The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (21 page)

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 Berlin. ‘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.

C
HAPTER
8

S
ICK
M
AN?

M
AHMUD
II’
S DEATH WAS MADE PUBLIC ON
1 J
ULY
1839
AND
within twenty-four
hours there was a minor palace revolution in Stamboul. The septuagenarian Mehmed Husrev Pasha seized the Grand Vizier’s seals of office (literally) and induced Abdulmecid to confirm him as
head of an emergency government. A sixteen-year-old ruler might have fared far worse: although a cynical French ambassador called Husrev the ‘master-strangler’, he could at least claim
a long experience of the Ottoman administrative system.
¹
As far back as 1801, Sultan Selim III had appointed him Governor of Egypt, the last before
Muhammad Ali, and under Mahmud II he fought in the Peloponnese and against the Persians. For twelve years he was Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet and in 1827 he succeeded Hüseyin as
serasker
of the army, a post he held for another ten years. But age had made Husrev an arch-conservative, with many enemies. Like so many pillars of the Ottoman establishment, he had
received generous gifts from Orlov at the time of the Unkiar Skelessi Treaty: now—six years later—one eminent rival, Grand Admiral Ahmed Fevzi, convinced himself that Husrev remained in
Russian pay. So certain was he of Husrev’s likely betrayal of Ottoman interests that he committed an even greater act of treachery himself. Even before news of the Nezib disaster could be
confirmed in the capital, Fevzi sailed his fleet across to Alexandria. There he surrendered it to the Viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali.

The odds were therefore stacked heavily against the frail young Sultan: no navy in the Mediterranean; no field army to face Ibrahim
in Anatolia. Nor could he hope to find
sound currency in the treasury, for that department of state was so troubled with chronic deficits that Mahmud had authorized debasement of the coinage on seventy-two occasions in a thirty-one-year
reign. Yet, fortunately, Abdulmecid acceded with two great assets: his mother, the
Valide Sultana
Bezmialem; and a promise of loyal support from the most skilled of his father’s
westernizing reformers, Mustafa Re
ş
id, who was a special envoy in London at the time of Mahmud’s death.
²

Bezmialem, a Georgian said to have been a bath-attendant before entering the imperial harem, was only fifteen when she gave birth to Abdulmecid. At thirty-one she was still young enough to
despise and mistrust the elder non-statesman who had made himself chief minister. She advised her son to allow Husrev to incur the odium of seeking terms from Muhammad Ali but urged him to resist
the Grand Vizier’s attempts to advance his nominees to important offices of state. Abdulmecid duly played for time, awaiting Re
ş
id’s return from England before taking any major
decisions on policy. His mother had given him sound counsel. So shrewd was her judgement of men and their motives that the
Valide
Sultana
continued to influence the choice of
ministers until shortly before her death fourteen years later.

Bezmialem recommended Re
ş
id to Abdulmecid because she believed he understood what Mahmud had been seeking to achieve in his reform programme. But Re
ş
id had qualities of his own, too. By 1839 his
command of French was so good that he could converse with King Louis Philippe without an interpreter. He had met Palmerston in London and Metternich in Vienna, and he knew what Europe thought of
the Ottoman Empire. Of equal value to the Sultan was a mission Re
ş
id had undertaken to Egypt four years before, enabling him to see for himself the kingly authority Muhammad Ali exercised in Cairo
and Alexandria. Abdulmecid appointed Re
ş
id as Foreign Minister, retaining Husrev as Grand Vizier until June 1840. But it was Re
ş
id who, with a sound instinct for cultivating goodwill in Westminster
and Paris, persuaded Abdulmecid to allow him to make the first dramatic public gesture of the reign, the promulgation on 3 November 1839 of the Imperial Rescript of the Rose Chamber.

The occasion was described by several ambassadors and other foreign visitors to Constantinople.
³
All the higher dignitaries
of Ottoman society, together with foreign envoys accredited to the Sublime Porte, gathered in the Gülhane (‘Rose Chamber’) gardens beyond the outer wall of the Topkapi Sarayi.
There, in front of Grand Vizier Husrev, Re
ş
id read out their sovereign’s first ‘Noble Rescript’, with Abdulmecid looking down on the assembly from a window of the Gülhane
kiosk itself. The ‘Gülhane Decree’ let the outer world know it was Abdulmecid’s intention to reign as an enlightened Sultan. He would protect the lives and property of his
subjects, introduce a code of justice asserting the equal status of Muslims, Christians and Jews before the law, institute a regular system of assessing and levying taxes; and he undertook to
enhance and respect the consultative legislative councils favoured by his father, and to develop a fair method of conscripting his subjects for service in a modernized army and navy.

The ceremony in the Gülhane gardens, with the westernizing Foreign Minister prostrating himself twice before his Sultan and Caliph, impressed the foreign observers as Re
ş
id had anticipated
it would. ‘Theatrical’ but successful, was the Russian envoy’s verdict. ‘A victorious answer to those who say that this Empire cannot be saved by its ancient
Government,’ Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador, commented two days later in a dispatch to Palmerston. An event ‘fraught with incalculable advantage’, the Foreign Secretary
replied early in December; ‘A grand stroke of policy, and it is producing great effect on public feeling here and in France.’
⁴
Both Ponsonby
and Palmerston had in mind the mounting impatience of the Russians with their Ottoman neighbour, and the inclination of successive governments in Paris to back Muhammad Ali in building up a
financially viable and independent Egyptian state. Any move by the Sultan which indicated renewed vigour at the centre of his empire was welcome. For another three decades Ottoman decline was
checked by a parallel process: the imposition of westernizing changes upon traditional society at home; and the bolstering of the imperial structure by other Great Powers seeking stability in order
to stave off drastic revision of the map of Europe.

At first the renewal of war between the Sultan and Muhammad Ali in the spring of 1839 had tempted Nicholas I to intervene with war
ships and soldiers. Surely, he argued,
this provided the opportunity Orlov had foreseen in 1833, the moment when a Russian expeditionary force would be hailed on the Bosphorus as returning guardians of the Straits? Nesselrode was more
realistic. Patiently, and with a cold reappraisal of the imperial state debt, he persuaded the Tsar not to risk all the uncertainty and expense of unilateral action. Thereafter Russia, Austria,
Prussia, France and Great Britain appeared to act in concert; on 27 July 1839 a collective Note from the ambassadors of the five Powers indicated their wish to arbitrate in the
Ottoman–Egyptian War. This willingness of ‘Europe’ to impose a settlement in the Levant came as welcome news for Re
ş
id on his arrival home from London. It enabled him to stiffen
Abdulmecid’s resistance to a peace party at court which favoured accepting, as speedily as possible, whatever demands Muhammad Ali might make.

Yet while the five Great Powers were prepared to recognize Muhammad Ali as the head of a new Egyptian dynasty, there was little cohesion among them.
⁵
Austria, whose policy was still shaped by Metternich (Foreign Minister since 1809), favoured the maintenance and strengthening of the Sultan’s authority for two main reasons: a stable
government in Constantinople would extend the trade concessions already enjoyed by steamship companies and mining concerns to other Austrian enterprises; while conversely, and of greater
significance in Vienna, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would unleash Balkan nationalism, thereby threatening the existence of the multinational Habsburg monarchy. The Prussians closely
followed the policy of their Austrian ally, although in the Berlin newspapers there was a certain grudging admiration for Ibrahim’s victorious army.

French diplomacy backed Muhammad Ali. The happy coincidence that he had been born at Kavalla under the same zodiacal sign of the same year as Bonaparte at Ajaccio was duly noted;
‘Napoleonic Legend’ romanticism was in fashion that summer. More prosaically, Parisian bankers hoped they might turn Muhammad Ali’s lands into a commercial satrapy dominating the
Levant. For a variety of motives, the French therefore sought the inclusion of Syria and Lebanon—as well as the Arabian peninsula—in the territories of which he was overlord.

No other government agreed with the French. Palmerston feared that Muhammad Ali’s efficient army would threaten the shortest route to India; and complained that his
monopoly of trade in the vast area over which he asserted Egyptian sovereignty would deprive the City of London of advantages accruing from the Anglo-Turkish commercial treaty which Sultan Mahmud
had accepted ten months before his death. Tsar Nicholas I—or, rather, State Chancellor Nesselrode—also mistrusted Muhammad Ali’s ambitions. The Russians had good grounds for
believing he was contemplating a grand alliance with the Persians, aimed at extending his empire into Mesopotamia in return for assisting the Qäjár Shah in Teheran to undermine the
Tsar’s hold over the Muslims of the Caucasus and Turkestan. There was sufficient hostility to Muhammad Ali and his dynasty in both London and St Petersburg to foster an Anglo-Russian entente
which was suspicious of the French and, since it was prepared to bolster up the Ottoman Empire as long as possible, could count on Austrian and Prussian support.