The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (15 page)

Selim felt sufficiently sure of his standing and popularity in the capital to resume his policies of westernization, but this proved a grave miscalculation.
¹⁴
Coffee-house rumour maintained that he invited French actors to perform in his palace and that, contrary to the teachings of the
ulema
, his rooms were decorated with
imported paintings from Western Europe which depicted the human body. Once again, as in the last years of Ahmed III’s reign, there were complaints from the sober-minded that
‘Frankish’ (European) manners and customs were permeating society in the capital, and seditious ways of thought undermining Holy Law. Rather strangely, Selim failed to identify, amid
this mounting unease, the stern disapproval
ş
eyhülislâm
, the ‘Chief Mufti’ as foreign ambassadors generally called him. The Sultan even sought his advice.

Not that Selim had any intention of abandoning his cherished reforms. To pay for modern weapons he needed ready money. He therefore resumed a process, begun several years earlier, of converting
timar
fiefs into crown land, which would then be leased out to tax-farmers who had no feudal military obligation and who were permitted a dangerous freedom in choosing the methods by which
they might raise money from their tenants. Not surprisingly, these
iltizam
leases were unpopular with the peasantry, whom unscrupulous tax-farmers ruthlessly
exploited; better the old system than any ‘new order’. At the same time, the constant debasement of the coinage caused hardship and despair in the trading communities, not
only around the Golden Horn but in Smyrna, Adana and Salonika as well. Even so, a fortnight after the Ottoman fleet had sailed into the Aegean, and while Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar was leading an army
northwards across the Danube, Selim went ahead with the next stage of military reform. The young Janissary auxiliaries (
yamaks
), mostly Albanians or Circassians, were to be reconstituted as
New Order regiments, wearing French-style uniforms: red breeches, tightly cut, and blue berets. Or so it was intended. But in the fort of Rumeli Kavak, out beyond Sariyer and nearly at the mouth of
the Bosphorus, the
yamak
auxiliaries mutinied, rather than be issued with the infidel dress. On 25 May 1807 they murdered a New Order officer and threatened to march on the capital, some
fourteen miles away.

At this point Selim showed again that wretched weakness of character which had so nearly cost him his throne during the Edirne disturbances two years earlier. Instead of sending loyal
French-trained officers from the New Order barracks against the Rumeli Kavak mutineers, he consulted the ‘Chief Mufti’, who urged him not to precipitate a civil war but to discover the
nature of the
yamak
grievances. It was fatal advice, as no doubt it was meant to be. Over the following two days discontent spread through the Bosphorus forts until, on the morning of 27
May, six hundred
yamaks
from Büyükdere, a camp three miles south of Rumeli Kavak, landed by boat at Galata, carrying the contagion of unrest to the capital. Thousands of
Janissaries joined them, as well as religious students meeting in the At Meydani, the ‘square of horses’, encompassing the Byzantine Hippodrome, less than half a mile from the inner
apartments of the Topkapi Sarayi. Desperately the Sultan played for time; was he, perhaps, still hoping for ‘a whiff of grape-shot’ from French-trained gunners? It seems unlikely,
although Sébastiani had some experience in such matters; eight years earlier, he had commanded the 9th Dragoons, supporting Bonaparte at St Cloud on 18 Brumaire.

But Selim was no Napoleon. In his panic, he was prepared to sweep away his one prop: the New Order regiments would be disbanded, he announced. He then sent some of his westernizing ministers out
of the
palace to meet their death, next day appointing reactionaries to the Divan in their place. None of these gestures satisfied the At Meydani mutineers; they suspected
that, if Selim remained on the throne, today’s announcements would be rescinded once he could bring back loyal troops from the Danube Front. Lest Selim should fail to get their message, the
mutineers seized his personal secretary in the outer First Court of the palace and hacked his body to pieces. The dead man’s head was then borne into the throne room and laid before Selim, as
a dog might drop a bone at his master’s feet.
¹⁵

‘May a Sultan whose behaviour and enactments work against the sacred teachings of the Holy Koran continue to reign?’ the
ş
eyhülislâm
was asked next day—a
somewhat loaded question. The answer was never in doubt. The only problem was who should succeed to the throne; though Selim III had taken eight wives, none had borne him a boy; and of Abdulhamid
I’s thirteen sons, only two had survived infancy. The eldest of these, Prince Mustafa, was mentally unstable; the younger, Prince Mahmud, was said to be influenced by the fashionable French
heresies of his uncle. The rebels and the
ilmiye
had no hesitation in requiring the natural order of succession to be observed. A
fetva
was issued: Selim III was deposed on 29 May
1807 in favour of Mustafa IV; and while the At Meydani mutineers, Janissary commanders and Chief Mufti imposed reactionary rule through judicial murder, the
kafe
apartments of the Topkapi
Sarayi gave sanctuary to the most enlightened incumbent ever to return to their seclusion.

French diplomats and soldiers in Constantinople and the neighbouring forts, fearing for their lives, could do nothing to influence Ottoman policy in this crisis. Sébastiani was recalled
to France, soon to resume his active service in Spain. The events in the capital, and especially the suppression of the New Order regiments, abruptly halted the offensive on the lower Danube, where
Bayraktar was forced to abandon the siege of Russian-occupied Bucharest. Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar himself was politically conservative, long convinced that Selim was reckless in pushing through
reform. But he was also a competent general, anxious to get on with a campaign that had begun well, and he possessed too stern a sense of discipline to accept months of anarchy, as in the days of
Patrona Halil. Briefly he hurried back to the capital, and restored a semblance of discipline. But he found it impossible to collaborate with the
ulema
and the new
Divan, and he soon returned to the war zone in the Danubian Principalities.

Then suddenly, less than a month after Selim’s fall, the chessboard of diplomacy was overturned by a Russo-French armistice and the meetings of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit.
Within a fortnight treaties, public and secret, bound the recent enemies in uncertain partnership. Napoleon did not entirely desert his Ottoman allies, however much their new rulers might rail at
‘Frankish customs’. The Treaty provided for Russian evacuation of Moldavia and Wallachia and the conclusion of a Russo-Ottoman armistice, which was signed at Slobodzeia on 24 August, in
the presence of a personal envoy from Napoleon. The Emperor was as determined as his British enemies that the Russians should not secure control of Constantinople; but he was prepared to discuss
with Alexander the future partition of the Ottoman Empire—largely an imaginative exercise in hypothetical map-making. Both sovereigns showed a fine lack of embarrassing precision. They had no
choice. What would happen next on the Golden Horn was anyone’s guess. How far would the Sultan’s effective sovereignty extend by the end of the decade?

With the francophile Selim deposed, the British hoped they might recover some influence at the Porte. Sir Arthur Paget, for the past five years a skilled negotiator in Vienna, arrived in
Constantinople late in August on a special mission. But he achieved little. Rival secular and religious pressure groups were in bitter conflict. Although all loathed the ‘abominable
customs’ of the French, Paget was puzzled by the Porte’s apparent determination to remain, so far as possible, under Napoleon’s protection.
¹⁶

Sultan Mustafa IV was a puppet of the reactionaries, though it was never clear at any one moment who was pulling the strings. Increasingly, the discontented—including many frustrated
opportunists—drifted away to provincial cities. Most went north, crossing the Bulgarian lands to Ruschuk, the walled ferry-town where Mustafa Bayraktar had his headquarters, looking out over
the Danube and the Wallachian plain towards Bucharest. There, a secret ‘Ruschuk Committee’ planned a counter-coup. Agents in the palace would convince the pliable-minded
Mustafa IV that the only way he would be able to rule in his own right would be to follow the example of Mahmud I and shake off the fetters imposed on him by those rebellious
Sultan-makers, the Janissary commanders and the devious
ş
eyhülislâm
, Ataullah Effendi.

The Committee’s agents did all that was expected of them. On 19 July 1808, on the invitation of Mustafa IV, Bayraktar arrived back in Constantinople at the head of his army and obliged the
Sultan and his Grand Vizier by getting rid of the more overbearing Janissary commanders and of Ataullah Effendi, whom Bayraktar replaced with a less ambitious Mufti. But having accomplished the
task for which he had been summoned south, Bayraktar showed a strong reluctance to take his army back to stand guard yet again along the lower Danube. Spies reported to Mustafa IV that the Pasha
intended to secure his deposition and restore Selim III. Mustafa, however, reasoned that if both Selim and his own half-brother Mahmud were killed, he would be the sole surviving male member of the
Ottoman dynasty, and therefore his life and his possession of the Sultanate would be secure. On 28 July 1808 Sultan Mustafa therefore sent executioners into the Fourth Courtyard to have his kinsmen
killed in their
kafe
apartments.

Confusion persists over what happened where inside the Topkapi Sarayi on that Thursday.
¹⁷
Selim certainly resisted the executioners, and it is
probable that he burst through into the throne room before dying in the Sultan’s presence. It is also clear that he was not quietly and efficiently strangled, for Bayraktar found the
blood-stained corpse when his troops burst into the inner courtyard later in the morning: ‘The Bayraktar was touched and confused. They say he wept tears,’ a Dutch diplomat reported two
days later.
¹⁸
The Grand Admiral wanted to avenge Selim’s death by having Mustafa killed on the spot. But the execution of two Sultans on one
morning might have been regarded as excessive. Moreover, as Mustafa had calculated, it seemed probable that if he were killed the Othman line would be extinguished, for there was still a grave
doubt over the fate of Prince Mahmud. No ambitious competitor for high office wanted a struggle for the succession between rival notables, with private armies converging on the capital from various
provinces. A civil war of this character would have broken up the Empire for all time.

The twenty-three-year-old Mahmud survived. He appears to have heard the commotion as the executioners burst in upon his cousin, Selim. A long tradition maintains that
Mahmud, helped by his mother the
Valide Sultana
Naksidil, escaped to the roof of the harem while Naksidil’s slave-girl, Cevri Khalfa, prevented the killers from mounting a staircase in
the colonnaded corridor of the outer harem which would have enabled them to seize the Prince. One report says that Bayraktar found the young man concealed beneath a pile of carpets and that, having
secured a
fetva
of deposition against Mustafa IV, he thereupon proclaimed the accession of Sultan Mahmud II. An equally probable tale says that the Prince had the good sense to remain in the
shadows of the forest of chimneys on the palace roof until swords were sheathed below. At all events, within a fortnight his accession was acknowledged in solemn ceremonial at the Eyüp
mosque—and Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar became Grand Vizier. The wretched Mustafa IV was back in the
kafe
, again heir-apparent in a dynasty into which no child had been born for almost
twenty years.

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.