The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (11 page)

A similar pattern prevailed across the straits in Rumelia, where there were four dominant ‘feudatories’. Tirsinikliö
lü Ismail was master
along what is now the Bulgarian bank of the Danube from Ruschuk (Ruse) westwards to Nikopol. Dagdevirenos
lu controlled the Edirne region. Kara Mahmud of Bushat, who
was lord of northern Albania by 1770, subsequently consolidated the hereditary pashalik of Scutari (now Shkodra), claimed by his father some ten years before. The most famous of all these warlords
was Ali Tepedelenlio
lü, ‘Ali of Tepelene’, whose stormy career spanned more than half a century.
³
No one
associates Ali Pasha with his birthplace, for Tepelene is a forgotten village at a river-crossing in southern Albania. He is best remembered as the legendary ‘Lion of Ioánnina’
(Janinà), the fortress town in Epirus which he seized in 1788, a few months after Sultan Abdulhamid rewarded his war service against the Austrians by appointing him Pasha of Trikkala. But
already by 1770 he was lord of southern Albania, having made himself Bey of Tepelene when he was about twenty-eight years old. From this small Albanian power-base Ali advanced his career, until by
the close of the century he and his sons were effective rulers over all Epirus, Thessaly and most of the Peloponnese as well.

Many provincial notables were capriciously cruel, although several—like the Sultans themselves—tempered a natural despotism with occasional gestures of benevolence. Modern Baghdad
rightly recalls the firm and enlightened administration of the Mameluke leader, Suleiman Pasha ‘the Great’. The eastern frontier had long been loosely held by poorly paid Ottoman
garrisons and the Persians constituted a serious threat on several occasions, for four years occupying the rising river port of Basra (1775–9). Thereafter, however, from 1780 to 1802,
Mesopotamia and most of present-day Iraq was ruled from Baghdad by Suleiman, who
imposed an iron rule to curb the Bedouin and check the Persians. He was, however, too
contemptuous of his imperial overlord in Constantinople to send anything more than a token annual tribute to the Sultan’s coffers.

Some sixteen hundred miles away, along the European frontiers of the empire, individual beys observed an Islamic fanaticism more intensive than any fervour shown in the capital. In Bosnia, for
example, a conservative landholding Muslim aristocracy subjected a Christian peasantry to heavy taxation, although little revenue found its way back to Constantinople; often the notables, with
Sarajevo as their stronghold, defied successive governors in Travnik, the provincial capital, maintaining that they were dangerously innovative. Yet, in reality, both governors and notables had to
stand on the defensive against a double threat. They faced, as ever, the risk of invasion from Roman Catholic Hungary; but they were also aware of a challenge from Montenegro, the neighbouring and
fiercely independent mountain fastness whose Orthodox ruler, Prince-Bishop Danilo, had celebrated Christmas in 1702 by ordering the massacre of every Muslim in his principality. Eighty years later
Danilo’s great-nephew, the wise and able Vladika Peter I—Prince-Bishop in Cetinje from 1782 to 1830—began to westernize his principality as part of the long struggle to keep the
Turks away from the Black Mountain, whose villages they had sacked on three occasions; and at last, in 1799, Vladika Peter duly secured from the Sultan formal recognition that the
‘Montenegrins have never been subjects of our Sublime Porte’.

This assurance to the smallest of the Balkan principalities was an inexpensive gesture of appeasement, given at a time of protracted crisis. Throughout the last two decades of the eighteenth
century the Ottoman system was shaken by a succession of challenges to its corporate existence. By 1781–2 the evident decay of centralized administration, the anarchy in many outlying
provinces, and the threat of erosion along distant frontiers, had begun to tempt the Sultan’s most powerful neighbours into behaving as if the Empire were under notice to quit. Catherine the
Great, influenced by her favourite Prince Potemkin, exchanged letters with the Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II, proposing an alliance: Austria would acquire large areas of modern Roumania and
Yugoslavia while Russia would absorb Turkish lands around the Black Sea and establish
autonomous states in Rumelia, eventually setting up a new Byzantine Empire under the
sovereignty of Catherine’s grandson, the infant Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich (1779–1831). When, in April 1783, Catherine proclaimed annexation of the Tatar khanate of the Crimea as
a first step towards realization of this secret ‘Greek Project’, there was widespread indignation at Constantinople.
⁴
But no declaration of
war was made; the Sultan and his viziers were pessimistic about their chances of success without a powerful ally, and none was forthcoming.

Yet it became increasingly difficult for Abdulhamid to ignore Russian provocation. His chief concern was the persistent Russian advance in the Caucasus, following the establishment in 1783 of a
protectorate over Georgia. But there were other acts of aggravation, too: the encouragement given to visits by Greek Orthodox churchmen to the court at St Petersburg; the incitement of unrest by
Russian consular officials in Bucharest, Jassy and several Greek islands; the rapid building of a river port to handle Black Sea trade at Kherson, on the Dnieper, where 10,000 people were settled
by 1786; a triumphal progress by the Empress through her newly acquired Crimean lands. Abdulhamid was physically strong and mentally alert, the father of twenty-two known children, but by 1785 he
was ageing rapidly and growing morbidly suspicious of palace intrigue. In the spring of that year he connived at the fall and execution of Halil Hamid, a reforming minister who had trimmed down the
Janissary Corps by some sixty per cent. In January 1786 the Sultan appointed Koça Yusuf as Grand Vizier. He was a Georgian convert to Islam who as governor of the Peloponnese had been
inclined to see Russian agents lurking on every quay in his province. In August 1787 Koça induced the ailing Abdulhamid, although still without an ally, to declare war on Russia.

This renewed conflict with imperial Russia began a half-century in which the Ottoman Empire was intermittently at war with foreign powers for twenty-four years. During the same period the
Sultans were also forced to mount fifteen repressive campaigns against insurrections in outlying provinces, the most serious of which developed into wars of national liberation. These military and
naval demands checked the economic growth of the Turkish heartland and limited the character of the reforms undertaken by Abdulhamid’s two strong-minded successors,
Selim III and Mahmud II. At the same time, they brought the Sublime Porte into the European diplomatic system, posing an Eastern Question to which the only possible solution ultimately
proved to be the dissolution of the multinational Ottoman Empire itself.

At first, in the early autumn of 1787, Koça Yusuf’s war seemed reluctant to come to the boil. Even when Joseph II became Catherine’s ally, six months later, little happened.
On land, the Austrians lumbered into Bosnia and crossed from the Bukovina into northern Moldavia, while the Russians eventually took the fortress of Ochakov, commanding the approach to the Bug and
the Dniester; and in June 1788 two naval engagements were fought amid the mudflats of the Dnieper estuary, where a Russian flotilla led by the American hero John Paul Jones exposed the weakness of
the newly revived Ottoman navy. There was little co-ordination between Russia and Austria, both empires being distracted by threats elsewhere in Europe. Habsburg victories in Serbia went
unexploited by the Russians until Suvorov won his ten-hour battle at Focsani in August 1789; but by the following summer, when Suvorov and Kutuzov stormed the Turkish defences around Izmail,
Austria was already negotiating for a separate peace. The Ottoman envoys secured good terms from the Habsburgs at Sistova in August 1791; and joint British, Prussian and Dutch mediation enabled the
war with Russia to be ended before Catherine’s armies swept south of the Danube delta. Even so, the Peace Treaty of Jassy (January 1792) was yet another humiliation for the Porte in what had
so long been reserved as the Ottoman’s maritime lake: the Sultan recognized, not only Catherine’s annexation of the Crimea and the protectorate over Georgia, but the southern advance of
the Russian frontier to the line of the lower Dniester. It was in this region that, in August 1794, the first stones were laid of the port of Odessa, soon to give the Turks a more formidable
competitor for Black Sea trade than up-river Kherson.
⁵

Abdulhamid I, like his predecessor in an earlier conflict with the Russians, succumbed to apoplexy at the height of the war. His nephew Selim III acceded in April 1789, that momentous month when
George Washington became the first President of the United States and deputies converged on Versailles for Louis XVI’s opening of the States General.
Events in America mattered little to Selim; but what happened in France was of considerable interest. Even during his years of nominal confinement in the
kafe
,
Selim had been in touch with Louis. A trusted friend, Ishak Bey, served as Selim’s personal emissary, travelling to Versailles in 1786 with a plea that France, as a long-term friend and ally
of the Ottoman Empire, should provide aid in modernizing the army and support policies aimed at the containment of Russia. But the Comte de Vergennes, Louis’ foreign minister for the first
thirteen years of his reign, had himself served as ambassador in Constantinople: he was sceptical over the prospects of reform in Turkey and strongly opposed to any enterprise which might lead to a
Franco-Russian conflict. Louis’ reply to Selim was guarded and patronizing. ‘We have sent from our court to Constantinople officers of artillery to give to the Muslims demonstrations
and examples of all aspects of the art of war’, Louis wrote in a letter dated 20 May 1787, ‘and we are maintaining them so long as their presence is judged
necessary.’
⁶

Throughout the war with Russia French officers continued to give advice to cadets on the Golden Horn. Translations of military manuals were turned out by the excellent private press attached to
the French embassy: aspiring Turkish gunnery specialists could therefore study the treatises from which the young Bonaparte profited at the academy in Brienne. Of course, none of these benefits
were in themselves sufficient to change the military balance along the shores of the Black Sea. Whatever his sympathies and inclination, Selim was able to do little to reform or improve the Ottoman
state during the first three years of his reign, when day-to-day reports of the war with Russia determined the behaviour of sultan and viziers alike. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1791 Selim
ordered twenty-two dignitaries, both secular and religious, to draw up memoranda on the weaknesses of the empire and the way to overcome them. When, a few months later, the Jassy settlement gave
the Ottoman Empire a respite from war, the Sultan resolved to press ahead with a policy of westernization. He hoped that the preoccupation of European statesmen with events in Paris would, at the
very least, enable him to ensure that his army and navy should catch up the armed forces of the West in training and equipment.