The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (19 page)

‘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
ş
elamlik
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 put 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

C
HAPTER
7

E
GYPTIAN
S
TYLE

W
ITH THE
J
ANISSARIES 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
ş
eyhülislâm.
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
ş
eyhülislâm
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