Arabs (16 page)

On July 8, the Egyptians engaged the Ottomans in their first major battle for control of Syria near the town of Homs. “It was a stirring sight,” Mishaqa wrote. “When the regular Egyptian troops reached the battlefield, they were met by the more numerous regular Turkish troops. One hour before sunset the battle raged between the two sides with continuous fire of guns and cannon.” From his hilltop, Mishaqa could not make out which way the battle would go. “It was a frightful hour, during which the very gates of hell were opened. At sundown the noise of guns was quieted, leaving
only the pounding of cannon until an hour and a half after sunset, when total silence reigned.” Only then did he learn that the Egyptians had secured total victory in the Battle of Homs. The fleeing Ottoman commanders had abandoned their camp in their haste. “Food was left burning over the fire, and medicine chests, rolls of dressing and shrouds [for the dead], a great number of furs and mantles for awards and much materiel were all left behind.
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The restless Ibrahim Pasha did not linger in Homs. One day after his victory, he drove his army northward to Aleppo to complete his conquest of Syria. Like Damascus, Aleppo surrendered without resisting the Egyptian army, and Ibrahim Pasha left behind a new administration to govern the city on Egypt’s behalf. The Ottoman governor had withdrawn to join a large Ottoman army that included the surviving units from the Battle of Homs. On July 29 the Ottomans engaged the Egyptian army in the village of Belen, near the port of Alexandretta (now in modern Turkey, but at the time part of the province of Aleppo). Though outnumbered, the Egyptian forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Ottomans before accepting their surrender. Ibrahim Pasha then marched his forces to the port of Adana, where Egyptian ships could resupply his exhausted army. Ibrahim Pasha sent dispatches to Cairo detailing Egypt’s victories and awaited further orders from his father.

Muhammad ’Ali moved from warfare to negotiations, trying to secure his gains in Syria either by the sultan’s edict or through European intervention. The Ottomans, for their part, were unwilling to concede any gains to their renegade governor in Egypt. Rather than recognize his position in Syria, the Ottoman grand vizier (or prime minister) Mehmed Reshid Pasha began to mobilize a massive army of over 80,000 men to drive the Egyptians from the Turkish coast and out of Syria altogether. After rebuilding his army and his stores, Ibrahim Pasha set off into Central Anatolia in October 1832 to face down the Ottoman threat. He occupied the city of Konya that month, where he prepared for battle.

The Egyptian army would now have to fight in the most inhospitable environment imaginable. Used to the desert heat of summer and the temperate winters along the Nile, the Egyptian troops found themselves in the driving snow and subfreezing temperatures of winter on the Anatolian plateau. Yet even in such conditions, the unwilling conscripts proved the more disciplined army, and though outnumbered, they secured a total victory over Ottoman troops in the Battle of Konya (December 21, 1832). The Egyptians even managed to take the grand vizier prisoner, which strengthened their bargaining position enormously.

Upon receiving news of his army’s defeat and the capture of his grand vizier, the sultan capitulated and agreed to most of Muhammad ‘Ali’s territorial demands. He had no military options following the defeat of his army at Konya, and he now faced an Egyptian army billeted in the western Anatolian town of Kütahya, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the imperial capital, Istanbul. In order to secure a complete
withdrawal of Egyptian forces from Anatolia, Mahmud II reestablished Muhammad’Ali as governor of Egypt (he had been stripped of the title and declared a renegade following his invasion) and conferred the provinces of Hijaz, Crete, Acre, Damascus, Tripoli, and Aleppo on Muhammad ‘Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, with the right to collect taxes from the port city of Adana. These gains were confirmed in the May 1833 Peace of Kütahya, brokered by Russia and France.

Following the Peace of Kütahya, Ibrahim Pasha withdrew his troops to Syria and Egypt. Muhammad ’Ali had not achieved the independence to which he had aspired. The Ottomans had bound him firmly to their empire’s rule. But he had secured most of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire for his family’s rule, creating an Egyptian empire that rivaled the Ottomans for the rest of the 1830s.

Egyptian rule proved very unpopular in Syria. A new tax laid a heavy burden on all layers of society, from the poorest worker to the richest merchant, and local leaders were alienated when they were stripped of their traditional powers. “When the Egyptians began to alter the customs of the clans and institute more taxation of the inhabitants than they were accustomed to pay,” Mishaqa recorded, “the people began to despise them and, wishing for the rule of the Turks back again, manifested signs of rebellion.” The Egyptians responded by disarming and conscripting the Syrians into their service, which only compounded the opposition. “A soldier had no fixed period of service after which he would be free to return to his family, but rather his service was as everlasting as hell,” Mishaqa explained.
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Many young men took flight to avoid conscription, further undermining productivity in the local economy. Rebellion spread from the Alawite Mountains on the Syrian coast to the Druze in Mount Lebanon and southern Syria, to Nablus in the Palestinian highlands. Between 1834 and 1839, Ibrahim Pasha found his troops pinned down in the suppression of an accelerating cycle of revolts.

Muhammad ‘Ali was undeterred by popular unrest in the Syrian countryside and viewed Syria as a permanent addition to his Egyptian empire. He worked assiduously to gain European support for a plan to secede from the Ottoman Empire and to establish an independent kingdom in Egypt and Syria. In May 1838 he informed the Porte and the European powers of his determination to establish his own kingdom, offering the Ottomans a severance fee of £3 million ($15 million). British Prime Minister Palmerston responded with a stern warning that “the Pasha [Muhammad ’Ali] must expect to find Great Britain taking part with the Sultan in order to obtain redress for so flagrant a wrong done to the Sultan, and for the purpose of preventing the Dismemberment of the Turkish empire.”
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Even Muhammad ’Ali’s French allies warned him against taking measures that would draw him into confrontation with both the sultan and Europe.

Buoyed by European support, the Ottomans decided to take immediate action against Muhammad ’Ali. Sultan Mahmud II mobilized another massive campaign
force. Since the violent disbanding of the Janissaries in 1826, Mahmud had made great investments in a new Ottoman Nizami army. His top officers assured him that his modern German-trained infantry was more than a match for the Egyptians, battle-weary after five years of suppressing popular rebellions in Syria. The Ottomans marched to the Syrian frontiers near Aleppo and attacked Ibrahim Pasha’s forces on June 24, 1839. Contrary to all expectations, the Egyptians routed the Ottomans in the Battle of Nezib, inflicting massive casualties and taking more than 10,000 prisoners.

Sultan Mahmud II never received word of his army’s defeat. Suffering from tuberculosis, the sultan’s health had been deteriorating for months, and he died on June 30 before learning of the disaster at Nezib. He was succeeded by his adolescent son, Sultan Abdulmecid I (r. 1839–1861), whose youth and inexperience did little to calm nerves among the commanders of the empire. The admiral of the Ottoman fleet, Ahmed Fevzi Pasha, sailed his entire navy across the Mediterranean and placed it under Muhammad ‘Ali’s command. The admiral feared the fleet might fall to Russian control if, as he expected, they intervened to prop up the young sultan. He also believed Muhammad ’Ali to be the leader most capable of preserving the Ottoman Empire; a virile rebel would make a better sultan than a callow crown prince. Panic spread across Istanbul. The young sultan faced the greatest internal threat in Ottoman history with no army or navy to defend him.

The European powers were no less concerned by the turmoil in Ottoman domains than the Ottomans themselves. Britain feared that Russia would take advantage of the power vacuum to seize the Straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles to secure access for its Black Sea fleet to enter the Mediterranean. This would overturn decades of British policies designed to contain the Russian fleet in the Black Sea and deny it access to warm water ports, preserving the balance of maritime power to Britain’s advantage. The British also hoped to frustrate French ambitions to extend its ally Egypt’s rule over the Eastern Mediterranean. Britain headed a coalition of European powers (from which France abstained) to intervene in the crisis, both to shore up the Ottoman dynasty and to force Muhammad ’Ali to withdraw from Turkey and Syria.

Negotiations dragged on for one year, as Muhammad ‘Ali tried to leverage his victory at Nezib to secure more territorial and sovereign privileges, while the British and the Porte pressed for Egypt’s withdrawal from Syria. In July 1840 the European coalition—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—offered Muhammad ’Ali lifetime rule over Damascus and hereditary rule over Egypt if his soldiers withdrew from the rest of Syria immediately. With the British and Austrian fleet assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean to take action, it was their last offer. Believing he had the support of France, Muhammad ’Ali rejected the offer.

The allied fleet approached the port city of Beirut under the command of British Admiral Napier, and on September 11 they bombarded Egyptian positions. The
British used local agents to circulate pamphlets throughout Syria and Lebanon calling on the local people to rise up against the Egyptians. The people of Greater Syria had done so in the past, and were only too happy to do so again. The allied fleet meanwhile proceeded from Beirut to Acre to drive the Egyptians from the citadel. The Egyptians had assumed they could withstand any attack, but the joint Anglo-Austrian-Ottoman fleet took the citadel within three hours and twenty minutes, according to Mikhayil Mishaqa. The Egyptians had just taken delivery of gunpowder, which lay stacked and exposed in the center of the citadel. A shot from one of the allied ships detonated the powder “in such an unexpected fashion that the soldiers inside Acre fled, leaving no one to defend it.”
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The European and Ottoman forces retook Acre and established their control over the whole of the Syrian coast.

Ibrahim Pasha found his position increasingly untenable. Cut off from the sea, he had no means to resupply his troops, which were now constantly harassed by the local population. He withdrew his forces from Turkey and all parts of Syria to Damascus. As soon as his soldiers—some 70,000 in all—had assembled in Damascus, Ibrahim Pasha began an orderly withdrawal from Syria along the overland route to Egypt in January 1841.

 

The Egyptian menace had been contained, but the threat posed by the Second Egyptian Crisis to the survival of the Ottoman Empire required a formal settlement. In a deal brokered in London, the Ottomans conferred on Muhammad ‘Ali lifetime rule over Egypt and Sudan and established his family’s hereditary rule over Egypt. Muhammad’Ali, for his part, recognized the sultan as his suzerain and agreed to make an annual payment to the Porte as a token of his submission and loyalty to the Ottoman state.

Britain also wanted assurance that troubles in the Eastern Mediterranean would never again threaten the peace of Europe. The best insurance against conflict among the European powers for strategic advantage in the Levant was to ensure the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire—long a preoccupation of Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister. In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to “seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.”
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This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory.

B
etween 1805 and 1841, Muhammad ‘Ali’s ambitions had gone full circle. He rose to rank of governor and made himself master of Egypt. Once he was secure
in Egypt and had expanded the revenues of his province, he set about creating a modern military. He then expanded his territorial reach from Sudan and Hijaz in the Red Sea to include much of Greece for a while, and all of Syria. These gains were denied him by foreign intervention, and by 1841 he had been reduced to Egypt and Sudan. Egypt would have its own government and make its own laws, but it would remain bound by the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire. Though the Egyptians could strike their own coinage, their gold and silver coins would bear the sultan’s name, leaving the name of the Egyptian ruler for base copper. Egypt would have its own army, but its numbers were restricted to 18,000—a far cry from the massive army of 100,000–200,000 that Egypt formerly fielded. Muhammad ’Ali’s accomplishments were great, but his ambitions had been greater.