The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Never before had warships of these three Great Powers collaborated as allies: never again did they do so until 1915, at the Dardanelles. Not that George Canning thought the guns need open fire: the naval presence was a deterrent, and armed diplomacy would ensure a settlement rather than prevarication. A secret emissary was sent to Cairo to talk to Muhammad Ali directly, in case the Sultan’s ministers played for time. But all these plans were thrown into confusion by George Canning’s death on the day that news of the treaty reached Constantinople. When the Porte scorned the proposed allied mediation, Stratford Canning encouraged the naval commander to exercise a freedom of action which his cousin had never envisaged. On 20 October 1827 Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington led twenty-four British, French and Russian warships into Navarino bay, where eighty-one Turkish and Egyptian vessels rode at anchor off Ibrahim’s main supply base in the Peloponnese.

  Responsibility for what happened next remains uncertain.5 In Britain it has long been maintained that Codrington wished to persuade Ibrahim to embark his troops and sail off to Alexandria while the allies imposed an armistice, and that the battle of Navarino began only when a fireship was sighted bearing down upon the allied squadron. Ottoman historians claim that Codrington had sought for many days to lure the Turco-Egyptian fleet into battle on the open seas, and that the fireship was intended to scatter ships which had established an illegal blockade along the Greek coast. But whatever the immediate cause of the battle, the allied bombardment was decisive. Within three hours two-thirds of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet was sunk, with the loss of 8,000 lives. Navarino was therefore an even greater disaster for the Sultan’s navy than Cesme in 1770, although the impact was lessened by the fact that Codrington destroyed mainly old and decaying warships: Mahmud’s ambitious naval reform programme had been launched only four weeks before. By cutting off supplies from Crete and Egypt, Codrington ensured the eventual triumph of the Greek cause. French troops landed in the Peloponnese and supervised the evacuation of Ibrahim’s army; and when, thirteen weeks after the battle, that stormy petrel John Capodistrias reached Nauplion as Greece’s first President, he came ashore from one of Codrington’s ships, HMS Warspite, which was symbolically escorted into Greek waters by a Russian and a French veteran of Navarino.

  Wise statecraft might have secured Mahmud a compromise settlement after Navarino, enabling him to anticipate and avoid new challenges to the survival of the Ottoman State. But, as at Easter 1821, the Sultan’s hot temper led him into another act of folly. The Muslim faithful were called to arms in order to resist the combined onslaught of the Russians and the Greeks and, shortly after Capodistrias reached Nauplion, the Sultan ordered the closure of the Straits to all foreign ships. The long-anticipated Russo-Turkish War followed at the end of April 1828, even though Mahmud and his ministers knew how limited were their resources. The new Ottoman army, ‘The Victorious Forces of Muhammad’, was still in training; and Mahmud could not rely on further help from Muhammad Ali, who had received little reward for the great expenditure incurred by Ibrahim’s expedition to Crete and the Peloponnese. In declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas convinced himself that a spring campaign in the Balkans would ensure rapid victory.

  He was mistaken. His armies advanced into eastern Anatolia, took Kars, and were welcomed by the Armenian Christians as liberators from Muslim rule. In the Balkans three Russian columns reached the Danube south of Bucharest, but they encountered strong resistance around Silistria and Ruschuk and it was not until the following summer that they penetrated the Balkan mountains. August 1829 was a black month for Sultan Mahmud: in the east one Russian army had taken Erzerum and threatened Trebizond, on the Black Sea; and, less than 150 miles from his capital, a second Russian army captured Edirne after a three-day siege. Some cavalry units even reached the Aegean coast. Hurriedly the Porte sought the mediation of the Great Powers; and it was at Edirne on 14 September 1829 that a peace treaty was signed (generally known as the Treaty of Adrianople, the city’s Byzantine name).

  A senseless war, which a Sultan of less pride and greater moral courage need never have waged, was followed by a peace settlement which left the core of Ottoman lands intact.6 The Treaty of Adrianople allowed the Russian frontier to creep southwards in the Caucasus to include all Georgia, but Erzerum and Kars were evacuated and in Europe the Tsar pulled back his troops north of the river Pruth. The Sultan at last accepted the Anglo-Russian proposals for an autonomous Greece, although with its boundaries as yet undefined. In a show of Slav solidarity, the Russians secured concessions for their Serb brethren. Although an Ottoman garrison remained in Belgrade, Serbian autonomy became a reality; Milos̆ Obrenović was invested as hereditary Prince of Serbia by Mahmud II eleven months later and the administration was handed over to the Prince’s nominees. The harshest clauses required payment over ten years of an extremely high war indemnity, equivalent in total to twice the annual budget of the whole Ottoman Empire. Moreover, although the Russian armies were to evacuate the Balkans, the Sultan had to accept demilitarization of his frontier along the Danube and the Pruth, a provision which would ensure a rapid return of Russian troops in the event of any renewal of the war. Tsar Nicholas was satisfied that the peace settlement gave Russia the choice of preserving the Ottoman Empire or of breaking it into fragments. Already, in the last weeks of the war, he had set up a six-man committee in St Petersburg to map out the future course of Russo-Turkish relations.

  The committee reported to Nicholas I two days after the peace treaty was signed: to destroy the Ottoman Empire would be to invite Austria, France and Great Britain to secure footholds in the Balkans and the Levant, thereby (wrote Nesselrode) forcing Russia ‘to plunge into a labyrinth of difficulty and complications each more inextricable than the other’.7 The Tsar accepted the need to preserve the Ottoman Empire; only if it seemed about to collapse would Russia need (in his own words) ‘to ensure that the exit from the Black Sea is not seized by any other Power’. Mahmud and his ministers knew nothing of these deliberations in St Petersburg, but they soon became aware that their traditional enemy was showing a rare benevolence; even the hated war indemnity was cut, in return for minor frontier concessions. Moreover, when the Navarino coalition decided on total independence for the Greeks, not merely autonomy, it was the Russians who insisted on negotiating the revised settlement, rather than imposing it on the Sultan under threat of force. In February 1830 the London Protocol set up a sovereign Greek kingdom guaranteed by Russia, Great Britain and France as Protecting Powers, although not until 1832 did a German prince (Otto of Bavaria) accept the Greek crown.

  The new kingdom was small. The Ottoman frontier ran barely 130 miles north of Athens, leaving most of modern Greece under Mahmud’s rule. Yet the creation of an independent state out of part of his empire was an ominous precedent. Moreover, though the Greek War was over, its aftermath frustrated Mahmud’s attempts at westernizing his empire. Muhammad Ali expected territorial compensation for Ibrahim’s long campaigns—Syria, perhaps? The Viceroy possessed natural shrewdness and coldly calculating gifts of patience. His son, a fine military commander, had none of these gifts; caution was to him a sign of weakness. In November 1831 Ibrahim crossed the Gaza desert and, with offshore support from a reconstituted navy, thrust northwards along Bonaparte’s old line of march, taking Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa, until he reached the formidable bastion of Acre which, once again besieged, defied him for eight months. By midsummer in 1832 the whole of Syria and Lebanon was in Egyptian hands; and by July, when the Viceroy persuaded his son to halt his advance, the invaders were approaching Antioch and Alexandretta (Iskenderun).

  Although Mahmud proclaimed Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim rebels and traitors, the Viceroy insisted that he remained the Sultan’s loyal subject and that he only sought compensation in Syria for the services he had rendered the Ottoman state. With the Egyptian army encamped in the plain of Issos—where Alexander the Great once defeated Darius—there was a flurry of diplomatic activity around the Porte an
d the Constantinople embassies. A compromise settlement would have permitted Mahmud to press ahead with the material improvements he sought at the heart of his empire: the building of new houses, bridges, roads and schools; and especially, in these later years, the reconstruction of Christian villages destroyed during the fanatical conflicts of the previous decade. But neither the Sultan nor the Sultanate had changed in character: three prominent ministers fell suddenly from favour, and were executed as swiftly and as mercilessly as Kara Mustafa a century and a half before; and Mahmud’s personal pride and confidence in his new army made him unwilling to offer concessions to Muhammad Ali. The Sultan was, however, prepared to look abroad for support. Early in November 1832 Lord Palmerston, by then in his third year as Foreign Secretary, received a request from Mahmud for naval assistance against the Egyptians; but the Royal Navy was already more heavily committed outside the Mediterranean than Palmerston’s cheese-paring cabinet colleagues thought desirable, and the Foreign Secretary took no action, apart from supporting a remonstrance urging Muhammad Ali ‘forthwith to retire to Egypt and rest content with that fertile country’.8

  Ibrahim, however, would neither withdraw nor wait any longer on events. He resumed his advance, penetrating the Taurus range. In December 1832 his troops routed an Ottoman force outside Konya, taking the Grand Vizier prisoner. By the first days of February the Egyptian vanguard was at Kutahiya, deep into Anatolia, and less than two hundred miles from the Bosphorus. Mahmud, desperate to defend his capital, sought aid from the most formidable of his neighbours: three flotillas of Russian warships were invited to sail down the Bosphorus to moorings off the Golden Horn. They were followed by a Russian expeditionary force which established advanced headquarters on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus at Hünkar Iskelesi, a bay some twelve miles up the straits from Constantinople and generally transliterated as Unkiar Skelessi. By early April nearly 30,000 Russians were deployed in defence of Mahmud’s capital, with a camp at Buyukdere on the European shore as well as at Unkiar Skelessi.

  The Russian presence alarmed the ulema, producing the first serious grumblings of discontent with Mahmud’s policies since the bloody suppression of the Janissaries seven years before. But the Tsar’s intervention made it certain that the other Great Powers would soon take an interest in a crisis which they had tended to regard as an Ottoman domestic affair. British and French naval squadrons cruised off the Dardanelles in June. By then, however, the original crisis was over: Muhammad Ali accepted French mediation; Ibrahim’s army would withdraw from Anatolia in return for confirmation of Muhammad Ali’s status as Governor of Egypt and Crete, while Ibrahim would become Governor of Damascus, Aleppo and Adana. Both father and son remained technically the Sultan’s vassals, Muhammad Ali having rejected Ibrahim’s pleas to insist that the settlement should grant them total independence.

  Throughout the early summer of 1833 the Russians remained military masters of Constantinople, for the only time in history. But Nicholas and Nesselrode showed moderation. The Tsar sent to Constantinople a firm, gifted and charming plenipotentiary, his personal friend Count Alexis Orlov, with instructions to seek a lasting treaty with the Porte. Orlov flattered the Turks, high and low alike: generous gifts at the top were matched by the distribution of 24,000 medals, each bearing the Tsar’s portrait, to the Turkish soldiery in order to express his Imperial Master’s admiration for the courage with which they would no doubt have fought had Ibrahim’s army borne down upon them. At the same time, once the Egyptians had pulled back from Anatolia, the Russian fleet sailed away and the tents came down in the huge camp at Unkiar Skelessi. But before the last officer in the military mission left for Odessa an alliance treaty was signed, much to Mahmud’s personal satisfaction, for he hoped it would dispel for all time the Russian bogey. Orlov’s treaty of Unkiar Skelessi of 8 July 1833 was essentially a pact of mutual Russo-Ottoman assistance in case of attack, valid for eight years. A secret article gave Russia the right to waive any request for Ottoman assistance, provided the Sultan closed the Dardanelles to ‘foreign vessels of war’. Orlov told the Tsar he was perpetuating a Russian protectorate on the Bosphorus. He thought the Russians would be summoned back again within a few years. ‘Thanks to our antecedents,’ Orlov wrote, the Tsar’s troops would be able to return ‘without arousing suspicion and . . . in such a way as never to leave again, if need be.’9

  Nicholas I, Nesselrode and Orlov all believed the treaty was a guarantee of stability and order in Constantinople. It enabled them to control Mahmud, firmly rejecting as early as 1834 the Sultan’s attempt to secure Russian backing for a war of revenge against Muhammad Ali. But news of the treaty alarmed Palmerston and his French colleagues: they believed it contained even more drastic secret articles, giving the Russians the right to regulate the passage of ships through the Straits at any time. Palmerston convinced himself that the Tsar was planning the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Russophobia remained rife in the Foreign Office throughout the decade, with fears of the Tsarist agents said to be active in Persia and Afghanistan. The Foreign Secretary had a curious conviction that a forward policy in Central Asia would, in some mysterious way, ‘place the Dardanelles more securely out of the grasp of Russia’.10

  Palmerston also believed in the imminence of another struggle between the Sultan and his vassals in Syria and Egypt. In this he was right; and it proved difficult to restrain Mahmud in 1835 and again a year later, when he sent a secret agent to London, hoping to win active British support for renewal of the war. The army’s defeat at Konya had deeply shocked Mahmud, and he convinced himself that it was his duty to avenge an Ottoman defeat by the Albanian tobacco dynasty he had come to despise. Mahmud was only forty-seven at the time of the battle of Konya but he was a sick man, prematurely old from drink and dissipation; and in his last years he became obsessed with the need to complete the military reforms he had always sought. Prussian, Russian, British and French officers were invited to the barracks in Pera and Üsküdar, and to field exercises in Anatolia. By 1837 the Sultan could rely on some 40,000 good infantrymen and six regiments of cavalry, but with artillery weakened because guns of nine different calibres were in use. Most critical was the Sultan’s total inability to chose good commanders.

  In 1838 Mahmud instructed his ambassador in London to offer Britain generous concessions in a commercial treaty, hoping that the prospect of improved trade would tempt Palmerston into a formal alliance. By the early spring of 1838 it was clear that the British would not give him the support he sought. By now the Sultan, who had long suffered from tuberculosis, knew he could not live much longer, for he was also racked with pain from cirrhosis of the liver. He determined on one last quest for military victory. In mid-April 1839 he ordered Hafiz Pasha to lead an Ottoman army across the Euphrates towards Aleppo, calling on the Syrians to throw off Ibrahim’s Egyptian yoke and welcome the Sultan’s troops as liberators.

  Cautiously Hafiz moved forward. With him were some Prussian advisers, the most senior of them being Major Helmuth von Moltke. At first Ibrahim made no response to the threat from the north; neither did the Syrians rise in rebellion. But Hafiz never reached the borders of Syria. From the town of Nezib (now Nizip) a cloud of dust heralded the approach of Ibrahim’s army. Moltke advised Hafiz to await the enemy behind fortified trenches and solid town walls; the ulema declared that a rebel must suffer in the open plain. Hafiz listened to the mullahs, not to the future victor of Sadowa and Sedan.

  The battle of Nezib—on 24 June 1839—was short but decisive. The Ottoman vanguard was checked and turned back, throwing the troops immediately in the rear into confusion. The Prussians advised Hafiz to send forward a single unbroken column; he preferred to hack about him, cutting down his own fleeing fugitives in a paroxysm of anger. Every Ottoman field piece was destroyed, or abandoned by its terrified gunners. Ten thousand prisoners passed into Ibrahim’s hands. Moltke was fortunate to escape. ‘The army of Hafiz Pasha has ceased to exist,’ the Prussian wrote contemptuously that night to Ber
lin. ‘The Turks threw down their arms and abandoned their artillery and ammunition, flying in every direction.’11 Nezib was an even greater disaster for the Ottoman army than Konya.

  Fortunately for his peace of mind, Sultan Mahmud was spared knowledge of the defeat. No courier was in a hurry to take the bad news across five hundred miles of mountain to a sick man beside the Bosphorus. On 29 June, five days after the battle, Mahmud II finally drank himself to death. The first grim rumours of defeat were not confirmed until 7 July. By then Mahmud’s eldest son, Abdulmecid, had been proclaimed sovereign and caliph. It was an inauspicious moment for a sixteen-year-old prince to accede to the throne.