wool, and drawers, and a light half-boot.⁹⁴

Traditionally the janissary corps had been made up of Christian converts to Islam, and no doubt converts had continued to join even after Muslim-born men came to form its backbone; the law-code for the new ‘Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad’ laid down that no converts should be enlisted. Non-Muslims were found among the dead janissaries in Istanbul, identified by the sign of the Cross tattooed on their arms; the Sultan maintained they had been spies, Christians masquerading as Muslims.⁹⁵

The janissary barracks in Istanbul were razed, and the new army was quartered outside the city at Levent Çiftliği, Üsküdar and Daud Pasha, where Selim III had built barracks for his ‘New Order’ troops. The military and naval engineering schools, the medical school and other such institutions were expanded to support the new forces. Unlike his forebears, Mahmud involved only a handful of foreign advisers in the establishment of his new army – the Ottomans had few European friends at this time, and the canny governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha, when approached by the Sultan, claimed that his own drill officers were not yet ready for the task – while his foreign instructors ‘had become accustomed in Egypt to high salaries and expensive uniforms, and their presence in Istanbul would be obstructive to the Ottoman army’.⁹⁶

One of the handful of foreigners to get involved was Signor Calosso, a former officer of the Piedmontese cavalry who had been living in Istanbul for some years, who taught Sultan Mahmud to ride in the European style. As the Scottish traveller Charles Macfarlane wrote in 1828 when he visited the city:

The difference of this from the Turkish style of equitation is so immense as to offer no trifling difficulty to one accustomed to the latter, with huge saddles like cradles, and short and almost immoveable stirrups that tuck up the knees in close contact with the groin. Indeed, so considerable is this difficulty, that but few of the regular imperial guard could yet keep a steady seat with their long stirrups . . . Mahmood was indisputably the best horseman à la Européen in his army; and this acquirement, together with another proficiency he was fast arriving at, viz. that of commanding and manoeuvring a squadron of horse, formed then his pride and glory.⁹⁷

The abolition of the janissaries was followed within a month by a government attack on the Bektaşi, the dervish order most closely associated with them – the eponymous founder was patron saint of the corps, which was, indeed, often referred to as the ‘Bektaşi corps’. Leaders of dervish orders acceptable to the government – the Nakşibendi, Kadiri, Halveti, Mevlevi and Sa‘di – were co-opted to adduce arguments for the suppression of the Bektaşi. Whatever degree of reluctance they may have felt about pronouncing on the fate of their fellows, they had no choice but to rubber-stamp what was in effect a political decision, presented as a religious one. The charge levelled against the Bektaşi was traditional enough – that of heterodoxy, so often used historically to justify politically expedient action against Muslims whose orthodox Sunni credentials were in doubt. Prominent members of the order were executed, and Bektaşi property in Istanbul was destroyed, or confiscated and sold, or converted to other uses. The ruling applied not only in the capital: throughout Rumeli and Anatolia the break with the past was pitilessly emphasized with the redirection of revenue from Bektaşi lands to the treasury of Mahmud’s new army.⁹⁸

Rumour and misinformation fed the purges: many of those anathematized as such were not Bektaşi at all, and this applied to both high and low. The grand vezir, Selim Mehmed Pasha, was made responsible for rooting out Bektaşi adherents in Istanbul – but it came to the ears of the contemporary court chronicler Ahmed Lutfi Efendi that Selim Mehmed Pasha was himself a Bektşsi.⁹⁹ From the upper strata of the religious establishment, Şanizade Ataullah Efendi – a former court chronicler, and author of important medical works – was accused in 1826 of being a Bektaşi sympathizer, and exiled from Istanbul; he died of a broken heart – so it was said – before the Sultan’s order of exile could reach him.¹⁰⁰ The practice of affiliation to more than one dervish order was so common, and the attempt to eradicate Bektaşism at this time so vehement, that sheikhs of other orders were also rounded up and sent into internal exile. Largely because of their infiltration into and acceptance by other orders, however, especially the officially-favoured Nakşibendi order – on whom their properties were bestowed – the Bektaşi were able to survive clandestinely, and by mid-century they were again finding open favour in elite circles.¹⁰¹

Association with the janissaries also brought execution for the politically-influential heads of the three wealthiest Jewish families in Istanbul – Adjiman, Carmona and Gabbai. Isaiah Adjiman was banker to the janissary corps at the time, as his predecessors had been before him; the other two were said also to have links with janissary finances. Their estates were confiscated, and doubtless the resulting treasury windfall was a consideration sealing their fate.¹⁰² Apologists for this treatment of Jews see matters differently, however, blaming their deaths on Armenian–Jewish rivalry over lucrative financial posts.¹⁰³ (Wealthy Armenian bankers had themselves suffered execution and dispossession at times: a notable case was that of Yakub Houvanessian, who had managed the financial affairs of Mahmud I’s long-serving chief black eunuch Hacı Beşir Agha in the mid-eighteenth century.)¹⁰⁴

The summary execution of the Jewish bankers and the suppression of the Bektaşi brought widespread complaint – although Mahmud had stopped short of formally proscribing the Bektaşi order – and the costs of his reforms were biting: all the officials on whom he had relied for the success of his plans to improve his army were handsomely rewarded, and new taxes were levied on the artisans of the city to make up the shortfall. The people of Istanbul were numbed by the events of these months – insecure, and harassed by the authorities, they watched in horror as dead bodies, ‘many of them torn, and in part devoured by dogs’, washed up on the shore below Topkapı Palace; plague broke out in the city in late July as the number of corpses mounted. On 31 August 1826, by which time he thought his victory over the janissaries complete, the Sultan replaced the sacred standard in the treasury. Almost immediately a terrible fire began to rage through the city, whose houses were dry as tinder because of the summer heat; former janissaries who had escaped the purge were held responsible by many for setting the blaze.¹⁰⁵

Within months of the defeat of the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet in the battle of Navarino, Russia declared war on the Ottomans; in April 1828 the Russian army crossed into Moldavia, and by July 1829 had reached Edirne – only 200 kilometres from Istanbul – while their Caucasian forces had taken north-eastern Anatolia as far as Erzurum and Trabzon, seizing many other fortresses along the way. The Ottomans sued for peace, which was concluded with the Treaty of Adrianople (Edirne). As one of the terms of the peace the Ottomans acquiesced in the establishment of an independent Greek state comprising the Peloponnese and part of mainland Greece together with some islands. In May 1832 the fledgling Greek republic officially became a kingdom, under the ‘protection’ of Britain, France, Russia, and Bavaria – the last of which provided the seventeen-year-old Catholic Prince Otto, son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, to be its king. This recognition of the new state marked the beginning of the European involvement in Greece which was to last throughout the nineteenth century. Under the Treaty of Adrianople Russia won the right to trade within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, its occupation of part of Georgia and Armenia was recognized and, of particular significance, so was Russian influence in the Danubian Principalities.¹⁰⁶ To Britain, especially, this development was an unwelcome milestone in Russia’s achievement of control in the Balkans and over the Ottoman Empire: she was beginning to see Russia as a significant potential threat to her growing interests in the east. Over the coming years Great Power politics underwent a realignment at the heart of which lay Britain’s determination to prevent the break-up of the Ottoman Empire to the benefit of Russia.¹⁰⁷

Despite the onerous provisions of the peace treaty and the accompanying loss of prestige, Sultan Mahmud survived defeat by Russia. For him it was merely a demonstration that the war had come too soon: the benefits of his military reforms were not yet sufficiently far-reaching. For lower-ranking clerics, however, it demonstrated yet again that western-inspired innovations were inimical to the tenets of Islam. They not only withdrew their support but encouraged the people of the provinces to join their protests. The popular uprisings that swept through Anatolia in 1829 and 1830 were an opportunity for erstwhile janissaries to make their continuing nuisance value felt.¹⁰⁸ Against this background of external humiliation and internal disquiet, Mahmud pursued reform with renewed urgency. His ambitions, unlike those of his predecessors, were not limited to the military sphere alone: it was evident to him that no piecemeal enhancement of military effectiveness was of itself sufficient to maintain Ottoman integrity and sustain an active role for the Ottoman Empire in international decision-making. His aim, therefore, was nothing less than a transformation of society – a re-ordering or Tanzimat, ‘the Auspicious Re-ordering’ as he called it in an edict written shortly before his death.¹⁰⁹

Accordingly, Mahmud turned his attention to the administration of the empire, aiming to recentralize it as he had the army and the treasury. But first he needed an accurate idea of the empire’s resources. In 1830–31, therefore, Rumeli, Anatolia and the Aegean Islands were subjected to their first modern census, designed to count and categorize Ottoman subjects with a view to ascertaining their military and tax obligations; it was completed within a year and, to make it almost impossible to escape the census-taker’s register, was intended to be repeated every six months.¹¹⁰

Mahmud was the first Ottoman sultan to tour his domains for the purpose of seeing for himself how his subjects lived. Between 1830 and his death in 1839 he made five trips, to Tekirdağ on the north coast of the Sea of Marmara in January 1830; to the Dardanelles and Edirne in June 1831 – when he stayed away from Istanbul for a full month; to Gemlik and İzmit to visit the naval dockyards for a week in September 1833; a second visit to İzmit in November 1836 to launch a new ship of the line; and in April 1837 he spent more than a month touring Rumeli, visiting Varna on the Black Sea coast, Silistra and Ruse on the Danube, and Shumen, Veliko Tŭrnovo, Kazanlŭk and Stara Zagora in Bulgaria. On each journey he visited shrines and military installations, inspected public works and promised state aid in building more, met local dignitaries, and lent an ear to the concerns of the common people, both Muslim and non-Muslim.¹¹¹

Ottoman administration had evolved to meet the demands of the changing functions it was called upon to fulfil, and traditionally there had been a fluidity between its three main branches – military, civil and judicial-religious – with many prominent statesmen starting their careers in the last-named branch and moving across into the military or civil branch. In the final two years of his reign, beginning in 1837, Mahmud established three ministries which, although they proved to be short-lived, set an important precedent for the future: the ministry of the interior, headed by the grand vezir (from this time on sometimes also referred to as prime minister); the foreign ministry, which had emerged as a separate branch of government during the late seventeenth century; and the ministry of justice. A hierarchical structure was introduced for civil servants, the old system of annual appointments was dropped, and salaries replaced the customary and much-abused system of fees. The supreme council of justice set up by Mahmud’s government in 1838 to prepare and implement legislation was later expanded, and remained the principal legal body of the empire.¹¹²

The pages of Ottoman history are filled with accounts of expropriations and executions of high-ranking officials – including, in the seventeenth century, members of the supposedly-exempt religious establishment – summarily punished at the whim of the sultan and often at the instigation of rivals for power; victims were frequently led to believe they had attracted the lesser punishment of exile only to find the executioner in hot pursuit. The last bureaucrat to suffer this fate was Pertev Pasha, head of the ministry for civil affairs (soon to become the ministry of the interior), in 1837. In a case of factional antipathy combining elements of international diplomacy and conflicting directions in policy-making, his rival Akif Pasha, head of what was shortly renamed the foreign ministry, persuaded the Sultan of Pertev’s perfidy, accusing him in particular of closeness to the British. Mustafa Reşid Pasha, known simply as Reşid Pasha, Mahmud’s most brilliant ambassador and a protégé of Pertev Pasha, had become foreign minister by the time of his patron’s death, but could not save him: instead he pressed for the abolition of these extra-judicial punishments and expropriations, and this was accepted as one aspect of the penal code for officials and judges of 1838.¹¹³

Not content with rationalizing government procedures, Mahmud sought also to remove the visible markers of difference between individuals – this was an extraordinary measure, for external appearances had always counted in the Ottoman Empire, and the sumptuary laws governing the dress proper to an individual’s status in society were enforced, or allowed to lapse, or rewritten, as political circumstances demanded. As recently as 1814 Mahmud himself had warned the people of Istanbul that they must wear appropriate garb ‘because it has become impossible to differentiate one class from another’:

The people of the Exalted Abode of the Sultanate [i.e. Istanbul] are divided into numerous classes and every class has its own costume; they should go about wearing that costume, with everyone observing established custom and knowing their place, and honouring and respecting their betters and military officers and obeying them . . . And those in the retinues of pashas, and members of the imperial guard and the constabulary and tradesmen must not wrap a shawl and cotton embroidered in silk around their heads like galleon sailors, and whatever their status and the peculiarities of their dress, they must garb themselves appropriately. For some time . . . a blind eye has been turned, and the spendthrift of all classes have abandoned their former dress and the garments peculiar to them, and they have dressed in a recklessly extravagant manner according to whatever enters their heads . . . most palace officials and the military class and tradesmen have altered their ancient costume and their essential appearance.¹¹⁴

The fez condemned by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) – first president of the Turkish Republic – in 1925 as a relic of the Ottoman past had been introduced by Mahmud II a century earlier. His imposition of the new head-gear on his new army proved remarkably problem-free – the fez was already worn by the military forces of the Magrebi provinces and Egypt, as it was by troops in the retinue of the Sharif of Mecca, so it was abundantly clear that there was no canonical objection to it. It had in fact already made its appearance in the Ottoman army, worn by musketeers fighting against the rebellious Balkan notable Pasvanoğlu Osman Pasha of Vidin. The wearing of the fez was extended to government employees in 1829; the support of the religious establishment was sought, and mosque preachers were enlisted to convince the people that the fez was acceptable.¹¹⁵

The sumptuary laws had distinguished people by religion as well as by rank, and those whose only claim to superiority was their status as Muslims were strongly opposed to Mahmud’s demands for uniformity, by which this religious distinction became invisible. Non-Muslims, on the other hand, even those who were not bureaucrats, were keen to embrace this symbol of a new age, one in which they hoped to co-exist on equal terms with Muslims.¹¹⁶ Clerics proved steadfastly immune to sultanic blandishments, and rejected outright Mahmud’s demand that they too adopt the new headgear in place of their turbans.¹¹⁷ Mahmud’s own adoption of the trousers and frock-coat – in a modified version known as istanbulin – of his fellow monarchs in Europe demonstrated the sincerity of his commitment to this break with the past.

Cultural displays in the western idiom became all the rage in the rarefied circles in which Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims mingled, but did not stop there. Mahmud invited the composer Giuseppe Donizetti, brother of the better-known Gaetano, to Istanbul as master of the sultan’s music, with the task of training the military band (first founded by Selim III for his ‘New Order’ troops) which had replaced the janissary band whose sound had once struck fear into the hearts of their infidel foes. Contemporary Italian music soon became popular at court.¹¹⁸ Since about the middle of the eighteenth century sacred architecture had displayed a westernizing, baroque tendency – as exemplified in the Nuruosmaniye mosque built in the 1750s – of which perhaps the last example was the Mosque of Victory (Nusretiye), built between 1823 and 1826 and named for Mahmud’s triumph over the janissaries. Mahmud continued the very un-Islamic and un-Ottoman practice of having his portrait painted, and presenting copies – possibly in cameo form – to his own statesmen and to foreign dignitaries. He was bolder than Selim, however, and in addition ordered his portrait to be hung on view in public places such as barracks and government offices, just as other European monarchs of the time did. The religious establishment strongly disapproved of such display of the royal person, but in 1832 he nevertheless presented a bejewelled portrait of himself to the sheikhulislam of the time.¹¹⁹ Reflecting on the splendid ceremonial accompanying the hanging of the royal portrait in the Selimiye barracks at Harem in Üsküdar in 1836, the court historian Ahmed Lutfi Efendi countered possible canonical objections with the arguments that it was beneficial to preserve the likeness of the truly great – such as Sultan Mahmud – and that the practice conformed to ancient custom. He also noted, however, that when Mahmud’s portrait was presented to Arab notables, any religious formulae were omitted,¹²⁰ in order to avoid further upsetting people whose support he needed and to whom the very fact of figural representation might have been offensive.

In Egypt, Mehmed Ali had gone further than Mahmud down the road of overhauling his domains, but his reforms were achieved at great cost and the results were not always as successful as he had hoped: changes in the military, financial and agricultural spheres – of which an extensive irrigation programme was an integral component – were pushed through at the expense of the peasantry, while his new army had singularly failed to impress in the Navarino campaign of 1827. Mehmed Ali promptly took further measures to improve both his army and his navy.¹²¹

France was disappointed in its hopes of using Mehmed Ali for its own purposes in the Sultan’s Magrebi provinces – for he was convinced that his interests lay in the eastern Mediterranean, not in the west¹²² – and acted on its own, progressively occupying the Ottoman satellite province of Algiers from the 1830s. As compensation for his losses at the hands of the Great Powers in the Peloponnese Mehmed Ali requested of Sultan Mahmud the Syrian provinces, rich in natural and human resources; the Sultan awarded him instead the governorship of Crete, but he rejected it, aware that the costs of keeping order on the island would be a drain on his finances. In 1831 he launched land and sea campaigns against Syria. Commanding the revitalized Egyptian army, his son İbrahim Pasha routed the Ottoman forces and advanced into Anatolia where he met with an eager response from the local population. Such an act of open revolt could not be tolerated by Istanbul: like insubordinate governors before them down the ages, with Tepedelenli Ali Pasha of Ioannina only the latest example, Mehmed Ali and İbrahim were branded rebels, and an army under the grand vezir, Reşid Pasha, was sent against them. When the two armies met outside Konya, the Ottoman army was defeated and the Grand Vezir taken prisoner.¹²³

Possibly Mehmed Ali had no intention of declaring independence of the Sultan at this time¹²⁴ – his ambitions certainly drove him to test the boundaries of his vassalage to their limits, but in all probability he had no idea of operating outside the framework of the empire; he was, after all, an Ottoman. İbrahim Pasha saw matters differently. Even as Mehmed Ali wrote to Mahmud asking forgiveness – at the same time demanding that he be allowed to keep the extensive territories he had won – İbrahim was insisting that his father should mint coins in his own name and have his name used in the Friday prayer.¹²⁵ Yet again, it seemed, the greatest threat to the empire’s integrity was found to come from within it: by January 1833 İbrahim had advanced to Kütahya, within striking distance of Bursa. Supplies for Istanbul were partly cut off by the Egyptian advance and famine threatened in the city. Failing to gain definite promises of help from either Britain or France, Sultan Mahmud was forced to call upon Tsar Nicholas for help, and in February 1833 the Russians established a bridgehead up the Bosporus from Istanbul.¹²⁶ Such an appeal for assistance against one of the Ottoman Empire’s own governors to a long-time adversary whose motives for intervention could only be self-serving was unprecedented and a measure of the empire’s weakness.

Mehmed Ali emerged from this adventure with profit. Repeated attempts to appease him had brought him, by April 1833, the governorships of Egypt, Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli (in Syria), Acre, Crete, Beirut, Safed, Jerusalem and Nablus; İbrahim Pasha was to govern Jiddah, Habeş and Mecca, and at the beginning of May was appointed revenue-collector of the Anatolian province of Adana, from whose forests he hoped to extract timber to build up his fleet. In July a so-called mutual defence pact between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was signed, the Treaty of Hunkarİskelesi, named for the upper Bosporus base of the Russian fleet during the summer of 1833. The devil was in the detail of a secret article by which the Ottomans in effect agreed to close the Dardanelles, should Russia request it, to the warships of other foreign powers.¹²⁷

Mahmud resented the concessions which had been the price of peace. Despite all he had secured, Mehmed Ali also considered himself to have done badly: İbrahim’s appointment was subject to annual review, Egypt was still expected to pay an annual remittance to the Ottoman exchequer, and possession of the Syrian territories proved less advantageous than he had envisaged because of local resistance to İbrahim’s administration. Sliding cotton prices depressed the Egyptian economy, and Egypt’s oppressed people signalled their simmering opposition to the manner and pace of Mehmed Ali’s reforms by refusing to serve as conscripts in the army.¹²⁸

His dissatisfaction with his achievements and the setbacks he suffered in the years that followed served only to increase Mehmed Ali’s ambition. To the alarm of both the Sultan – who would thereby lose even nominal control of the Holy Places – and the western powers, in May 1838 he made it clear he wanted independence. In 1839 an Ottoman army was again sent to deal with İbrahim Pasha and again, Mahmud’s improvements notwithstanding, it failed. İbrahim won a decisive field battle at Nizip, south-east of Gaziantep, on 24 June; within a week Mahmud was dead and his son Abdülmecid was sultan. The Grand Admiral chose this moment to defect to Mehmed Ali, sailing to Alexandria and taking the imperial fleet with him. The new sultan’s government prepared to come to terms.¹²⁹

The war with Mehmed Ali was an internal Ottoman problem, but it was resolved through European adjudication. After much disagreement between themselves, Britain, Russia, France, Austria and Prussia, presenting a united front, warned the Grand Vezir against rushing into a settlement with the rapacious governor. On 22 August, Istanbul responded by authorizing the Powers to negotiate a settlement on the empire’s behalf, and the diplomatic manoeuvring that ensued revealed the nub of the ‘Eastern Question’: each of the Powers was suspicious of the influence wielded by the others in the Ottoman Empire, and particularly fearful lest another Power should gain an untoward advantage – whether strategic, territorial or commercial. By contrast with the Greek case, where European interests came down firmly against the Ottomans and were instrumental in bringing independence, in 1839 fear of Russia drove the diplomacy: the entrenched position of Russia in Ottoman affairs following the Hunkar İskelesi treaty of 1833 and what it might portend was a cause to Britain especially of great concern.¹³⁰

A great deal of intricately nuanced negotiation eventually resulted in July 1840 in a compromise – the Convention for the Pacification of the Levant – signed by Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire; France refused to be party to the inevitable coercive measures against Mehmed Ali. Under the terms of this agreement, the other provinces Mehmed Ali held were lost to him, but the governorship of Egypt was confirmed as hereditary for him and his heirs – a solution to which he had aspired for many years. From the Ottoman perspective, Egypt remained part of the empire. Mehmed Ali at first refused to withdraw from the territories he was no longer permitted to control, and looked forward to obtaining more favourable terms with the mediation of France. A revolt against İbrahim Pasha’s regime in Syria gave the Powers the opportunity they sought to intervene and expel him; Mehmed Ali agreed to return the Ottoman fleet, and the Sultan tried to attach strict conditions to his hereditary governorship of Egypt but was dissuaded by his partners to the convention – within a year Mehmed Ali was subdued. The imperial decree embodying the revised status of the province of Egypt included a proviso that all treaties concluded by the Ottoman government with other states should apply equally to Egypt, and this curbed Mehmed Ali’s potential for further trouble-making: his power had been largely funded by the operation of state monopolies, but these had been banned under the terms of the commercial convention known as the Baltalimanı Convention, after the Bosporus village where it was signed between Britain and Sultan Mahmud in 1838.¹³¹ In July 1841 France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia and the Ottomans signed the Straits Convention, under which the principle was accepted that the Dardanelles and the Bosporus should remain closed to foreign warships in time of peace.¹³²

From this time, British influence and intervention in the Near East burgeoned. It was not long before other European states were accorded similar trading privileges, but it was the British, with their advanced industrialization and financial institutions, who were best placed to profit from the commercial opportunities now available to them. The long-term effects of this liberalization of trade were mixed: foreign merchants had the advantage over Ottoman merchants, who continued to pay internal customs dues; the volume of trade increased, but at the cost of undermining Ottoman domestic production and, primarily because of the loss of income from tariffs, of weakening still further the finances of the empire. As one historian sees it, ‘the Ottoman Empire turned into a virtual British protectorate’.¹³³