The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  The cycle of palace revolutions was still not complete. Bayraktar tried to resume the policy of army reform. He raised, not ‘New Order’ regiments—for the term was discredited—but ‘New Keepers of the Hounds’ (Segban-i Cedit), reviving the name of a bodyguard once acceptable to the Janissaries. Yet, since he gave command of these troops to former New Order officers, the reactionaries were far from placated. Moreover, Bayraktar made the mistake of feasting with his Segban guards at the meal which marked the end of Ramadan, a time of stress, when old resentments easily fray fiery tempers. The Janissaries brooded on their grievances overnight. Next morning (15 November 1808) they attacked the Grand Vizier within the Sublime Porte itself. Bayraktar took refuge in a neighbouring small stone building, which looked solidly defensible. Unfortunately it was a powder magazine; and as the fighting went on around it there was a sudden massive blast which killed the Grand Vizier, his bodyguard, and several hundred of the attacking Janissaries.19

  The fighting and the explosion were some distance away from the Topkapi Sarayi, allowing Sultan Mahmud to act swiftly. His favourite Sultana, Fatma, was several months pregnant (she died the following February, giving birth to a princess who did not survive infancy: a tragedy which could not, of course, have been foreseen that November) and Sultan Mahmud, oddly confident of a male heir, took the decision which Bayraktar had rejected in July: his half-brother, the ex-Sultan Mustafa IV, was strangled forthwith. At the same time Mahmud called out from their barracks other Segban units under training, and appealed for help to the warships in the Golden Horn, whose officers loathed the Janissaries. For two days there was a highly destructive civil war in Stamboul, with large fires in some of the oldest parts of the city. Eventually the ulema, horrified by the damage to the mosques and the evkaf pious foundations, secured a cease-fire and a compromise. The Segban-i Cedit had to go, at least as a separate institution, and the Janissaries were promised the restoration of their barracks, virtually destroyed in the bombardment. But Mahmud II remained on the throne: he was still Sultan thirty years later.

  Selim III—that ‘Most Exalted, Most Excellent, Omnipotent, Magnanimous and Invincible Prince’ (the salutation is Napoleon’s)—had promised much and accomplished little. In the end, prejudice and convention triumphed over his will to reform. In one sense Selim was a would-be saviour of the Empire, rejected by his people because they could not understand him. Perhaps his main achievement was negative, a warning to later Ottoman reformers how not to refurbish their inheritance. Yet in two respects the dramatic climax to Selim’s reign possessed lasting significance. It showed the revived importance of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles as vital strategic guard-posts of the Empire, essential to be kept in good repair and held by troops whose loyalty was beyond suspicion. And it also emphasized the oddest feature of Ottoman rule in these years of arrested decline: the extent to which, as in an older Mediterranean civilization, nominal government of a vast empire in three continents still depended upon the mood of a single city. With the politics of Constantinople counting for so much and the Sultan’s distant subjects receiving so little attention in the capital, it is hardly surprising if movements for local autonomy, which even before Selim’s accession had cost the Ottomans direct sovereignty over many outlying provinces, were becoming clearly defined expressions of separatist sentiment.

  Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar perceived the danger, for he had spent much of his life consolidating a virtual satrapy along the lower Danube. During his sixteen-week Grand Viziership he summoned the powerful notables of the empire to the capital for a conference to discuss reform.20 In the last days of September 1808 the heads of over-mighty families arrived from inner Anatolia, from Karaman, Aleppo and the Lebanon, and from southern Rumelia. Of those who did not care to travel so far from their power base, most sent deputies. Yet, sound though the idea of such a conference was in itself, once again little was achieved. The notables pledged loyalty to the Sultan and respect for the Grand Vizier as his sovereign representative, but they safeguarded their local rights so jealously that Mahmud II rejected their agreement. In retrospect, the greatest interest of the gathering is in noting those who thought themselves so independent that this first initiative of Sultan Mahmud’s reign was of no concern to them. From Bayraktar’s conference there were two outstanding absentees. There was no Ali Pasha of Ioánnina: the lord of southern Albania and the Greek mainland did not even send one of his sons, but was represented by a single frightened nominee, attended by his own bodyguard. Most significantly, from Muhammad Ali in Cairo there came no one at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  MAHMUD II, THE ENIGMA

  OVER A CENTURY AND A HALF AFTER HIS DEATH, MAHMUD II remains the most puzzling of the thirty-six Ottoman Sultans. We know what he looked like because his enlightened views allowed artists to paint several portraits. All show a vigorous, broad-chested man, haughtily conscious of his sovereignty; a well-trimmed dark beard emphasizes the paleness of his face. Most of all we notice the ‘large black peculiar eyes which looked you through and through and which were never quiet’, as a Scottish traveller, Charles MacFarlane, commented—and as Byron, too, observed on the one occasion he was admitted to the audience chamber.1 But, although we may recognize him framed on a wall, the inner man eludes us. Was he a despot or a reformer, a capricious betrayer of trust or a dedicated ruler of vision, a muddler who plunged into disastrous wars or a shrewd statesman who preserved his Empire from rapacious neighbours? Should we think of him as the ‘Infidel Sultan’ who imposed European ways on the Islamic faithful, or as Mahmud Adli (‘Mahmud the Just’), like Turks today? The contrasts seem endless. Mahmud is one of history’s more enigmatic figures; he defies over-simplified docketing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ruler.

  Yet the attempt has been made. Harold Temperley, writing shortly before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thought he was ‘the greatest sovereign since the days of Suleiman’, a Sultan who, acceding when ‘all was chaos at Constantinople’, ensured by percipient statecraft that ‘the marvellous vitality of the Turkish Empire was soon to reassert itself.’ From across the Atlantic later historians, too, pay tribute to Mahmud ‘the determined reformer’, ‘the Ottoman Westernizer’.2 And in Istanbul the epitaph on the Sultan’s turbe in Yenicerila Caddesi recalls ‘A great Sovereign, just and wise, the sun to his empire, He who opened the gate of the East to new life’.

  Contemporaries were more critical. Stratford Canning, later Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the most famous of British ambassadors, remembered Mahmud as ‘in temper and policy a despot and a caliph’, a ruler whose ‘natural abilities would hardly have distinguished him in private life. He had no scruple of taking life at pleasure from motives of policy or interest.’ Adolphus Slade, a British naval officer who spent many years at Constantinople, complained of Mahmud’s stubborn inflexibility; reform, Slade argued, removed natural checks on a Sultan’s despotism, ‘accomplishing the entire subversion of the liberties of his subjects’; and, after four years in Ottoman service, the great Prussian soldier Helmuth von Moltke considered Mahmud’s qualities as essentially destructive: he would ‘raze to the ground any other authority within the compass of his Empire’, and yet he lacked the skill to ‘set up his own building in its place’. Moltke scorned the analogy often drawn between Mahmud’s services to the Ottoman Empire and Peter the Great’s achievements in Russia: while the Tsar acquired strategically valuable land to expand his empire north and south, Mahmud lost historic possessions in two continents.3

  Yet, whatever their reservations, contemporary critics and later commentators agree that from his accession until the last weeks of his life Mahmud recognized the need for change in the Ottoman state. Romanticists like to believe he was introduced to the concept of enlightened despotism in his youth by the ‘French Sultana’ said to have been his mother, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery. More plausibly, it seems possible that he was influenced by the unfortunate Selim III in the months the fallen Sultan and the heir-apparent spent confined together in the kafe. M
ahmud’s first years on the throne were certainly overshadowed by memories of Selim’s fate, and by a fear of renewed violence in the capital. He showed no inclination to live in the Stamboul palace where he had so narrowly escaped death at the hands of his half-brother. It remained the Grand Seraglio, the formal residence of the Court, but Mahmud dined and slept in a smaller and more defensible palace, across the Golden Horn at Besiktas. From there an imperial caique carried the Sultan in state to the Topkapi Sarayi for official ceremonies.

  For four years after his half-brother’s death Mahmud was still the only male member of the dynasty. In December 1812 an Ottoman prince was born in the palace, after a lapse of more than a quarter of a century, but the child was sickly and died in infancy. The Sultan’s continued good health therefore remained essential in order to ward off that old bogey, an empire disintegrating in a power struggle between rival notables. Mahmud faced a double task: he had to safeguard his position, while not offending powerful sections of the community; and he had to convince the other powers that the Ottoman Empire was still an effective unitary state. Small wonder that after those critical days in November 1808 he moved cautiously. Outwardly he seemed to abandon all pretence of westernization, restoring the traditional corps of the Ottoman armies and ignoring the recent improvisations of Selim and Mustafa Bayraktar. But gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Sultan placed his own supporters in key military and naval commands and in the principal offices of state, ready to revive the active rule of the sovereign. It was a slow process, spanning eighteen troubled years in which there were few signs of renewed vitality at the heart of the Empire.

  The beginning of this period coincided with the arrival in Turkey of Stratford Canning, who by mid-century was the best-known of ambassadors to the Porte, ‘the Great Elchi’. He reached Constantinople at the end of January 1809, less than three months after Bayraktar’s death. At twenty-two he was beginning his diplomatic career as secretary to Sir Robert Adair, the envoy sent to re-establish links with the Ottoman Empire; and already, before their ship was allowed into the Sea of Marmara, Adair had concluded a formal peace treaty at the Dardanelles, secretly pledging British naval aid if the Sultan’s Aegean and Adriatic possessions were attacked by France, Austria or Russia. Somewhat surprisingly, the improvement of Anglo-Turkish relations was soon entrusted to this young and inexperienced secretary, for within eighteen months Adair left for Vienna and Canning became ‘minister plenipotentiary to the Sublime Porte’. In all, Stratford Canning—created Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe in 1852—represented British interests at the Porte for twenty-three years (1810–12; 1824–7; 1831–2; 1841–6; 1848–58), and his opinions on Turkish affairs still commanded respect in London in the late 1870s, during the great Eastern Crisis. But at no later moment did Ottoman prestige abroad count for so little as in these early years, when it seemed as if the Empire must soon fall. ‘Mahmud’, Stratford later recalled, ‘had everything to apprehend from the circumstances in which he was placed. Both morally and materially his empire was bordering on decrepitude.’4

  After two years of uneasy truce, hostilities with Russia were resumed in December 1809, and the Ottoman army fared disastrously. Sultan Mahmud’s commanders suffered a series of defeats; their ill-equipped troops were forced back from the Danubian fort of Izmail southwards across Bulgaria into the main Balkan mountain range. To Stratford Canning’s intense fury, although the Sultan could no longer count on help from Napoleon, the French encouraged the Turks to carry on fighting against the Russians. The French embassy, he informed the Foreign Secretary, contained ‘the vilest scum that ever fell from the overboilings of the pot of Imperial Jacobinism’, and he spent much of his first eighteen months as ambassador finding honeyed phrases to flatter the Grand Vizier and counter a series of French intrigues.5 It was clear to all outside observers that, as Franco-Russian relations deteriorated from the high point reached at Tilsit, Napoleon would use every means to prevent Tsar Alexander from concentrating his armies in Poland.

  In October 1811 Stratford Canning’s persuasive attempts at mediation seemed close to success: Russo-Turkish peace talks opened in Giurgevo. But, as so often, the clash of Turkish pride and Russian obstinacy made the discussions drag on inconclusively. Eventually, in May 1812, the imminence of a Napoleonic invasion induced the Russians to accept terms, and a peace treaty was at last signed at Bucharest, generous to the defeated Ottomans. Although Bessarabia became a Russian province and limited autonomy was promised to insurgent Serbia, the Sultan’s authority was confirmed in the Danubian Principalities (subject to the restoration in both Moldavia and Wallachia of the traditional hospodar administration).

  The Bucharest settlement pleased Canning: the Turks had won concessions unattainable seven months before. He was well satisfied by the way the Sultan’s emissaries had extricated their master from the Russian imbroglio. So, it seemed, was Mahmud; he declared himself ‘much gratified’ by the ‘English minister’s interest . . . in my royal affairs.’ But when the Grande Armée crossed the river Niemen and thrust relentlessly forwards into Russia, the Sultan had second thoughts. In the autumn of 1812, with Napoleon in Moscow and the Tsar’s armies apparently beaten, Mahmud decided that his emissaries had conceded far too much, and he took vengeance on them: two Phanariot brothers employed as translators and intermediaries during the peace talks at Giurgevo were executed, while the plenipotentiary who signed the Treaty of Bucharest was sent into exile. By then, however, Stratford Canning had left Turkey and was home in England.6

  Over the following three years the map of central and western Europe was dramatically redrawn through the collapse of the French Empire and the peacemaking of the Great Powers at the Congress of Vienna. But, apart from the establishment of a British protectorate over Corfu and the seven Ionian islands, there were no significant changes in the Balkans or around the eastern Mediterranean. The Bucharest settlement, together with Tsar Alexander’s Grand Design for a lasting European peace, thrust Ottoman affairs temporarily into the background: Mahmud II could face the immediate problems of his Empire without the risk of intervention from formidable neighbours beyond the Danube. No help came to the Serbs when, in 1813, the convergence of three Turkish armies on their nascent principality crushed the nine-year rebellion and forced Karadjordje Petrovic to flee to Hungary. And little interest was taken by the European Powers in what was happening at the opposite extremity of the Empire, in Mesopotamia, where the ruthless policies of Halet Effendi ensured a restoration of direct Ottoman rule. So impressed was Mahmud by Halet Effendi’s success in Baghdad that, from 1813 onwards, he accepted this arch-traditionalist and former envoy to Napoleon’s court as his most trusted adviser.

  For the moment, too, the Sultan was left to deal in any way he might wish with the ambitious Governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. Here, however, the western European Powers had interests to protect. During the closing stages of the Napoleonic Wars the British replaced the French as the principal western European traders in the Levant; they therefore showed some concern over what was happening in Alexandria, Cairo and Beirut. But their needs were relatively straightforward: the maintenance of good order in the ports and free movement of goods. It made little difference to London merchants that they were carried mainly in Greek-owned vessels. Nor did it matter to foreign traders whether government in Egypt and the Levant was exercised directly by the Sultan, or by his appointed representative, so long as it was efficient. There was no open conflict between Mahmud and Muhammad Ali during the difficult period of readjustment which followed the eclipse of French influence in the Levant. So changed was the character of gubernatorial administration that it became customary to speak of Muhammad Ali as the ‘Viceroy of Egypt’. Yet Mahmud continued to find him dutiful and accommodating: he liquidated the last of the Mamelukes (1811), paid to the Sultan his regular annual tribute, placated the ulema, and—at Mahmud’s request—sent well-trained Bosnian and Albanian troops to suppress rebellions in Arabia.

  Ali Pasha in Ioánni
na posed a more immediate problem. His diplomatic contacts, first with the French and later with the British, made him a considerable power in Balkan politics. He was establishing a dynastic authority which, to Halet Effendi, seemed a greater threat to the Ottoman hold on Europe than the Serbian rebellion. In 1820 hit-men sent by Ali to Constantinople sought to assassinate a personal enemy in a house adjoining the imperial palace. Halet Effendi induced the Sultan to dismiss Ali and his sons from their official posts and to prepare land and sea expeditions to recover the Epirus and end Ali’s half-century of rule. His autonomous despotate crumbled with astonishing rapidity and by August 1820 Ioánnina was invested, the thriving commercial centre suffering as much from Ali’s scorched-earth policy as from the rigours of a siege. Even so, for more than a year the old Lion held out in the citadel, fleeing at last to his small fortified island villa in the Lake of Ioánnina. It was not until the closing days of January 1822 that treachery enabled the local commander to have him slaughtered there. The corpse was decapitated and Ali’s head exposed outside the Topkapi Sarayi to celebrate the triumph of Mahmud’s armies over a chieftain who had defied the authority of five Sultans.7

  The collapse of Ali’s authority allowed the Ottomans to recover military control of land routes on either side of the central Pindus range, southwards to the Peloponnese. By now this region was of vital strategic significance. With the imminent fall of the despotate, a new and more serious challenge had begun to threaten Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Ioánnina had never been simply the lair of an almost sophisticated brigand. Henry Holland, visiting the ‘inland city surrounded by mountains’ in 1812, commented both on the widespread continental connections of the Greek merchants there, and on the high level of cultural life: ‘The Greeks of Ioánnina are celebrated among their countrymen for their literary habits’, he wrote, somewhat surprisingly.8 Ali never permitted local communities to take any political initiative, nor was he interested in their spiritual well-being, whether Islamic or Christian. But, though a Muslim Albanian himself, he had allowed the Greeks to assert their cultural national identity, in so far as it existed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he had personal contacts with influential Greek emigrants in Vienna during the Congress. In the last resort, in May 1820, Ali called on the Greeks of the despotate to join him in resisting the Turks. They failed to respond to this appeal. Leading Greek patriots, however, both in the Peloponnese and among emigrant communities abroad, sought to take advantage of Ali’s protracted last stand. Accidentally, he advanced the timing of the national rebellion: it was no coincidence that the Greek War of Independence began in 1821 while Ottoman troops were still heavily engaged around Ioánnina.