by Alan Palmer
It was on the initiative of the British ambassador that Canopus was lying off Galata. Charles Arbuthnot—better remembered in middle age as ‘Gosh’ Arbuthnot, the close friend of the Duke of Wellington—had been in residence for the past two years. Like so many of his compatriots, he was certain that nothing would so effectively concentrate a Sultan’s mind on essentials as the sight of warships flying the White Ensign above the waters off his palace. A couple of months before Sébastiani’s arrival Arbuthnot had assured the Foreign Secretary (Charles Grey, Viscount Howick) that Selim III ‘would prefer a French war in Bosnia to an English one off the Seraglio Point’. His reports confirmed the predilection of the Foreign Office and the Admiralty for a show of strength at Constantinople similar to the action off Copenhagen in April 1801, when Admirals Hyde Parker and Nelson used some fifty ships to intimidate the Danes. At the end of the second week in November, Howick notified Arbuthnot that naval reinforcements would soon be sailing from Plymouth for the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile the ambassador was to demand Sébastiani’s departure, on the grounds that the General’s activities were a breach of Ottoman neutrality.9
But Arbuthnot was already shaping British policy long before the messages from London reached Constantinople. He sought armed mediation in Turkey’s quarrel with Russia; and it was to give weight to his diplomacy that at the beginning of December he induced Rear-Admiral Louis to bring Canopus and the forty-four-gun frigate HMS Endymion up through the Dardanelles—the Hellespont of ancient times—into the Sea of Marmara. While Sir John Duckworth was bringing a more powerful squadron from Gibraltar to the Aegean, Arbuthnot tried to convince the Porte of Britain’s indignation at Sébastiani’s privileged position, but he made little impression. Louis took Canopus back down the Hellespont, carefully studying the Turkish forts on the way; as yet, no fleet had attempted to force its way through the Straits in the face of Ottoman resistance.10
At the end of January 1807 tension in Constantinople became explosive, and Arbuthnot was warned by his spies to leave Pera. He invited the British merchants in Constantinople to dine with him aboard Endymion on 29 January; once they were aboard, the frigate slipped quietly away and headed for the Dardanelles. If Arbuthnot had hoped to find a powerful naval force awaiting him at the mouth of the Straits, he was disappointed; there was only Admiral Louis in Canopus, with two other ships. The Admiral told Arbuthnot the French were helping the Turks to improve the defences of the Dardanelles, belatedly modernizing the sixteenth-century fortresses of Sedd-el-Bahr and Kilid Bahr and siting new batteries on the Asian shore. Louis had sent a fast vessel to Malta with a request for ten line-of-battle ships and troop transports to provide landing parties to spike batteries on the Gallipoli peninsula and across the Narrows. Meanwhile the four ships waited in Besika Bay, off Tenedos (Bozcaada).
A swift naval passage up the Dardanelles, with all the panache of the Nelson touch, might have speedily toppled Sébastiani from his eminence. But ten days elapsed between Endymion’s reunion with Canopus and the arrival of seven line-of-battle ships in Admiral Duckworth’s squadron. For nine more days the wind blew directly down the Dardanelles, keeping the squadron in the lee of Tenedos. At last, on 19 February 1807—for the first time in the history of the Royal Navy—British warships began to force the Dardanelles. Heavy cannonades came from the forts and from some of the older Ottoman ships, off Maidos; several were sunk by return fire; no British vessels were seriously damaged. By the following evening Duckworth’s small fleet had crossed the Sea of Marmara—not, however, to threaten Sultan Selim in the Topkapi Sarayi, for winds and current down the Bosphorus were too strong to approach the moorings Louis had used in December. HMS Royal George, Duckworth’s flagship, dropped anchor some eight miles short of the city, off the island of Prinkipo (Büyükada).11
For two days pinnaces and caiques plied across the waters, as Arbuthnot sought to negotiate from strength. The arrival of the ships, outwardly unscathed, caused consternation—until it was noted that they were lying well off shore. Despite a heavy sea Endymion reached the mouth of the Golden Horn, but was withdrawn when an envoy from the Porte warned Arbuthnot that feeling was running so high, the presence of the frigate might precipitate a general massacre of foreigners. At 11.20 in the morning of 22 February Duckworth ordered his ships to prepare to sail close in and bombard the city, but almost immediately he cancelled the order: constant squalls and strong headwinds saved Constantinople from the fate of Copenhagen.
While armed diplomacy faltered and stuttered, General Sébastiani resumed his military career. The French mission supervised the siting of artillery around the city. Civilians were mobilized to strengthen the defences: even the Greek Patriarch, staff in hand, was seen exhorting a thousand Phanariots to help build new fortifications. The strong winds straight down the Bosphorus continued until the last day of the month. By then some 300 guns were in position, commanding the waters between Prinkipo and the Golden Horn. They were not called into action. Duckworth, fearing that his ships might be bottled up in the Sea of Marmara, sailed the squadron down the Straits and into the Aegean. On this occasion the fire from the forts at the Narrows was more accurate; masts and rigging on several vessels were shot away.12
Back in the lee of Tenedos Duckworth’s chastened captains were joined on 8 March by a Russian force under Admiral Senyavin. Briefly Arbuthnot and the two Admirals considered forcing the Straits and bombarding the capital; but to what purpose? Without troops, there was no prospect of striking a militarily decisive blow. Moreover, the British were by no means convinced it was in the national interest to help the Tsar become master of Constantinople. On Friday, 13 March, the allied squadrons sailed off across the Aegean. The first British naval demonstration in the Dardanelles had proved a fiasco.
It was not the only one. On Saturday, 14 March, 6,000 British troops were landed seven hundred miles way at Alexandria, in an attempt to wrest Egypt from Ottoman suzerainty. Had their transports been attached to Duckworth’s squadron, the show of strength off Selim’s capital might well have achieved all Arbuthnot desired. As it was, the Egyptian expedition, too, was a blunder. Five months of determined resistance by Muhammad Ali, backed by an energetic French consul-general, confined the invaders to a few hundred square miles of swampy shore around Alexandria and Rosetta. An orderly evacuation followed in September. From the Bosphorus to the Nile delta, British prestige stood at rock bottom.13
On paper, Duckworth’s failure vindicated Sultan Selim’s policies. As the British ships sailed away from Prinkipo Island there was wild rejoicing in Stamboul and Galata. A shower of rich gifts testified to the Sultan’s high regard for Sébastiani and the French military mission. The Grand Vizier prepared to strike at Turkey’s other enemy. Early in April 1807 the main Ottoman army left the capital for Edirne in preparation for a summer offensive against the Russians in the Danubian Principalities. The fleet, too, prepared to seek Senyavin in the Aegean. The more modern ships were undamaged by Duckworth’s guns, having wintered up the Bosphorus; and on 10 May the Ottoman navy left the Golden Horn, sailing southwards through the Dardanelles a few days later. After the big military and naval concentration around the capital in the first quarter of the year, Constantinople was relatively denuded of troops.
Selim felt sufficiently sure of his standing and popularity in the capital to resume his policies of westernization, but this proved a grave miscalculation.14 Coffee-house rumour maintained that he invited French actors to perform in his palace and that, contrary to the teachings of the ulema, his rooms were decorated with imported paintings from Western Europe which depicted the human body. Once again, as in the last years of Ahmed III’s reign, there were complaints from the sober-minded that ‘Frankish’ (European) manners and customs were permeating society in the capital, and seditious ways of thought undermining Holy Law. Rather strangely, Selim failed to identify, amid this mounting unease, the stern disapproval şeyhülislâm, the ‘Chief Mufti’ as foreign ambassadors generally called him. The Sultan
even sought his advice.
Not that Selim had any intention of abandoning his cherished reforms. To pay for modern weapons he needed ready money. He therefore resumed a process, begun several years earlier, of converting timar fiefs into crown land, which would then be leased out to tax-farmers who had no feudal military obligation and who were permitted a dangerous freedom in choosing the methods by which they might raise money from their tenants. Not surprisingly, these iltizam leases were unpopular with the peasantry, whom unscrupulous tax-farmers ruthlessly exploited; better the old system than any ‘new order’. At the same time, the constant debasement of the coinage caused hardship and despair in the trading communities, not only around the Golden Horn but in Smyrna, Adana and Salonika as well. Even so, a fortnight after the Ottoman fleet had sailed into the Aegean, and while Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar was leading an army northwards across the Danube, Selim went ahead with the next stage of military reform. The young Janissary auxiliaries (yamaks), mostly Albanians or Circassians, were to be reconstituted as New Order regiments, wearing French-style uniforms: red breeches, tightly cut, and blue berets. Or so it was intended. But in the fort of Rumeli Kavak, out beyond Sariyer and nearly at the mouth of the Bosphorus, the yamak auxiliaries mutinied, rather than be issued with the infidel dress. On 25 May 1807 they murdered a New Order officer and threatened to march on the capital, some fourteen miles away.
At this point Selim showed again that wretched weakness of character which had so nearly cost him his throne during the Edirne disturbances two years earlier. Instead of sending loyal French-trained officers from the New Order barracks against the Rumeli Kavak mutineers, he consulted the ‘Chief Mufti’, who urged him not to precipitate a civil war but to discover the nature of the yamak grievances. It was fatal advice, as no doubt it was meant to be. Over the following two days discontent spread through the Bosphorus forts until, on the morning of 27 May, six hundred yamaks from Büyükdere, a camp three miles south of Rumeli Kavak, landed by boat at Galata, carrying the contagion of unrest to the capital. Thousands of Janissaries joined them, as well as religious students meeting in the At Meydani, the ‘square of horses’, encompassing the Byzantine Hippodrome, less than half a mile from the inner apartments of the Topkapi Sarayi. Desperately the Sultan played for time; was he, perhaps, still hoping for ‘a whiff of grape-shot’ from French-trained gunners? It seems unlikely, although Sébastiani had some experience in such matters; eight years earlier, he had commanded the 9th Dragoons, supporting Bonaparte at St Cloud on 18 Brumaire.
But Selim was no Napoleon. In his panic, he was prepared to sweep away his one prop: the New Order regiments would be disbanded, he announced. He then sent some of his westernizing ministers out of the palace to meet their death, next day appointing reactionaries to the Divan in their place. None of these gestures satisfied the At Meydani mutineers; they suspected that, if Selim remained on the throne, today’s announcements would be rescinded once he could bring back loyal troops from the Danube Front. Lest Selim should fail to get their message, the mutineers seized his personal secretary in the outer First Court of the palace and hacked his body to pieces. The dead man’s head was then borne into the throne room and laid before Selim, as a dog might drop a bone at his master’s feet.15
‘May a Sultan whose behaviour and enactments work against the sacred teachings of the Holy Koran continue to reign?’ the şeyhülislâm was asked next day—a somewhat loaded question. The answer was never in doubt. The only problem was who should succeed to the throne; though Selim III had taken eight wives, none had borne him a boy; and of Abdulhamid I’s thirteen sons, only two had survived infancy. The eldest of these, Prince Mustafa, was mentally unstable; the younger, Prince Mahmud, was said to be influenced by the fashionable French heresies of his uncle. The rebels and the ilmiye had no hesitation in requiring the natural order of succession to be observed. A fetva was issued: Selim III was deposed on 29 May 1807 in favour of Mustafa IV; and while the At Meydani mutineers, Janissary commanders and Chief Mufti imposed reactionary rule through judicial murder, the kafe apartments of the Topkapi Sarayi gave sanctuary to the most enlightened incumbent ever to return to their seclusion.
French diplomats and soldiers in Constantinople and the neighbouring forts, fearing for their lives, could do nothing to influence Ottoman policy in this crisis. Sébastiani was recalled to France, soon to resume his active service in Spain. The events in the capital, and especially the suppression of the New Order regiments, abruptly halted the offensive on the lower Danube, where Bayraktar was forced to abandon the siege of Russian-occupied Bucharest. Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar himself was politically conservative, long convinced that Selim was reckless in pushing through reform. But he was also a competent general, anxious to get on with a campaign that had begun well, and he possessed too stern a sense of discipline to accept months of anarchy, as in the days of Patrona Halil. Briefly he hurried back to the capital, and restored a semblance of discipline. But he found it impossible to collaborate with the ulema and the new Divan, and he soon returned to the war zone in the Danubian Principalities.
Then suddenly, less than a month after Selim’s fall, the chessboard of diplomacy was overturned by a Russo-French armistice and the meetings of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit. Within a fortnight treaties, public and secret, bound the recent enemies in uncertain partnership. Napoleon did not entirely desert his Ottoman allies, however much their new rulers might rail at ‘Frankish customs’. The Treaty provided for Russian evacuation of Moldavia and Wallachia and the conclusion of a Russo-Ottoman armistice, which was signed at Slobodzeia on 24 August, in the presence of a personal envoy from Napoleon. The Emperor was as determined as his British enemies that the Russians should not secure control of Constantinople; but he was prepared to discuss with Alexander the future partition of the Ottoman Empire—largely an imaginative exercise in hypothetical map-making. Both sovereigns showed a fine lack of embarrassing precision. They had no choice. What would happen next on the Golden Horn was anyone’s guess. How far would the Sultan’s effective sovereignty extend by the end of the decade?
With the francophile Selim deposed, the British hoped they might recover some influence at the Porte. Sir Arthur Paget, for the past five years a skilled negotiator in Vienna, arrived in Constantinople late in August on a special mission. But he achieved little. Rival secular and religious pressure groups were in bitter conflict. Although all loathed the ‘abominable customs’ of the French, Paget was puzzled by the Porte’s apparent determination to remain, so far as possible, under Napoleon’s protection.16
Sultan Mustafa IV was a puppet of the reactionaries, though it was never clear at any one moment who was pulling the strings. Increasingly, the discontented—including many frustrated opportunists—drifted away to provincial cities. Most went north, crossing the Bulgarian lands to Ruschuk, the walled ferry-town where Mustafa Bayraktar had his headquarters, looking out over the Danube and the Wallachian plain towards Bucharest. There, a secret ‘Ruschuk Committee’ planned a counter-coup. Agents in the palace would convince the pliable-minded Mustafa IV that the only way he would be able to rule in his own right would be to follow the example of Mahmud I and shake off the fetters imposed on him by those rebellious Sultan-makers, the Janissary commanders and the devious şeyhülislâm, Ataullah Effendi.
The Committee’s agents did all that was expected of them. On 19 July 1808, on the invitation of Mustafa IV, Bayraktar arrived back in Constantinople at the head of his army and obliged the Sultan and his Grand Vizier by getting rid of the more overbearing Janissary commanders and of Ataullah Effendi, whom Bayraktar replaced with a less ambitious Mufti. But having accomplished the task for which he had been summoned south, Bayraktar showed a strong reluctance to take his army back to stand guard yet again along the lower Danube. Spies reported to Mustafa IV that the Pasha intended to secure his deposition and restore Selim III. Mustafa, however, reasoned that if both Selim and his own half-brother Mahmud were killed, he would be the sole
surviving male member of the Ottoman dynasty, and therefore his life and his possession of the Sultanate would be secure. On 28 July 1808 Sultan Mustafa therefore sent executioners into the Fourth Courtyard to have his kinsmen killed in their kafe apartments.
Confusion persists over what happened where inside the Topkapi Sarayi on that Thursday.17 Selim certainly resisted the executioners, and it is probable that he burst through into the throne room before dying in the Sultan’s presence. It is also clear that he was not quietly and efficiently strangled, for Bayraktar found the blood-stained corpse when his troops burst into the inner courtyard later in the morning: ‘The Bayraktar was touched and confused. They say he wept tears,’ a Dutch diplomat reported two days later.18 The Grand Admiral wanted to avenge Selim’s death by having Mustafa killed on the spot. But the execution of two Sultans on one morning might have been regarded as excessive. Moreover, as Mustafa had calculated, it seemed probable that if he were killed the Othman line would be extinguished, for there was still a grave doubt over the fate of Prince Mahmud. No ambitious competitor for high office wanted a struggle for the succession between rival notables, with private armies converging on the capital from various provinces. A civil war of this character would have broken up the Empire for all time.
The twenty-three-year-old Mahmud survived. He appears to have heard the commotion as the executioners burst in upon his cousin, Selim. A long tradition maintains that Mahmud, helped by his mother the Valide Sultana Naksidil, escaped to the roof of the harem while Naksidil’s slave-girl, Cevri Khalfa, prevented the killers from mounting a staircase in the colonnaded corridor of the outer harem which would have enabled them to seize the Prince. One report says that Bayraktar found the young man concealed beneath a pile of carpets and that, having secured a fetva of deposition against Mustafa IV, he thereupon proclaimed the accession of Sultan Mahmud II. An equally probable tale says that the Prince had the good sense to remain in the shadows of the forest of chimneys on the palace roof until swords were sheathed below. At all events, within a fortnight his accession was acknowledged in solemn ceremonial at the Eyüp mosque—and Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar became Grand Vizier. The wretched Mustafa IV was back in the kafe, again heir-apparent in a dynasty into which no child had been born for almost twenty years.