The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Yet, so far as Mahmud II was concerned, by the spring of 1826, the Greek rebellion was at an end. Muhammad Ali’s modernized military machine brought the victory which had so long eluded the traditional Ottoman regiments and the Janissaries. The Sultan was therefore faced with two urgent—and inter-related—tasks: to free himself from dependence upon his Egyptian vassals, father and son; and to emulate Muhammad Ali’s example in Cairo by imposing a series of drastic reforms on the imperial capital. He sought to consolidate central authority and, at the same time, to sweep away the archaic institutions which hindered westernization by their vested interest in retaining obsolete practices. But, to avoid provoking the reaction which had frustrated the efforts of earlier reformers, he had to move with caution. As a preliminary step to ensuring success Mahmud wooed the ulema, hoping to silence any doubts over his zeal for the faith. New mosques were built, and religious establishments which had fallen into decay were revived. In November 1825 Mahmud secured the appointment of the energetic and personally loyal Mehmed Tahir Effendi as şeyhülislâm. He was a natural reformer, a Grand Mufti who had no intention of allowing local imams to behave as though they were Janissary commanders at prayer.

  The Janissary Corps remained the greatest obstacle to Europeanization. When Byron and his friend Hobhouse arrived in Constantinople in 1810 they found themselves residents of a Janissary-ordered city. Foreigners lived, for the most part, in the derisively nicknamed ‘Pig Quarter’ of Pera, the district where foreign Christians might eat pork; and in Pera every ambassador had an orta (battalion) of Janissaries assigned to his service, providing—on paper—a body of 200 delegated protectors for his nationals. In reality, as Hobhouse wrote, ‘there are not more than four or five in constant attendance.’21 But the orta would assemble speedily ‘upon any requisite emergency’. Even the fire brigade was under Janissary control. Most blazes in the capital were blamed on Janissary arsonists, who were alleged to start fires in order to secure payment for extinguishing them. From being the ‘formidable foes’ of Christendom in the seventeenth century, the Janissaries had degenerated into a privileged social menace. When in late May 1811 the Janissaries mustered for what became their last campaign against a foreign enemy, 13,000 men reported for active service at the barracks in Stamboul, and like their predecessors over so many years duly marched out of the city along the road towards Edirne and the theatre of war. But by the time the Corps reached Silivri—a mere 35 miles away—they were down to 1,600 men. Some 11,400 deserters had dropped out. Ten years later, when the Greek Revolt began to shake the heart of the empire, the Janissaries had become little more than a body of licensed bandits. ‘Time and again the Sultan had passed the pen of pardon over the page of their wrongdoing,’ one of Mahmud’s court propagandists later explained, in a semi-official chronicle of the most momentous event in his reign.22

  During the winter of 1825–6 Sultan Mahmud increased the strength of the artillery corps in the capital and in the forts along the Bosphorus. At the same time he planted his own nominees at the head of the Janissary Corps: the first sound disciplinarian—Kara (‘Black’) Hüseyin—commanded the corps for only eight months in 1823, for the Sultan had hurriedly to remove him to commands in Bursa and Izmit to prevent a Janissary uprising which he was not yet ready to contain; but Kara Hüseyin’s successor, Celaleddin Mehmed, prepared the ground more carefully. Hüseyin remained in the vicinity of the capital, and in April 1826 was described by the British ambassador as ‘the Pasha of the Bosphorus’. He ‘has manifested his energy by a most unsparing execution of refractory Janissaries,’ Stratford Canning commented.23

  Mahmud was determined to avoid his predecessor’s mistake of 1807: having provoked the Janissaries to insurrection, Selim found he lacked the armed might to keep order in the capital. By May 1826 Mahmud was confident that most senior officers were sympathetic to reform, and at the end of the month he required the Corps to accept a European code of drill, European uniforms, and training in the use of rifles. For over a fortnight resentment at this new attempt to impose order and discipline smouldered in the ranks, but the natural rebels within the Corps had no leaders, nor any plan of resistance. On 5 June the Grand Vizier appeared at a parade in the braided jacket and tight trousers which were accepted dress among officers of the European armies. It was announced that the Sultan would review the Janissaries, in their new uniforms and drilled in westernized form, on 18 June, a Sunday. Drilling for the parade finally exasperated the Janissaries. On the Wednesday evening the junior officers of five Janissary orta gathered in At Meydani, the old Hippodrome, a time-honoured place of assembly. They demanded the immediate withdrawal of the army reforms. Their troops in the neighbouring barracks were encouraged to overturn the soup cauldrons, a traditional signal of revolt.

  ‘I had not long been in bed when my sleep was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a dragoman, who announced that the Janissaries “were up”,’ Stratford recalled in later years.24 Despite Mahmud’s precautions it seemed at first as if the Janissaries would soon secure control of Stamboul. But Mahmud was at Besiktas rather than in the old palace when the revolt began, and Kara Hüseyin was able to bring considerable reinforcements and twenty-five cannon down the Bosphorus to command the approaches to the Topkapi Sarayi. Moreover, whereas on earlier occasions the Stamboul mob had invariably backed the rebels, in 1826 the mass of the population failed to respond to the usual xenophobic appeals, probably because the ulema were solidly behind the Sultan. Only poorer artisans, afraid of losing their meagre livelihood from ancient crafts if ‘westernization’ continued, supported the Janissaries. They were strong enough to attack the Porte itself, but the threat of Kara Hüseyin’s cannon halted them short of the old palace. By Thursday noon the Janissaries had fallen back on their At Meydani barracks.

  ‘The weather was hot, and we dined at an early hour,’ Stratford recalled some years later, describing the scene from the Pera embassy; ‘My seat at table fronted the windows which commanded a view of Stamboul beyond the Golden Horn, and I had scarce taken my place when I observed two slender columns of smoke rising above the opposite horizon. What could they mean? I asked, and the reply informed me that the Sultan’s people had fired the barracks of the Janissaries, who had no resource but to fly.’ In a thirty-minute bombardment of the barracks and the old concourse of the Hippodrome, many hundreds of Janissaries perished. Others, taken prisoner, were swiftly executed. ‘The mere name of Janissary, compromised or not by an overt act, operated like a sentence of death,’ Stratford wrote. Summary executions took place throughout the Friday, too. Hüseyin’s gunners escorted the Sultan to the weekly şelamlik prayers, trailing through the filthy streets captured soup-kettles and Janissary flags and emblems. ‘Things continue in a violent combustion, or rather a merciless inquisition, for every corner of the town is searched,’ Bartolomeo Pisani reported that day. ‘No quarter is given to anyone.’25

  Out in the provinces most Janissaries prudently chose to conform rather than to resist the new Ottoman march of progress, although cannon were brought into action against dissidents in both Izmit and Edirne. On Saturday, 17 June 1826, the Janissary Corps was formally abolished. So limited and localized was the resistance of the Janissaries that in retrospect it seems extraordinary that no previous sultan had turned the cannon on them. Mahmud’s success came not merely from his employment of the ruthless Kara Hüseyin, but from the skill with which he had already isolated the Corps from the ulema, who in the past had so frequently stirred up the mob in the capital.

  There are wild variations in the estimates of the dead in the Empire as a whole. The Sultan promised life pensions to Janissaries wise enough to have kept out of trouble during these momentous days, but so many applicants were speedily killed on trumped-up charges that those with a sure instinct for survival preferred to forgo their claims. Eight executioners were kept fully employed throughout the second half of June. Stratford Canning thought about 6,000 had perished; he was probably right, although several sources pu
t the figure far higher. Contemporary Turkish writers, recognizing the liquidation of the Janissaries as a landmark in Ottoman history, gave these events a euphemistic respectability by referring to them collectively as ‘The Auspicious Incident’, an episode which held out a promise of future success for the Sultan. But to foreign residents on the Bosphorus the blood-bath of June 1826 came as a dramatic end rather than an auspicious beginning. ‘The sanguinary measures . . . have struck a panic throughout the nation,’ wrote the British ambassador. ‘A main source of the greatness and glory of the Ottoman Empire’ had gone, he reported; and he added, without too much conviction, ‘The Sultan must show that he can sheath the sword when justice is satisfied.’26

  CHAPTER 7

  EGYPTIAN STYLE

  WITH THE JANISSARIES NO LONGER THREATENING ANY RULER who ‘opened the gate of the East to new life’, the Sultanate enjoyed a rare sense of security. Soon Mahmud II felt able to impose the changes in administration, government and society which he had sought since his accession, and the last thirteen years of his reign stand out as an era of reform. He died, however, bitterly frustrated. Unresolved problems in the Eastern Question and the growing menace of Muhammad Ali’s Egypt halted his revolution from above when it had completed no more than its first quarter-turn towards the West.

  Yet the list of Mahmud’s achievements in these years still makes impressive reading. Both the army and navy were modernized; an official Court Gazette was published, regularly in Turkish and occasionally in French (Le Moniteur Ottoman); new government departments (embryonic ‘ministries’) were set up—Justice, Civil Administration, Finance, Trade, and Religious Foundations among them. The Sultan himself appeared in westernized uniform—‘Egyptian style’, as Stratford Canning interestingly described it, for there was no doubt that Mahmud continued to follow trends set by Muhammad Ali, however much he might mistrust his ambition.1 Fluency in French became essential for those who sought advancement in Ottoman service, civil or military. It was not only the soldiery who changed their appearance: for court functionaries and civil servants a frock coat, black trousers and fez replaced the flowing robes and turban of the past. Soon the particular cut of the frock coat ensured that it had a name of its own, the stambouline, identifiable in Paris and in London.

  Some changes sprang directly from the liquidation of the Janissaries. There were fine pickings from the Corps’ properties, enabling the Sultan to reward the most loyal of his supporters. Mehmed Tahir Effendi was given the former home of the Janissary Aga as an official residence for the şeyhülislâm. Kara Hüseyin was accorded the courtesy title of Aga Pasha and appointed Commander-in-Chief (serasker) of the new Ottoman Army, which was proleptically honoured with the name Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad). The serasker, too, received an official residence: Beyazit, the first palace the Ottomans had built after capturing Constantinople. Once modernized, it served as the Ministry of War until the fall of the Empire. Soon after taking up office Hüseyin received Mahmud’s permission to build there the marble tower for fire-watchers still prominent on the Istanbul skyline.

  There was, of course, in many of these reforms, an element of window-dressing. But other changes went to the heart of Ottoman society. It was logical to follow the destruction of the Janissaries with the abolition of the last feudal obligations, and in 1831 the timar system—which Selim III had drastically modified by his creation of iltizam leases—was finally swept away, with some 2,500 military fiefs becoming imperial domain and being leased out to tax-farmers. The sipahis, as antiquated a fighting force as the Janissaries, were either pensioned off or embodied in the new army, where they provided four squadrons of cavalry. More radical were Mahmud’s sustained attempts to ‘nationalize’ the vakif so as to ensure that revenue from the evkaf pious foundations was supervised by the state. This reform, possible only so long as the Sultan-Caliph and the şeyhülislâm worked together in close co-operation, remained incomplete, although Mahmud did extend governmental intrusion into vakif affairs by setting up his Ministry of Religious Foundations.2

  Mahmud II was also conscious of the need to stimulate the economic life of his empire, particularly in the provinces which constitute present-day Turkey. Towards the end of his reign he established a Council of Agriculture and Trade, which he intended should discuss ways of developing subsistence farming into a productive industry and of promoting the export market. In the early years of the reform era his main concern was, by a secure system of communications, to safeguard internal trade from brigandage. Traditional routes were repaired until they resembled roads, and an embryonic Ottoman postal service was set up. It linked the capital with Izmit and soon afterwards with Edirne, along specially protected ‘postal roads’. But overland communication was difficult before the age of railways, particularly in Anatolia. An empire which possessed some five thousand miles of shoreline and a multiplicity of small natural harbours had long accepted coastal shipping as the principal form of commercial transport, to the great benefit of the Phanariots. From 1826 onwards Sultan Mahmud encouraged the building of a merchant fleet which would no longer depend upon Greek seamanship.

  Briefly the Sultan hoped his Turkish subjects would pioneer steamships in home waters. On 20 May 1828, amid great excitement from astonished onlookers, the first steam-boat chugged confidently up-current to anchor off Galata.3 She was a British vessel, the Swift, and—together with another London-built ship—was soon purchased by the Sultan, who retained the English officers to train Turkish crews in steam-navigation and engineering; but this experiment was not a success. By the end of the reign British steam tugs plied the Bosphorus, British and Austrian steamships ran a joint service between Constantinople and Trebizond, and in the last fortnight of May 1837 regular and competing Austrian and French steamships linked Constantinople with Trieste (in fourteen days) and Marseilles (in ten). Although these contacts—and shorter inshore voyages by British, Italian, Greek and Russian ships—improved the empire’s foreign trade, little of it was carried in Turkish vessels, despite the Sultan’s early patronage. The Ottoman coastal steamship line, for which Mahmud had enthusiastically purchased several vessels, did not begin a regular service until five years after his death. As so often in his reign, he saw what needed to be done, but his subjects lacked the skills to attain what he asked of them.

  Yet in foreign affairs Mahmud II was not so clear-sighted. His reform era coincided with a succession of defeats in statecraft more humiliating than any predecessor had sustained. The Greek revolt, which the Sultan believed to have been ended in the spring of 1826 with Ibrahim’s entry into Missolonghi, was far from over; and the ambitious Muhammad Ali was prepared to turn Ibrahim’s army against the Sultan if the Ottoman state showed signs of beginning to slip into quick decline.

  After the fall of Missolonghi the Greek revolt became a klephtic war, the local variant of guerrilla resistance. Patriot groups in the mountains would launch raids on Ottoman positions, their leaders seeking and securing temporary truces whenever the situation began to look desperate. Isolated Greek garrisons still held out—Athens until the summer of 1827, for example. Ambitiously-named ‘national assemblies’ met in towns or islands beyond the reach of Ibrahim’s troops: the best-known of these assemblies met at Epidaurus in the early spring of 1826, while during February 1827 there were rival assemblies at Kastri, in the eastern Peloponnese, and on Aegina. But the most active resistance came from groups of philhellene volunteers, many of them French or British although coming from some ten other countries, too. Occasionally, serving British and French naval and army officers stretched neutrality into an unauthorized co-belligerence. It was a curious situation, puzzling to the rival combatant forces and exasperating to the statesmen of the Great Powers who, since the Congress of Vienna, had been seeking to introduce a disciplined orderliness into the conduct of international diplomacy.

  Both Greeks and Turks exaggerated the influence of these philhellenes on their governments in London and Paris. Yet
it could not be discounted. George Canning—who shaped British diplomacy from September 1822 to August 1827 as Foreign Secretary and, for the last three months of his life, as Prime Minister—was not prepared to rush into war on behalf of the Greeks. But he was alarmed by rumours that Ibrahim intended to exterminate the Greek population in the Peloponnese and set up Muslim military colonies there, and he was aware of strong ‘anti-Turk’ prejudice among his liberal Tory supporters, a curious blend resulting from classical learning, commercial interest, and the deeply-rooted conviction that Ottoman troops on the march were, and always had been, a marauding horde of plunderers and incendiarists.

  Canning recognized that the Russians held the key to any solution of the Eastern Question, for only the Tsar could put both military and naval pressure on the Porte. At the same time, to restrain Russia it would be better to work with Nicholas I than against him. Canning therefore wished to implement as soon as possible the St Petersburg Convention of April 1826, which had accepted the need for Anglo-Russian mediation to create a Greek autonomous state. But it was by no means clear that the Tsar was still interested in Greek affairs. Throughout the summer of 1826 Russian and Ottoman diplomats held talks in Akkerman, a small town near Odessa, now named Ovidiopol to honour an earlier resident. The resultant Convention of Akkerman (7 October 1826) gave Russia greater control over the internal administration of the Danubian Principalities and concessions along the disputed frontier in the Caucasus. It also reaffirmed the right of the Serbs to autonomy, but it made no reference to Greece. Mahmud seems to have hoped that, in settling other problems, the Convention would rule out a Russian crusade on behalf of the Orthodox Greeks. Here he miscalculated: the Convention enabled Nesselrode to concentrate solely on the Greek Question in long negotiations with the British and French. In July 1827 a new Treaty of London committed Britain, France and Russia, not only to recognize an autonomous Greece, but to induce the Sultan to accept an armistice by concentrating a combined fleet in Greek waters.4